Alas, lots of microwave ovens these day have mode stirrers, metal spinners that spray the microwaves more evenly throughout the cavity. The goal is to reduce hot spots, possibly enough to ruin the nice pattern in the marshmallows.
But they DID!. Wrecking billions of dollars ' worth of prime real-estate with only a few box cutters and the like is pure genius.
I was thinking along the lines of causing grave strategic injury to the U.S. The 9-11 attacks were tactically brilliant, but strategically ineffectual. The U.S. could withstand an attack of that magnitude once a month indefinitely. A successful cyberspace attack every month, however, would destroy the economy within a year, and all it takes is one bright kid.
BTW, Al Qaeda did not accomplish the attacks with "a few boxcutters". They accomplished it with applied psychology. The critical point of the 9-11 strategy was convincing several hundred people to sit on their hands while their planes were turned into missiles. The coming cyberspace attacks will probably use similar social engineering techniques to trick people into working for the attackers to violate security isolation.
I agree totally with your LED comments. Their optical power density is simply too low to be practical.
What you really want is some sort of gas discharge lamp (e.g., xenon). They're bright, have a predictable flattish color spectrum, and last a couple of thousand hours. You can buy projectors that have them built in these days. (I wouldn't try a retrofit though. Getting the electrical drive, cooling, and lenses right would be more trouble than it is worth.)
Nowadays, a s'kiddie with a problem can do millions of dollars' worth of damage because he's in a bad mood, and he can do it in a matter of minutes. No matter how good your security and recovery procedures are, a virus can always hit at the wrong time and do serious damage.
True, but there are billions of people out there and a significant fraction of them cannot be deterred except by killing them. They might be crazy, they might want to bring down the techno-societies, they might not care what happens to them, whatever. Such people are inevitable, so you have to regard them as a force of nature and work around them. Any system that assumes they don't exist, or assumes that they can be deterred, will certainly fail.
Slapping them on the wrist and saying "Naughty" just isn't sending the right message.
OTOH, deterrence and punishment are almost completely futile from a strategic point of view. Deterrence is never perfect, and it only takes one undeterred person to bring down the system. The solutions are better technology and better user training.
Look at it from a warfare angle: Goner is a half-assed stunt by some *Israeli* kids. You can rest assured that if Al Qaeda could find two brain cells to rub together that they would've done something similar, and unlike the kiddies they would've wiped BIOSes and NIC MAC addresses, wiped filesystem metadata and boot sectors, programmed video cards to extremely high refresh rates (destroying old monitors and maybe making them catch on fire), and so forth.
Many manufacturers publish mean time before failure (MTBF) specs on thier hardware.
Most MTBFs are calculated values, derived from historical failure-over-time rates for the individual components inside the equipment. Take them with a grain of salt, especially if the equipment is used more heavily than was assumed for the MTBF calculations.
The other problem is that modern designs tend to push the components very hard, especially regarding heat dissipation and electrical currents. Even if the design is good, the components are still pushed into a regime where the historical data isn't as valid. And all too often the design turns out to be not good enough. (How many laptop batteries have been recalled over the last year?)
The teachers... are fighting a move to increase their health care premiums by up to $600 per person, per year. Currently, they pay $250.
Per year, not per month.
You might not ever talk to a commoner in your gated community...
LOL! I current pay $300/month to live in an ordinary neighborhood, and before that it was $190/month for a crappy apartment.
So basically you admit at this point you were full of shit when you claimed they were fighting for higher wages when in fact they were fighting to keep their wages.
Your rudeness and illogic make it meaningless to attempt to continue this conversation.
My god then imagine what kinds of cretins offering 560 million would attract to corporate boards.
Indeed. Entirely too many good companies have been flushed down the toilet by bloated boards and fat cat executives.
Go and read the article... They are not asking for more money. The school district wants to raise their healthcare premiums by over 100% and they are fighting it.
I did, in fact, read all the details. The increase was a few hundred dollars *a year*, 1% of their annual salary. The equivalent of making them come to work five minutes earlier each day. For this, they shut down the schools.
I *do* see their point of view. Perhaps they should have done something, perhaps the policy change was unfair. But their response was entirely disproportionate. It was the business equivalent of a preemptive thermonuclear strike. And over what? A piddling sum of money that they would hardly notice. Foolish. It'll be years before they can even civilly discuss compensation again, and they destroyed a lot of public trust and the public will remember when appropriations time rolls around.
It never ceases to amaze me how a conservative statement always ends up with a "troll" marking while leftist "all software should be free" propaganda gets marked "interesting"
The really curious thing is that if it were Microsoft using their monopoly over an organization's critical resources to extract extra not-previously-negotiated payments, Slashdotters would instantly break out the digital pitchforks and electronic torches and go off to burn out the Evil Empire's castle. But let a teacher's union do the exact same thing...
Do the math fuckhead they live in NJ. You know what the cost of living is like over there?
Actually, yes, I considered cost of living. Except for a few ridiculous areas, cost of living is fairly flat. Middletown, NJ is only 30% more expensive than where I live. So the $56k/year corresponds to $42.5k/year locally, and I *know* that's enough to live comfortably while supporting a family. So they're not striking because they're living in poverty or anything, they're doing it because they are greedy and power hungry. Typical unionism.
OH BTW. If I ran the world teachers would get paid ten times what engineers do.
LOL. Offering $560k/year for teaching jobs would attract the worst kind of gold-brickers and remittance men. The schools would be destroyed within a week. Remember the lesson of the dot-coms: paying too much *guarantees* failure, not because the expenses are too high, but because you attract too many who produce negative accomplishment and disenchant to people who do have skill.
To get success, you have to hire just enough good people, pay them well enough that they don't have to worry about the bills, and help them build a success-centered culture. Well-paid people with practically guaranteed jobs who go on strike do not constitute such an organization.
Especially idiots engineers like you. You disgrace your profession.
OTOH, when I want money I ask for it, and if I don't get it I go elsewhere if the market lets me. I do not -- and would *never* -- collude with my fellows to put clients/employers in a position where they have to knuckle under to me or go out of business.
If those teachers in NJ were truly not being paid enough, they could go into business for themselves and people would line up to pay them better.
I swear, this is the last I'm posting in this thread.
True, but the fundamental feeling behind unions is one of solidarity -- that *everyone* should be taken care of, not just those who are extremely skilled.
CNN.com says the average salary of the striking teachers is $56k/year + benefits, only a little less than I make as an electrical engineer in the midwest. That isn't solidarity, it's larcency, a natural consequence of communism.
...is there conclusive proof that they are not, in fact, one in the same, and what we conceive as mass is merely the resistence of the energy (or its generated fields) to change?
That's a plausible general approach. Unfortunately generalities don't answer specific questions about the mass of particular particles. For example, if you divide the mass of the muon by the mass of the electron, you get a specific value. Why?
The answer is probably not just "Because that's the way it is." The reason is that the particles seem to have a lot of structure. There are three families of leptons (electron, muon, and tauon). Each of the lepton families has two members, a charged particle and an uncharged neutrino. At the same time, there are three families of quarks, and each quark family also has two members, one of which has 1/3 the electron charge, and the other of which has 2/3 the electron charge. The quarks have a property called 'color charge' and thus are subject to the 'strong force', while the leptons do not have color charge and do not feel the strong force. This page has a nice chart of the different families.
The patterns and symmetries make physicists very suspicious that properties like mass and charge actually arise from a more basic structure, but nobody knows yet. Personally, I'm betting that there *is* a more basic structure that explains the properties of the different particles.
Re:Assault weapons are designed to wound.
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Battlefield Lasers
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But after you win the war you have a hundred thousand blind people to take care of...
Who says they have to be taken care of?
...and a hundred thousand families that will be itching to make war on your grandchildren.
Blind them too. The primary goal of modern warfare is not to stop the present enemy, but to teach future enemies not to start fighting in the first place, and a blind city would make a pretty damn effective object lesson. I don't buy the "humanitarian" argument that being blinded or crucified is worse than being burned alive (Dresden) or nuked (Hiroshima).
..Any Laser have a couple of mirrors in it - beam bouncing between them, getting amplified.. They do withstand the beam just fine.
The laser can afford a platinum-on-sapphire mirror cooled with 1000 liters/minute of liquid argon. Plus the mirrors can operate at a lower power density and use lenses afterward to increase the power density to cut-through-tungsten-like-a-hot- knife-through-butter levels.
Idea: build little corner reflectors that can be fired with a mortar/howitzer. The laser boys will be unhappy when 90% of the optical power bounces back to their general vicinity.;-) At the very least it'll raise the supply and support costs for the laser units.
...there are true statements within any consistent axiomatic system that can never be proven.
Consistent self-referential axiom systems, that is. Incompleteness arises from the introspection of the Godel numbering. The incompleteness theorem is silent on whether non-self-referential axiom systems are incomplete.
IVR is the standard lingo for telephone voice response systems. "Press one for an operator. Press two for an annoying screech. Press three to have F16s bomb your current location. Etc."
Will this need to sample audio figure out what the hell people are trying to say, and then form a response?
Hopefully *NOT*. Speech recognition is a pain in the ass. They almost certainly just want to use telephone tones.
Or is it supposed to understand a command such as "AZIZ, LIGHT!"
<nothing happens> "I've changed it to 'Illuminate'".;-)
Otherwise you will only get halfassed answers,...
The people who can give useful answers will have understood it. <knocks on wood>
Just for the record I was interviewed by two secret service agents today over a comment I made on another internet forum...
And in that discussion I made comments about the entire chain of command being infected from the VP. And the K5 account is registered with my work email address. At least I won't have to worry about trying to hide being interrogated by the SS from my boss.;-)
<sigh> From now on I'm gonna just put a grid reference in my signature...
For what it's worth, I've talked to people who answer phones at an FBI office, and you would have trouble believing the number of lunatics that call them. E.g., people who truly believe that the Secretary of Defense is using mind rays to control their hamster. After the Reagan/Hinkley/Foster debacle you can hardly blame the Secret Service for being a bit twitchy about potential nutcases.
On the bright side, it was probably a prize for the agents to interview you. After hunting down vagrant basket cases and militiamen, a garden variety Tom Clancy wannabe has to be a relief.
Good luck, Lee, and try not to worry about any further gov't action. If they were going to do something, you'd already be experiencing it. It simply isn't their style to pussyfoot around. I look forward to reading the details when Kuro5hin is back up.
I do a ton of 3D models and animating, for money, even, and I have to tell you that a tool is a tool is a tool.
Well, there are tools, and then there are *TOOLS*. Especially when it comes to industrial-scale work, not all tools are equal. You hardly ever know exactly what you want to do when you start out, and in fact what you think you want often changes several times, so adaptibility and flexibility are highly valuable.
The only consideration for what OS to use for a major company is, "will it run the software I want on the hardware I want, quickly and well?"
Until you discover that you fucked up big time estimating hardware needs and all your boxes really need double the processor speed and RAM, as well as gigabit Ethernet instead of 100megabit Ethernet. And unless you have a crystal ball, such fuck ups *will* occur. (If you could predict future software needs, you wouldn't be lecturing us on animation, you'd be picking your teeth with the bones of IBM.) When requirements change, the only relevant question is "Can we just substitute new boxes?" If your OS can handle all popular hardware, the answer is probably "yes". If you picked a poorly-supported OS that is picky about hardware support, you're doomed, you have to stop and convert everything to a new OS. (And it's possible to pick a bad OS several times in a row.)
In my experience, and based on what I've read on the mailing lists and newsgroups, Linux has by far the widest hardware support. I've personally installed it on a huge range of machines, only finding one machine I could never get it to install on (and that was a BIOS problem). Conversely, the few times I've tried BSDs have been unmitigated disasters.
See, in the real world, it doesn't matter what car you drive, as long as it gets you to work.
On the other hand, a Ford Escort can't haul half a ton of widgets across town to a client's emergency, and even an SUV would have trouble with an emergency sheet of plywood. Fortunately when it comes to operating systems you can, in fact, "drive a cargo truck to work".
The idea that the "cost" of Linux having anything to do with the decisions of the directors to use it is really funny. Does anyone really think that a cost of even $500 per box would make or break this deal?
Sticker price is not the only cost. Adaptation and maintenance dominate, and Linux has significant benefits over many other operating systems. Need Beowulf-style clustering to do your rendering? Linux has excellent tools. Have software written for a 32-processor machine? Use the Mosix patches for Linux to tie together 32 ordinary PCs. Want to be able to rapidly upgrade and reinstall all 1000 machines in a cluster? Network boot Linux using the well-documented tools, and watch the entire cluster reboot in less than 10 minutes. (Try that with Windows sometime.)
FWIW, I use a few different systems in my 3D work. Some use an OS from Redmond. Some don't. It doesn't matter to me in the least.
Big jobs are different in kind from small jobs, not just different in size. A 10% mistake in a small job means you stay late that day. A 10% mistake in a one month, 1000 CPU job means you threw away the company. IMHO, the key to keeping large projects running smoothly is having flexible, adaptible tools, and the Unices come standard with awesome tools of all kinds. Windows, on the other hand, is worthless out of the box and remains inflexible even when you shell out the $$$ for the official tools.
It's important to remember that a singularity is a mathematical artifact where a physical property has no meaningful definition when measured by a particular metric. For instance, the north pole of the Earth is a longitude singularity, a point where the very concept of longitude ceases to have physical meaning.
It has no size, and therefore its density is infinite.
Actually, that turns out not to be the case, at least not relative to our reference frame. Imagine you're a distant (and indestructible!) observer watching a star collapse into a black hole. The more it collapses, the more it is affected by gravitational time dilation: time appears to run slower for the matter in the star than for the observer. Clocks in the star slow down. Light travelling away from the star is shifted towards the red end of the spectrum.
The more the star shrinks, the more it is affected by gravitational time dilation, and thus the more slowly it collapses as measured by the outside observer. The collapse thus asymptotically approaches infinite time dilation, and appears to freeze in time to the distant observer. Its physical size at the asymptote is the size of the event horizon, a.k.a. the Schwarzchild radius.
One way of measuring the star is to ask how long it would take light to travel from its outside edge to its center, as measured by a distant observer. (Theoretically, of course, as the star would absorb any light.) Think of it as the radius measured in units of literal light years. As the collapse approaches infinite time dilation, the 'light radius' approaches infinity. This is the singularity at the center of the black hole, and is a mathematical construct arising from the distant observer's point of view. It does not mean that density or any local physical parameter is infinite
I'm deliberately ignoring what the collapse looks like to an observer inside the star. Known physics simply cannot make any meaningful predictions, except that it will never be observable from the outside (because it literally takes an eternity to occur).
But then you need 4 (IIRC) years as basically an apprentice, working full time under the direct supervision of an accredited engineer.
There's more: you are often required to have worked under several different PEs. If your employer doesn't have enough PEs, you have to resign and go somewhere else. (Note: job hopping in your first few years of employment is a career-limiting move.)
The PEs you work under have no obligation whatsoever to provide you with references. If they did give you a reference, you'd be able to take work away from them.
It seems to me that all of our professional organizations are slowly becoming old-fashioned guilds, organized less for the benefit of the general public and more for the members.
Here in Oklahoma (United States), you are absolutely prohibited from doing *anything* that requires engineering-oriented technical knowledge unless you have a PE. This includes Radio Shack electronics kits, serving as a teaching assistant for a university engineering coures, operating a ham radio, *anything*. It doesn't matter if you aren't selling services to the public, or even if the engineering work has no conceivable effect on the public. Even just thinking engineering thoughts is probably illegal. The statute is very explicitly all-encompassing.
At the same time, you are absolutely prohibited from getting a PE unless you practice engineering beforehand. It's a beautiful catch-22 that gives the Engineering Guild -- let's call a spade a spade -- unlimited discretion to declare anything illegal and take pretty much any action they want. If they let you in, and later decide they don't like you, they can always go back and declare your pre-PE work unlawful and yank your license. The overall impression is one of banana republic corruption, except that the actions aren't even pro forma illegal.
How many brilliant young potential innovators are slowly crushed into mediocre clock-watchers,...
And how many flee to free states where they can talk about their jobs in public without fear of being arrested?
I think that far too few people question the value, competence, and good faith of professional organizations.
I think that the "professional" organizations are run by savvy politicos who know better than to attract the attention of the public, instead preferring to sneak around in the shadows. They can curry and maintain unlimited power because they are very, very discrete in exercising it. It's the usual power grab: make everybody a criminal with broad yet nebulous laws, then be very selective about prosecuting. The subjects' fear then rules them more effectively than any amount of draconian enforcement.
It seems to me that recognizing the situation for what it is gives you extreme leverage. Simply file fifty or a hundred thousand lawsuits against the critical employees of the state's industries, alleging product liability and danger to the public since they don't have licenses. Write scare letters to all their suppliers and business partners informing them of the malpractice and making vague, scary pronouncements about vicarious liability. If you do it thoroughly enough you can basically kill the economy overnight, scare all practicing engineers shitless, and piss off the general public in a major way. You probably wouldn't win with this technique, but at least everyone else would lose too.
I look at them, and see the gradual calcification, then downfall of our society.
Hear, hear! I don't actually know how the average age of PEs has changed, but I suspect it is rising rapidly, and I've heard anecdotes that certain jobs (e.g., power utility engineers) can't find PEs to fill the jobs.
Personally I'd like to see licensing optional for all things that don't directly affect public safety. Sure, the gov't ought to require experience and skill for things like bridges, utility power lines, steam boilers, nuclear reactors, and so forth, but private citizens and businesses ought to be able to hire whatever level of competence they prefer. The PE registration could be operated as a gov't service mark and people who falsify it could be prosecuted with existing trademark laws. Other organizations, like the IEEE, could create their own certifications and requirements as they deem appropriate. I think a license like "IEEE Master Engineer (Radio Communications)" would be a hell of a lot more useful to clients than a generic PE license.
I have little hope of seeing a rational licensing system in my lifetime.
A well-designed rail system is more efficient, less noisy, safer, and more environmentally friendly.
Rail is violently expensive. Profit margins tend to be low even in densely-populated areas.
To me, this sounds like NASA is grasping at straws trying to prove its relevance. But developing tech toys won't cut it, I suspect.
The problems that need to be solved for mass aviation are identical to many highly-relevant military problems: cruise missiles need to be able to autonomously navigate with 10 meter precision using terrain observation and inertial guidance (GPS simply doesn't *ever* work reliably), fighter/bombers need to land with a precision of a couple of meters on carriers, unmanned warplanes need to follow carefully-planned paths in the air, and so forth.
Remember that speculative gold-plated bleeding-edge military R&D will be civilian bread & butter in twenty years. I think NASA is just beginning the obvious commercialization work. Even if it doesn't quite pan out for 'flying cars', the work directly applies to making conventional jet lines more efficient, safer, and more flexible.
The aviation industry has a slow rate of improvement anyway. If you want to deploy massive improvements in 50 years, you need to start the preliminary work today. No, I'm not exaggerating. Aviation equipment and procedure life cycles are **EXTREMELY LONG** (where are <blink> tags when you need 'em?). For instance, the last B-52H heavy bomber was delivered in 1962, but they are expected to remain in service until 2035.
I mention this, because it is something I find myself wanting to do all the time, for example, when storing data that originates in OO programs. Being able to store it in an RDBMS has heaps of advantages for me... but I can't easily store the different info of different derived classes.
PostgreSQL provides inheritance for tables (which is why they call it an object-relational database). I haven't used that feature yet, but it looks perfect for persistent storage of OO data.
Speaking of DBMSes, one of the electrical engineers at work wanted to learn how to use the Oracle DB one of our projects is built on. Somebody told him "No problem, it's dead easy. Almost everything can be done with only two commands, SELECT and UPDATE. Simply learn those two and you'll know everything there is to know about DBs." Apparently, the CS guru who witnessed this nearly imploded. Wish I'd seen it...
However, if you want reliability and avoid downtime, you must have redundant servers or replication; journaling will not protect against most of the problems that cause downtime.
Here in the real world we cannot afford triple redundant drives, motherboards, RAM, CPUs, power supplies, keyboards, mice, monitors, NICs, routers, and network cables for every single computer on every desktop in the entire organization. Sure, we could do it, but the cost would be ludicrous for a very small payback.
Most computers simply don't need guaranteed zero downtime. What they need is bounded downtime. It's OK if they crash every once in a while, as long as they reboot cleanly within a few minutes. The biggest contributor to boot time after a crash is the file system check. Since a journalling file system can recover the file system within a few minutes, it is a huge win.
Relying on it for "filesystem integrity" or "reduced downtime" or "reliability" is foolish.
Here in the real world, even the big real-time transaction processing systems occassionally have common-mode failures that wipe out all the redundant subsystems at the same time. Lightning strikes, idiots frob the emergency power switch, etc. Thus, the big real-time systems need journalling even more desparately than the small systems.
You pay for fast reboots in slower performance and more complex file system code.
Sheer ignorance. Replication of filesystems and databases has at least as much of a performance hit as journalling, and the complexity is likely to be vastly higher.
Building a bridge requires very litte groundbreaking design: you take a typically take a known bridge concept, and specialize it for the terrain.
Small structures may often be handbook designs, but large bridges and buildings are frequently designed from scratch. There is no one true way to design a skyscraper, any more than there is one true way to design an ERP system.
An architect can look at rendered pictures of what he is designing to get an intuitive feel for its correctness,...
[Brief pause for architects to pick themselves up off the floor from laughing so hard.]
Building designs have more conflicting and poorly-specified human-interface requirements than nearly all software packages. Every aspect of the design -- foot traffic paths, shared workspaces, lighting, ventilation, storage, bathing facilities, and many others -- has a critical impact on both the usability and cost of the building.
Requirements analysis for a bridge is so simple a child can grok it: "something i can walk over the river on".
You vastly underestimate the complexity of bridge design. You must know whether the bridge is downstream from a forest, which determines how many trees will crash into it. You must know how much brush gets carried down the river, and how much brush gets caught on the bridge, which determines the lateral loads the bridge will carry in storm waters. You must know what vehicles need to cross the bridge and how often. If the bridge is near the ocean, it must be built of better materials to resist salt corrosion. Likewise if it is in an area where salt is commonly applied to the roads in the winter. If the bridge must carry both pedestrian and vehicular traffic it must have strong barriers to separate the two. If it must carry pipelines and cables, there must be possible to mount them to the bridge. If the waters will rise drastically during a storm, the bridge must not be washed away. The foundations must be deep enough that frost never reaches the bases. The more the temperature swings during the year, the longer its expansion joints must be. It must be able to carry enough traffic, not just today but for at least 50 years into the future. It must be aesthetically, politically, and financially acceptable to numerous conflicting groups of people.
The whole analogy between Contruction Engineering and The Art of Programming is flawed...
Both software and structures can be thrown together with little engineering work, but that doesn't make them good.
...otherwise a completed contruction project would be a 40 foot high stack of blueprints that are suppossed to solve a problem that nobody fully understands.
They are. Take a look at the engineering documentation for a skyscraper, car factory, or refinery sometime.
When you want to sense the raw quantity of light arriving (i.e., you don't care about direction, image, and color), PMTs are ludicrously good. They are absurdly linear over the range of one photon/year to millions of photons/second. (Solid-state detectors are notoriously nonlinear.) PMTs have a tremendous dynamic range. PMTs can measure the time of arrival of individual photons to the nearest nanosecond. (Solid-state devices tend to be much slower.) I don't know for sure, but I strongly suspect that large PMTs are vastly more reliable than equivalent solid-state detectors.
The real kicker is cost. Solid-state devices cost on the order of $1,000,000 per square meter of active area! PMTs are on the order of $100,000 per square meter. If you want hundreds of square meters of active area -- like in a neutrino observatory -- PMTs are the only way to go.
I know you think the analogy is amusing but I assure you it isn't. I was in the WTC 1 when this happened and I assure that it isn't amusing at all.
I think it was an accurate analogy, and I don't think it was intended as amusing.
You analogy is also flawed in that if you followed the rules Culp mentioned the people in the third plane would still know.
Nope. The Culp approach is that the public is not informed of the nature and existence of the vulnerability until The Authorities had analyzed the threat and deployed countermeasures to their official satisfaction. The full disclosure mode is that the everybody is informed of the vulnerability and they deploy countermeasures as fast as they desire.
The latter technique, of course, worked admirably on flight 93, reducing losses by at least tens of millions of dollars, and possibly by billions. (If they'd been a little luckier they could have reduced the flight 93 loss to nearly nothing.) Flight 93 didn't rely on a single gov't action : private individuals and companies closed the information loop and then attempted to counteract the threat, while the gov't response had barely started. There are lessons here on how to build a civil defense infrastructure to better handle the future attacks.
So next time think before you open you mouth and conjure horrible memories just to be a sorry troll bastard.
Information security attacks are just as expensive as the direct costs of the 9-11 attacks, costing billions of dollars a year in direct financial losses (and billions more from disclosure of sensitive information). The only difference is that infosec attacks are diffuse and don't draw much attention, while an equivalent military attack is spectacular and extremely photogenic. (Attacking the first WTC tower was a military action. The second was a publicity stunt designed to increase indirect losses.)
And don't anybody tell me that it's a poor comparison, that computer viruses don't cost lives and how can I be so insensitive. Suppose infosec attacks cost each American an average of one hour of their time each year. (Which is probably within an order of magnitude of being correct.) That's a total loss of 250 million man-hours. Assuming that the total work a person can do is 150000 hours/lifetime, that's 1700 human lifetimes squandered by infosec attacks each year. And that's not considering attacks against military and medical databases, and against industrial equipment, which can and do directly kill people.
People who think there cannot be an "Electronic Pearl Harbor" are in for quite a surprise, just as people who thought foreign affairs don't affect the modern American lifestyle were surprised on 9-11. Most current guerrillas lack the competence to carry out severe infosec attacks, but ignorance and religion are not necessary prerequisites for anger and extremism.
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Alas, lots of microwave ovens these day have mode stirrers, metal spinners that spray the microwaves more evenly throughout the cavity. The goal is to reduce hot spots, possibly enough to ruin the nice pattern in the marshmallows.
BTW, Al Qaeda did not accomplish the attacks with "a few boxcutters". They accomplished it with applied psychology. The critical point of the 9-11 strategy was convincing several hundred people to sit on their hands while their planes were turned into missiles. The coming cyberspace attacks will probably use similar social engineering techniques to trick people into working for the attackers to violate security isolation.
What you really want is some sort of gas discharge lamp (e.g., xenon). They're bright, have a predictable flattish color spectrum, and last a couple of thousand hours. You can buy projectors that have them built in these days. (I wouldn't try a retrofit though. Getting the electrical drive, cooling, and lenses right would be more trouble than it is worth.)
Look at it from a warfare angle: Goner is a half-assed stunt by some *Israeli* kids. You can rest assured that if Al Qaeda could find two brain cells to rub together that they would've done something similar, and unlike the kiddies they would've wiped BIOSes and NIC MAC addresses, wiped filesystem metadata and boot sectors, programmed video cards to extremely high refresh rates (destroying old monitors and maybe making them catch on fire), and so forth.
The other problem is that modern designs tend to push the components very hard, especially regarding heat dissipation and electrical currents. Even if the design is good, the components are still pushed into a regime where the historical data isn't as valid. And all too often the design turns out to be not good enough. (How many laptop batteries have been recalled over the last year?)
I *do* see their point of view. Perhaps they should have done something, perhaps the policy change was unfair. But their response was entirely disproportionate. It was the business equivalent of a preemptive thermonuclear strike. And over what? A piddling sum of money that they would hardly notice. Foolish. It'll be years before they can even civilly discuss compensation again, and they destroyed a lot of public trust and the public will remember when appropriations time rolls around.
To get success, you have to hire just enough good people, pay them well enough that they don't have to worry about the bills, and help them build a success-centered culture. Well-paid people with practically guaranteed jobs who go on strike do not constitute such an organization.
OTOH, when I want money I ask for it, and if I don't get it I go elsewhere if the market lets me. I do not -- and would *never* -- collude with my fellows to put clients/employers in a position where they have to knuckle under to me or go out of business.If those teachers in NJ were truly not being paid enough, they could go into business for themselves and people would line up to pay them better.
I swear, this is the last I'm posting in this thread.
The answer is probably not just "Because that's the way it is." The reason is that the particles seem to have a lot of structure. There are three families of leptons (electron, muon, and tauon). Each of the lepton families has two members, a charged particle and an uncharged neutrino. At the same time, there are three families of quarks, and each quark family also has two members, one of which has 1/3 the electron charge, and the other of which has 2/3 the electron charge. The quarks have a property called 'color charge' and thus are subject to the 'strong force', while the leptons do not have color charge and do not feel the strong force. This page has a nice chart of the different families.
The patterns and symmetries make physicists very suspicious that properties like mass and charge actually arise from a more basic structure, but nobody knows yet. Personally, I'm betting that there *is* a more basic structure that explains the properties of the different particles.
Idea: build little corner reflectors that can be fired with a mortar/howitzer. The laser boys will be unhappy when 90% of the optical power bounces back to their general vicinity. ;-) At the very least it'll raise the supply and support costs for the laser units.
<sigh> From now on I'm gonna just put a grid reference in my signature...
For what it's worth, I've talked to people who answer phones at an FBI office, and you would have trouble believing the number of lunatics that call them. E.g., people who truly believe that the Secretary of Defense is using mind rays to control their hamster. After the Reagan/Hinkley/Foster debacle you can hardly blame the Secret Service for being a bit twitchy about potential nutcases.
On the bright side, it was probably a prize for the agents to interview you. After hunting down vagrant basket cases and militiamen, a garden variety Tom Clancy wannabe has to be a relief.
Good luck, Lee, and try not to worry about any further gov't action. If they were going to do something, you'd already be experiencing it. It simply isn't their style to pussyfoot around. I look forward to reading the details when Kuro5hin is back up.
In my experience, and based on what I've read on the mailing lists and newsgroups, Linux has by far the widest hardware support. I've personally installed it on a huge range of machines, only finding one machine I could never get it to install on (and that was a BIOS problem). Conversely, the few times I've tried BSDs have been unmitigated disasters.
On the other hand, a Ford Escort can't haul half a ton of widgets across town to a client's emergency, and even an SUV would have trouble with an emergency sheet of plywood. Fortunately when it comes to operating systems you can, in fact, "drive a cargo truck to work". Sticker price is not the only cost. Adaptation and maintenance dominate, and Linux has significant benefits over many other operating systems. Need Beowulf-style clustering to do your rendering? Linux has excellent tools. Have software written for a 32-processor machine? Use the Mosix patches for Linux to tie together 32 ordinary PCs. Want to be able to rapidly upgrade and reinstall all 1000 machines in a cluster? Network boot Linux using the well-documented tools, and watch the entire cluster reboot in less than 10 minutes. (Try that with Windows sometime.) Big jobs are different in kind from small jobs, not just different in size. A 10% mistake in a small job means you stay late that day. A 10% mistake in a one month, 1000 CPU job means you threw away the company. IMHO, the key to keeping large projects running smoothly is having flexible, adaptible tools, and the Unices come standard with awesome tools of all kinds. Windows, on the other hand, is worthless out of the box and remains inflexible even when you shell out the $$$ for the official tools.The more the star shrinks, the more it is affected by gravitational time dilation, and thus the more slowly it collapses as measured by the outside observer. The collapse thus asymptotically approaches infinite time dilation, and appears to freeze in time to the distant observer. Its physical size at the asymptote is the size of the event horizon, a.k.a. the Schwarzchild radius.
One way of measuring the star is to ask how long it would take light to travel from its outside edge to its center, as measured by a distant observer. (Theoretically, of course, as the star would absorb any light.) Think of it as the radius measured in units of literal light years. As the collapse approaches infinite time dilation, the 'light radius' approaches infinity. This is the singularity at the center of the black hole, and is a mathematical construct arising from the distant observer's point of view. It does not mean that density or any local physical parameter is infinite
I'm deliberately ignoring what the collapse looks like to an observer inside the star. Known physics simply cannot make any meaningful predictions, except that it will never be observable from the outside (because it literally takes an eternity to occur).
The PEs you work under have no obligation whatsoever to provide you with references. If they did give you a reference, you'd be able to take work away from them.
Here in Oklahoma (United States), you are absolutely prohibited from doing *anything* that requires engineering-oriented technical knowledge unless you have a PE. This includes Radio Shack electronics kits, serving as a teaching assistant for a university engineering coures, operating a ham radio, *anything*. It doesn't matter if you aren't selling services to the public, or even if the engineering work has no conceivable effect on the public. Even just thinking engineering thoughts is probably illegal. The statute is very explicitly all-encompassing.At the same time, you are absolutely prohibited from getting a PE unless you practice engineering beforehand. It's a beautiful catch-22 that gives the Engineering Guild -- let's call a spade a spade -- unlimited discretion to declare anything illegal and take pretty much any action they want. If they let you in, and later decide they don't like you, they can always go back and declare your pre-PE work unlawful and yank your license. The overall impression is one of banana republic corruption, except that the actions aren't even pro forma illegal.
And how many flee to free states where they can talk about their jobs in public without fear of being arrested? I think that the "professional" organizations are run by savvy politicos who know better than to attract the attention of the public, instead preferring to sneak around in the shadows. They can curry and maintain unlimited power because they are very, very discrete in exercising it. It's the usual power grab: make everybody a criminal with broad yet nebulous laws, then be very selective about prosecuting. The subjects' fear then rules them more effectively than any amount of draconian enforcement.It seems to me that recognizing the situation for what it is gives you extreme leverage. Simply file fifty or a hundred thousand lawsuits against the critical employees of the state's industries, alleging product liability and danger to the public since they don't have licenses. Write scare letters to all their suppliers and business partners informing them of the malpractice and making vague, scary pronouncements about vicarious liability. If you do it thoroughly enough you can basically kill the economy overnight, scare all practicing engineers shitless, and piss off the general public in a major way. You probably wouldn't win with this technique, but at least everyone else would lose too.
Hear, hear! I don't actually know how the average age of PEs has changed, but I suspect it is rising rapidly, and I've heard anecdotes that certain jobs (e.g., power utility engineers) can't find PEs to fill the jobs.Personally I'd like to see licensing optional for all things that don't directly affect public safety. Sure, the gov't ought to require experience and skill for things like bridges, utility power lines, steam boilers, nuclear reactors, and so forth, but private citizens and businesses ought to be able to hire whatever level of competence they prefer. The PE registration could be operated as a gov't service mark and people who falsify it could be prosecuted with existing trademark laws. Other organizations, like the IEEE, could create their own certifications and requirements as they deem appropriate. I think a license like "IEEE Master Engineer (Radio Communications)" would be a hell of a lot more useful to clients than a generic PE license.
I have little hope of seeing a rational licensing system in my lifetime.
Remember that speculative gold-plated bleeding-edge military R&D will be civilian bread & butter in twenty years. I think NASA is just beginning the obvious commercialization work. Even if it doesn't quite pan out for 'flying cars', the work directly applies to making conventional jet lines more efficient, safer, and more flexible.
The aviation industry has a slow rate of improvement anyway. If you want to deploy massive improvements in 50 years, you need to start the preliminary work today. No, I'm not exaggerating. Aviation equipment and procedure life cycles are **EXTREMELY LONG** (where are <blink> tags when you need 'em?). For instance, the last B-52H heavy bomber was delivered in 1962, but they are expected to remain in service until 2035.
Speaking of DBMSes, one of the electrical engineers at work wanted to learn how to use the Oracle DB one of our projects is built on. Somebody told him "No problem, it's dead easy. Almost everything can be done with only two commands, SELECT and UPDATE. Simply learn those two and you'll know everything there is to know about DBs." Apparently, the CS guru who witnessed this nearly imploded. Wish I'd seen it...
Most computers simply don't need guaranteed zero downtime. What they need is bounded downtime. It's OK if they crash every once in a while, as long as they reboot cleanly within a few minutes. The biggest contributor to boot time after a crash is the file system check. Since a journalling file system can recover the file system within a few minutes, it is a huge win.
Here in the real world, even the big real-time transaction processing systems occassionally have common-mode failures that wipe out all the redundant subsystems at the same time. Lightning strikes, idiots frob the emergency power switch, etc. Thus, the big real-time systems need journalling even more desparately than the small systems. Sheer ignorance. Replication of filesystems and databases has at least as much of a performance hit as journalling, and the complexity is likely to be vastly higher.Building designs have more conflicting and poorly-specified human-interface requirements than nearly all software packages. Every aspect of the design -- foot traffic paths, shared workspaces, lighting, ventilation, storage, bathing facilities, and many others -- has a critical impact on both the usability and cost of the building.
You vastly underestimate the complexity of bridge design. You must know whether the bridge is downstream from a forest, which determines how many trees will crash into it. You must know how much brush gets carried down the river, and how much brush gets caught on the bridge, which determines the lateral loads the bridge will carry in storm waters. You must know what vehicles need to cross the bridge and how often. If the bridge is near the ocean, it must be built of better materials to resist salt corrosion. Likewise if it is in an area where salt is commonly applied to the roads in the winter. If the bridge must carry both pedestrian and vehicular traffic it must have strong barriers to separate the two. If it must carry pipelines and cables, there must be possible to mount them to the bridge. If the waters will rise drastically during a storm, the bridge must not be washed away. The foundations must be deep enough that frost never reaches the bases. The more the temperature swings during the year, the longer its expansion joints must be. It must be able to carry enough traffic, not just today but for at least 50 years into the future. It must be aesthetically, politically, and financially acceptable to numerous conflicting groups of people. Both software and structures can be thrown together with little engineering work, but that doesn't make them good. They are. Take a look at the engineering documentation for a skyscraper, car factory, or refinery sometime.The real kicker is cost. Solid-state devices cost on the order of $1,000,000 per square meter of active area! PMTs are on the order of $100,000 per square meter. If you want hundreds of square meters of active area -- like in a neutrino observatory -- PMTs are the only way to go.
The latter technique, of course, worked admirably on flight 93, reducing losses by at least tens of millions of dollars, and possibly by billions. (If they'd been a little luckier they could have reduced the flight 93 loss to nearly nothing.) Flight 93 didn't rely on a single gov't action : private individuals and companies closed the information loop and then attempted to counteract the threat, while the gov't response had barely started. There are lessons here on how to build a civil defense infrastructure to better handle the future attacks.
Information security attacks are just as expensive as the direct costs of the 9-11 attacks, costing billions of dollars a year in direct financial losses (and billions more from disclosure of sensitive information). The only difference is that infosec attacks are diffuse and don't draw much attention, while an equivalent military attack is spectacular and extremely photogenic. (Attacking the first WTC tower was a military action. The second was a publicity stunt designed to increase indirect losses.)And don't anybody tell me that it's a poor comparison, that computer viruses don't cost lives and how can I be so insensitive. Suppose infosec attacks cost each American an average of one hour of their time each year. (Which is probably within an order of magnitude of being correct.) That's a total loss of 250 million man-hours. Assuming that the total work a person can do is 150000 hours/lifetime, that's 1700 human lifetimes squandered by infosec attacks each year. And that's not considering attacks against military and medical databases, and against industrial equipment, which can and do directly kill people.
People who think there cannot be an "Electronic Pearl Harbor" are in for quite a surprise, just as people who thought foreign affairs don't affect the modern American lifestyle were surprised on 9-11. Most current guerrillas lack the competence to carry out severe infosec attacks, but ignorance and religion are not necessary prerequisites for anger and extremism.