Montana also has a bill in process to remove Montana-made suppressors from the National Firearms Act, allowing them to be bought over the counter. It's HB366, and here's the excerpt.
Section 4. Prohibition. A personal firearm, a firearm accessory, or ammunition that is manufactured commercially or privately in Montana and that remains within the borders of Montana is not subject to federal law or federal regulation, including registration, under the authority of congress to regulate interstate commerce. It is declared by the legislature that those items have not traveled in interstate commerce. This section applies to a firearm, a firearm accessory, or ammunition that is manufactured in Montana from basic materials and that can be manufactured without the inclusion of any significant parts imported from another state. Generic and insignificant parts that have other manufacturing or consumer product applications are not firearms, firearms accessories, or ammunition, and their importation into Montana and incorporation into a firearm, a firearm accessory, or ammunition manufactured in Montana does not subject the firearm, firearm accessory, or ammunition to federal regulation. "Generic and insignificant parts" includes but is not limited to springs, screws, nuts, and pins. It is declared by the legislature that basic materials, such as unmachined steel and unshaped wood, are not firearms, firearms accessories, or ammunition and are not subject to congressional authority to regulate firearms, firearms accessories, and ammunition under interstate commerce as if they were actually firearms, firearms accessories, or ammunition. The authority of congress to regulate interstate commerce in basic materials does not include authority to regulate firearms, firearms accessories, and ammunition made in Montana from those materials. Firearms accessories that are imported into Montana from another state and that are subject to federal regulation as being in interstate commerce do not subject a firearm to federal regulation under interstate commerce because they are attached to or used in conjunction with a firearm in Montana.
Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success
You've got to be kidding me. That's like saying "Efforts to increase enrollment in the mathematics program was increased by decreasing emphasis on calculus."
Not even kidding. CIWS is a 20mm Gatling gun with in integrated radar/FLIR and fire control computer. You can literally flip the switch and it will kill anything moving within 10,000 yards. An ex-CIWS tech posted someplace that the tracking system is so good that it tends to get extraordinarily aggravated by flocks of seagulls. It has to be locked down in port so it doesn't get angry at them.
It's a USB audio card the size of a thumb drive. Its ground is completely isolated from the computer, and as such it is dead quiet - this is especially great in laptops. I have Shure e3 headphones and if you ran them directly into my laptop you'd hear clicks and pops as the HDD was operating.
Have you ever been to China? I spent a month there, and that was all it took to realize that the US has nothing to fear from the Chinese - economically or militarily - in the next 50 years. Everything is done as fast and cheap as possible. Every month or so a goddamn office building falls down because they were so cheap they used concrete with too much filler and rebar from a junkyard. Every public works project is done by armies of 5000 guys with picks and shovels, and some projects lose as much as 5% of the workforce to accidental deaths. Their unemployment/underemployment is horrendous. There are areas of the country where people are still living in dirt-floor hovels with a life expectancy of 40 and no teeth. The country as a whole is just barely hanging together politically - there is only the thinnest layer of Communism over the whole works. They own so much of our foreign debt that they can't go to war with us, and we can't go to war with them. Their culture squashes innovation. Chinese high art is considered "who can make the best copy of this goldfish". I'm convinced that their economic growth is a product of having a massive unskilled human labor pool, natural resources they're willing to pollute the shit out of their land to get at, and foreign investment that's willing to take advantage of those two things.
I repeat: we have nothing to fear from the Chinese.
Yes, it's more difficult, but you (potentially) get large gains in speed due to shorter wire lengths. I'm not up on all of the technology, but some of it centers around fabbing layers separately and then bonding them together (similar to PCBs), and others are all-at-once methods.
This cooling method is also valuable for MEMS systems.
Chips fabbed in 3D have numerous advantages - short trace lengths, higher density, etc. However, the problem with all of them is getting the heat out with today's convective cooling technologies. This technology will allow multiple cores in 3D to operate without overheating, and that's a good thing as the number of cores in personal computers and servers continues to increase.
Actually, $75K isn't far out of line for new grads from a topflight school. I assume he has a master's degree.
Word of advice man - start your OWN company if that's what they're offering you off the bat. Even if it fails, you get an automatic bump of 20-50% in pay at the next job you get, based on your experience alone. If it succeeds, you have something you can sell off.
$110K plus isn't out of line for someone who's in their mid-20's and has the experience of running a business. I did it (age 26) , but it's not easy.
The university is covering for something, this doesn't smell right. Watch for a sweetheart deal with a Wifi provider that has "hypoallergenic and safe" EM waves or something, and look for the uni to pay a premium for it, and banning all other wifi devices is for "health reasons" - not, of course, because the other company wants to charge a premium for their "safe" hardware.
The students are going to get screwed one way or another, that's for sure.
"And the legality of BT trackers is overall just "questionable.""
Oh, absolutely. All those people with BT trackers running for the perfectly legal torrents of the Linux ISOs and WoW updates and 3DMark apps should be shut down immediately - you know, for the children.
The point is that you could automate the entire process - for example, posting that you graduated from Rose-Hulman on a job board wouldn't be allowed unless the job posting system actually did a lookup on you at the school using your public key and the aforementioned string. Yes, I know it's easy to look someone up, but the point is that people don't do it - thus we get cases like this one.
For as much as they embrace tech, you'd think that by this time university degrees would be signed by the dean electronically with a private key that changes once per year. All HR people would have to do is paste the string "JLSEAGULL/MS ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING/ROSE HULMAN INST OF TECH/2001" and the digital signature into a box and the response would either be "VALID" or "INVALID". How hard can this be? Hell, even make it so the message has to be signed by both the graduate and the dean, so there's less of a privacy problem (the graduate can change their key every year to keep companies from doing random lookups on them). Is there something about the PGP keyspace that makes attacks on signatures easy that I'm not aware of?
I've heard of way too many cases of people passing themselves off as having graduated from a given university when in fact they did not. My dad fired someone a couple of years ago for passing himself off as graduating with an engineering degree from the University of Chicago, when at the time he "graduated" they had no engineering school!
I once was a housemate with a guy that got kicked out of a fraternity for being too drunk and rowdy. He had stolen a 1968 vintage kegerator from a carnival, and the thing sucked like 1200 watts or more, and ran continuously with no thermostat. One day, he came home with a keg of Stroh's that he had bought for $20 on special. He came face to face with the resolution that it would cost him more in electricity to cool the beer with the antique device than it cost to buy the keg.
Late that night, I found him outside dressed in all black, carrying a trenching shovel and a long extension cord toward our neighbors' house...
I say take the startup, but consider taking these steps first. My paycut on starting at my present job was 100%. 1. Eliminate debt, especially if you've been living close to your means. Cut back on unneccessary expenses. 2. 100 hour weeks kill your body. Get an HSA if your startup doesn't have a health plan. Get a physical before you start, and tell the doc that you're going to be working a startup and ask his advice. 3. 100 hour weeks are hard on your posture. Ergonomicize your office, professionally if need be. 4. Join a 24-hour gym, or better yet get some dumbbells and a pullup bar for the office. Doing a few reps loosens up the mind. 5. Stock a desk drawer with multivitamins, dried fruit, jerky, nuts, gingko biloba, etc. 6. Make sure that you get a deferred compensation package to make up for the cut.
Most importantly:
7. Your admission that your girlfriend is a "living expense" is a very telling one, and I think you should be careful. Are you spending more than $100 on Valentine's Day? Do you take her out to expensive dinners? Did you meet her before or after you started making bank? If the answer to any of these is yes, you may be in a spot of trouble. She's going to want you to keep spending money on her. She's going to treat any decision you make that results in less money with scorn, regardless of whether it's your dream. It might not be obvious to you, but almost 100% of your chance at success in a startup with less money is dependent on the whims of your Little Miss Perfect. If she doesn't like your decision, she's going to make your life a living hell. Startup hours put stress on any relationship, and you'd better take a hard look as to whether you should continue to have a girlfriend if she's not going to support your decision 110%. I'm very lucky my girl does, but we're both workaholics and we're both looking forward to a 6 week trip to China this summer so we can decompress. I hope you're similarly lucky.
The reason WLAN support has been sucking for a long time is that the WLAN adapters whether they're PCMCIA or USB have very very stupid chips inside them from Atheros, Atmel, Prism, Broadcom, etc.
They're pretty much just a radio, an IF, and a MAC. Because the manufacturers wanted to save money and sell their chips all over the world, they rely on a closed-source object called a HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) so you can't turn up the power to unreasonable or illegal levels, or use channels outside what that country specifies.
Linux, being open source, hates the fact that these companies bent over to the FCC and equivalents and only released a closed source HAL object in order to keep hackers from violating the UNII restrictions on frequency and power. I'm banging on doors at a large mfr. of USB sticks to get driver people on the horn so I can use their 802.11 USB stick in a commercial portable device that runs Linux. They're not cooperating.
My girlfriend and I were recently at a conference in Europe (she spoke, I puttered around the city for a week drawing cathedrals), where I got the chance to read some of the posters. One was particularly interesting, but I don't have the proceedings in hand so I can't find the title.
In any case, it was basically proposing the need for people that had access to large sensitive databases to be granted access to everything, but they had a daemon watching over them that detected aberrations in the pattern of access and notified a supervisor or locked them out of the database.
For example, you could have someone doing single-user lookups all day as they service customers, then their terminal starts generating lookups for huge ranges of people with full information. The daemon would recognize this and slow down their query rate, lock them out, or call a supervisor. This daemon also logged access, but it only logged what it termed to be unusual patterns of access. It also was able to watch who worked on a file or directory, and it had figured out something as unusual if a person accessed a file at a time outside the ordinary, or (especially cool) if someone accessed a file when other members of the team weren't logged in.
I have no idea how they trained something like this daemon, but it was a neat use of an expert system.
There is a lot of value in knowing the dude down the street with the corner electronics shop when a drive or a valve in the demo fails 2 hours before said demo.
For the mechanically inclined, there's McMaster-Carr.
If you're in the same city like I was, you could order and one thousand reverse-threaded titanium compact swivel joints (real product!) would appear on your doorstep in two hours. Providing that's what you ordered, of course.
3 years ago, I switched away from CD's and DVD's as a backup medium. Last year, HDDs provided more storage per dollar than tape. When I recieve a CD as part of a game or CAD install software, I use dd or Alcohol 120% to create a disk image on my RAID 5 array. Then I use virtual disks to mount the images over the network. Works for DVD movies as well.
I've had 1 drive that I used smartctl to catch - replaced the drive and rebuilt the array inside of an hour.
I have not lost my email archive, photos, or files (cough...porn...cough) at all in this time. Personally, I think that people are going to look on early 21st century as the time when we started saving all of our useless crap, but I think it's going to be a marvelous historical archive. ("Hey, look! Here's all of Dad's old college term papers!")
Hell, I keep entire HDD images of my laptop drive on the array. If my laptop drive dies, I can dd over the image to a new drive, dual boot configuration and all.
That wasn't the goal, but it would be cool too. The point was to have a mouse that could do x'(t) translations in a game (twisting the mouse to the left accelerates strafe or something). I've never been able to use a trackball to play a game.
When finishing a dense PCB design after a spate of 100 hour weeks, my eyes started to shake side-to-side at about 2Hz. Scared the fuck out of me, I thought I was having a stroke or MS symptoms.
Turned out it was just fatigue, so I take breaks more often now.
I've thought of hacking together a mouse that had dual optical sensors for axial rotation in addition to the standard translation of a single sensor mouse. User interfaces for 3D CAD programs would benefit - twist to rotate the object. Gaming would benefit - you could circle strafe with one hand by making the twist of the mouse accelerate the strafe. OS GUIs would benefit - click on an object then turn the mouse to activate an option on the context menu.
Good idea, or invitation for wrist-strain lawsuits?
Slashdot Mirror
Montana also has a bill in process to remove Montana-made suppressors from the National Firearms Act, allowing them to be bought over the counter. It's HB366, and here's the excerpt.
Section 4. Prohibition. A personal firearm, a firearm accessory, or ammunition that is manufactured commercially or privately in Montana and that remains within the borders of Montana is not subject to federal law or federal regulation, including registration, under the authority of congress to regulate interstate commerce. It is declared by the legislature that those items have not traveled in interstate commerce. This section applies to a firearm, a firearm accessory, or ammunition that is manufactured in Montana from basic materials and that can be manufactured without the inclusion of any significant parts imported from another state. Generic and insignificant parts that have other manufacturing or consumer product applications are not firearms, firearms accessories, or ammunition, and their importation into Montana and incorporation into a firearm, a firearm accessory, or ammunition manufactured in Montana does not subject the firearm, firearm accessory, or ammunition to federal regulation. "Generic and insignificant parts" includes but is not limited to springs, screws, nuts, and pins. It is declared by the legislature that basic materials, such as unmachined steel and unshaped wood, are not firearms, firearms accessories, or ammunition and are not subject to congressional authority to regulate firearms, firearms accessories, and ammunition under interstate commerce as if they were actually firearms, firearms accessories, or ammunition. The authority of congress to regulate interstate commerce in basic materials does not include authority to regulate firearms, firearms accessories, and ammunition made in Montana from those materials. Firearms accessories that are imported into Montana from another state and that are subject to federal regulation as being in interstate commerce do not subject a firearm to federal regulation under interstate commerce because they are attached to or used in conjunction with a firearm in Montana.
Go Montana!
Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success
Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success
Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success
You've got to be kidding me. That's like saying "Efforts to increase enrollment in the mathematics program was increased by decreasing emphasis on calculus."
Not even kidding. CIWS is a 20mm Gatling gun with in integrated radar/FLIR and fire control computer. You can literally flip the switch and it will kill anything moving within 10,000 yards. An ex-CIWS tech posted someplace that the tracking system is so good that it tends to get extraordinarily aggravated by flocks of seagulls. It has to be locked down in port so it doesn't get angry at them.
Some videos of the CIWS:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDWH1CHNOw4
It's a USB audio card the size of a thumb drive. Its ground is completely isolated from the computer, and as such it is dead quiet - this is especially great in laptops. I have Shure e3 headphones and if you ran them directly into my laptop you'd hear clicks and pops as the HDD was operating.
2 788
Here's a link:
http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=
The TBAAM is pretty much the best value upgrade for a laptop's audio out.
Have you ever been to China? I spent a month there, and that was all it took to realize that the US has nothing to fear from the Chinese - economically or militarily - in the next 50 years. Everything is done as fast and cheap as possible. Every month or so a goddamn office building falls down because they were so cheap they used concrete with too much filler and rebar from a junkyard. Every public works project is done by armies of 5000 guys with picks and shovels, and some projects lose as much as 5% of the workforce to accidental deaths. Their unemployment/underemployment is horrendous. There are areas of the country where people are still living in dirt-floor hovels with a life expectancy of 40 and no teeth. The country as a whole is just barely hanging together politically - there is only the thinnest layer of Communism over the whole works. They own so much of our foreign debt that they can't go to war with us, and we can't go to war with them. Their culture squashes innovation. Chinese high art is considered "who can make the best copy of this goldfish". I'm convinced that their economic growth is a product of having a massive unskilled human labor pool, natural resources they're willing to pollute the shit out of their land to get at, and foreign investment that's willing to take advantage of those two things.
I repeat: we have nothing to fear from the Chinese.
Yeah, but then you'd be driving the Deliverator for Uncle Enzo. :)
Is there a waiting list somewhere for the Black Sun VIP passes? Where do I sign up?
(mouth moving out of sync with the words, as in a chop-socky flick)
"Your CMOS-fu is greater than mine! Please say more, so that I might sit and listen!"
Can you point to some more links on 3D fabrication? Thanks!
Yes, it's more difficult, but you (potentially) get large gains in speed due to shorter wire lengths. I'm not up on all of the technology, but some of it centers around fabbing layers separately and then bonding them together (similar to PCBs), and others are all-at-once methods.
This cooling method is also valuable for MEMS systems.
Chips fabbed in 3D have numerous advantages - short trace lengths, higher density, etc. However, the problem with all of them is getting the heat out with today's convective cooling technologies. This technology will allow multiple cores in 3D to operate without overheating, and that's a good thing as the number of cores in personal computers and servers continues to increase.
Actually, $75K isn't far out of line for new grads from a topflight school. I assume he has a master's degree.
Word of advice man - start your OWN company if that's what they're offering you off the bat. Even if it fails, you get an automatic bump of 20-50% in pay at the next job you get, based on your experience alone. If it succeeds, you have something you can sell off.
$110K plus isn't out of line for someone who's in their mid-20's and has the experience of running a business. I did it (age 26) , but it's not easy.
The university is covering for something, this doesn't smell right. Watch for a sweetheart deal with a Wifi provider that has "hypoallergenic and safe" EM waves or something, and look for the uni to pay a premium for it, and banning all other wifi devices is for "health reasons" - not, of course, because the other company wants to charge a premium for their "safe" hardware.
The students are going to get screwed one way or another, that's for sure.
"And the legality of BT trackers is overall just "questionable.""
Oh, absolutely. All those people with BT trackers running for the perfectly legal torrents of the Linux ISOs and WoW updates and 3DMark apps should be shut down immediately - you know, for the children.
Idiot.
The point is that you could automate the entire process - for example, posting that you graduated from Rose-Hulman on a job board wouldn't be allowed unless the job posting system actually did a lookup on you at the school using your public key and the aforementioned string. Yes, I know it's easy to look someone up, but the point is that people don't do it - thus we get cases like this one.
For as much as they embrace tech, you'd think that by this time university degrees would be signed by the dean electronically with a private key that changes once per year. All HR people would have to do is paste the string "JLSEAGULL/MS ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING/ROSE HULMAN INST OF TECH/2001" and the digital signature into a box and the response would either be "VALID" or "INVALID". How hard can this be? Hell, even make it so the message has to be signed by both the graduate and the dean, so there's less of a privacy problem (the graduate can change their key every year to keep companies from doing random lookups on them). Is there something about the PGP keyspace that makes attacks on signatures easy that I'm not aware of?
I've heard of way too many cases of people passing themselves off as having graduated from a given university when in fact they did not. My dad fired someone a couple of years ago for passing himself off as graduating with an engineering degree from the University of Chicago, when at the time he "graduated" they had no engineering school!
Good call. I forgot that one. Lawyer up!
I once was a housemate with a guy that got kicked out of a fraternity for being too drunk and rowdy. He had stolen a 1968 vintage kegerator from a carnival, and the thing sucked like 1200 watts or more, and ran continuously with no thermostat. One day, he came home with a keg of Stroh's that he had bought for $20 on special. He came face to face with the resolution that it would cost him more in electricity to cool the beer with the antique device than it cost to buy the keg.
Late that night, I found him outside dressed in all black, carrying a trenching shovel and a long extension cord toward our neighbors' house...
I say take the startup, but consider taking these steps first. My paycut on starting at my present job was 100%.
1. Eliminate debt, especially if you've been living close to your means. Cut back on unneccessary expenses.
2. 100 hour weeks kill your body. Get an HSA if your startup doesn't have a health plan. Get a physical before you start, and tell the doc that you're going to be working a startup and ask his advice.
3. 100 hour weeks are hard on your posture. Ergonomicize your office, professionally if need be.
4. Join a 24-hour gym, or better yet get some dumbbells and a pullup bar for the office. Doing a few reps loosens up the mind.
5. Stock a desk drawer with multivitamins, dried fruit, jerky, nuts, gingko biloba, etc.
6. Make sure that you get a deferred compensation package to make up for the cut.
Most importantly:
7. Your admission that your girlfriend is a "living expense" is a very telling one, and I think you should be careful. Are you spending more than $100 on Valentine's Day? Do you take her out to expensive dinners? Did you meet her before or after you started making bank? If the answer to any of these is yes, you may be in a spot of trouble. She's going to want you to keep spending money on her. She's going to treat any decision you make that results in less money with scorn, regardless of whether it's your dream. It might not be obvious to you, but almost 100% of your chance at success in a startup with less money is dependent on the whims of your Little Miss Perfect. If she doesn't like your decision, she's going to make your life a living hell. Startup hours put stress on any relationship, and you'd better take a hard look as to whether you should continue to have a girlfriend if she's not going to support your decision 110%. I'm very lucky my girl does, but we're both workaholics and we're both looking forward to a 6 week trip to China this summer so we can decompress. I hope you're similarly lucky.
The reason WLAN support has been sucking for a long time is that the WLAN adapters whether they're PCMCIA or USB have very very stupid chips inside them from Atheros, Atmel, Prism, Broadcom, etc.
They're pretty much just a radio, an IF, and a MAC. Because the manufacturers wanted to save money and sell their chips all over the world, they rely on a closed-source object called a HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) so you can't turn up the power to unreasonable or illegal levels, or use channels outside what that country specifies.
Linux, being open source, hates the fact that these companies bent over to the FCC and equivalents and only released a closed source HAL object in order to keep hackers from violating the UNII restrictions on frequency and power. I'm banging on doors at a large mfr. of USB sticks to get driver people on the horn so I can use their 802.11 USB stick in a commercial portable device that runs Linux. They're not cooperating.
My girlfriend and I were recently at a conference in Europe (she spoke, I puttered around the city for a week drawing cathedrals), where I got the chance to read some of the posters. One was particularly interesting, but I don't have the proceedings in hand so I can't find the title.
In any case, it was basically proposing the need for people that had access to large sensitive databases to be granted access to everything, but they had a daemon watching over them that detected aberrations in the pattern of access and notified a supervisor or locked them out of the database.
For example, you could have someone doing single-user lookups all day as they service customers, then their terminal starts generating lookups for huge ranges of people with full information. The daemon would recognize this and slow down their query rate, lock them out, or call a supervisor. This daemon also logged access, but it only logged what it termed to be unusual patterns of access. It also was able to watch who worked on a file or directory, and it had figured out something as unusual if a person accessed a file at a time outside the ordinary, or (especially cool) if someone accessed a file when other members of the team weren't logged in.
I have no idea how they trained something like this daemon, but it was a neat use of an expert system.
There is a lot of value in knowing the dude down the street with the corner electronics shop when a drive or a valve in the demo fails 2 hours before said demo.
For the mechanically inclined, there's McMaster-Carr.
If you're in the same city like I was, you could order and one thousand reverse-threaded titanium compact swivel joints (real product!) would appear on your doorstep in two hours. Providing that's what you ordered, of course.
3 years ago, I switched away from CD's and DVD's as a backup medium. Last year, HDDs provided more storage per dollar than tape. When I recieve a CD as part of a game or CAD install software, I use dd or Alcohol 120% to create a disk image on my RAID 5 array. Then I use virtual disks to mount the images over the network. Works for DVD movies as well.
I've had 1 drive that I used smartctl to catch - replaced the drive and rebuilt the array inside of an hour.
I have not lost my email archive, photos, or files (cough...porn...cough) at all in this time. Personally, I think that people are going to look on early 21st century as the time when we started saving all of our useless crap, but I think it's going to be a marvelous historical archive. ("Hey, look! Here's all of Dad's old college term papers!")
Hell, I keep entire HDD images of my laptop drive on the array. If my laptop drive dies, I can dd over the image to a new drive, dual boot configuration and all.
That wasn't the goal, but it would be cool too. The point was to have a mouse that could do x'(t) translations in a game (twisting the mouse to the left accelerates strafe or something). I've never been able to use a trackball to play a game.
When finishing a dense PCB design after a spate of 100 hour weeks, my eyes started to shake side-to-side at about 2Hz. Scared the fuck out of me, I thought I was having a stroke or MS symptoms.
Turned out it was just fatigue, so I take breaks more often now.
I've thought of hacking together a mouse that had dual optical sensors for axial rotation in addition to the standard translation of a single sensor mouse. User interfaces for 3D CAD programs would benefit - twist to rotate the object. Gaming would benefit - you could circle strafe with one hand by making the twist of the mouse accelerate the strafe. OS GUIs would benefit - click on an object then turn the mouse to activate an option on the context menu.
Good idea, or invitation for wrist-strain lawsuits?