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Comment: Re:time for more apprenticeships over older collge (Score 1) 226

by L7_ (#40344993) Attached to: Too Many Biomedical Graduate Students, Not Enough Jobs

Exactly. And also of note that biology and life science degrees are also considered to be easier than the physical sciences and engineering disciplines due mainly to the lack of advanced mathematical concepts and rigor. It is turtles all the way down (or up?) though, and if people are being condescending to others studying humanities, or what is contrived to be an easier/less rigorous field, you should take a minute to look at the people studying electrical engineering, who have no time to be condescending! :-)


by L7_ (#40344947) Attached to: Too Many Biomedical Graduate Students, Not Enough Jobs

Right. You don't get people switching to Biology because it is too hard, what you do get is a ton of Biology students that have no real interest in Biology and just want to "become a doctor" (note that they do not really want to practice medicine).

Actually, (even with no evidence) I believe that at least a third of these people have no real interest in biomedical research, they are just doing it as a graduate student because there are almost no other options available. They did not make it into Medical school (or could not afford it) and have no other option with an undergraduate degree in Biology.

Not going to medical school and with no real idea of what to do in the 'real world' with their biology degree and an advisor talking about grant money, they are encouraged to apply to graduate work in biomedical research or something similar. They don't really care about it though, they are just failed doctoral students.

Call me biased, but too many freshman level advisors tell people to study Biology.

Comment: Re:3D maps... well, that's ambitious. (Score 1) 88

by L7_ (#35082146) Attached to: Russia Launches, Loses, Finds Military Satellite

when things move as fast as satellites move, you never really know where they are. even a 0.01% uncertainty in velocity of a typical satellite going ~2000m/s... after about a minute the resulting position would have a bounding box of 12 meters. Now, after an hour, a day? It's not too difficult to lose track of where you need to point your radars to find your bird.

[Calculation is very general, I pulled that 0.01% velocity uncertainty from my ass]

Comment: Re:Here we go again (SCO) (Score 1) 675

by L7_ (#34052244) Attached to: Oracle Claims Google 'Directly Copied' Our Java Code

The CEO of VMWare Paul Martiz thinks that everyone is moving to Python/Ruby, specifically Django and Rails as replacements for the J2EE stack.

Think of it what you will, but unless you've tried to write a small-medium sized project in Python (as suggested by ESR: ) then you don't know what you're missing, especially if you're moving from Java.

Comment: Re:How convenient... (Score 1) 107

by L7_ (#33987092) Attached to: Google Testing High-Speed Fiber Network At Stanford Res Halls

Actually, I thought it deserved a comment because he reversed the usage on both:

Google has plans to scale they're broadband experiment up to 50,000-500,000 homes before their done.

Should be "Google has plans to scale thier..." and " before they're done."

Such improper usage leads me to believe that the original poster just does not understand proper grammar.

Comment: Re:Only one real reason (Score 1) 329

by L7_ (#33986682) Attached to: Why Silicon Valley Won't Be the Green Car Detroit

You're wrong, please don't be defensive.

Nothing was ever designed in Alabama. Defense contractors in Southern California (mainly Los Angeles) used fabrication facilities to manufacture things in Alabama, but all of the science was done in LA. All of the scientific brainpower for those companies have never resided in Huntsville, it's a shithole.

And JPL? I thought that was a Caltech institution? You know, in eastern Los Angeles? And Los Alamos National Lab in Santa Fe, NM might have something to do with the design of the nuclear bomb.

Because a company or an institution has offices in a rural southern state for cheap menial jobs, does not mean that those laborers contribute science or engineering designs. They don't.

Sentient plasmoids are a gas.