Microsoft President Brad Smith: Computer Science Is Space Race of Today 171
theodp writes: Q. How is K-12 computer science like the Cold War? A. It could use a Sputnik moment, at least that's the gist of an op-ed penned by Senator Jerry Moran (R., KS) and Microsoft President Brad Smith. From the article: "In the wake of the Soviet Union's 1957 Sputnik launch, President Eisenhower confronted the reality that America's educational standards were holding back the country's opportunity to compete on a global technological scale. He responded and called for support of math and science, which resulted in the National Defense Education Act of 1958 and helped send the country to the moon by the end of the next decade. It also created the educational foundation for a new generation of technology, leadership and prosperity. Today we face a similar challenge as the United States competes with nations across the globe in the indispensable field of computer science. To be up to the task, we must do a better job preparing our students for tomorrow's jobs." Smith is also a Board member of tech-bankrolled Code.org, which invoked Sputnik in its 2014 Senate testimony ("learning computer science is this generation's Sputnik moment") as it called for "comprehensive immigration reform efforts that tie H-1B visa fees to a new STEM education fund [...] to support the teaching and learning of more computer science," nicely echoing Microsoft's National Talent Strategy. Tying the lack of K-12 CS education to the need for tech visas is a time-honored tradition of sorts for Microsoft and politicians. As early as 2004, Bill Gates argued that CS education needed its own Sputnik moment, a sentiment shared by Senator Hillary Clinton in 2007 as she and fellow Senators listened to Gates make the case for more H-1B visas as he lamented the lack of CS-savvy U.S. high school students.
What a complete... (Score:4, Interesting)
... dearth of inspiration or even otherwise useful things to say. It's all transparently self-serving but so conspicuously lacking in substance and foundation.
If you really wanted to ensure a solid influx of STEM university students a few years down the line, you wouldn't be bothering with "learning to code" today. You'd make sure they get a solid grounding in the basics. You know, spelling, grammar, thinking, coming up with things to say. And, of course, math. Not "new math", but actual real math taught in a way that is maybe not huggy-feely, but certainly imparts the skill without putting off. Mathematicians have known for years that the math grounding is awful (along with the rest of highschool), and that it only gets interesting once you "catch the bug" and dive in, later, much later. Do something about that and raise the expected literacy and math proficiency floor from "typically functionally illiterate" to, well, somewhat higher at least.
But that isn't sexy. That's boring and hard work. Companies and politicians don't want to sponsor that.
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Re:What a complete... (Score:5, Informative)
One of the things that the "New Math" textbooks in my state employed was the concept of a "function machine". It was essentially reducing math processes to black boxes for the purpose of understanding how inputs related to outputs. This was at an elementary grade level.
The next time I saw a construct like this was in Differential Calculus, where functions are the very basis.
Of course, functions are also at the very heart of Computer Science. So my "New Math" stood me in good stead.
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If you are going to become a mathematician, scientist, or engineer, then "new math" was a good basis for learning advanced math. But for the majority that need to be able to make change at the grocery store, it was a disaster. I remember learning set theory in 4th grade, with unions, intersections, and Venn diagrams. I "got it" immediately, but was surprised when most of the class didn't. The teacher spent the rest of the year going over and over the same concepts, and many students learned nothing. Te
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In my day they would give us a page of 20-30 long division problems. Today they concentrate more on abstract concepts and will assign four to six.
I remember I would try to do them, and get five or six done and then pass in the page incomplete. Due to silly mistakes, I'd get bad marks on the tests too.
But I always understood all the concepts, but was unable to do complete the sheer number of problems especially without error. Compared to my classmates I sucked at math.
But then on standardized tests, I wo
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Are you referring to Common Core as new math?
These kids are going to be so fucked when they hit HS or college.
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...and even back in the 60s. I had New Math in 7th and 8th grade in 1963-4 (now you know how old I am). Our Junior High was one of three or four that fed into a single High School. One of the other Jr Hi's had opted out of New Math, and had had Algebra in 8th grade. That put them a year ahead of the rest of us.
A very good High School math teacher put me back on track by letting me take two math classes at the same time. If it hadn't been for him, I (along with everyone else from our Jr Hi) would have b
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Do you know what "Primary School" is? Because in the USA, it means grades K-8. Secondary education is the last 4 years of compulsory school. "High school".
My high school was doing alright in 1998 before new math, when it offered AP calculus... to SENIORS.
No, there was no calculus in 6th grade. What the fuck are you smoking?
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It's like any real problem in computing. If you don't have the people that are able to deal with the technology platform you've chosen, then you can't implement your project. It really doesn't matter if it's the fault of your people or the platform. You end up with the same result and that's what really matters.
Trying to teach something that your teachers can't cope with simply because it's "trendy" is really quite stupid and is comparable to the usual corporate nonsense.
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"New Math" was around precisely during the 70's and 80's. Then it was abolished.
Same thing with Harvard Calculus in the 90's. I sat in on the weekly presentation in Fall 1994 when the instructors demonstrated how a textbook filled with word problems was a better approach to teaching calculus than a textbook filled with mathematical symbols. An old mathematician in the back of the room banged his cane against an empty chair that Harvard Calculus was blasphemy and the instructors would burn in hell for teaching this garbage. I took Harvard Calculus in Spring 1995 and bailed out with half
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It was around (or at least s.t. by that name, dunno if it was the same content you're talking about) in the early 60s. I was there. (Take that, Judy Collins!) Set theory, a smattering of geometry, non-decimal bases.
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The people who invented computing had a grounding in the "basic" sciences. I don't think a person who only needs to know how to code can bootstrap even more advances in computing. Unless they bang the blocks together in a new and imaginative way.
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Superficially true, but without them CS theory would be largely pointless. It would just be a set of otherwise unrelated subfields of mathematics with no common application.
Re:What a complete... (Score:4, Informative)
you wouldn't be bothering with "learning to code" today.
I completely disagree. I got into coding when I was in 5th or 6th grade with Hypercard. Then (mostly in order) Applescript, the Mac debugger, my TI-89 calculator, Matlab, PHP, Java, C, C++, Python.
I'm just a Mechanical Engineer. My job title has nothing to do with any of those languages. No interview I've ever had has ever even touched on how much of those I knew. They're just tools I use to get my job done. It's beyond frustrating dealing with co-workers that refuse to learn to program or worse refuse to use a one-off program to solve a problem they're having. 90% of 'work' is done in Excel. Cell equations that would make small children cry.
I wouldn't be in the job I have now or doing it as proficiently as I do without having learned to code when I did. This national initiative to teach people to code isn't to churn out coders. It's to turn out _____ that can code. Mechanical Engineers that can code. Doctors that can code. And in doing so they don't need to get into all the dirty internals.
It's just "keyboarding" class all over again. I'm sure all of the Typists were crying left and right that schools teaching people to type was going to cut into their job.
My wife works at a hospital with older doctors that were told "You don't need to learn to type or use a computer. You'll have a secretary!".
Once upon a time coders didn't even enter their code into the computer, you had the punch card operator.
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you wouldn't be bothering with "learning to code" today.
I completely disagree. I got into coding when I was in 5th or 6th grade with Hypercard. Then (mostly in order) Applescript, the Mac debugger, my TI-89 calculator, Matlab, PHP, Java, C, C++, Python.
I'm just a Mechanical Engineer. My job title has nothing to do with any of those languages. No interview I've ever had has ever even touched on how much of those I knew. They're just tools I use to get my job done.
I went back to school for advanced math, after being inspired by programming such as Project Euler. A lot of pure math concepts were instantly recognizable as data structures, for example. As a consequence, I think I got much more out of the courses than somebody who just builds on theory without any application ideas.
The same idea applies to most of my life interests. For example, I've been playing with electronics since about 8, but it was only in my 20s that I had learned enough theory and related sub
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Self interest is only a small part of the equation. You also have to have access to the tools and documentation. I'm a terrible self learner. I tried and failed to learn many other languages through 'self learning' and it went nowhere. (I still have a Cocoa and Objective-C book on my shelf that never went past the first 5 pages). I, along with others like me, need a more hands on approach. It took me ~5 years to get to the same level of proficiency with PHP as I had with Matlab because of that.
However I do
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... dearth of inspiration or even otherwise useful things to say. It's all transparently self-serving but so conspicuously lacking in substance and foundation.
If you really wanted to ensure a solid influx of STEM university students a few years down the line, you wouldn't be bothering with "learning to code" today. You'd make sure they get a solid grounding in the basics. You know, spelling, grammar, thinking, coming up with things to say. And, of course, math. Not "new math", but actual real math taught in a way that is maybe not huggy-feely, but certainly imparts the skill without putting off. Mathematicians have known for years that the math grounding is awful (along with the rest of highschool), and that it only gets interesting once you "catch the bug" and dive in, later, much later. Do something about that and raise the expected literacy and math proficiency floor from "typically functionally illiterate" to, well, somewhat higher at least.
But that isn't sexy. That's boring and hard work. Companies and politicians don't want to sponsor that.
"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."
Please stop. It doesn't work the way you're ranting it does.
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If you really wanted to ensure a solid influx of STEM university students a few years down the line [...] you'd make sure they get a solid grounding in the basics. You know, spelling, grammar, thinking ...
It is even simpler than that. If you want a solid influx of STEM students, just increase research funding. If the US just matched the top country in R&D spending / GDP it would require $260 billion in extra R&D spending. That is stimulus spending I could get behind, even on borrowed money. A combination of tax breaks for US-based R&D spending and direct funding of University R&D would actually give incentives for students to pursue STEM careers.
There are around 10 million STEM related jobs i
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There are ten countries beating the US in R&D spending / GDP which is not the way to win this war.
And the US spends as much as those ten countries combined. It's even more one-sided when you don't play the PPP game and use actual GDP.
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I'm with Khallow, what research spending are you looking at?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
1 United States 473.4 2.742% 1,442.51 2013 [2]
2 China 409 2.1% 298.56 2015 [3]
- European Union 334.3 1.94% 657.48 2014 [2]
3 Japan 170.8 3.583% 1,344.31 2014 [2]
4 Germany 106.5 2.842% 1,313.46 2014 [2]
5 South Korea 91.6 4.292% 1,518.47 2014 [2]
It ain't even close.
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Hell, even just getting admitted into a top tier university is hard because foreign students have priority (affirmitive action).
Affirmative action has nothing to do with admitting foreign students. Affirmative action means that given two equally qualified candidates, you pick the one with more general disadvantages. The quotes for foreign students at specified university courses are completely independent from affirmative action, Those quotes were negotiated for in student exchange programs and similar contracts.
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Affirmative action has nothing to do with admitting foreign students.
Foreign students, both out of state or out of country, pay more in tuition than in state students do. The academic ideal got replaced by the altar of cold hard cash.
Stop laying people off at 45 (Score:5, Insightful)
And stop with the night and weekend hours, 72 hour weeks, and low status compared to the sales and marketing wing of the country.
But having a career that ends 20 years after you start is the worst part. It was true even in the late 1980s when i saw lots of 45ish year old programmers laid off and pushed out of the field.
When you combine the low status, long hours, short career window, you can see why people avoid the field.
It sorta has pay going for it- but not so much when you consider the sudden age discrimination end compared to many other fields.
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Dunno, I'm well over 45 and the only time I have ever been "laid off" was when the startup I was at ran out of money. I know plenty of others in my line of work who are well past 45 too.
Could it possibly be that those 45 year olds that got laid off had become complacent and hadn't kept their skills current?
Staying current is hard work. Software development is very different from what it was when I started my career. Yesterday? Today? Tomorrow? it doesn't matter whether it's software development or something
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Staying current is hard work.
Yeah for those spastic corps that follow trends like an ADHD bloodhound.
Software development is very different from what it was when I started my career.
And yet from where I sit it is the exact same as it was 30 years ago. It's following very slow very gradual trendlines if you ignore the bullshit coming out of San Francisco, California. Seriously. Just take out that nonsense datapoint with those billionaires and the bullshit bubbles they create to sell ice to eskimos, and you have a slowly steadily improving industry that looks a lot like it did many decades ago.
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"Staying current" is essentially like doing the final year of university non-stop. New hardware (6502, 6800, 68000, 80x86, ARM, MIPS), new software languages (Pascal, C, C++, Objective C), new programming models and notation (flow-charts, data-flow diagrams, UML)
Best way to survive is to find a niche area that values experience over cost, and to avoid employers that play dead-man's shoes or don't let you keep your skills up to date or allow you to network outside of work.
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new software languages (Pascal, C, C++, Objective C),
...None of those are new. In the least.
new programming models and notation (flow-charts, data-flow diagrams, UML)
No one actually gives a fuck if you use a dotted line or a dashed line. UML, while marginally useful, is overblown. (And all of those are UML diagrams).
"Staying current" is essentially like doing the final year of university non-stop.
Eh, more like doing a final year of uni every 5-10 years.
And yeah... Do it at work. "Hey boss, remember $THATHORRIBLEPROBLEMWEHAD? How about we try $NEWTHING to fix/avoid it?" Get paid to learn.
What kind of tyrannical sweatshop doesn't let you talk to people outside of work?
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Your reality is limited.
I am rather well-known for a long history of being at the leading edge of technology and often even serving as a guru for emerging technologies.
Maybe, just maybe if I'd been willing to become a migrant worker, I might have avoided those long stretches of unemployment. But as a stereotypical geek (lousy social skills, no network to speak of, etc.), I didn't have people falling all over themselves to hire me. But I did have cases where my age was mentioned as a minus. Not enough to sue
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But as a stereotypical geek (lousy social skills, no network to speak of, etc.), I didn't have people falling all over themselves to hire me.
I think I've spotted your problem. To use nerd jargon, PEBCAK.
I'm at least as socially inept as you and I'm going out to lunch today to try to fend off a job offer while keeping the friend that's offering it. Networking, it works, kids.
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I am rather well-known for a long history of being at the leading edge of technology and often even serving as a guru for emerging technologies.
Sounds legit...
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I am rather well-known for a long history of being at the leading edge of technology and often even serving as a guru for emerging technologies.
So you're essentially a jack of all trades and master of none, ever looking for that silver bullet or unicorn and have no real expertise to offer? It explains much about your situation and resulting world view. Always have a solid fallback by being an expert in something. Keep your nose aligned on trends, and if your chosen fallback is dropping out of favor, it might be time to become an expert in its replacement. And stop chasing unicorns.
Oh, please. (Score:1)
Could it possibly be that those 45 year olds that got laid off had become complacent and hadn't kept their skills current?
OK, here we go the "keep the skills current"...
OK. You're working a job - say in the insurance industry - that has millions of lines of COBOL code. You're working your ass off and want to have a life. You see the new flavor on the block is Java and you go and take a class and there are NO Java projects where you work. Then you get laid off. Guess what happens.
"I'm sorry, but we need someone with on-the-job experience."
That has been MY experience.
Staying current is hard work.
Current in what? See, if you are as old as you say you are,
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This is heresy on slashdot.
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Upsetting a bunch of people that spend their free time on Slashdot rather than learning new skill sets.
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Whelp, time to get back to work.
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Why should you choose a job with such instability and required constant retraining when there are so many other fields with higher status, lower learning requirements, lower working hours (ESPECIALLY no night, weekend, and holiday hours)?
Some have slightly lower pay but the hourly wage is better, work life balance is better, and the chance of really good six figure pay is much better (esp when you figure that programmers in six figure jobs must work in areas where a six figure salary will get you a bed in a
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45? What kind of retirement community do you live in that keeps programmers around until they are 45?
By the late 1980's, even being over 30 was perilous.
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45? What kind of retirement community do you live in that keeps programmers around until they are 45?
By the late 1980's, even being over 30 was perilous.
Could always work for a military contractor. They're still using 8-inch floppy disks [cnbc.com]!
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> 45? What kind of retirement community do you live in that keeps programmers around until they are 45?
>
> By the late 1980's, even being over 30 was perilous.
It's funny but a know a bunch of GAME programmers that old.
Beyond that, there's just about any place outside of California.
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It is today especially at companies like Google where employees won't hire skilled applicants because they are too old or they don't "fit the youth culture" (this gem was actually posted to slashdot in the last 12 months. Imagine not hiring a skilled applicant because they don't fit the "male culture" or the "white culture".
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I find myself unable to disce
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This is the crux of the matter. Newer, less-developed languages/frameworks, languages/frameworks that no one can be an expert in because they are still so new...is what employers are looking for "expertise" in.
You can't expect to reason with unreasonable people and the world is full of them.
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what do you think about Node, Ruby, Python, etc.
I am NOT old, in fact I am still quite young, but I still don't like them. They are all interpreted languages, with almost no type system (everything dynamic). In Javascript you can't even distinguish between integers and floats.
I don't suggest to go down the java path, but at least use something with a compiler that actually helps you find bugs. All the productivity you "gain" thanks to no static typing you already lose again due to having to write unit tests for even the smallest piece of code.
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What have frameworks to do with how to start a project? Shouldn't the right answer to that question be something like "Collect and analyse all the customer requirements".
Selection of which third party technologies to employ should be far later and be heavily influenced by everything that went before.
I don't really get what's wrong with Struts from the age perspective though. The latest stable release is not even 2 months old. But I am mostly involved with embedded projects where updating after production is
Stop refusing to learn until you're 45. (Score:3)
When I was younger hearing things like this scared me, now that I'm mostly on my way to 45 I know exactly who those people that get laid off are. They're the people that refuse to learn anything new past getting a job. Learning is a life long activity. If you aren't continually updating your skill sets during your entire career you're going to find yourself obsolete.
Take a hypothetical example of an old programmer that refuses to learn about newfangled "Makefiles". For a while they'll be able to carry on ju
Re:Stop refusing to learn until you're 45. (Score:4, Interesting)
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And what was your dad's job? Was he blue or white collar?
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Who cares when you can easily save enough money to retire after 10? [mrmoneymustache.com]
Besides, the age discrimination thing and the 72-hour week thing are Silicon Valley (and maybe Seattle) issues, not industry issues. Stay the fuck away from the West Coast and it's better. In Atlanta, for example, I work 40-hour weeks and have bunches of co-workers in their 50s.
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That's actually what I did (plus the training plus going into management).
Retired at 51. Because I saw the layoffs and discrimination when I was young and I listened.
I saved hard.
In the end, right after I retired, the last company laid off 400+ IT guys and replaced them with Infosys.
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But having a career that ends 20 years after you start is the worst part.
I heard somewhere that the average person will have six different careers in their lifetimes. I've done a lot stuff in my technical career: virtual world tester (six months), video game tester (six years), helpdesk/desktop support (four years), PC technician (three years), wireless technician (one year) and security technician (two years). My father did the same job for three generations of owners over 50 years, but you can't expect that to happen again.
It sorta has pay going for it- but not so much when you consider the sudden age discrimination end compared to many other fields.
Work for the government. I'm surrounded by old farts,
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"...six different careers in their lifetimes." When I was in my teens (in the 60s), I read that for many of us, the job we would have in 30 years (made up number, I don't recall the real one) didn't even exist yet. I kind of laughed. Now I'm a computational linguist.
Not every field changes like that, of course. But I tell the linguists who work for me that their field is going to be radically different in 20 years--pretty much absorbed into computational linguistics. And they had best get on the bandwa
So it's ultimately useless? (Score:1)
So we went to the moon before the Soviets got there and they gave up. Big deal. There's still no moon base, let alone anything beyond that, and there won't be any for the foreseeable future.
Re: So it's ultimately useless? (Score:1)
It was about parallel use of the technology for the military. Kennedy couldn't come right out and say he was dedicating a generation to producing missles and nuclear weapon delivery systems. Dreamy scifi stuff sells better.
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I believe you meant sublunarian...
IT industry is the Stasi of today (Score:2, Insightful)
Computer science of today is more like the espionage part of the cold war, not space race. IT companies, including Microsoft, are now concentrating just on gathering more and more of information out of people.
No ennemy (Score:1)
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Wrong race (Score:1)
If we really wanted to make the world a better place and invoke the space race analogy, then the race should be about getting us off fossil fuels. Better energy storage technology, rapid charging, etc. Anything that gets us off oil as quickly as possible. Look at the misery the Middle East has caused the world, and it's all over oil.
That's the same race (Score:1)
The research on alternative fuel sources is being done by people in the STEM field. STEM education is the source of those people, dumbass.
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The research on alternative fuel sources is being done by people in the STEM field. STEM education is the source of those people, dumbass.
Brilliant, except that the article is about Computer Science, not STEM in general.
I agree with the parent. A "Manhattan Project" effort in alternative energy would be great.
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Better energy storage technology, rapid charging, etc.
And better renewable energy sources - like solar panels and related storage/inverter/control systems that are cheaper in total-cost-of deployment, operation, and energy delivered than more grid power.
But we already HAVE that, at least for sunny sites. Good but cheap panels, batteries that have good lifetimes, are efficient, and have hysterically-high charge/discharge rates, inverter and control electronics that have the benefits of decades of Moore's l
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Just curious: by "hysterically-high charge/discharge rates", you're referring to hysteresis, not comedy, right?
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Just curious: by "hysterically-high charge/discharge rates", you're referring to hysteresis, not comedy, right?
Neither. The meaning I intended is more like "extremely", but far beyond it. "Extremely" might be read as a substantial improvement but still within the same general range. (Like "ultra-fast", it has been devalued by previous use for smaller deltas.) "Hysterically" would be more in the "whole new ballpark" class - an order of magnitude or much more improvement.
"Hysterically" could mean somethin
Globalism (Score:2)
It's too late. Tech seemed like a great career many years ago, but the successful tech corporations lobbied their way to bring in cheap foreign labor and for tax breaks for moving call centers and jobs to overseas locations. And even today they complain about how expensive (!!) tech labor is while they hide their profits in foreign tax havens.
So you spend all this tax money (from a treasury these tech companies are avoiding paying into) to push kids into STEM fields where they will fail to get employment
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It's too late. Tech seemed like a great career many years ago, but the successful tech corporations lobbied their way to bring in cheap foreign labor and for tax breaks for moving call centers and jobs to overseas locations.... (blah blah blah)
Let me guess... you're a Donal Trump supporter, right?
Bzzzt! I'm an American software developer over 50.
My turn: I'm guessing you're a young person in tech working in the US on an H1-B, right?
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Even Ted Cruz can manage to be right once in awhile...
Microsoft lost trust (Score:1)
Oh hell no.
These rotten pieces of protoplasm are not mankind's friend.
They have lost the right to dictate this conversation.
Only big media amplifies their voices.
If you have a head, you know damn well, there is no more negotiation with these untrusted lying backstabbers.
That doesn't mean they can't force things through the system using their muscle.
In the end, through their lawyers, it won't be good and you won't have any rights.
Go linux - any flavor and get a free key to your jail cell door.
Put a stake th
Mising the point (Score:4, Insightful)
Back in the days of the space race it was the environment that got people interested and they went into the field that mattered most to them.
Today they are trying to force computer "science" onto every child and hope that it sticks with them. It's going to turn kids off computers more than get them onto programming because it's being forced on them for the whole of their education. While I have no problem with it being offered and having it introduced to everyone I don't think it should be shoved down their throats. Our schools should not be used to train students for particular jobs. I believe that a school should be teaching students a wide variety of skills in order to let them discover what they enjoy.
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" I don't think it should be shoved down their throats. Our schools should not be used to train students for particular jobs"
I teach computer science and robotics to high school students (and sometimes middle school), I can tell you with 100% we are NOT doing this to train them for particular jobs, but essentially ALL jobs. It hardly matters what career you go into these days, you need to have WAY more understanding of computers than I did growing up. I know many adults who are playing catch-up and have had
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There's a difference between having a computer class like the one that you have and what some of the larger companies have been proposing. They are pushing to have mandatory computer courses from K to 12. You are getting students that are already interested in the subject.
Imagine if the big fast food companies were getting together to introduce a program of mandatory courses in high school that taught all students to "cook" but it was all about using their equipment. There would be an outcry but because th
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"You are getting students that are already interested in the subject." I took a computer programming class in 1968 because I had to. Didn't want to, but found to my surprise it was great fun. And I've been doing it (almost) ever since. Had it not been required, I probably wouldn't have gotten into it. So at least from my N of 1, it seems to be a good idea to require at least an intro to CS. Some of the students might discover they like it. (Whether it should be required every year is a different ques
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"...and sometimes middle school": That caught my eye, as we're thinking of doing s.t. along those lines. Can you say a little about how much CS middle school students are capable of? Are you teaching average students, or the best? And by CS and robotics, I assume you mean beginning programming, right? Do you introduce it with things like Blockly? Can the students progress beyond that? Have you published anything on this?
I realize that's a lot of questions; I'd be happy to see (or start) a new \. threa
Sorry Mr. Smith. It's about energy. (Score:2)
If there is a space race presently here on Earth it is to develop energy from Thorium --- specifically the LFTR as envisioned by Weinberg, but also the various other approaches such as fission U-233 burners and denatured molten salt reactors.
Major players include,
The United States who developed the technology, then shelved it. Now a handful of individuals and small companies are struggling to attract the attention of investors. Canada, as our closest ally in LFTR. India whose interest in Thorium has been ma
No, no it is not (Score:2)
Guess what the space race of today is? It's another space race! And guess what the USA is doing in this race? That's right, it's ceding it to corporations. Bombing brown people for economic benefit is more important. Better cross your fingers that SpaceX keeps improving, because they're our space program now
Sputnik moment (Score:2, Funny)
Ok, I have designed a small spherical computer program that does nothing but beep at me every 20 minutes.
I'll accept my Nobel Prize and high-level position at Microsoft now, thank you.
Bill Gates is a God Damed Liar (Score:1)
Murder Spies and Voting Lies .. (Score:1)
A little self serving, but there is a point there (Score:1)
While the comment regarding coding miss the mark and is in line with the latest groupthink from non-techies thinking that computer science is just typing with curly braces, there is a valid point about the cultural shift away from science in the USA.
In the USA we seem to be giving up on science. Our pop culture glorifies lawyers, advertisers, financial middle men, and sales. The scientists and engineers are almost always portrayed as awkward, unhappy, and somehow flawed. This has always been the case to som
old farts take (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Sputnik moment (Score:2)
The Space Race didn't involve... (Score:1)
...a wage race to the bottom. Programming isn't just being used for elite government projects with unlimited funding, it's everywhere.
And CS != programming, dammit. Programming can be done just fine without knowing a damn thing about how a computer works, any more than I need to know the human auditory system to communicate via spoken language. Are tomorrow's jobs really going to be designing higher performance processors and new paradigms for information transformation? Or, primarily using what we have to
Rocket Science != Computer Science (Score:2)
One big difference between rocket "science" and CS is that the rocket science remained the province of a few countries for a long time (Soviet Union and US, later China, the EU and India, with most other countries still struggling to field mid-range missiles). But CS, and particularly programming skills, can be copied and then used by almost any other country. And that makes a CS race comparable to the Space Race of the 60s rather unlikely. ...and I realize that basic programming skills are not computer _
Re: (Score:2)
But if you saved your salary, it shouldn't matter.
If you saved your salary, it was probably wiped out or otherwise stolen by taxes, inflation, deliberately depressed interest rates, and other economic manipulation (such as the "economic crisis" - or crises) by now. Going forward, with the current policies of effectively zero (or even negative) interest rates it can be expected to be even worse.
Re: (Score:2)
If your money got wiped out then you aren't nearly as smart as you think you are.
Even the stock market managed to recover.
Re: (Score:2)
I would have said that neither rocket design nor software design is science, they're both engineering. At least mostly; if you're trying to create a non-chemical rocket (or other device) to take people to Mars, or you're working on AI, then there's science. But building a low Earth orbit rocket, or building medical (etc.) software, is, IMO, engineering.
Re: (Score:2)
They thought that back in the 60s. Sort of like nuclear fusion.