stevenbedrick

> Norwegians now have a sense of entitlement.

You say that like it's a bad thing. One could say that us Americans have a "sense of entitlement" about things like clean drinking water, functioning emergency services, and a publicly-funded education system; alternatively, one could just as easily say that we have a set of baseline expectations about the sorts of things that a modern society is supposed to provide to its citizens (in exchange for taxes, etc.).

It sounds like Norwegians have a different idea of where that baseline should be.

> It all depends on what you want. If you want an easier start, but have your overall potential income limited, start a company in Norway. If you want a riskier start, with less limits in the long-run, start your company in the US.

OK, fair enough, but again- remember why it is that you care one way or the other about how big your "overall potential income" is. There comes a point where you've got enough to live luxuriously, have all your material wants satisfied, and basically do whatever you want on a day-to-day basis- is there a point to accumulating more than that? From the article, and from what other posters on this thread have said, it sure sounds like the "limited" potential income level in Norway is still quite high, by any rational standard, so what does it matter? After five or six million dollars per year, would an increase actually impact your life in a noticeable way?

By the way, I'm speaking from a strictly pragmatic standpoint here, not an idealogical one- some people see this as a moral issue, and that's not where I'm going here. I'm basically saying, "if my income is X millions of dollars, why do I care if the government takes half of that and I only have .5X?" Especially since I know that, by giving up that money, I'm ensuring that my neighbors and employees don't have to worry about medical costs and will be able to retire comfortably? Past a certain point, can you really spend more? And if you do, will it make you happy?

Of course, I should point out that this is all very easy for me to say, seeing as I never have and probably never will earn enough to face this question personally. Maybe I'd feel differently if I were rich, who knows.

Edit: just noticed, it should say "the aforementioned inverse of the money/freedom relationship", not "the aforementioned inverse relationship".

> Everyone is in it for the money. Money means freedom. Freedom from governments and your boss.

No, everybody is not "in it for the money". You said it yourself, actually: most people are in it for the things that money allows them to do. That is a very important difference, and it's one that a lot of people forget about.

Here in the US, a lot of the things from which we'd like to be "free" from (living in fear of health care-related bankruptcy, having to beg a boss for an extra week of vacation, being limited to absurdly short and unpaid (ma|pa)ternity leave periods, etc.) come with a hefty price tag, and as such are associated with (and often thought of as proxies for) having a lot of money.

In a place like Norway, many of the things that that we Americans see as perks afforded to only the wealthiest of individuals are instead thought of as baseline facts of life.

Is it so surprising, then, that people whose world-views are shaped by such a system don't have the same difficulties at disentangling financial cause and effect that we Americans have? They say that "past a certain point, money's just a way of keeping score," and it sounds to me as though that point is a lot lower in a place like Norway than it is here in the US.

As an experiment, let's try formulating it (semi)-logically (it's been a while since I had logic, so if I'm getting this wrong, please let me know):

    if (has lots of money) -> (freedom from financial catastrophe, and lots of social perks)

In the US, the inverse is true:

    not (has lots of money) -> not (freedom from financial catastrophe, lots of social perks, etc.)

Because of how our system is set up, the converse is also typically true:

    if (freedom from financial catastrophe, lots of social perks) -> (has lots of money)

This leads us to conclude that there's an inevitable relationship between having lots of money and having the freedom that you talk about.

In Norway, however, the system is different, and it doesn't sound like the aforementioned inverse relationship between money and freedom is true: since you can have the freedom from healthcare-related financial catastrophe, a decent vacation policy, educational benefits, etc. all without having tons of money. Since there are different "givens", it's not surprising that Norwegians have arrived at different conclusions and attitudes towards money. QED?

Let's see... he doesn't speak Arabic, so any "regular" journalistic skills he might have would be useless, and AFAIK he's not an expert on Egyptian culture and politics, so he doesn't have any special domain expertise that might be useful even without Arabic language skills. I'd personally rather hear more on CNN, MSNBC, etc. from actual Egyptian journalists.

Agreed. I mentioned something like this in a comment the other day- a liberal arts background can be a massive help to one's ability to function as a programmer, and when I was hiring programmers at my old job, I routinely found that candidates who had spent some significant time outside of the CS building tended to work out better than less well-rounded candidates.

Fair enough, but if those treasury bonds don't end up being worth what they're supposed to to be worth, it seems to me that we've got bigger problems than SS going under.

However, I heartily agree with your request for correction by someone who knows better- this is about the full extent of my knowledge on the subject, and I'd love to hear from somebody with expertise in this field.

Yup, that's the one. I would've included it in my post, but I couldn't quite remember the specific syntax. Even with this option, though, I ran into some irregularities involving font embedding and Adobe Illustrator.

Supposedly, the newest version of MMA has improved its font embedding behavior such that it all should "just work," but I haven't had a chance to test it out yet.

Without commenting on your theory as to why Israel's favored by the USA, I'd like to point out a bigger reason that Israeli leaders won't be sleeping well: whoever ends up in charge of Egypt is quite likely to be a lot more hostile toward Israel than Mubarak's government has been.

Israel has been able to count on relatively peaceful relations with Egypt for the last few decades, meaning that since the treaty with Jordan they've only had to worry about one hostile immediate neighbor. Suddenly having to worry about Egypt as well as Lebanon would represent a big change.

Not that I disagree about SS being a time bomb, but I think you're slightly mistaken about where SS revenue comes from (or I could be mistaken; anybody out there who knows for sure should please correct me). What most Americans think of as "federal tax" is actually several separate taxes, and which ones any given individual actually pays varies depending on their employment situation.

There's a specific tax that workers (either self-employed or otherwise) pay that goes to social security (as opposed to the general federal income tax), and as far as I know, those specific funds go to the central social security trust fund rather than the federal government's general fund. Funds used for invading other countries, paying off interest payments, etc. etc. comes from other revenue streams.

As I understand it, the reason SS is potentially in trouble is that, the baby boomers are beginning to retire and draw on the system. This represents a simultaneous large decrease in the number of people paying into the fund and increase in the number of people extracting money from the fund. The precise financial implications of this seem to be up for debate- some people say that there will be sufficient money to cover everybody, while others say that there won't be.

I personally don't see how it can possibly work, but I'm certainly not an economist so what do I know? At any rate, I don't expect to see a dime of it when my time comes. At this point, I view the whole thing as basically a charity for baby boomers, and from that perspective it kind of makes sense- unless we want to let them die/starve in the streets, we're going to end up paying for them one way or another; we may as well make use of the existing infrastructure for helping to support elders.

> What's going on with the symbols (%, #, @, etc.) in those comparisons? It looks like they're getting pulled from Courier New.

Mathematica can be really finicky regarding fonts in graphics when it comes to what it thinks of as "math" symbols. This has to do with the way that it typesets equations- most fonts won't have glyphs for integral symbols, for example. Let's say that for some odd reason you wanted to typeset an equation in Zapfino. Mathematica will be happy to do this, but since Zapfino lacks integral signs and numerous other mathematical symbols, Mathematica will helpfully substitute glyphs from its own built-in fonts "as needed."

Unfortunately, it can be overzealous about this- its definition of "as needed" is awfully broad. I recently had a seriously annoying problem involving a graph I was trying to export- I'd set the graph up using Optima, but the graph's title included parentheses and a percentage sign. It all looked fine on the screen, but upon exporting it I found that the (, ), and % were all in the wrong font, since Mathematica decided that those were math symbols and as such needed to be substituted out for glyphs from another font. Turns out there's a (well-hidden and poorly-documented) way to manually override this font-embedding behavior- if any Mathematica users out there are interested, drop me an email.

I disagree. My undergraduate degree was in biology, but I earned it from a liberal arts college. What did that mean? It meant that I took an awful lot of biology classes, but I was also forced[1] to take a lot of classes outside of the science building. The college's degree requirements specified that you had to take a certain number of credits from such-and-such department, a certain number from so-and-so, and so on, no matter what your major happened to be. As a science major, it was sometimes very challenging to fit all the requirements in, but I'm really glad I did. Having a broad base of knowledge outside one's speciality is extremely liberating personally, and it can be professionally empowering, as well.

It's easy, as a scientist, to lose perspective about what we do- both in terms of "why are we doing this at all" to "why do we do this in this specific way." A good liberal arts education helps you a) recognize situations in which those sorts of questions are relevant, and b) can help you develop a useful set intellectual tools for answering those questions. Also, a lot of the biology I learned is already obsolete, ten years later; while learning it was certainly worthwhile, it is of relatively little practical value to me today (and not just because I didn't end up going into biology).

Also, having to take some humanities classes helped me become a better writer, and also helped me learn how to effectively discuss my work and why it is important. Those have proved to be extremely useful skills in life, both in academia as well as in the "real world".

Now, I would also argue that, had I been a humanities major of some sort, taking some hard-core science classes would have been quite beneficial- it would have taught me about a different way to engage with and think about reality, which can only be beneficial to one's ability to think about literature, or music, or whatever.

Oh, BTW- in addition to biology classes, I took a fair number of CS classes (almost enough for a minor), and I feel like my programming abilities over the years have definitely benefited from a liberal arts background. Furthermore, when I was doing hiring at my pre-grad-school job, I found that the best candidates weren't necessarily the ones with impeccable CS credentials. Often, the ones that worked out best in the end were often the ones that had broader academic horizons. They tended to have an easier time dealing with ambiguous situations and instructions, and were better able to "dive in" and "JFDI" when confronted with new and unfamiliar codebases, technologies, or projects. That's not to say that CS classes weren't important, or anything like that- just that there's a synergistic effect between good CS and the humanities.

[1]: "Forced" isn't quite the right word, here, since getting a broad education was the whole reason I chose a liberal arts school. "Required," maybe?

I don't know specifics about Kinect, but I do know that MSR has done a ton of work on computer vision and its applications over the last ten or fifteen years, and I would be extremely surprised if that work didn't inform the efforts of whoever did invent Kinect.

Thank you. Maybe I'm blind, or something, but I sure couldn't find a link to the original source on the Engadget article page.

One of my advisors once summed up aviation-as-a-hobby in one sentence: "The times in your life during which you've got adequate free time to devote to the hobby, you don't have the money... and when you've got the money for it, you don't have the free time."

Who do you think comprise the biggest funders this sort of research?

This article is full of excellent advice- anybody out there thinking about a PhD would be well-advised to read it, and pay especially close attention to the part about figuring out why you want the PhD.

T5's not awful, or anything, except for one thing: power outlets, or, actually, the extreme lack thereof. There are very few places you can sit while simultaneously charging your laptop and keeping an eye on the departure board.

If I had to guess, it's because the way you read DNA is only along one of the strands (starting at the 5' end, IIRC), in which case you've still got four possible "characters" to use in your representation- A-G is different from G-A, etc. People have thought up all sorts of clever ways to think of how one might encode data using DNA base pairs, but it's been too long since I did any bioinformatics for me to be able to remember exactly how they calculated it all out.

Probably because it was coming out of her own pocket, and researchers generally don't make that much (especially if she was a post-doc). I'm pretty sure that the NIH won't let you charge "stolen laptop reward" to your grant, and your university sure as heck isn't going to shell out for something like that.

How much time have you spent around cancer researchers? I can assure you that many of the most brilliant scientists I know are all almost entirely computer-illiterate.

If I had a dollar for every lab computer I've seen whose desktop is full of a few dozen Excel files ("data1.xls", "data2.xls", "new data.xls", "jim new data.xls"...), I would never need to apply for another grant as long as I live.

I agree with you 100%, but the comment to which I was responding seemed to be suggesting that he solve his debt problems by choosing to work as a more profitable sort of attorney (as opposed to a public defender). Until he passes the bar, those specific options will be closed to him.

Furthermore, the student isn't demanding that anybody hire him as an attorney- just that they grant him the legal credentials needed to be eligible to be hired as an attorney. There's a big difference.

But the catch 22 is that he can't work as a lawyer until he passes the bar...

Depending on the nature of the job, yes, it is definitely low. If we're talking freelance, remember that you've got to account for your own self-employment tax and health insurance out of that.

The last time I did any serious freelance software work, five or six years ago, I started out charging $80/hr, and was still selling myself short.

Since this gem appears to use Google's public API, one important thing to keep in mind is that there's probably a hard limit on the amount of text that can be translated at one go. I've found that throwing more than a thousand or so characters at GT's API results in their server throwing "URI too long" errors, since it only works via HTTP GET.

Disclaimer: This might have changed in the five or six months since I last messed around with Google's API, or, alternatively, this gem could be doing something clever to try and get around the problem. Either way, I'd suggest checking it out.

My dissertation research involved using (and, most importantly, evaluating) GT for certain medical text problems (going from EN->ES), and I found that its performance is highly domain-dependent (i.e., the quality of its translations depends a lot on what kind of input text you're feeding it). Furthermore, I found that whether or not it's "good enough" depends heavily on the user, specifically that user's level of proficiency in English.

GT is better than a lot of machine translation systems, but it still falls victim to a number of common problems that face such systems. Specifically, I've run into a lot of major word-sense-disambiguation issues, especially when working with the sort of short snippets of text that the gem in question uses as examples. Basically, that sort of short bit of text is a worst-case scenario for statistical machine translation, since there's so little context. Google generally does much better with longer runs of text than it does with short phrases.

Yup, this hits the nail on the head. I was in the same situation- I lucked out into a very nice fellowship whose stipend the first four years of grad school started out one or two kilobucks higher than the standard level, and (amazingly, for a grad school stipend) went up a little bit each year. By the end, I was almost at $30k, and felt like a millionaire compared to friends who were on the school's standard stipend scale. Of course, during the fifth year, for various reasons, the fellowship's funding agency adjusted their stipend scale, at which point I discovered that there is a very real difference between making $25k and $30k. Even better, my funding ran out entirely a few months ago, so the last four or five months of my PhD have involved living off of my savings from the previous five years and the odd bit of consulting income.

Let this be a lesson to other grad students out there: save like heck, 'cause you never know when there's going to be a gap in your funding, or a change in its level.

I'm not sure exactly how it works, but Verizon does offer international roaming in a few places (Mexico, etc.). It's nowhere near as good as AT&T's international roaming, but, as other commenters have posted, GSM is far more prevalent outside the US than CDMA.

I wonder how much they'll charge for the mobile hotspot feature? Earlier last year, when they were desperately trying to unload Palm Pres, they were throwing that capability in for free... but I somehow doubt that that will be the case with the iPhone. But I'd love to be proven wrong, as it's been an incredibly useful feature.

Besides federal income tax (as noted by another commenter), there's local sales tax, state property tax, and who knows what-all else. Income tax is sometimes one piece of a state's tax system, but it's never the only piece.

I agree that it's not a perfect comparison, but there are undoubtably similarities. In both cases, you're working mostly on your own, on a project that you have to define and that is entirely dependent on your personal level of self-motivation. One of the biggest challenges to running a startup seems to be correctly defining the problem on which to work, and the single biggest hurdle to finishing a PhD is coming up with your dissertation topic.