Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "Delegate Seth Howard - "I don't see how replacing a knob on a controller encroaches on Sony's IP"" video.

  1. For every one story like yours, there are 99 stories of people who dream big, but lack the talent to make it big. I see it all the time. Kids with only bonehead math on their transcript heading to college "determined" to be electrical engineers. I try never to discourage anyone, but if you're 18 and you still don't have algebra and trig out of the way, you're already adding a year or two to your expected graduation date, because engineering programs - 4-year engineering programs - are based on starting with Calculus I. Rather than try to bring them down, I just lay out their program of study, with a semester of college algebra and college trigonometry taking up the first year. And that's assuming they're even prepared for college algebra, which many are not. They like tinkering with things and they like the idea of being a high-paid engineer, but they have no idea what they're up against in the years to come. The only "discouragement" they get from me is my being realistic about how long it's going to take them, and, given their current level of learning, how EARLY it is for them to be deciding they're cut out for engineering, at least in the traditional sense. A lot of those kinds of young people would be better served getting into a vocational-technical program for electricians or electronics-repair.men. It may even put them closer to what they actually want, which is to tinker with electronics and build their own cool projects. And if they're STILL determined to be a traditional, college-graduated engineer, they've got a skill to help PAY for it, so they don't have to live like poor college students for 5 or 6 (or more) years, with nothing certain except for a mountain of debt when they're done, assuming they finish. As a mathematician, I feel that a good engineer is BETTER in some areas of math than I am, because of their immediate applications to their field, and their constant use of those areas. There are also a lot of DIGITAL techniques that serve the same purpose, but without all the theory, other than a general understanding that if they've got enough data, they can build a model, empirically, without really concerning themselves with what classical function it most resembles. A LOT of the math they'll teach in a classical engineering program is built on mathematics that was invented because if they didn't find something clean to represent their model, they were at a loss, because they lacked the computing power to brute-force it. If we had computers before Newton came along, maybe we wouldn't care one bit about "smoothness and continuity" principles, but just build a digital model of how far the apple has fallen after x number of seconds, build a smooth curve through all the data points and extrapolate from that curve you built off empirical data. You might never have to know the basic falling-body model in order to predict when the apple hits the ground and how fast it's moving when it does. In real-life engineering, there's a lot more experimentation and testing than theory. They may not know WHY x amount of this metal makes the alloy the strongest, but they tried every percentage and took the one that was best. Maybe in 20 years or 30 years, they'll figure out why. I remember teaching an applied problem: "How long should your eaves stick out if you want to block the sun in summer and let the sun in in winter?" problem. I used data for the angle of the sunlight at the solstices and equinoxes, and gave a really complicated derivation of the ideal length. A physics prof taught in that room the next hour, saw what I was doing, and said "Why not just use a stick to see where the shadow falls on those days, and use that?"
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  2. I think looking to politicians who are informed by big-company lobbyists and the donor class, is a waste of time. In the long run, the more they drag their feet on common-sense right-to-repair principles, the more the marketplace will punish companies like Apple, and open the door to thousands if not millions of small competitors. There's a "new normal" on its way that those who are pushing "new normal" the hardest are going to regret. The more they "win" now, the less likely it is that they will dominate the market in 10 or 20 years. The politicians won't pull their heads out of their asses until it's too late to "repair" the financials of the companies that own them, now.
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  3. Wake me up when EU does anything good for the common people that offends the established order on high.
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