I won't say there is a massive shortage of people or a huge number of unfilled openings, but there is a healthy market with employers like Lockheed, Raytheon, CIA - calls from recruiters and job hopping are pretty common where I work.
I dunno. I'm an MSEE with 2 years experience and a 3.4 from a pretty good uni, and I've been trying to get in at Lockheed for about six months. I know one of their VP's and about eight other people in their spacecraft systems group, but they insist on going through HR, who are quite snotty and never get back to you. They have scads of jobs on their website, but don't respond at all to inquiries. Lockheed seems to take forever to do anything. I guess it makes sense, being that it's a 150K+ employee company, but it's frustrating to deal with.
And WHAT happened to those interesting pics that that person in cal took, the "purple beam", that NASA sent a t-38 jet over to snag his camera and go "investigate". That story has poofed too near as I have seen. Maybe I missed it, but after a few days it evaporated, and I don't recall seeing them release the pics.
Pictures of the Shuttle on-orbit can be found here.
Basically, the Starfire Optical Range can operate as a directed energy weapon using a high-power laser to ionize a conductive path through air, then pulsing a high-voltage, high-current jolt through it. It's actually pretty useful for atmospheric studies as well.
Cisco needs the help that a cheap, consumer-grade prduct can bring. When I worked at Cisco, we took apart the Linksys PCMCIA wifi cards and compared them to ours, to see how things stacked up. For one thing, the antenna assembly on a Cisco card is a monstrosity. Believe me, I tested enough of the things to know that there were four layers of polycarb, copper, nylon, etc, to get misaligned, diconnected, etc. The antenna used to attach with 2 SMB connectors that never seemed to mate correctly. The RF shielding in the case of a Cisco card looks like a sculpture; almost nothing is punched from sheet metal; rather, most of the noisy parts are covered with custom-machined aluminum blocks.
In contrast, a Linksys card has no funky multilayer antenna, the whole card is on one piece of PCB, and the RF shielding is basically aluminum foil with holes. There's no screws, either. Just ultrasound welded plastic. Essentially, the thing was cheap and well-designed to be manufactured in bulk. The range sucked because of the stupidly designed antenna patch - they basically just put a patch of copper down without even trying to tune it so the mismatch was horrible. And still it worked.
Cisco can benefit greatly from using Linksys bulk sales to support their bottom line while they do what they do best - R&D. The wireless division I worked for had some of the best radio engineers I've ever met - hell, you walked into the parking lot, and every other car had a ham license plate and a 3-meter antenna.
So, yeah. This is a good thing, and will help Cisco get back on top of their shit.
After testing, Sensei took a bunch of us out for beer and wings. Nice guy. Very loud, very smart in a Buddha-meets-Jim-Belushi kind of way. One of the junior students, who is kind of a sanctimonious, attention-seeking little guy, said something to the effect of "I don't think I should go to the advanced classes. I feel like I'm holding everyone back. I... I... I..." Sensei put down his beer, and said, "You think you're being humble, you think you're making yourself more worthy of attention by saying this. Fact is, this is your ego talking. You become so concerned with how inferior you are that your training suffers as a result. In fact, you become inferior because you think you are. So go to the advanced classes. Feel stupid. Screw up. Transcend your ego, and get down to business. Forget about 'you'. Think about what needs to be done and do it."
And this, friends, is how we all must be. We need to stop martyring ourselves to the lions of popularity and public opinion. We shouldn't "apply our intellects to playing the game." If we do that, we become the calculating, soulless PUA's and PHB's. We need to learn that the people who seem to cross social boundaries effortlessly do so beacuse they act as if those bounds do not exist.
Think about the last time someone, say, bumped you in the hallway. Did you brush it off, thinking, "maybe they were in a hurry"? Or did your ego take over, spinning the incident into a larger tapestry of us-vs-them, nerds-vs-jocks social conspiracy, all directed at keeping YOU down? If it was the latter, you need to reexamine how you relate to the world, and find a healthier way to do it.
Do you really believe this, or are you trolling? There is a noticeable effect on the pH. Assuming you're serious, one can calculate it.
Consider a 30m diameter lake 1m deep on average. That's 707m^3 of water, weighing 707e6 grams. Water is 10g/mol, so 707e5 mol of water.
Sodium ionizes into Na+, freeing an electron. So one mole of electrons are freed for each mole of sodium. 3lb=1364g=124mol OH-.
That's a ratio of 1.75e-6 OH-/H2O. Normal water has a concentration of 1e-7 OH-/H20, so add the two to get the total concentration C, and -log C = pOH = 5.73, so pH = 14-pOH = 8.26.
The ideal range for aquatic life tilts toward the basic: 6.5 to 8.5, so he should be OK. Ten pounds would probably have some undesirable effects, however. He is right about the stupidity of no lower limit on reportable releases of sodium - hell, salting the roads in winter is a release of hundreds of tons (though excess salinity has its bad effects as well).
Self-configurable housing. Something like a series of open platforms mounted on either arms or tracks, able to reconfigure themselves using hydraulics. Who needs to go to the kitchen to get a beer, bring the kitchen to you.
The second is kind of an "apartment stalk" with an elevator core and a double helix track up it. With this arrangement, one can construct a house shaped like 7/8 of a helix on the ground and "screw" it up the stalk past all of the other houses to its desired position. If the stalk were made out of something strong and flexible like carbon fiber, one can imagine fields of these structures swaying in the wind...
The notion of the old-fashioned massive book sale is not dead yet, either.
There's a book sale that Case Western Reserve U. has every few years. It goes on for four days, and the last day is "box day" - meaning that you fill any size box with books, and pay only $5. People drive from Alabama for this sale, it's something of a legend.
This year, I got the complete set of Asimov's Foundation series (in hardcover), 4 of Buckminster Fuller's greatest books, 4 hardcover William Gibsons (of these, the best find was The Difference Engine), 4 lonely planet travel guides, Carl Sagan's Cosmos and Dragons of Eden and about 35 kilos more of miscellaneous biographies, textbooks, philosophy anthologies, Time-Life coffee-table books, the complete corpus of James Michener - all for five bucks!
Meanwhile, my compulsive roommate bought two complete encyclopedias, one from 1905 and one from 1860. I asked him why, he says, "they were old."
Among the finds on this year's silent auction table will be a first-edition copy of E. B. White's Charlotte's Web, with illustrations by Garth Williams; a copy of Paul Cheswick's Robin Hood, illustrated by N.C. Wyeth; a rare James Joyce Pomes Penyeach, printed privately in Cleveland in 1931 and from a limited series of 100 copies; and a leather-bound copy of Charles Dickens' Master Humphrey's Clock and The Old Curiosity Shop (printed in London by Chapman and Hall).
If you're anywhere in the East, I encourage you to come next year. All the proceeds go to the Association for Continuing Education.
I agree. As soon as one successful assassination is carried out against the head of a corporation, more will follow. However, I don't see any Slashbots running to pick up guns.
Rather, it will be the anti-corporatist self-titled "eco-defenders" that will take that and run with it. It will be an oil, timber, automobile, chemical, or energy CEO that takes the first assassin's bullet. It's far off, but you can see it coming.
And a lot of civil wars are started by assassins...
An engineer must face the consequences.
on
When Looks Can Kill
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
LATE 2004, SOMEWHERE IN THE UNITED STATES
You're at home watching TV. You flip to the news. You get up to go to the kitchen, but as you do, you hear that a tape has been released by foreign terrorists that captured a U.S. soldier last week, and that he has been killed. You sit back down.
There is a disclaimer: "Our more sensitive viewers may wish to not watch the following segment." The video starts. It's the captured soldier. He's facing the camera, a large bruise on the side of his head, and he's bleeding. His face displays no emotion - he looks almost resigned. His captors are not visible.
A voice in a foreign language is heard. There's a delay while the translator picks it up: "...in light of his crimes against the (static), we cannot allow this dog to live."
And just like that, a gloved hand holding a pistol rises into the left side of the frame, and shoots the soldier in the temple. There is surprisingly little blood, as the dead man drops out of the frame.
You hit the pause button on your TiVo remote. You squint at the gun onscreen. As it dawns on you, you begin to feel a little sick.
Eight years ago, you designed that gun.
You designed the blowback ejector assembly with loving care. You fired hundreds of rounds with that first prototype at the test range, and put in countless late nights simulating the magazine dynamics to reduce the probability of jamming by 1.2%. You got a promotion. Your prototype became the foundation of an entire product line. They were manufactured in the hundreds of thousands. Some of them were sold to overseas customers, some to domestic ones. Your company made millions. You got another promotion. Evenutally, you moved on to other projects.
And now your old project, your baby, just put a bullet through the head of an American soldier halfway around the world.
You flip off the TV. "I'm not responsible," you tell yourself. "It's not like I pulled the trigger." And you're right. If you hadn't designed it, some other person would have - but then they would have gotten those promotions, those bonuses. You had to do it.
Right?
You lay down in bed.
And try to sleep.
Re:please think twice about stories like this.
on
When Looks Can Kill
·
· Score: 1
Nothing to see here.
Just another use of your hard-earned dollars to more efficiently kill people. Not to mention that tactical predictions of the next 30 years indicate that this weapons system will never be needed, as no country we could ever concieve of warring with has a real air force to speak of. Just another weapon of the video-game generation.
I have this bumper sticker for my car: "Real engineers don't design weapons." I stick to it because I believe it. I've been interviewed for lucrative positions at Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, Northrop-Grumman, and a slew of others. In each interview, I asked what projects they had been working on in the last year, and what they expected to work on in the future. In each case, I got a litany of defense-related weapons or systems integration projects - and in each case, I walked out of the interview. Knowing that my work is being used to kill - you couldn't pay me enough. Two of my friends have done similarly.
Engineers, consider that what you build or design will be around for a long time after it leaves your lab - perhaps even outliving you. Consider that every land mine and nerve agent and dum-dum bullet were designed by somebody who didn't stop to consider the real consequences of their actions, choosing only to consider the expedient solution. Considering that arms sales from the U.S. to other countries outnumber domestic arms sales by 2 to 1, in all likelihood weapons systems designed and sold by U.S. armaments manufacturers will be used to kill American soldiers. As an engineer, you are more than a mere tool. You are a tool with a conscience. Use it.
Oh, sure, it's cheap as long as you are a student or professor, but once you graduate, expect to pay many thousands of dollars even for a basic license, and many students graduating from top engineering and research labs are largely incapable of programming in anything else.
A prof related to me a story of when he consulted for NASA. They had this "great" orbital mechanics and logistics package, incorporating several databases of over 10K records(all the crossreferencing was handled by the package), as well as incorporating an expert system to determine particular mission profiles. The size of the application suite and all associated libraries, databases, and scripts was around 470MB - AND THE WHOLE DAMN THING WAS WRITTEN IN MATLAB! He said he had never seen such a hacked together, impossible to understand, and poorly documented package. His perspective(as an electrical engineer) was that Matlab allowed engineers with no knowledge of or care for software engineering principles to hack together massive just-in-time kludges that happened to fix the present problem, but someone had to dive into the code again every time a slightly different set of problems had to be solved. In other words, Matlab gives engineers too much power and too little guidance.
Actually, the article is correct, and their point is valid. "Dirty" bits actually refer to the edges of the pits burned into the disc having edges that aren't crisp. This increases the likelihood of bit flips, lessening the quality of the resulting audio output when the DSP in the CD player can't handle indistinct edges of the pits. This becomes a very real problem when a burned CD is stored in a hot environment, such as a car dashboard. Try it yourself.
As an industry position paper, this describes my situation pretty well. As a user of pretty much every fileshare program out there, I still feel the need to buy software in certain special cases. Not to say that there isn't software on my computer that skirts the bounds of legality($140 for the latest version of Mathematica is too much for a poor student). However, I recently was forced to purchase Homeworld so I could play with my 13-year-old little brother online - something about the serial number not working for the online service. I was surprised what I got for $10. Nice manual, carefully written backstory, as well as the strategy guide. In other words, a perfect example of extra incentives that worked pretty well and satisfied a reticent college-age consumer.
As a radio engineer, I am with you. The design procedures featured on the site, as well as the performance indicators, are abominable. The designs they propose will never be better than a real antenna, but at least they're trying. While a hacked antenna requires little intellect to "design", it requires consequently less intellectual invenstment as well - no need to learn field equations. At least it keeps them happy and out of our hair.
Here's why. It might work if you are sitting in a coffeeshop with one or two other people and you can sit there for a few minutes while your devices trade off, but what about walking past someone in the street, where there was only time to grab part of a file? What about if you were in a room with hundreds of similar devices, how would you keep the bitrate up and use channels efficiently? With present tech, that partial file could never be recieved fully, as the "same" file with a different length or checksum couldn't be integrated within the filesystem. Channel congestion and crosstalk would reduce concentrations of devices of nine or above to substandard bitrates. Eavesdropping concerns are rampant. Lastly, you could never make it cheap enough for the system to be adopted.
Distributed services of this type require entirely new network service layers, not the least of which are:
Seamless encryption. I do not want people to lock in on file transfers between me and a trusted client. Period. In addition, one might implement a 'friend' list that would only lock in on people that were known clients, or friends of a known client.
Robust file transfer services that support successive and iterative media interleaving. As in, devices that query, "Hey, I have half of G. Love's Kick Drum, anyone got the other half? What about a different bitrate, or a slightly different checksum? I don't care, just give it to me and I'll integrate it with the half that I have on the fly."
Semi-intelligent cooperation methods between groups of devices to relay content to distant users, and power and channel scheduling to prevent congestion in high-density concentrations of these devices. As in, "Anyone know anyone that knows anyone that has any 216? Think you can get it for me?"
What about providing live recordings in realtime to people at a concert as part of their ticket price? You'd need broadcast data methods that have almost no upstream information, not even error correction, coming back to the reciever, as it would be wasteful of available channels. Instead, you'd need to be able to broadcast redundant media streams that could reconstruct themselves at the reciever, with minimal loss. You'd need an entirely new data transport service to realize this.
But that's just me thinking. Nope, I'm not thinking about starting a company that does this with off-the-shelf hardware. No, I haven't put together simulations that indicate that concentrations of these devices in 'recieve from broadcast node' mode can work at 943KBps, in groups of 1500 on a group of three channels 24MHz wide. No, I don't think I can get it in a form factor the size of a cell phone, with cost projections indicating that this device could cost under $70 in two years with the prices of 2.4GHz radio transcievers and storage media dropping as they are.
Nope, nothing at all. I have nothing. Nothing that could possibly worry the RIAA.
...dude. thanks for posting this. I popped over to Alternet to grab another story with a similar view and post it, but evidently, there are a lot more people than I thought with a dim view of the truth, timing, and propaganda value of this movie.
A mouthpiece for American Airlines came on CNN and stated that the plane's last scheduled biweekly maintenance was the 11th of this month(i.e. yesterday night). Given that they just caught a guy shipping himself to New York in a shipping container with forged airplane mechanic's identifications for a few airports, it looks possible that there was sabotage involved.
The General Electric CF6-80C2 turbofans in the Airbus that went down are designed to be swapped out easily, without removal of accessory panels - that is, you don't have to take the top shell of the wing off. The mount point, while very solid, is still weaker than the surrounding stucture, and may be vulnerable to a shaped charge triggered by a barometer. As little as 200g of plastique or 300g of TNT composite is sufficient to cut a 25mm alloy mounting bolt or two if shaped properly(more TNT composite is necessary, as you need more filler to hold the shape of the charge). A device of this type could be as small as 50-60 cm^3 and could easily fit in a toolbox.
In addition, this document details some of the mandatory modifications to this engine, not the least of which is:
"DGCACF6-80C2/12 FAA AD 95-17-16. AS IN AD & SB. AS IN AD & SB. TO PREVENT COMPRESSOR REAR FRAME(CRF) SEPERATION, WHICH COULD RESULT IN A REJECTED TAKEOFF AND DAMAGE TO THE AIRCRAFT."
Note that the engine in the parking lot of the gas station on 116th has the rear frame ripped or blown off. It could be that either this disaster represents a failure in a known vulnerable engine component in which case GE is responsible, a failure by American to do required modifications of said engine in which case American and GE are responsible, or an act of deliberate sabotage exploiting a known vulnerable engine component, in which case GE and the saboteur are responsible. However, the internals of this area are extremely hot, even in flight. Therefore, a charge in this area would need to be external - that is, noticable in a preflight walkaround - so it seems unlikely that a charge was used to exploit this weakness.
Accessing the rear frame area of the engine is harder to do, but is done more often and therefore would attract less attention. However, the level of sabotage neceesary to assure a catastrophic failure at altitude would in all likelihood create that same failure immediately upon preflight engine start.
In all cases, it seems that people are not looking hard enough at the designer and manufacturer of the CF6-80C2, General Electric.
By enabling the installation a corporate-beholden president, you are going to see a backlash in '04 against the current administration. The next (Democratic) president will then recognize that they have to embrace Green philosophies if they wish to stay in power. I'd say that's political capital well spent.
The GPUSA is the fragmented wing of the original party, the Greens. These guys try to pass themselves off as the legitimized Green Party in order to gain visibility. Notice that the statement you referred to says: "This platform, therefore, does not necessarily reflect in every respect the views of Green Party candidates at any level, including Ralph Nader and Winona LaDuke, Green Party candidates for President and Vice-President in 2000." That's called a disclaimer.
In other words, thank you for playing and please try again.
When I interned at a really, really big chip company, I worked in the laser lab. Since we were working with these infrared sub-milliwatt lasers that were pushed though a diffraction setup, one needed the lights off to align the AOM properly; in addition, ambient light would futz with any optical i/o connection with the on-chip diodes... But I digress. In any case, we had a flashing red warning light on the ceiling to use when the lasers were on. So here I am, 1am, lights off, dimly flashing red light in the corner...
Remember in "Aliens", when the red emergency lighting goes on just before all hell breaks loose? Right. So the air-suspended optical table chooses to re-level itself...
Slashdot Mirror
I won't say there is a massive shortage of people or a huge number of unfilled openings, but there is a healthy market with employers like Lockheed, Raytheon, CIA - calls from recruiters and job hopping are pretty common where I work.
I dunno. I'm an MSEE with 2 years experience and a 3.4 from a pretty good uni, and I've been trying to get in at Lockheed for about six months. I know one of their VP's and about eight other people in their spacecraft systems group, but they insist on going through HR, who are quite snotty and never get back to you. They have scads of jobs on their website, but don't respond at all to inquiries. Lockheed seems to take forever to do anything. I guess it makes sense, being that it's a 150K+ employee company, but it's frustrating to deal with.
Got any tips?
More information at this page.
Pictures of the Shuttle on-orbit can be found here.
Basically, the Starfire Optical Range can operate as a directed energy weapon using a high-power laser to ionize a conductive path through air, then pulsing a high-voltage, high-current jolt through it. It's actually pretty useful for atmospheric studies as well.
You can't be modded up any more, so I'll add my emphatic "brilliant, mate!".
Cisco needs the help that a cheap, consumer-grade prduct can bring. When I worked at Cisco, we took apart the Linksys PCMCIA wifi cards and compared them to ours, to see how things stacked up. For one thing, the antenna assembly on a Cisco card is a monstrosity. Believe me, I tested enough of the things to know that there were four layers of polycarb, copper, nylon, etc, to get misaligned, diconnected, etc. The antenna used to attach with 2 SMB connectors that never seemed to mate correctly. The RF shielding in the case of a Cisco card looks like a sculpture; almost nothing is punched from sheet metal; rather, most of the noisy parts are covered with custom-machined aluminum blocks.
In contrast, a Linksys card has no funky multilayer antenna, the whole card is on one piece of PCB, and the RF shielding is basically aluminum foil with holes. There's no screws, either. Just ultrasound welded plastic. Essentially, the thing was cheap and well-designed to be manufactured in bulk. The range sucked because of the stupidly designed antenna patch - they basically just put a patch of copper down without even trying to tune it so the mismatch was horrible. And still it worked.
Cisco can benefit greatly from using Linksys bulk sales to support their bottom line while they do what they do best - R&D. The wireless division I worked for had some of the best radio engineers I've ever met - hell, you walked into the parking lot, and every other car had a ham license plate and a 3-meter antenna.
So, yeah. This is a good thing, and will help Cisco get back on top of their shit.
After testing, Sensei took a bunch of us out for beer and wings. Nice guy. Very loud, very smart in a Buddha-meets-Jim-Belushi kind of way. One of the junior students, who is kind of a sanctimonious, attention-seeking little guy, said something to the effect of "I don't think I should go to the advanced classes. I feel like I'm holding everyone back. I... I... I..." Sensei put down his beer, and said, "You think you're being humble, you think you're making yourself more worthy of attention by saying this. Fact is, this is your ego talking. You become so concerned with how inferior you are that your training suffers as a result. In fact, you become inferior because you think you are. So go to the advanced classes. Feel stupid. Screw up. Transcend your ego, and get down to business. Forget about 'you'. Think about what needs to be done and do it."
And this, friends, is how we all must be. We need to stop martyring ourselves to the lions of popularity and public opinion. We shouldn't "apply our intellects to playing the game." If we do that, we become the calculating, soulless PUA's and PHB's. We need to learn that the people who seem to cross social boundaries effortlessly do so beacuse they act as if those bounds do not exist.
Think about the last time someone, say, bumped you in the hallway. Did you brush it off, thinking, "maybe they were in a hurry"? Or did your ego take over, spinning the incident into a larger tapestry of us-vs-them, nerds-vs-jocks social conspiracy, all directed at keeping YOU down? If it was the latter, you need to reexamine how you relate to the world, and find a healthier way to do it.
Dude! Mike Mullane! I was at SpaceCamp around then, in 1991. I got a free ride from Lockheed Martin, and was on the UTC team. Which site were you at?
Man, brings back memories.
Change in PH?
0.
NADA! NONE! ZEEEEERRRRROOOOO.
Do you really believe this, or are you trolling? There is a noticeable effect on the pH. Assuming you're serious, one can calculate it.
Consider a 30m diameter lake 1m deep on average. That's 707m^3 of water, weighing 707e6 grams. Water is 10g/mol, so 707e5 mol of water.
Sodium ionizes into Na+, freeing an electron. So one mole of electrons are freed for each mole of sodium. 3lb=1364g=124mol OH-.
That's a ratio of 1.75e-6 OH-/H2O. Normal water has a concentration of 1e-7 OH-/H20, so add the two to get the total concentration C, and -log C = pOH = 5.73, so pH = 14-pOH = 8.26.
The ideal range for aquatic life tilts toward the basic: 6.5 to 8.5, so he should be OK. Ten pounds would probably have some undesirable effects, however. He is right about the stupidity of no lower limit on reportable releases of sodium - hell, salting the roads in winter is a release of hundreds of tons (though excess salinity has its bad effects as well).
look here for more information.
Self-configurable housing. Something like a series of open platforms mounted on either arms or tracks, able to reconfigure themselves using hydraulics. Who needs to go to the kitchen to get a beer, bring the kitchen to you.
The second is kind of an "apartment stalk" with an elevator core and a double helix track up it. With this arrangement, one can construct a house shaped like 7/8 of a helix on the ground and "screw" it up the stalk past all of the other houses to its desired position. If the stalk were made out of something strong and flexible like carbon fiber, one can imagine fields of these structures swaying in the wind...
The notion of the old-fashioned massive book sale is not dead yet, either.
There's a book sale that Case Western Reserve U. has every few years. It goes on for four days, and the last day is "box day" - meaning that you fill any size box with books, and pay only $5. People drive from Alabama for this sale, it's something of a legend.
This year, I got the complete set of Asimov's Foundation series (in hardcover), 4 of Buckminster Fuller's greatest books, 4 hardcover William Gibsons (of these, the best find was The Difference Engine), 4 lonely planet travel guides, Carl Sagan's Cosmos and Dragons of Eden and about 35 kilos more of miscellaneous biographies, textbooks, philosophy anthologies, Time-Life coffee-table books, the complete corpus of James Michener - all for five bucks!
Meanwhile, my compulsive roommate bought two complete encyclopedias, one from 1905 and one from 1860. I asked him why, he says, "they were old."
Right. Now I have to build new shelves.
They also have some rarities. From the website:
Among the finds on this year's silent auction table will be a first-edition copy of E. B. White's Charlotte's Web, with illustrations by Garth Williams; a copy of Paul Cheswick's Robin Hood, illustrated by N.C. Wyeth; a rare James Joyce Pomes Penyeach, printed privately in Cleveland in 1931 and from a limited series of 100 copies; and a leather-bound copy of Charles Dickens' Master Humphrey's Clock and The Old Curiosity Shop (printed in London by Chapman and Hall).
If you're anywhere in the East, I encourage you to come next year. All the proceeds go to the Association for Continuing Education.
I agree. As soon as one successful assassination is carried out against the head of a corporation, more will follow. However, I don't see any Slashbots running to pick up guns.
Rather, it will be the anti-corporatist self-titled "eco-defenders" that will take that and run with it. It will be an oil, timber, automobile, chemical, or energy CEO that takes the first assassin's bullet. It's far off, but you can see it coming.
And a lot of civil wars are started by assassins...
We have an anti-anti-antimissile missile!
LATE 2004, SOMEWHERE IN THE UNITED STATES
You're at home watching TV. You flip to the news. You get up to go to the kitchen, but as you do, you hear that a tape has been released by foreign terrorists that captured a U.S. soldier last week, and that he has been killed. You sit back down.
There is a disclaimer: "Our more sensitive viewers may wish to not watch the following segment." The video starts. It's the captured soldier. He's facing the camera, a large bruise on the side of his head, and he's bleeding. His face displays no emotion - he looks almost resigned. His captors are not visible.
A voice in a foreign language is heard. There's a delay while the translator picks it up: "...in light of his crimes against the (static), we cannot allow this dog to live."
And just like that, a gloved hand holding a pistol rises into the left side of the frame, and shoots the soldier in the temple. There is surprisingly little blood, as the dead man drops out of the frame.
You hit the pause button on your TiVo remote. You squint at the gun onscreen. As it dawns on you, you begin to feel a little sick.
Eight years ago, you designed that gun.
You designed the blowback ejector assembly with loving care. You fired hundreds of rounds with that first prototype at the test range, and put in countless late nights simulating the magazine dynamics to reduce the probability of jamming by 1.2%. You got a promotion. Your prototype became the foundation of an entire product line. They were manufactured in the hundreds of thousands. Some of them were sold to overseas customers, some to domestic ones. Your company made millions. You got another promotion. Evenutally, you moved on to other projects.
And now your old project, your baby, just put a bullet through the head of an American soldier halfway around the world.
You flip off the TV. "I'm not responsible," you tell yourself. "It's not like I pulled the trigger." And you're right. If you hadn't designed it, some other person would have - but then they would have gotten those promotions, those bonuses. You had to do it.
Right?
You lay down in bed.
And try to sleep.
Nothing to see here.
Just another use of your hard-earned dollars to more efficiently kill people. Not to mention that tactical predictions of the next 30 years indicate that this weapons system will never be needed, as no country we could ever concieve of warring with has a real air force to speak of. Just another weapon of the video-game generation.
I have this bumper sticker for my car: "Real engineers don't design weapons." I stick to it because I believe it. I've been interviewed for lucrative positions at Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, Northrop-Grumman, and a slew of others. In each interview, I asked what projects they had been working on in the last year, and what they expected to work on in the future. In each case, I got a litany of defense-related weapons or systems integration projects - and in each case, I walked out of the interview. Knowing that my work is being used to kill - you couldn't pay me enough. Two of my friends have done similarly.
Engineers, consider that what you build or design will be around for a long time after it leaves your lab - perhaps even outliving you. Consider that every land mine and nerve agent and dum-dum bullet were designed by somebody who didn't stop to consider the real consequences of their actions, choosing only to consider the expedient solution. Considering that arms sales from the U.S. to other countries outnumber domestic arms sales by 2 to 1, in all likelihood weapons systems designed and sold by U.S. armaments manufacturers will be used to kill American soldiers. As an engineer, you are more than a mere tool. You are a tool with a conscience. Use it.
Oh, sure, it's cheap as long as you are a student or professor, but once you graduate, expect to pay many thousands of dollars even for a basic license, and many students graduating from top engineering and research labs are largely incapable of programming in anything else.
A prof related to me a story of when he consulted for NASA. They had this "great" orbital mechanics and logistics package, incorporating several databases of over 10K records(all the crossreferencing was handled by the package), as well as incorporating an expert system to determine particular mission profiles. The size of the application suite and all associated libraries, databases, and scripts was around 470MB - AND THE WHOLE DAMN THING WAS WRITTEN IN MATLAB! He said he had never seen such a hacked together, impossible to understand, and poorly documented package. His perspective(as an electrical engineer) was that Matlab allowed engineers with no knowledge of or care for software engineering principles to hack together massive just-in-time kludges that happened to fix the present problem, but someone had to dive into the code again every time a slightly different set of problems had to be solved. In other words, Matlab gives engineers too much power and too little guidance.
Actually, the article is correct, and their point is valid. "Dirty" bits actually refer to the edges of the pits burned into the disc having edges that aren't crisp. This increases the likelihood of bit flips, lessening the quality of the resulting audio output when the DSP in the CD player can't handle indistinct edges of the pits. This becomes a very real problem when a burned CD is stored in a hot environment, such as a car dashboard. Try it yourself.
As an industry position paper, this describes my situation pretty well. As a user of pretty much every fileshare program out there, I still feel the need to buy software in certain special cases. Not to say that there isn't software on my computer that skirts the bounds of legality($140 for the latest version of Mathematica is too much for a poor student). However, I recently was forced to purchase Homeworld so I could play with my 13-year-old little brother online - something about the serial number not working for the online service. I was surprised what I got for $10. Nice manual, carefully written backstory, as well as the strategy guide. In other words, a perfect example of extra incentives that worked pretty well and satisfied a reticent college-age consumer.
As a radio engineer, I am with you. The design procedures featured on the site, as well as the performance indicators, are abominable. The designs they propose will never be better than a real antenna, but at least they're trying. While a hacked antenna requires little intellect to "design", it requires consequently less intellectual invenstment as well - no need to learn field equations. At least it keeps them happy and out of our hair.
Mod parent up! Great, great idea!
Here's why. It might work if you are sitting in a coffeeshop with one or two other people and you can sit there for a few minutes while your devices trade off, but what about walking past someone in the street, where there was only time to grab part of a file? What about if you were in a room with hundreds of similar devices, how would you keep the bitrate up and use channels efficiently? With present tech, that partial file could never be recieved fully, as the "same" file with a different length or checksum couldn't be integrated within the filesystem. Channel congestion and crosstalk would reduce concentrations of devices of nine or above to substandard bitrates. Eavesdropping concerns are rampant. Lastly, you could never make it cheap enough for the system to be adopted.
Distributed services of this type require entirely new network service layers, not the least of which are:
Seamless encryption. I do not want people to lock in on file transfers between me and a trusted client. Period. In addition, one might implement a 'friend' list that would only lock in on people that were known clients, or friends of a known client.
Robust file transfer services that support successive and iterative media interleaving. As in, devices that query, "Hey, I have half of G. Love's Kick Drum, anyone got the other half? What about a different bitrate, or a slightly different checksum? I don't care, just give it to me and I'll integrate it with the half that I have on the fly."
Semi-intelligent cooperation methods between groups of devices to relay content to distant users, and power and channel scheduling to prevent congestion in high-density concentrations of these devices. As in, "Anyone know anyone that knows anyone that has any 216? Think you can get it for me?"
What about providing live recordings in realtime to people at a concert as part of their ticket price? You'd need broadcast data methods that have almost no upstream information, not even error correction, coming back to the reciever, as it would be wasteful of available channels. Instead, you'd need to be able to broadcast redundant media streams that could reconstruct themselves at the reciever, with minimal loss. You'd need an entirely new data transport service to realize this.
But that's just me thinking. Nope, I'm not thinking about starting a company that does this with off-the-shelf hardware. No, I haven't put together simulations that indicate that concentrations of these devices in 'recieve from broadcast node' mode can work at 943KBps, in groups of 1500 on a group of three channels 24MHz wide. No, I don't think I can get it in a form factor the size of a cell phone, with cost projections indicating that this device could cost under $70 in two years with the prices of 2.4GHz radio transcievers and storage media dropping as they are.
Nope, nothing at all. I have nothing. Nothing that could possibly worry the RIAA.
But I do need funding.
...dude. thanks for posting this. I popped over to Alternet to grab another story with a similar view and post it, but evidently, there are a lot more people than I thought with a dim view of the truth, timing, and propaganda value of this movie.
here you go
The destination was Montreal, I believe. Misremembered it. Thanks for pointing that out.
The General Electric CF6-80C2 turbofans in the Airbus that went down are designed to be swapped out easily, without removal of accessory panels - that is, you don't have to take the top shell of the wing off. The mount point, while very solid, is still weaker than the surrounding stucture, and may be vulnerable to a shaped charge triggered by a barometer. As little as 200g of plastique or 300g of TNT composite is sufficient to cut a 25mm alloy mounting bolt or two if shaped properly(more TNT composite is necessary, as you need more filler to hold the shape of the charge). A device of this type could be as small as 50-60 cm^3 and could easily fit in a toolbox.
In addition, this document details some of the mandatory modifications to this engine, not the least of which is:
"DGCACF6-80C2/12 FAA AD 95-17-16. AS IN AD & SB. AS IN AD & SB. TO PREVENT COMPRESSOR REAR FRAME(CRF) SEPERATION, WHICH COULD RESULT IN A REJECTED TAKEOFF AND DAMAGE TO THE AIRCRAFT."
Note that the engine in the parking lot of the gas station on 116th has the rear frame ripped or blown off. It could be that either this disaster represents a failure in a known vulnerable engine component in which case GE is responsible, a failure by American to do required modifications of said engine in which case American and GE are responsible, or an act of deliberate sabotage exploiting a known vulnerable engine component, in which case GE and the saboteur are responsible. However, the internals of this area are extremely hot, even in flight. Therefore, a charge in this area would need to be external - that is, noticable in a preflight walkaround - so it seems unlikely that a charge was used to exploit this weakness.
Accessing the rear frame area of the engine is harder to do, but is done more often and therefore would attract less attention. However, the level of sabotage neceesary to assure a catastrophic failure at altitude would in all likelihood create that same failure immediately upon preflight engine start.
In all cases, it seems that people are not looking hard enough at the designer and manufacturer of the CF6-80C2, General Electric.
By enabling the installation a corporate-beholden president, you are going to see a backlash in '04 against the current administration. The next (Democratic) president will then recognize that they have to embrace Green philosophies if they wish to stay in power. I'd say that's political capital well spent.
In other words, thank you for playing and please try again.
Remember in "Aliens", when the red emergency lighting goes on just before all hell breaks loose? Right. So the air-suspended optical table chooses to re-level itself...
HICCCHSSSSS...
Total chills, man.