Many things need to be bootstrapped if they are going to be successful:
* Look at the subsidy system used to get railroads across the country.
* Air line companies don't pay for airports, nor for the ATC system to keep them from bumping into each other.
* Trucking companies didn't pay for the interstate system.
Engineers know that everytime you double the number of units produced the cost per unit goes down by N%. This is well enough known, that Boeing uses it in their order book. E.g. The first ten 747s off the line cost, say, 100 million each. The next ten 90 million each, the next twenty 81 million each. The next forty 72.9 million each.
Windmills show the same sort of cost breakdown.
If you don't do this, you have to wait for the price of alternatives to get higher that the price of the first windmill.
Yes you can create FUD with talk of externalities. What we really need is a way of Generally Accepted Accounting Practices that take externalities into account. This isn't easy.
Meanwhile, we can see the bad effects of certain actions. I have no problems with government tweeking the system to favour alternatives.
And this is the problem. Our current business model is wrapped up in the next quarterly report:
Suppose we changed the playing field:
1. No official in a company could get more than 3 times the salary of the lowest salaried employee.
2. In addition to his basic salary, a top official received the dividends off a block of stock for the next 20 years for this year's work. He cannot sell the stock until the end of the 20 year period.
3. Each year he gets his salary and another block of stock.
So if a person visualizes a future working for a company for 20 years, and he can't sell his last block of stock until 20 years after he quits, then he has strong incentive to plan long term for the company.
Distribute this system down the ranks, even into the bottom tier. If anyone who has been working for the company for 5 years is now getting 25% of their income in the form of company dividends, now the employees have an incentive to see that the company does well. Of course at this level, it is best to try to split the system so that employee dividends depend on the success of their particualr plant, department, or section.
Right now most of the right of way isn't covered with road, it's covered with grass, bush and weeds. This may make more sense for such a venture.
* People don't drive (often) in the ditches and median.
* By putting them on angles, we could eliminiate the snow sticking issue.
* In the latter case, the land underneath would go to shade tolerant species and the land would still be available for soaking up rainfall.
Perhaps a better alternative would be to enclose the roads in snow shed like structures (roofs on posts) This keeps the roads dry most of the time, and allows a cheaper less sturdy alternative photocell.
You still end up with your power being distributed in long thin lines.
According to one book I have on landscape design alternatives, half the impermeable surface in urban areas is roof. Seems to me that putting cells on roofs (and in Canada on south facing walls) makes a lot more sense:
* No one drives on roofs, other than parking lot roofs.
* The average transmission distance is way down: Your customer is often quite near.
Or How about putting them up in nice neat rows in a desert? Hmm.
* Doesn't need paving grade cells. * Can tilt to maximize light absorbtion. * The power is in much more concentrated locations, making it easier to tie in to the grid. * Not nearly as much driving to fix things. * Less worry about casual vandalism.
What a great idea. If I weren't so selfless I'd run out and patent this today before someone else thinks about it.
Remember that Einstein got started through the failure of the Michelson-Morley experiment to detect the ether.
If there is no gravitational waves, is GR fundamentally wrong, or does it just need a tweak.
"Science is not the process of replacing wrong theories with correct ones. It's the process of replacing wrong theories with ones that are more subtly wrong
Two component phones. A handset that can be either something the size of a pencil or a hands free ear mount. And a transmitter that stays on your waist/in your purse/in your briefcase/in your computer. We are close to this with bluetooth.
Extension phones. I want to have 3 phones on the same number. Two are hardly used. One stays in the toolbox on the tractor, so I can call for help. One stays in the glove box of the beater truck for the same reason. I will accept the limitation that two phones with the same number cannot both be on the network at the same time. The act of turning your phone off then on, makes that phone the one the network acknowledges.
Or when I've got the computer, I want the bluetooth/computer phone, but when I'm going grocery shopping I want the minibrick (iphone) type phone so I can see the shopping list. But I want it to have the same number.
A user interface that doesn't need buttons. Trying to pick up messages while driving is dangerous. Navigating numeric telephone answering systems (as in tech support numbers) in a noisy server room is a nuisance. They will become useful gadgets when you have an alternative voice control for every function.
Smart avatar capability. I want it to have the ability of a good appointments secretary: Take messages for me interactively, "I'm sorry, he's in a meeting right now until about 3. Would you like him to return your call then?" And then bring up a screen message. "Mike Johnson has called three times now, and seems pretty upset."
Power boost to the one on the tractor can actually talk to a cell tower.
Phones that I can use in a monsoon without turning into a paperweight.
is too darned awkward. And having a user read off soup over the phone is error prone.
Good naming conventions: A: Give some clue as to what you are dealing with. At one job I had 11 flavours of unix, 3 versions of winsnooze and 2 versions of Macs.
B: Are pronouceable, not requiring spelling out over the phone.
C: Are not words in common use, but are recognizable.
D: Are not people's names.
E: Are more than a single syllable.
So the SGI lab on 4th floor were all birds -- bluejay, siskin... The secretaries' pool of windows boxes were all named after ancient goddesses. The linux boxes in grad offices were norse gods and heroes. Most of the individual profs workstations were named after their favorite famous mathematiction. (Hilbert wasn't bad but 'ssh chandrasekhar' was a bit much. chand was a cname really fast)
This way grad students would poke their head in my office and say, "Tanager's disk is whining, and it won't boot." and I would know right away that it was an SGI in the stats lab, and not an linux box in that grad's office. Further, it was far more informative than SL-121 as 121 may have actually been 112.
As to naming/licensing issues. There is merit in a computer having an asset tag, or id, whatever, which you use to link all the other info together. The name then becomes what you call it. If the role changes in a major way, you can change the name without screwing up the rest of the data associated with it.
With people, in the U.S. you do this with your SocSec number. That's your asset ID. But no one calls you 619-68-6160, they call you Mike.
When I was with this department I had a flat file that contained stanzas of the form:
A script using this would rewrite my DNS files, my DHCPD.conf file, my YP files, That way it was all in one place.
In general whimsical names are used by people who have a very small network to maintain. Themed names are used by people who have a few hundred machines. Soup is used by groups of people who have thousands of machines.
Soup comes into play when you have an IT mob, instead of 1 or two guys. Soup happens when there is no association of particular machines oddities for the IT guys. Soup happens when you have a zillion almost interchangable units. -- 12,000 cisco routers, 8127 identical Dell Winsnooze boxes. Soup happens when the memory of the IT guy is not capable of mapping the entirety in his own head.
When you work in a place that has nothing but alphabet soup, get out. There is/will be little freedom. You will be criticised for wearing shorts and sandals in the server room. They will start charging you for coffee, and will buy cheap coffee to boot. You will spend your time defending why you did trouble tickets out of order, and for every minute you spend working on a problem, you will spend 3 on documenting it and 6 more on filling out paperwork to get the parts to fix it.
Parent:
If MPeg can do this, then it potentially can stabilize badly shot film. What a feature for the average camcorder user! Sure, you're going to lose a border of pixels, but most hand held camera work isn't tightly cropped anyway.
Grandparent:
Hand held camera work may be used because it's CHEAP. Cheap to shoot (Don't have to rent stedicam gear, lift trucks...) cheap to set up (Don't have to lay dolly track, don't have to shoot the scene twice to avoid the dolly tracks.) Cheap to create sets (A jerky camera means that detailing doesn't have to be as good.)
1. The Tyrell Dinosaur museum near Drumheller Alberta. That's 3 hours gone. Nearby is Dinosaur Provincial Park. I had a school group there, and one of the kids actually found a significant bone sticking out of the cliff.
2. If you are interested in early technology, Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump Interpretive center is worth your time. Technology of dealing with 2000 lb food when you don't have a horse.
3. In Toronto the Royal Ontario Science Museum has lots of hands on stuff. Can spend days there.
4. In central washington there is an interpretive center near dry falls where the channeled scablands were formed when glacial lake Missoula drained. At the center you overlook a shallow canyon -- about 1000 feet deep. On the horizon you see another rim -- 20 miles away. For two weeks water poured through this gap 700 feet deep, moving 70 miles an hour.
The center is worth an hour or two, the walks another hour.
This, along with continental drift, shattered the geological theory of uniformism.
Don't expect that you will know her once you make the committment and tie the knot. I've talked to people who have lived together for 5 eyars who still say that you marry a stranger. Go Figure.
You cannot change someone else. Learn to accept what is, instead of trying to make what isn't.
You can change yourself. But don't do it to please someone, do it only if you want the change.
Give her her own space.
Talk to her.
Listen to her.
Share the chores -- do them together.
Try to leave work at work.
Spend an hour a day out of the bedroom doing something together. Otherwise you can find that you are living with a total stranger that you used to know. If your life is hectic, it may be only chores. It may only be using the dining room table as a study hall, and both of you helping teh kids with your homework. It can even be one person on the mower with one with the weedwhacker, although it should be something with a few more opportunities for shared comments.
Don't have kids until you are sure this will last for 20 years. It's not fair to them. In my days as a teacher I've seen the damage that parents at war or separated can do. I've also seen the positive results from parents where they live in harmony and teach this relationship skill to their kids.
I think the article turned it around the other way: If we send a probe to Ajax, if there was a civilization there within the last 100,000,000 years we would be able to detect it.
I'm not so sure: The pyramids are showing wear after a few K years. Three mile island will be hard to spot with any kind of remote sensor in a few 10's of thousands of years.
Concrete doesn't last as well as stone -- the rebars rust, expand, and break it up.
Toilet bowls may last. There are lots of them, and fired ceramics seem to come down through the ages fairly well. But how much digging would you have to do to find one.
In a few million years, continents move, rivers shift, ice shuffles the surface layer. Where would you dig?
Some of the larger mining sites may last. While the pits would fill in, the discontinuity in the ore body may give it away. That however requires a Star-Trek level of sophistication in remote sensing.
The best chance we have to make a lasting mark is with things in stable orbits, and with litter left on large airless objects. E.g. the landers on the moon. (Are the geosync satellites stable over geologic time?)
A civilization that is only as advanced as ours can leave very little lasting impression on a biologically geologically active planet.
What is the difference between dropping a file and opening a file? E.g. If I drag and drop a "flibbit" from firefox onto Gimp, or save the flibbit as a file, then try to open it. If gimp understands flibbits, it opens it. If gimp doesn't understand flibbits it gives you a fuss message.
D&D could be implemented by the receiving application taking any dropped item, save it to a file, then open it.
I was in high school at the time the first medium scale ICs were coming into use.
We had a optional class in electronics that worked like this:
Two days a week the teacher would lecture. Three days a week we worked in the lab.
The lab manual had about 40 projects in it, and a tree of which projects had to be done before other projects.
So for example: the first project was to build a voltage divider. Two resistors.
Another basic project was to determine if a transister was a PNP or NPN.
A third that depeded on both the above was to build a simple biased transistor amplifier.
Dr. Ingerson, our teacher, gave us schematics, but didn't put values on them. We had to work out what the values should be from the content of the lectures.
By mid term we were making bistable flip flops, multistable flip-flops, one shot flip flops.
By doing it this way the need for exotic equipment was minimized. While everyone needed a VOM, we could get by with only a half dozen signal generators, a similar number of oscilloscopes, a single transistor tester, a single high frequency oscilloscope etc. Of the 40 projects you only needed to do, I think 20. And after the bottom 10 or so, there was enough scope that not everyone was doing everything in lock step.
If you needed one of the special pieces of equipment you sat next to it. In this way, 2-3 people could use the HF oscilliscope, check something, and dig into their circuit to fix things while the next guy used it.
Some of the projects helped with equipment. One, for example, was to sort 100 random resistors into the parts bin. At that time you could get floor sweepings for about a cent each. By the time you had done a hundred, you knew the resistor color code -- and also NOT to believe the code.
Another was to sort a batch of 20 transistors by beta using the transistor tester. You had to sort by PNP/NPN Si/Ge and beta at some nominal voltage above the knee.
Another project was to make an electret -- the electrical equivalent of a magnet. And then demonstrate that you had made one by measuring the field with a free gate mosfet.
Photocell controlled circuits.
Op amps.
Now you could easily do a project to transmit your voice down the hall with an LED and photocell.
All the projects were breadboarded with spring loaded wire clips. It meant that quick cut and try circuits were possible. We were expected to keep a note book. We had no guarantee that the circuit would be intact at the next class, although usually they were.
Each project had defined goal: E.g. We used old car batteries with a circuit breaker for a lot of our power supplies. (A car battery would hold *some* charge long after it's too tired to start a car) So that first project would have as a defined goal, "Produce a voltage divider uses a car battery as source, and delivers 5 volts. You should be able to pull 200 mA without droppnig the voltage by more than.5 volts."
Ingerson taught us 'model making' It was critical to have a mental model of how the circuit worked. When things didn't work as expected, he would say, "Your model doesn't match reality. Check your model" And we'd start measuring voltages and got to quickly find out that the triple orange 33K resistor was actually and infinite ohm resister. (Or as Wally Russell my classmate commented, "It's a dual pack monode")
It was one of the coolest classes in high school.
I'm not sure if grade 9's as a group are ready for it. My experience is that 9's would have trouble with the level of abstraction. Oh, half would do ok, but the other half would have trouble.
If I were teaching science to grade 9's and lived in a climate that had more than "winter" and "August" as seasons, I'd do field ecology. Trap and band mice. Do population studies. Migration & territory studies. Habitat studies.
Option 1: Rear end gearing that lowers RPM for the same speed.
Option 2: Use a narrower tire running at higher pressure. This also requires modifying the suspension system to get the same quality ride.
Option 3: under body panels to reduce undercar drag, possibly combined with airdams, or some form of flexible skirting.
Option 4: Smart continuous gas mileage readout. (Smart, because it should take into account when you are storing energy in the form of speed, or going up hill. This way you can learn how to best drive the beast. (In passing, I think that this single change -- continuous readout mileage guage -- would give an enormous return on the cost in terms of making America energy independent.
That would be the "regular car" division.
Another division would be the, "modified body on standard chassis" where you could chuck the regular body, and put a whole new body on it.
A third division would be the "Change the power train" where you could replace/rebuild/the engine and transmission. Hard to draw the line on this one.
But if you believe the Vinum documentation you should choose a stripe size that is large compared to your average write. This way most transactions use only a single stripe. Alas for all it's elegant theory, I could never get vinum or gvinum to work for me for more than about 3 days without irrecoverable errors.
There is no reason that a RAID system needs to require all copies of a transaction to finish before the next one starts. Indeed the virtue of queued writes is that the file access doesn't even have to proceed in the correct order.
If you are concerned about file system consistency, you write a sequential number as part of each transaction. So if the power fails after copy A is written, but B has not, the sequence number tells the OS which one is the most recent.
I've looked at raid at various times through my IT life, and concluded that, at least in hardware, it wasn't ready for prime time for much of these faults. At least not at the consumer level.
As a sysadmin, almost all of my restore requests for files were from people who shot themselves in the foot: Deleting a file accidentally. (Or for whom Microsoft had shot them instead. The dreaded "Your Powerpoint file is corrupt...")
Most users don't need atomic database consistency as much as they need protection from their own mistakes. Myself included.
So now, I eschew raid. I back up to anohter computer using rsync with some form of versioning. It with great pleasure I see the look of joy on a grad student's face when I tell him that he now has 3 folders in his home directory labeled "Tuesday", "Wednesday", and "Thursday" with the 3 latest versions of this doctoral thesis.
With paper publications, the publisher decided on a page size, and Vol 1, Issue 27, page 341 was the same for everyone.
The web has to be readable on everything from an iphone to a 2000 x 3000 pixel display.
Page is not relevant to web browsers.
As far as I can tell, the OP's big problem is the issue of bibliographic citation. How do you cite a particular point in the text, ideally in a way that can be done both automatically on computer, and by people reading the paper copy.
Number the paragraphs.
Just as the various flavours of TeX have prescribed macro packages, an academic journal could have a prescribed CSS style sheet.
A citation then is in the form of author, article, paragraph number instead of page number.
There are details to hammer out: Are tables given their own numbering or are they considered a paragraph. (Can be a real problem with floats.) Illustrations/figures, section and subheads? Stuff that has z-levels?
I sympathize. I like to eat, and I can gain weight by sniffing good food or so it seems. As you get older it gets worse. Start now and build habits.
Try the following things:
1. Take healthy snacks with you.
2. Make sure you don't take vending machine (coins) with you to work. Much easier to reduce temptation if you have to go through a couple extra steps. Tell your co-workers your plan and ask them to not give you change for bills.
3. Tell your boss that you want what physical tasks there are. If your IT job was anything like my last job there are trucks coming in that have to be unloaded, printers to fill and so on.
4. Replace your chair with a large ball.
5. Mount multiple monitors where you can't see all of them from one location forcing you to stand up.
6. Buy 8 concrete blocks and some pavers and mount your desk so you work at it standing instead of sitting.
7. Spend lots of time in the server room. One job I had the server room was at 55 F. That got the metabolism going. In general underdress to the extent you can. Being cold uses more energy. Aim for chronic mild hypothermia. Not hard in cold server rooms.
8. Park a half hour walk from work. This helps not only with your exercise, but the walk is a good time without distractions to organize your day. I did this for `10 years when I worked for the U of Alberta. It was a 45 minutes through the river valley. Meant I didn't have to pay $40 per month for parking either. Once I had done it for a month, it was a habit. And I couldn't say at the end of the day, "I don't wanna do it. Well, I could say that, but I had to do it anyway. Some places aren't conducive to pleasant walks.
9. Bring your lunch from home. Bring it as a bunch of tiny things you can eat at your desk. Use your lunch break to do something physical. Race walk laps around the building if nothing else.
10. Collect information on the advantages of fit staff. Go to your boss and ask for a room for soem exercise machines, and showers. I was able to get one boss to put in showers when they were doing other plumbing work on the building. It meant that a bunch of us could bike to work and not stink. Mind you we told her that we were going to bike anyway, even if we did stink.
11. Find a partner to exercise with at lunch. Exercise is a lot more pleasant if you can chat while you are doing it.
12. Join weight-watchers or Jenny Craig. Both programs have lots to teach and lots of support for people who fight the battle of the bulge.
I can deal with beating up on the OS to get dual monitors working. I can live without flash working. The last update broke sound, and so far I can't get it working.
What I can't deal with is the lack of specific applications.
Gimp != photoshop.
No equivalent for Mapmaker Pro.
No working equivalent for Access. (I spent a week looking and trying.)
No equivalent for Omnifocus. (Mac/iPhone/iTouch todo/project manager software)
No working equivalent for iTunes that works with my iTouch.
So I run a mac in addition to my linux box.
I run WinXP in a VirtualBox.
Linux is still the underdog. To win adherents, it has to do everything that both Mac and Windows does and do it close to as well and as fast.
I'm surprised at the reaction. On/. I would expect the discussion to be on how to make it work, not mostly, "this is a bad idea."
How do you coerce a significant number of votes?
Yes, I can coerce one vote, or one household's votes, but how can I get to enough houses to do any good.
This could be even further eliminated by setting up the system so that if you vote twice, the second one appears just like the first, but is not counted. Vote early in the day, and the coercer comes by and you pretend to vote a second time for him, it appears normal, but it goes to/dev/null
The interception/trojan problem is more serious.
To me this means we have to have dual channel communication.
E.g. You submit a vote online, but you receive a confirming message back via text message, or by snail mailed letter, or by email to a web based account that you can check with another computer. This makes reliable operation of data interception difficult.
It does not have to be a revelation of how you voted. E.g. Take the voter's registered name, his ballot number concatenate the people he voted for on it, and hash the string.
Give people a choice of whether to have the 'clear text' ballot sent to them in addition to the hash.
I would like to have two election reforms in Canada:
#1. I would like to be able to rank candidates in order, much as the aussies do. This changes strategic voting. E.g. I mark the green candidate as my first pick, because I agree with his policies, even though I'm pretty sure he won't get in. When my candidate is eliminated, my vote is transfered to whoever I put down 2nd. This process continues until a candidate has a majority.
It also allows endless material for pundit analysis as the returns come on. (Yes, John, 18% of people who marked the PC's as first choice marked the NDP as second choice...)
#2. The second is more controversial. I would like an option to say, "No candidate is acceptable." In this situation a candidate still requires a majority to win. If sufficient people mark NCIS then there is a new election called, but no candidate that didn't get 100/N% of the vote can run in the second election. (N = number of candidates running.) Thus if there are 4 candidates running, you have to have gotten 25% of the vote to run in the second one. This eliminates the noise at the bottom of the heap, and requires the parties to find a better candidate.
Being able to mark NCIS would be a big incentive to get out the vote.
Because our elections don't have people stumping around the country for a year before they occur, this is workable here. Generally national elections are called 6 weeks before the election. Candidates are chosen by their riding association. It would mean that RA's would choose a backup candidate.
It would be more interesting at the municipal level. Much of the problem here is either lack of choice (only one person runs) or there are two fools contending for their piece of pork. It could be that the second election is equally inconclusive.
I would propose that in this situation that the lieutenant governor of the next level of government up appoint a person to represent that group's interests. E.g. for a muni election the provician Lt. Gov would appoint. For a national riding, the governor general would appoint.
Population density goes down really fast as you go north. Edmonton is the furthers north significant city. (> 100,000) I don't think that there are more than 200,000 people total in Canada living north of Edmonton metro area.
Yes you have Ft. MacMurray at around 60K, Whitehorse and maybe Yellowknife at 20K.
Perspective: Many northern Canada maps mark places such as "Coppermine" "Coral Beach" "Stony Rapids" These towns are all under 1000 people. 90+ percent of the people live within 100 miles of the U.S. border. And Edmonton accounts for a lot of the remaining 10%
The territories between them have only about 100,000 or so people total.
So, in context of someone wanting to work in a high tech large company, Edmonton is close to as far north as it gets, unless you work for one of the mining or oil companies. They tend to base you in Edmonton, and fly you in for X days in, Y days out. It's cheaper to build camps and fly workers than to build towns and fly supplies for the whole family.
(Much of the north is "Canadian Shield" a mess of granite, lakes, and bogs. Beautiful country in a stark way, but even simple roads get unbelievably expensive -- hence the annual ice roads.)
I can see cause for confusion. All cheese wagons are the same colour, and it's not like they are as different as a subaru and an F150. All it would take would be for a dislexic kid and similarly gifted superviser to read 113 and think 131.
As a kid in a rural town, about 3/4 oft he students bussed. One of the things they did to make it harder for kids to get on the wrong bus was that each bus was named after a cartoon character. 6" white letters on the front bumper. Remembering Wily Coyote was easier than route 113.
Another factor was that there was room for all the busses to stop at once, and they were there when school got out. Every bus had a designated spot. So you had consistency of location too.
The efficiency of huge schools is pretty much an illusion. Sure you may cut down a bit on support staff salaries, but it's never as much as you think. It will sometimes make sense if you have a special facility that is expensive -- such as a swimming pool. (One school here shares an indoor pool with the city. It gets a lot of use by the school during the day, and is available to city people during evenings, weekends, and holidays.)
There are sweet spots in terms of efficiency in running a school. The first one is where you have 1 class of each grade. Less than this, teacher's salaries cost too much per kid.
The second sweet spot is at about 3 classes per grade -- this allows you to start running special programs.
At highschool it starts to make sense to have 7-8 classes per grade. This allows you to run an IB program, as well as specialized art, music, language and vocational ed programs
Elementary schools should have under 200 kids in them. High schools don't need more than 5-6 hundred. This is not a contradiction to the above. Read on to see how it can work:
My local city, Edmonton, has a moderately clever school board. (Mark Twain comments that God first made an idiot for practice, then created a school board) In Edmonton, parents can choose to send their kid to any school in the system. Bus transport is only provided to the nearest school, but the transit dept has super deals for students on the city bus system. If you're willing to spend the time on the bus you can go to the school on the opposite corner of the city.
Schools are funded on the students they teach. So they specialize. There are now a raft of special interest schools including an armed forces cadet school, a girls only school, several aboriginal schools that teach Cree as a second language, a bunch of other unusual language schools, a performing arts school aka Fame! several varieties of sports oriented schools, academic emphasis schools with no sports program. Back to basic schools. Montessori schools. Because the province gives extra money for kids with special needs, there are schools that concentrate on these kids too.
As to the original poster:
1. Get the kid an appropraite cell phone, code in the numbers she needs to use, and teach her to use it. 2. In her book bag put a card with her name, your name and full contact info. Write it on a label on her lunch box too. 3. Teach her responses to "I'm lost" Practice this -- make a game out of it. Re-practice it every few months. Such training should include:
* What are safe places? (Convenience store, block parent sign, library, police station.
* What are safe people? (Policemen, women clerks (yes I'm being sexist -- most pedophiles are men) information booths, bus drivers.
* Places to stay away from. (dark places, lonely places)
* Places to wait: (Under a security camera -- well lit store entrances...)
Then she phones you. Practice this first in a grocery store. Send her for the the yoghurt while you are picking up lemons. Get her used to doing things on her own, getting lost, and figuring it out. Get her used to making a mental map. Teach her names for sections of the store.
When she's good at the grocery store bit, expand it to the department store.
When she's a suitable age, get connected with the local orienteering club. Their bottom level courses are suitable for 8 year olds, but I've seen 12 year olds do the adult courses. This also will enhance her spacial relations skills. 4. Do get the GPS feature for her phone, and do figure out how to use it. A frightened kid may not be able to give a good description of where she is, and knowing within a few blocks can make all the difference. But use this as a reactive measure, not a proactive measure.
Mouthpiece. Good point. In band while waiting for the teacher to show up we'd swap mouthpieces. A trumpet sounds VERY different if you used a french horn mouthpiece.
And Sax invented a whole new class of instruments by putting a clarinet mouthpiece on a brass instrument. So how do they know what the mouthpiece was like?
As to earlier posts comment that there is a reason for early instruments to become extinct implying that they sound awful.
There are many other possible reasons -- here's some guesses.
1. A lot of instruments died in the conversion from salon music to concert halls. The old instruments weren't loud enough. The metal flute replaced the wooden flute for this reason. (Although the latter is not extinct, only endangered)
2. Many early instruments were built in a specific key, and could not easily accommodate the half notes.
3. Some didn't have the range. More and more pieces expect a range of several octaves. A recorder gets two octaves, a flute gets 3+
4. Some are just plain hard to play. (Compare a bagpipe chanter to a clarinet or oboe)
5. The invention of valves put to rest a bunch of brass instruments. A valveless trumpet has only a few notes -- all overtones of the fundamental frequency. In a way the valved brass was the first digital instrument -- 3 valves allowed adding any combination of 3 lengths of tubing, giving 8 possible lengths to the instrument. This gives 8 'fundamental' notes which allows playing a scale, something that a valveless trumpet couldn't do.
6. Musicians became mobile. While some are cursed with instruments that are difficult to move (e.g. double bass) many of the newer instruments were more portable. One valved trumpet replaced a trunk full of separate valveless instruments all formed in different keys.
There's some that I wish were still around outside museums. I remember in my music class hearing recordings of medieval instruments. There was one, I can't remember the name, that sounded much like a kazoo being used as a mouthpiece in a Sousaphone
With the advent of high quality digital recordings, some of the old instruments are making a comeback. It's one way to be different from the herd. (Should that be heard?)
Run the system all the time. But when you aren't transmitting a message, transmit noise. This makes statistical detection of communication much more difficult, especially if you can package the steno into a popular software package so that many users are doing this.
The next effect is that the nation as a whole seems to have crappy connection issues.
One of the goals of such a system is to overload the censor computers. And if much of the hidden traffic is the output of/dev/random then even if the channel is detected, you tie up huge amounts of computing power trying to decrypt noise.
I'm curious as to why there needs to be a NACK.
If we assume that there is a cover stream and a data stream then if the transmitter sends CCCCCCDCCCCCCCCCCCCCDCCCCC with the D having a packet number that is the same as some later packet. With the current setup, doesn't TCP sometimes get duplicate packets, and have a way to deal with them?
Slashdot Mirror
Many things need to be bootstrapped if they are going to be successful:
* Look at the subsidy system used to get railroads across the country.
* Air line companies don't pay for airports, nor for the ATC system to keep them from bumping into each other.
* Trucking companies didn't pay for the interstate system.
Engineers know that everytime you double the number of units produced the cost per unit goes down by N%. This is well enough known, that Boeing uses it in their order book. E.g. The first ten 747s off the line cost, say, 100 million each. The next ten 90 million each, the next twenty 81 million each. The next forty 72.9 million each.
Windmills show the same sort of cost breakdown.
If you don't do this, you have to wait for the price of alternatives to get higher that the price of the first windmill.
Yes you can create FUD with talk of externalities. What we really need is a way of Generally Accepted Accounting Practices that take externalities into account. This isn't easy.
Meanwhile, we can see the bad effects of certain actions. I have no problems with government tweeking the system to favour alternatives.
And this is the problem. Our current business model is wrapped up in the next quarterly report:
Suppose we changed the playing field:
1. No official in a company could get more than 3 times the salary of the lowest salaried employee.
2. In addition to his basic salary, a top official received the dividends off a block of stock for the next 20 years for this year's work. He cannot sell the stock until the end of the 20 year period.
3. Each year he gets his salary and another block of stock.
So if a person visualizes a future working for a company for 20 years, and he can't sell his last block of stock until 20 years after he quits, then he has strong incentive to plan long term for the company.
Distribute this system down the ranks, even into the bottom tier. If anyone who has been working for the company for 5 years is now getting 25% of their income in the form of company dividends, now the employees have an incentive to see that the company does well. Of course at this level, it is best to try to split the system so that employee dividends depend on the success of their particualr plant, department, or section.
Right now most of the right of way isn't covered with road, it's covered with grass, bush and weeds. This may make more sense for such a venture.
* People don't drive (often) in the ditches and median.
* By putting them on angles, we could eliminiate the snow sticking issue.
* In the latter case, the land underneath would go to shade tolerant species and the land would still be available for soaking up rainfall.
Perhaps a better alternative would be to enclose the roads in snow shed like structures (roofs on posts) This keeps the roads dry most of the time, and allows a cheaper less sturdy alternative photocell.
You still end up with your power being distributed in long thin lines.
According to one book I have on landscape design alternatives, half the impermeable surface in urban areas is roof. Seems to me that putting cells on roofs (and in Canada on south facing walls) makes a lot more sense:
* No one drives on roofs, other than parking lot roofs.
* The average transmission distance is way down: Your customer is often quite near.
Or How about putting them up in nice neat rows in a desert? Hmm.
* Doesn't need paving grade cells.
* Can tilt to maximize light absorbtion.
* The power is in much more concentrated locations, making it easier to tie in to the grid.
* Not nearly as much driving to fix things.
* Less worry about casual vandalism.
What a great idea. If I weren't so selfless I'd run out and patent this today before someone else thinks about it.
Remember that Einstein got started through the failure of the Michelson-Morley experiment to detect the ether.
If there is no gravitational waves, is GR fundamentally wrong, or does it just need a tweak.
"Science is not the process of replacing wrong theories with correct ones. It's the process of replacing wrong theories with ones that are more subtly wrong
My choice for new cell phone tech.
Two component phones. A handset that can be either something the size of a pencil or a hands free ear mount. And a transmitter that stays on your waist/in your purse/in your briefcase/in your computer. We are close to this with bluetooth.
Extension phones. I want to have 3 phones on the same number. Two are hardly used. One stays in the toolbox on the tractor, so I can call for help. One stays in the glove box of the beater truck for the same reason. I will accept the limitation that two phones with the same number cannot both be on the network at the same time. The act of turning your phone off then on, makes that phone the one the network acknowledges.
Or when I've got the computer, I want the bluetooth/computer phone, but when I'm going grocery shopping I want the minibrick (iphone) type phone so I can see the shopping list. But I want it to have the same number.
A user interface that doesn't need buttons. Trying to pick up messages while driving is dangerous. Navigating numeric telephone answering systems (as in tech support numbers) in a noisy server room is a nuisance. They will become useful gadgets when you have an alternative voice control for every function.
Smart avatar capability. I want it to have the ability of a good appointments secretary: Take messages for me interactively, "I'm sorry, he's in a meeting right now until about 3. Would you like him to return your call then?" And then bring up a screen message. "Mike Johnson has called three times now, and seems pretty upset."
Power boost to the one on the tractor can actually talk to a cell tower.
Phones that I can use in a monsoon without turning into a paperweight.
Phones that still work at -40.
1. I don't like alphabet soup for names.
# ssh gla-1127394
is too darned awkward. And having a user read off soup over the phone is error prone.
Good naming conventions:
A: Give some clue as to what you are dealing with. At one job I had 11 flavours of unix, 3 versions of winsnooze and 2 versions of Macs.
B: Are pronouceable, not requiring spelling out over the phone.
C: Are not words in common use, but are recognizable.
D: Are not people's names.
E: Are more than a single syllable.
So the SGI lab on 4th floor were all birds -- bluejay, siskin... The secretaries' pool of windows boxes were all named after ancient goddesses. The linux boxes in grad offices were norse gods and heroes. Most of the individual profs workstations were named after their favorite famous mathematiction. (Hilbert wasn't bad but 'ssh chandrasekhar' was a bit much. chand was a cname really fast)
This way grad students would poke their head in my office and say, "Tanager's disk is whining, and it won't boot." and I would know right away that it was an SGI in the stats lab, and not an linux box in that grad's office. Further, it was far more informative than SL-121 as 121 may have actually been 112.
As to naming/licensing issues. There is merit in a computer having an asset tag, or id, whatever, which you use to link all the other info together. The name then becomes what you call it. If the role changes in a major way, you can change the name without screwing up the rest of the data associated with it.
With people, in the U.S. you do this with your SocSec number. That's your asset ID. But no one calls you 619-68-6160, they call you Mike.
When I was with this department I had a flat file that contained stanzas of the form:
Name ...
Asset: string
IP: string
CNames: string; string; string
MAC: string;
Room: string
PrimaryUser: string
OSver: string;
A script using this would rewrite my DNS files, my DHCPD.conf file, my YP files, That way it was all in one place.
In general whimsical names are used by people who have a very small network to maintain. Themed names are used by people who have a few hundred machines. Soup is used by groups of people who have thousands of machines.
Soup comes into play when you have an IT mob, instead of 1 or two guys. Soup happens when there is no association of particular machines oddities for the IT guys. Soup happens when you have a zillion almost interchangable units. -- 12,000 cisco routers, 8127 identical Dell Winsnooze boxes.
Soup happens when the memory of the IT guy is not capable of mapping the entirety in his own head.
When you work in a place that has nothing but alphabet soup, get out. There is/will be little freedom. You will be criticised for wearing shorts and sandals in the server room. They will start charging you for coffee, and will buy cheap coffee to boot. You will spend your time defending why you did trouble tickets out of order, and for every minute you spend working on a problem, you will spend 3 on documenting it and 6 more on filling out paperwork to get the parts to fix it.
Parent:
If MPeg can do this, then it potentially can stabilize badly shot film. What a feature for the average camcorder user! Sure, you're going to lose a border of pixels, but most hand held camera work isn't tightly cropped anyway.
Grandparent:
Hand held camera work may be used because it's CHEAP.
Cheap to shoot (Don't have to rent stedicam gear, lift trucks...) cheap to set up (Don't have to lay dolly track, don't have to shoot the scene twice to avoid the dolly tracks.) Cheap to create sets (A jerky camera means that detailing doesn't have to be as good.)
Four come to mind:
1. The Tyrell Dinosaur museum near Drumheller Alberta. That's 3 hours gone. Nearby is Dinosaur Provincial Park. I had a school group there, and one of the kids actually found a significant bone sticking out of the cliff.
2. If you are interested in early technology, Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump Interpretive center is worth your time. Technology of dealing with 2000 lb food when you don't have a horse.
3. In Toronto the Royal Ontario Science Museum has lots of hands on stuff. Can spend days there.
4. In central washington there is an interpretive center near dry falls where the channeled scablands were formed when glacial lake Missoula drained. At the center you overlook a shallow canyon -- about 1000 feet deep. On the horizon you see another rim -- 20 miles away. For two weeks water poured through this gap 700 feet deep, moving 70 miles an hour.
The center is worth an hour or two, the walks another hour.
This, along with continental drift, shattered the geological theory of uniformism.
Don't expect that you will know her once you make the committment and tie the knot. I've talked to people who have lived together for 5 eyars who still say that you marry a stranger. Go Figure.
You cannot change someone else. Learn to accept what is, instead of trying to make what isn't.
You can change yourself. But don't do it to please someone, do it only if you want the change.
Give her her own space.
Talk to her.
Listen to her.
Share the chores -- do them together.
Try to leave work at work.
Spend an hour a day out of the bedroom doing something together. Otherwise you can find that you are living with a total stranger that you used to know. If your life is hectic, it may be only chores. It may only be using the dining room table as a study hall, and both of you helping teh kids with your homework. It can even be one person on the mower with one with the weedwhacker, although it should be something with a few more opportunities for shared comments.
Don't have kids until you are sure this will last for 20 years. It's not fair to them. In my days as a teacher I've seen the damage that parents at war or separated can do. I've also seen the positive results from parents where they live in harmony and teach this relationship skill to their kids.
I think the article turned it around the other way: If we send a probe to Ajax, if there was a civilization there within the last 100,000,000 years we would be able to detect it.
I'm not so sure: The pyramids are showing wear after a few K years. Three mile island will be hard to spot with any kind of remote sensor in a few 10's of thousands of years.
Concrete doesn't last as well as stone -- the rebars rust, expand, and break it up.
Toilet bowls may last. There are lots of them, and fired ceramics seem to come down through the ages fairly well. But how much digging would you have to do to find one.
In a few million years, continents move, rivers shift, ice shuffles the surface layer. Where would you dig?
Some of the larger mining sites may last. While the pits would fill in, the discontinuity in the ore body may give it away. That however requires a Star-Trek level of sophistication in remote sensing.
The best chance we have to make a lasting mark is with things in stable orbits, and with litter left on large airless objects. E.g. the landers on the moon. (Are the geosync satellites stable over geologic time?)
A civilization that is only as advanced as ours can leave very little lasting impression on a biologically geologically active planet.
I don't understand:
What is the difference between dropping a file and opening a file? E.g. If I drag and drop a "flibbit" from firefox onto Gimp, or save the flibbit as a file, then try to open it. If gimp understands flibbits, it opens it. If gimp doesn't understand flibbits it gives you a fuss message.
D&D could be implemented by the receiving application taking any dropped item, save it to a file, then open it.
Obviously I'm missing something here. Pelase educate me.
I was in high school at the time the first medium scale ICs were coming into use.
We had a optional class in electronics that worked like this:
Two days a week the teacher would lecture.
Three days a week we worked in the lab.
The lab manual had about 40 projects in it, and a tree of which projects had to be done before other projects.
So for example: the first project was to build a voltage divider. Two resistors.
Another basic project was to determine if a transister was a PNP or NPN.
A third that depeded on both the above was to build a simple biased transistor amplifier.
Dr. Ingerson, our teacher, gave us schematics, but didn't put values on them. We had to work out what the values should be from the content of the lectures.
By mid term we were making bistable flip flops, multistable flip-flops, one shot flip flops.
By doing it this way the need for exotic equipment was minimized. While everyone needed a VOM, we could get by with only a half dozen signal generators, a similar number of oscilloscopes, a single transistor tester, a single high frequency oscilloscope etc. Of the 40 projects you only needed to do, I think 20. And after the bottom 10 or so, there was enough scope that not everyone was doing everything in lock step.
If you needed one of the special pieces of equipment you sat next to it. In this way, 2-3 people could use the HF oscilliscope, check something, and dig into their circuit to fix things while the next guy used it.
Some of the projects helped with equipment. One, for example, was to sort 100 random resistors into the parts bin. At that time you could get floor sweepings for about a cent each. By the time you had done a hundred, you knew the resistor color code -- and also NOT to believe the code.
Another was to sort a batch of 20 transistors by beta using the transistor tester. You had to sort by PNP/NPN Si/Ge and beta at some nominal voltage above the knee.
Another project was to make an electret -- the electrical equivalent of a magnet. And then demonstrate that you had made one by measuring the field with a free gate mosfet.
Photocell controlled circuits.
Op amps.
Now you could easily do a project to transmit your voice down the hall with an LED and photocell.
All the projects were breadboarded with spring loaded wire clips. It meant that quick cut and try circuits were possible. We were expected to keep a note book. We had no guarantee that the circuit would be intact at the next class, although usually they were.
Each project had defined goal: E.g. We used old car batteries with a circuit breaker for a lot of our power supplies. (A car battery would hold *some* charge long after it's too tired to start a car) So that first project would have as a defined goal, "Produce a voltage divider uses a car battery as source, and delivers 5 volts. You should be able to pull 200 mA without droppnig the voltage by more than .5 volts."
Ingerson taught us 'model making' It was critical to have a mental model of how the circuit worked. When things didn't work as expected, he would say, "Your model doesn't match reality. Check your model" And we'd start measuring voltages and got to quickly find out that the triple orange 33K resistor was actually and infinite ohm resister. (Or as
Wally Russell my classmate commented, "It's a dual pack monode")
It was one of the coolest classes in high school.
I'm not sure if grade 9's as a group are ready for it. My experience is that 9's would have trouble with the level of abstraction. Oh, half would do ok, but the other half would have trouble.
If I were teaching science to grade 9's and lived in a climate that had more than "winter" and "August" as seasons, I'd do field ecology. Trap and band mice. Do population studies. Migration & territory studies. Habitat studies.
Hear hear!
Option 1: Rear end gearing that lowers RPM for the same speed.
Option 2: Use a narrower tire running at higher pressure. This also requires modifying the suspension system to get the same quality ride.
Option 3: under body panels to reduce undercar drag, possibly combined with airdams, or some form of flexible skirting.
Option 4: Smart continuous gas mileage readout. (Smart, because it should take into account when you are storing energy in the form of speed, or going up hill. This way you can learn how to best drive the beast. (In passing, I think that this single change -- continuous readout mileage guage -- would give an enormous return on the cost in terms of making America energy independent.
That would be the "regular car" division.
Another division would be the, "modified body on standard chassis" where you could chuck the regular body, and put a whole new body on it.
A third division would be the "Change the power train" where you could replace/rebuild/the engine and transmission. Hard to draw the line on this one.
But if you believe the Vinum documentation you should choose a stripe size that is large compared to your average write. This way most transactions use only a single stripe. Alas for all it's elegant theory, I could never get vinum or gvinum to work for me for more than about 3 days without irrecoverable errors.
There is no reason that a RAID system needs to require all copies of a transaction to finish before the next one starts. Indeed the virtue of queued writes is that the file access doesn't even have to proceed in the correct order.
If you are concerned about file system consistency, you write a sequential number as part of each transaction. So if the power fails after copy A is written, but B has not, the sequence number tells the OS which one is the most recent.
I've looked at raid at various times through my IT life, and concluded that, at least in hardware, it wasn't ready for prime time for much of these faults. At least not at the consumer level.
As a sysadmin, almost all of my restore requests for files were from people who shot themselves in the foot: Deleting a file accidentally. (Or for whom Microsoft had shot them instead. The dreaded "Your Powerpoint file is corrupt...")
Most users don't need atomic database consistency as much as they need protection from their own mistakes. Myself included.
So now, I eschew raid. I back up to anohter computer using rsync with some form of versioning. It with great pleasure I see the look of joy on a grad student's face when I tell him that he now has 3 folders in his home directory labeled "Tuesday", "Wednesday", and "Thursday" with the 3 latest versions of this doctoral thesis.
With paper publications, the publisher decided on a page size, and Vol 1, Issue 27, page 341 was the same for everyone.
The web has to be readable on everything from an iphone to a 2000 x 3000 pixel display.
Page is not relevant to web browsers.
As far as I can tell, the OP's big problem is the issue of bibliographic citation. How do you cite a particular point in the text, ideally in a way that can be done both automatically on computer, and by people reading the paper copy.
Number the paragraphs.
Just as the various flavours of TeX have prescribed macro packages, an academic journal could have a prescribed CSS style sheet.
A citation then is in the form of author, article, paragraph number instead of page number.
There are details to hammer out: Are tables given their own numbering or are they considered a paragraph. (Can be a real problem with floats.) Illustrations/figures, section and subheads? Stuff that has z-levels?
I sympathize. I like to eat, and I can gain weight by sniffing good food or so it seems. As you get older it gets worse. Start now and build habits.
Try the following things:
1. Take healthy snacks with you.
2. Make sure you don't take vending machine (coins) with you to work. Much easier to reduce temptation if you have to go through a couple extra steps. Tell your co-workers your plan and ask them to not give you change for bills.
3. Tell your boss that you want what physical tasks there are. If your IT job was anything like my last job there are trucks coming in that have to be unloaded, printers to fill and so on.
4. Replace your chair with a large ball.
5. Mount multiple monitors where you can't see all of them from one location forcing you to stand up.
6. Buy 8 concrete blocks and some pavers and mount your desk so you work at it standing instead of sitting.
7. Spend lots of time in the server room. One job I had the server room was at 55 F. That got the metabolism going. In general underdress to the extent you can. Being cold uses more energy. Aim for chronic mild hypothermia. Not hard in cold server rooms.
8. Park a half hour walk from work. This helps not only with your exercise, but the walk is a good time without distractions to organize your day. I did this for `10 years when I worked for the U of Alberta. It was a 45 minutes through the river valley. Meant I didn't have to pay $40 per month for parking either. Once I had done it for a month, it was a habit. And I couldn't say at the end of the day, "I don't wanna do it. Well, I could say that, but I had to do it anyway. Some places aren't conducive to pleasant walks.
9. Bring your lunch from home. Bring it as a bunch of tiny things you can eat at your desk. Use your lunch break to do something physical. Race walk laps around the building if nothing else.
10. Collect information on the advantages of fit staff. Go to your boss and ask for a room for soem exercise machines, and showers. I was able to get one boss to put in showers when they were doing other plumbing work on the building. It meant that a bunch of us could bike to work and not stink. Mind you we told her that we were going to bike anyway, even if we did stink.
11. Find a partner to exercise with at lunch. Exercise is a lot more pleasant if you can chat while you are doing it.
12. Join weight-watchers or Jenny Craig. Both programs have lots to teach and lots of support for people who fight the battle of the bulge.
13. On the other three days a week, do more.
Good luck.
I can deal with beating up on the OS to get dual monitors working. I can live without flash working. The last update broke sound, and so far I can't get it working.
What I can't deal with is the lack of specific applications.
Gimp != photoshop.
No equivalent for Mapmaker Pro.
No working equivalent for Access. (I spent a week looking and trying.)
No equivalent for Omnifocus. (Mac/iPhone/iTouch todo/project manager software)
No working equivalent for iTunes that works with my iTouch.
So I run a mac in addition to my linux box.
I run WinXP in a VirtualBox.
Linux is still the underdog. To win adherents, it has to do everything that both Mac and Windows does and do it close to as well and as fast.
I'm surprised at the reaction. On /. I would expect the discussion to be on how to make it work, not mostly, "this is a bad idea."
How do you coerce a significant number of votes?
Yes, I can coerce one vote, or one household's votes, but how can I get to enough houses to do any good.
This could be even further eliminated by setting up the system so that if you vote twice, the second one appears just like the first, but is not counted. Vote early in the day, and the coercer comes by and you pretend to vote a second time for him, it appears normal, but it goes to /dev/null
The interception/trojan problem is more serious.
To me this means we have to have dual channel communication.
E.g. You submit a vote online, but you receive a confirming message back via text message, or by snail mailed letter, or by email to a web based account that you can check with another computer. This makes reliable operation of data interception difficult.
It does not have to be a revelation of how you voted.
E.g. Take the voter's registered name, his ballot number concatenate the people he voted for on it, and hash the string.
Give people a choice of whether to have the 'clear text' ballot sent to them in addition to the hash.
I would like to have two election reforms in Canada:
#1. I would like to be able to rank candidates in order, much as the aussies do. This changes strategic voting. E.g. I mark the green candidate as my first pick, because I agree with his policies, even though I'm pretty sure he won't get in. When my candidate is eliminated, my vote is transfered to whoever I put down 2nd. This process continues until a candidate has a majority.
It also allows endless material for pundit analysis as the returns come on. (Yes, John, 18% of people who marked the PC's as first choice marked the NDP as second choice...)
#2. The second is more controversial. I would like an option to say, "No candidate is acceptable." In this situation a candidate still requires a majority to win. If sufficient people mark NCIS then there is a new election called, but no candidate that didn't get 100/N% of the vote can run in the second election. (N = number of candidates running.) Thus if there are 4 candidates running, you have to have gotten 25% of the vote to run in the second one. This eliminates the noise at the bottom of the heap, and requires the parties to find a better candidate.
Being able to mark NCIS would be a big incentive to get out the vote.
Because our elections don't have people stumping around the country for a year before they occur, this is workable here. Generally national elections are called 6 weeks before the election. Candidates are chosen by their riding association. It would mean that RA's would choose a backup candidate.
It would be more interesting at the municipal level. Much of the problem here is either lack of choice (only one person runs) or there are two fools contending for their piece of pork. It could be that the second election is equally inconclusive.
I would propose that in this situation that the lieutenant governor of the next level of government up appoint a person to represent that group's interests. E.g. for a muni election the provician Lt. Gov would appoint. For a national riding, the governor general would appoint.
Population density goes down really fast as you go north. Edmonton is the furthers north significant city. (> 100,000) I don't think that there are more than 200,000 people total in Canada living north of Edmonton metro area.
Yes you have Ft. MacMurray at around 60K, Whitehorse and maybe Yellowknife at 20K.
Perspective: Many northern Canada maps mark places such as "Coppermine" "Coral Beach" "Stony Rapids" These towns are all under 1000 people. 90+ percent of the people live within 100 miles of the U.S. border. And Edmonton accounts for a lot of the remaining 10%
The territories between them have only about 100,000 or so people total.
So, in context of someone wanting to work in a high tech large company, Edmonton is close to as far north as it gets, unless you work for one of the mining or oil companies. They tend to base you in Edmonton, and fly you in for X days in, Y days out. It's cheaper to build camps and fly workers than to build towns and fly supplies for the whole family.
(Much of the north is "Canadian Shield" a mess of granite, lakes, and bogs. Beautiful country in a stark way, but even simple roads get unbelievably expensive -- hence the annual ice roads.)
I can see cause for confusion. All cheese wagons are the same colour, and it's not like they are as different as a subaru and an F150. All it would take would be for a dislexic kid and similarly gifted superviser to read 113 and think 131.
As a kid in a rural town, about 3/4 oft he students bussed.
One of the things they did to make it harder for kids to get on the wrong bus was that each bus was named after a cartoon character. 6" white letters on the front bumper. Remembering Wily Coyote was easier than route 113.
Another factor was that there was room for all the busses to stop at once, and they were there when school got out. Every bus had a designated spot. So you had consistency of location too.
Schools should start small and not grow much.
The efficiency of huge schools is pretty much an illusion. Sure you may cut down a bit on support staff salaries, but it's never as much as you think. It will sometimes make sense if you have a special facility that is expensive -- such as a swimming pool. (One school here shares an indoor pool with the city. It gets a lot of use by the school during the day, and is available to city people during evenings, weekends, and holidays.)
There are sweet spots in terms of efficiency in running a school. The first one is where you have 1 class of each grade. Less than this, teacher's salaries cost too much per kid.
The second sweet spot is at about 3 classes per grade -- this allows you to start running special programs.
At highschool it starts to make sense to have 7-8 classes per grade. This allows you to run an IB program, as well as specialized art, music, language and vocational ed programs
Elementary schools should have under 200 kids in them.
High schools don't need more than 5-6 hundred. This is not a contradiction to the above. Read on to see how it can work:
My local city, Edmonton, has a moderately clever school board. (Mark Twain comments that God first made an idiot for practice, then created a school board) In Edmonton, parents can choose to send their kid to any school in the system. Bus transport is only provided to the nearest school, but the transit dept has super deals for students on the city bus system. If you're willing to spend the time on the bus you can go to the school on the opposite corner of the city.
Schools are funded on the students they teach. So they specialize. There are now a raft of special interest schools including an armed forces cadet school, a girls only school, several aboriginal schools that teach Cree as a second language, a bunch of other unusual language schools, a performing arts school aka Fame! several varieties of sports oriented schools, academic emphasis schools with no sports program. Back to basic schools. Montessori schools. Because the province gives extra money for kids with special needs, there are schools that concentrate on these kids too.
As to the original poster:
1. Get the kid an appropraite cell phone, code in the numbers she needs to use, and teach her to use it.
2. In her book bag put a card with her name, your name and full contact info. Write it on a label on her lunch box too.
3. Teach her responses to "I'm lost" Practice this -- make a game out of it. Re-practice it every few months. Such training should include:
* What are safe places? (Convenience store, block parent sign, library, police station.
* What are safe people? (Policemen, women clerks (yes I'm being sexist -- most pedophiles are men) information booths, bus drivers.
* Places to stay away from. (dark places, lonely places)
* Places to wait: (Under a security camera -- well lit store entrances...)
Then she phones you. Practice this first in a grocery store. Send her for the the yoghurt while you are picking up lemons. Get her used to doing things on her own, getting lost, and figuring it out. Get her used to making a mental map. Teach her names for sections of the store.
When she's good at the grocery store bit, expand it to the department store.
When she's a suitable age, get connected with the local orienteering club. Their bottom level courses are suitable for 8 year olds, but I've seen 12 year olds do the adult courses. This also will enhance her spacial relations skills.
4. Do get the GPS feature for her phone, and do figure out how to use it. A frightened kid may not be able to give a good description of where she is, and knowing within a few blocks can make all the difference. But use this as a reactive measure, not a proactive measure.
Mouthpiece. Good point. In band while waiting for the teacher to show up we'd swap mouthpieces. A trumpet sounds VERY different if you used a french horn mouthpiece.
And Sax invented a whole new class of instruments by putting a clarinet mouthpiece on a brass instrument. So how do they know what the mouthpiece was like?
As to earlier posts comment that there is a reason for early instruments to become extinct implying that they sound awful.
There are many other possible reasons -- here's some guesses.
1. A lot of instruments died in the conversion from salon music to concert halls. The old instruments weren't loud enough. The metal flute replaced the wooden flute for this reason. (Although the latter is not extinct, only endangered)
2. Many early instruments were built in a specific key, and could not easily accommodate the half notes.
3. Some didn't have the range. More and more pieces expect a range of several octaves. A recorder gets two octaves, a flute gets 3+
4. Some are just plain hard to play. (Compare a bagpipe chanter to a clarinet or oboe)
5. The invention of valves put to rest a bunch of brass instruments. A valveless trumpet has only a few notes -- all overtones of the fundamental frequency. In a way the valved brass was the first digital instrument -- 3 valves allowed adding any combination of 3 lengths of tubing, giving 8 possible lengths to the instrument. This gives 8 'fundamental' notes which allows playing a scale, something that a valveless trumpet couldn't do.
6. Musicians became mobile. While some are cursed with instruments that are difficult to move (e.g. double bass) many of the newer instruments were more portable. One
valved trumpet replaced a trunk full of separate valveless instruments all formed in different keys.
There's some that I wish were still around outside museums.
I remember in my music class hearing recordings of medieval instruments. There was one, I can't remember the name, that sounded much like a kazoo being used as a mouthpiece in a Sousaphone
With the advent of high quality digital recordings, some of the old instruments are making a comeback. It's one way to be different from the herd. (Should that be heard?)
As another option:
Run the system all the time. But when you aren't transmitting a message, transmit noise. This makes statistical detection of communication much more difficult, especially if you can package the steno into a popular software package so that many users are doing this.
The next effect is that the nation as a whole seems to have crappy connection issues.
One of the goals of such a system is to overload the censor computers. And if much of the hidden traffic is the output of /dev/random then even if the channel is detected, you tie up huge amounts of computing power trying to decrypt noise.
I'm curious as to why there needs to be a NACK.
If we assume that there is a cover stream and a data stream
then if the transmitter sends CCCCCCDCCCCCCCCCCCCCDCCCCC
with the D having a packet number that is the same as some later packet. With the current setup, doesn't TCP sometimes get duplicate packets, and have a way to deal with them?