While I too was shocked at the number of scam emails that my Monster resume elicited, it also elicited the phone call from the headhunter that landed me the new job from which I'm posting this message right now.
So now I'm e-malingering at a 20% higher wage. And in an R&D environment where it's (almost) encouraged!
Most upper management (and middle management) view e-mail not as a communication tool, but as a way to CYA.
And as we have learned recently, as one rises further up the food chain, to the Pentagon, DoJ and White House, the absence of an email trail becomes CYA.
(I think in many cases, the turbulence at the boundary layer would be quite entertaining to witness.)
In my last job, I was the second highest-ranked person in the building (Exec Row was across the street). If I closed my door, no one bothered me. Except for the first highest-ranked person, so if someone knocked on my door, I knew who it was.
Most of the time, when I closed my door it was to get work done, undisturbed.
But sometimes, I closed my door to eat, nap, or occassionally even rub one out.
(Sounds good, until you realize that when you're the second-highest ranked, there's not much room to rise. I left there to go work at a place where some upward mobility remained. And even the VPs work in cubicles here.)
/still looking for a place to go rub one out, occasionally
Aye, that was mine, too. It was on a printer terminal in the phone room of my middle school, which I was given access to as a result of consistently completing my math coursework in half the time of other students. After playing it just once, I discovered how to print out the BASIC listing.
Using only the program listing as an example, I rewrote the program overnight to add features including energy management and colorful dialogue from the TV series, both randomized and in response to gameplay outcomes. The next day I replaced the version on the host with my version, and two days later got called into the principal's office. Waiting for me was my math teacher, and another math teacher who had a reputation for being a stern taskmaster.
I thought I was in trouble. But in fact, I had gotten the attention of Mr. Taskmaster, the head of the math department who owned the account I was using, and whose directory contained the game's BASIC file I had modified. He sat down one afternoon to play the game, and got quite a surprise. Everyone in the room (except me) was impressed to the point of bewilderment.
As a result of the incident, they installed terminals in one of the math classrooms and instituted a "computer math program" in the gifted and talented curriculum.
My next experience was when I attended an engineering-prep summer program at a midwestern tech school, and discovered MORIA. I played it for hours every night, to the detriment of food, sleep, and project work. (I had already been playing D&D for several years at this point, so this was normal.) I've been hooked on roguelike games ever since.
And people who drive like the speed limit is just a guideline tend, in my experience, to be more prone to road rage than those who actually obey it.
Only when we encounter the people who drive like it's their privilege to enforce the speed limit by driving it in the passing lane, pacing their peers to the right, rather than exercising some basic courtesy and common sense by permitting the faster traffic to pass on the left.
Today is 11th of January and it is still not on the website. [snip] Is it that difficult to write "to be published" instead of "published"?
You realize that Nature is a physical, paper journal? Not a web-only publication like Salon.com or Newsmax.
Also, frequently these dead tree publications are post-dated so that -- with some luck -- they arrive in the subscriber's snailmail on the date of the issue (or in the case of porn rags, a month earlier), especially the weekly ones.
Just because it's not on the website doesn't mean it's "not published." If Nature published their articles on the web before most people received the laminar cellulose version, who would pay $199 per year for the latter?
When I was a young proto-geek, the Radio Shack 1001 Electronic Projects kit was the "Lego of Electronics," and it actually taught you something about, you know, Ohm's Law and Boolean Logic, and that junk.
The closest thing I can find on Google now is the modern version, which looks pretty darn close.
/we had to build our on Leyden jars, too //uphill, both ways
LED-illuminated. Meaning that the light switched by the MEMS mirrors and filtered by the color wheel originates from PN junction somewhere (i.e., instead of a lamp).
Yes - I'm on board with that. They both deserve punishment commensurate with their offenses, if only to further cement the legal principle that two wrongs do not make a right.
Neither of them, however, deserve to be cheered on. Encouragement of vigilantism is uglier than vigilantism itself./lawfulneutral
That's like taking your car to get it repaired and being pissed off when you get arrested because the mechanic notices the 5 kilos of coke in your back seat.
Since when does the legality of one's possessions alter one's rights?
If that porn had been "legal porn," then those Circuit City techs could easily have lost their jobs just for rifling thru the person's filesystem. There have been such cases receiving/. attention recently.
When the foil and saran wrapped bricks in the trunk of my car turn out to be aged sharp cheddar and not hashish, I have a right to complain that my privacy is violated by the person I hire to change my oil. But if they are bricks of hash, then all of a sudden, the violation of privacy is acceptable?
Bullshit. The end does NOT justify the means. It takes more courage and more discipline to apply the rules of civilized society to *everyone* than to run amok like a nation of thuggish authoritarian vigilantes.
And those who moderate the parent "insightful" are the same who vote for authoritarian, unamerican cowardly bullies that symbolically wipe their asses with the constitution with every vote to repeal habeas corpus and to further demolish the long-standing regulation of abusive corporate power that we learned THE HARD WAY was necessary, nearly a century ago.
Go ahead. Mod me "flamebait." It doesn't make my points any less valid.
Actually, I was doing some research into advanced Li chemistry cells in 2006, and learned then the Toshiba technology is more similar to the lithium ion titanate, using a titanium spinel for the anode, that was developed by Altair Nanotechnologies in the US. We tried to get some specifications and samples from Toshiba, but they were playing their cards very close to their chest.
At the time, Altair was trying to develop every market they could, and was developing methods for manufacturing all sizes of cells. Since then, however, they have concentrated on large-capacity batteries for transportation applications, while it appears Toshiba is going after the consumer portable electronics market. They will be competing directly with the Lithium Iron Phosphate chemistry, which has a lead to market.
It's interesting to note that the two chemistries are not exclusive -- someone with the proper licenses could use both materials.
You know, I've come to interpret "I have no counter argument left but to construct a strawman out of the most extreme case of your argument I can think of, then argue against that" as "I concede your argument in its totality."
Awesome. Since I don't have any mod points today, have a cookie!
Someone's being hyperbolic, somewhere. There's still a theoretical limit on the delta-V of any specific fuel-oxidizer mixture, and we've been only slowly pushing up against the practical limits. The intended benefit of the aerospike was to compensate for loss of efficiency as air pressure changes with altitude. Unfortunately, there are some unexpected issues with supersonic laminar flow below M=3, and cooling the aerospike wedge often requires more weight than is offset by the gains in efficiency. Eventually, when the right heat-tolerant materials become available, using an aerospike engine may save you some weight, but even if it took you straight to the theoretical limit, it would only buy you so much. Furthermore, there are issues with
In general, space propulsion using chemical rockets is not especially effective for getting us to orbit, much less for getting us to other planets. In fact, we don't use chemical propulsion for interplanetary travel... we exchange momentum with a celestial body, usually the Earth or Moon.
Couldn't electronics like this be used with heavy radiation shielding?
Yes and no. To be effective, shielding needs to be extremely thick, not only to stop the primary radiation (the incoming stuff), but also to absorb the secondary radiation "knocked loose" when the primary radiation interacts with the shielding. In some radiation environments (e.g., polar Earth orbit), shielding intended to reduce total dose exposure can actually make the situation worse -- trapped protons and cosmic rays can create more secondary radiation than the primary radiation it blocks.
However, an interplanetary mission a solution to another problem that can be used synergystically as radiation shielding for both electronics and humans. Water (and other hydrogen-rich liquids like ammonia and paraffin) makes an effective shielding material. And the human crew is going to need plenty of water. Solution: design the vehicle such that critical microelectronics enclosures are surrounded by lead (or iridium) water tanks.
As for electronics, aside from some electronic controls, I doubt rocket technology has changed very much since the Saturn V era.
As a rocket engineer myself, I can reaffirm this statement. Given the catastrohpic and costly nature of rocketry failures, rocket scientists are extremely conservative folks.
And fundamentally, nothing in chemical rocket propulsion has changed much in the 40 years since Apollo started, especially for the kinds of liquid engines required for a manned interplanetary mission. (Ion propulsion, hybrid motors, and other niche propulsion techniques have made some significant strides, but are impractical for manned missions.) Structurally there are new materials available, composites, cermet, etc., that provide marginal improvements in performance. By the 2020s when a mission like this is in the design phase, I expect even more materials improvements will have been made.
And yes, electronics has advanced by orders of magnitude. However, given the radiation environment of interplanetary space, most microelectronics would not survive the trip without being quintupally redundant, heavily shielded, or custom designed and processed from the substrate up. And remember, we're talking about ultraconservative rocket scientists designing a manned space mission.
The problem is, Moore's Law works to the detriment of radiation tolerance. As structures get smaller and smaller, they become more susceptible to damage by the small amounts of energy deposited by ionizing radiation and especially to heavy ions (cosmic rays). The circuits and structures have to be designed specifically to tolerate the damage from radiation without altering the microcircuit function too dramatically.
No, for a manned interplanetary mission, you're very likely to see most electronics be several generations old technology, and critical systems will be designed with failure-tolerant and radiation-immune technology like electron tubes and relays.
You may think I'm joking, or being hyperbolic... but I'm not.
Of course, by 2031, who knows what will be either radiation tolerant and/or "several generations old."
It [Crossover] runs every game I've needed so far, almost perfectly.
Interesting. Perhaps you could help me to get my copy of Crossover to run some old Win95-era games like Panzer General and Pax Imperia II? I can't seem to manage.
Home users will have little choice but to migrate as and when they buy thier next new PC
Home users have plenty of choice... although the choice isn't advertised.
When you go to Dell.com to buy a PC, and click on "Home & Home Office" links to shop online, your only OS Choice is Vista. However the clue is the phrase "Dell recommends Microsoft Vista operating system," which appears on every page. [emphasis mine]
Want XP or XP Pro? Don't select "Home & Home Office" at step 1. Choose "Small & Medium Business" and browse Dell's line of Latitude laptops, etc. There you are given options for your OS, including both XP and Vista.
HP and Lenovo play similar tricks. XP systems are still plentiful, but the average mark off the street is gonna get stuck with Vista by default. You just can't reveal that you're a "home" user.
Finally, there's always the option of buying a Mac, and running whatever OS you please. This may sound trollish, but in practice it is an attractive option to a traditional "wintel" machine for more and more consumers these days, especially home users.
As an earthlink customer, I can tell you when: From the time I subscribed in 1994 to the time they merged with Mindspring in 2000.
I've been an earthlink subscriber since 28.8 kbaud was the speed limit, and the level of service has steadily declined. When I subscribed, I knew that when I called tech support, I'd be speaking with someone right across town from me in Pasadena, CA. Now when I call tech support, I get someone with a Hindi accent who calls himself Dave, and whose number one skill is establishing that the problem lies with my hardware or local telco, and then getting me off the line.
The inflection point was the Mindspring merger. I'd change ISPs, but currently my only other affordable options are AT&T/Yahoo or Charter.:p
I was at a party recently and met John Callas, the MER Program Manager.
I shouldn't have tried to outdo him by bragging to the hostess that I was the only real "rocket scientist" present. (I build target missiles that get shot down by the MDA.)
A short while later, John used his cellphone to impress a young lady who wandered over to chat him up. He opened up his Razr and showed her how he gets 12-hour updates from each of the rovers via SMS, complete with maps.
The dude gets texted from Mars four times a day.
I had to concede.
Re:If there was only content worth watching
on
Miro Turns 1.0
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Agreed, most of the content I'm insterested comes from tvrss.net feeds.
The problem I have with that, however, is that the updates are inconsistent, as one may expect from a collection of "unauthorized" sources. (I'd watch the authorized version online, if Comedy Central's videos would play on my Mac using Quicktime and Flip4Mac.)
For instance, "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" hasn't been updated since 01 November. However, "The Colbert Report" is faithfully updated every day.
But generally, most of the good programs are seeded within a day of airing, and while I PVR most of those already, sometimes my hardware encoder flakes, or I miss a scheduled recording, so the tvrss.net feeds are a lifesaver.
Especially when your wife is grumpy because she forgot to tape this week's episode of Survivor!
Some of the Miro featured content is good too, like PBS Kids shows (for my 3yo son) and some of the bikini contest stuff (for Dad). Oh - and Democracy Now! HD is free featured content as well.
I'm a casual player, too. I had barely levelled my main to 60 before BC was released. I had several alts on both factions in their 30's. And I was discovering that, for a casual player at least, end game is boring.
My options were: 1) continue to grind rep/gold at 60, 2) Level an alt through the same 1-60 grind I had just completed, or 3) devote more time to the game so that I could participate in endgame dungeons and raids.
Fortunately, after only a few weeks, BC came out and gave me the opportunity to level a new race in a new starting area, By the time my BE and Draeni alts were each level 20, and had advanced to the same zones, same grinds, same quests as my earlier alts, Hellfire and Zangarmarsh were no longer overrun with hardcore 60's camping spawns and named mobs, so I could enjoy levelling my main again.
I'm pacing myself so that I have a main character on each faction approaching 70 by the time the next expansion comes out, so I can again avoid hitting the cap and getting bored.
Either that, or I'll be playing Age of Conan or Eve already.
Slashdot Mirror
So now I'm e-malingering at a 20% higher wage. And in an R&D environment where it's (almost) encouraged!
I mean if you program the robots with Asimov's Laws of Robotics, then what's the problem.
Robot on Robot violence?
Conscientiously objecting robots?
Or - the horror - formulation of a "Zeroth Law"?
And as we have learned recently, as one rises further up the food chain, to the Pentagon, DoJ and White House, the absence of an email trail becomes CYA.
(I think in many cases, the turbulence at the boundary layer would be quite entertaining to witness.)
Most of the time, when I closed my door it was to get work done, undisturbed.
But sometimes, I closed my door to eat, nap, or occassionally even rub one out.
(Sounds good, until you realize that when you're the second-highest ranked, there's not much room to rise. I left there to go work at a place where some upward mobility remained. And even the VPs work in cubicles here.)
Best OP in thread!
Using only the program listing as an example, I rewrote the program overnight to add features including energy management and colorful dialogue from the TV series, both randomized and in response to gameplay outcomes. The next day I replaced the version on the host with my version, and two days later got called into the principal's office. Waiting for me was my math teacher, and another math teacher who had a reputation for being a stern taskmaster.
I thought I was in trouble. But in fact, I had gotten the attention of Mr. Taskmaster, the head of the math department who owned the account I was using, and whose directory contained the game's BASIC file I had modified. He sat down one afternoon to play the game, and got quite a surprise. Everyone in the room (except me) was impressed to the point of bewilderment.
As a result of the incident, they installed terminals in one of the math classrooms and instituted a "computer math program" in the gifted and talented curriculum.
My next experience was when I attended an engineering-prep summer program at a midwestern tech school, and discovered MORIA. I played it for hours every night, to the detriment of food, sleep, and project work. (I had already been playing D&D for several years at this point, so this was normal.) I've been hooked on roguelike games ever since.
Only when we encounter the people who drive like it's their privilege to enforce the speed limit by driving it in the passing lane, pacing their peers to the right, rather than exercising some basic courtesy and common sense by permitting the faster traffic to pass on the left.
You realize that Nature is a physical, paper journal? Not a web-only publication like Salon.com or Newsmax.
Also, frequently these dead tree publications are post-dated so that -- with some luck -- they arrive in the subscriber's snailmail on the date of the issue (or in the case of porn rags, a month earlier), especially the weekly ones.
Just because it's not on the website doesn't mean it's "not published." If Nature published their articles on the web before most people received the laminar cellulose version, who would pay $199 per year for the latter?
Therefore "published" is correct.
The closest thing I can find on Google now is the modern version, which looks pretty darn close.
LED-illuminated. Meaning that the light switched by the MEMS mirrors and filtered by the color wheel originates from PN junction somewhere (i.e., instead of a lamp).
Just in case you think I'm being facetious: The best aged sharp cheddar in the US. Can you say "cheese buzz?"
Available by mail order.
Neither of them, however, deserve to be cheered on. Encouragement of vigilantism is uglier than vigilantism itself. /lawfulneutral
Since when does the legality of one's possessions alter one's rights?
If that porn had been "legal porn," then those Circuit City techs could easily have lost their jobs just for rifling thru the person's filesystem. There have been such cases receiving /. attention recently.
When the foil and saran wrapped bricks in the trunk of my car turn out to be aged sharp cheddar and not hashish, I have a right to complain that my privacy is violated by the person I hire to change my oil. But if they are bricks of hash, then all of a sudden, the violation of privacy is acceptable?
Bullshit. The end does NOT justify the means. It takes more courage and more discipline to apply the rules of civilized society to *everyone* than to run amok like a nation of thuggish authoritarian vigilantes.
And those who moderate the parent "insightful" are the same who vote for authoritarian, unamerican cowardly bullies that symbolically wipe their asses with the constitution with every vote to repeal habeas corpus and to further demolish the long-standing regulation of abusive corporate power that we learned THE HARD WAY was necessary, nearly a century ago.
Go ahead. Mod me "flamebait." It doesn't make my points any less valid.
At the time, Altair was trying to develop every market they could, and was developing methods for manufacturing all sizes of cells. Since then, however, they have concentrated on large-capacity batteries for transportation applications, while it appears Toshiba is going after the consumer portable electronics market. They will be competing directly with the Lithium Iron Phosphate chemistry, which has a lead to market.
It's interesting to note that the two chemistries are not exclusive -- someone with the proper licenses could use both materials.
Thank you. Consider this post another +1 Insightful.
Awesome. Since I don't have any mod points today, have a cookie!
In general, space propulsion using chemical rockets is not especially effective for getting us to orbit, much less for getting us to other planets. In fact, we don't use chemical propulsion for interplanetary travel... we exchange momentum with a celestial body, usually the Earth or Moon.
Yes and no. To be effective, shielding needs to be extremely thick, not only to stop the primary radiation (the incoming stuff), but also to absorb the secondary radiation "knocked loose" when the primary radiation interacts with the shielding. In some radiation environments (e.g., polar Earth orbit), shielding intended to reduce total dose exposure can actually make the situation worse -- trapped protons and cosmic rays can create more secondary radiation than the primary radiation it blocks.
However, an interplanetary mission a solution to another problem that can be used synergystically as radiation shielding for both electronics and humans. Water (and other hydrogen-rich liquids like ammonia and paraffin) makes an effective shielding material. And the human crew is going to need plenty of water. Solution: design the vehicle such that critical microelectronics enclosures are surrounded by lead (or iridium) water tanks.
As a rocket engineer myself, I can reaffirm this statement. Given the catastrohpic and costly nature of rocketry failures, rocket scientists are extremely conservative folks.
And fundamentally, nothing in chemical rocket propulsion has changed much in the 40 years since Apollo started, especially for the kinds of liquid engines required for a manned interplanetary mission. (Ion propulsion, hybrid motors, and other niche propulsion techniques have made some significant strides, but are impractical for manned missions.) Structurally there are new materials available, composites, cermet, etc., that provide marginal improvements in performance. By the 2020s when a mission like this is in the design phase, I expect even more materials improvements will have been made.
And yes, electronics has advanced by orders of magnitude. However, given the radiation environment of interplanetary space, most microelectronics would not survive the trip without being quintupally redundant, heavily shielded, or custom designed and processed from the substrate up. And remember, we're talking about ultraconservative rocket scientists designing a manned space mission.
The problem is, Moore's Law works to the detriment of radiation tolerance. As structures get smaller and smaller, they become more susceptible to damage by the small amounts of energy deposited by ionizing radiation and especially to heavy ions (cosmic rays). The circuits and structures have to be designed specifically to tolerate the damage from radiation without altering the microcircuit function too dramatically.
No, for a manned interplanetary mission, you're very likely to see most electronics be several generations old technology, and critical systems will be designed with failure-tolerant and radiation-immune technology like electron tubes and relays.
You may think I'm joking, or being hyperbolic... but I'm not.
Of course, by 2031, who knows what will be either radiation tolerant and/or "several generations old."
Interesting. Perhaps you could help me to get my copy of Crossover to run some old Win95-era games like Panzer General and Pax Imperia II? I can't seem to manage.
Home users have plenty of choice... although the choice isn't advertised.
When you go to Dell.com to buy a PC, and click on "Home & Home Office" links to shop online, your only OS Choice is Vista. However the clue is the phrase "Dell recommends Microsoft Vista operating system," which appears on every page. [emphasis mine]
Want XP or XP Pro? Don't select "Home & Home Office" at step 1. Choose "Small & Medium Business" and browse Dell's line of Latitude laptops, etc. There you are given options for your OS, including both XP and Vista.
HP and Lenovo play similar tricks. XP systems are still plentiful, but the average mark off the street is gonna get stuck with Vista by default. You just can't reveal that you're a "home" user.
Finally, there's always the option of buying a Mac, and running whatever OS you please. This may sound trollish, but in practice it is an attractive option to a traditional "wintel" machine for more and more consumers these days, especially home users.
I've been an earthlink subscriber since 28.8 kbaud was the speed limit, and the level of service has steadily declined. When I subscribed, I knew that when I called tech support, I'd be speaking with someone right across town from me in Pasadena, CA. Now when I call tech support, I get someone with a Hindi accent who calls himself Dave, and whose number one skill is establishing that the problem lies with my hardware or local telco, and then getting me off the line.
The inflection point was the Mindspring merger. I'd change ISPs, but currently my only other affordable options are AT&T/Yahoo or Charter. :p
I shouldn't have tried to outdo him by bragging to the hostess that I was the only real "rocket scientist" present. (I build target missiles that get shot down by the MDA.)
A short while later, John used his cellphone to impress a young lady who wandered over to chat him up. He opened up his Razr and showed her how he gets 12-hour updates from each of the rovers via SMS, complete with maps.
The dude gets texted from Mars four times a day.
I had to concede.
The problem I have with that, however, is that the updates are inconsistent, as one may expect from a collection of "unauthorized" sources. (I'd watch the authorized version online, if Comedy Central's videos would play on my Mac using Quicktime and Flip4Mac.)
For instance, "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" hasn't been updated since 01 November. However, "The Colbert Report" is faithfully updated every day.
But generally, most of the good programs are seeded within a day of airing, and while I PVR most of those already, sometimes my hardware encoder flakes, or I miss a scheduled recording, so the tvrss.net feeds are a lifesaver.
Especially when your wife is grumpy because she forgot to tape this week's episode of Survivor!
Some of the Miro featured content is good too, like PBS Kids shows (for my 3yo son) and some of the bikini contest stuff (for Dad). Oh - and Democracy Now! HD is free featured content as well.
I'm a casual player, too. I had barely levelled my main to 60 before BC was released. I had several alts on both factions in their 30's. And I was discovering that, for a casual player at least, end game is boring.
My options were: 1) continue to grind rep/gold at 60, 2) Level an alt through the same 1-60 grind I had just completed, or 3) devote more time to the game so that I could participate in endgame dungeons and raids.
Fortunately, after only a few weeks, BC came out and gave me the opportunity to level a new race in a new starting area, By the time my BE and Draeni alts were each level 20, and had advanced to the same zones, same grinds, same quests as my earlier alts, Hellfire and Zangarmarsh were no longer overrun with hardcore 60's camping spawns and named mobs, so I could enjoy levelling my main again.
I'm pacing myself so that I have a main character on each faction approaching 70 by the time the next expansion comes out, so I can again avoid hitting the cap and getting bored.
Either that, or I'll be playing Age of Conan or Eve already.