This seems like a good idea. I live near SF, and see bus lanes blocked occasionally, usually by double-parked delivery trucks.
SF Muni operates more than typical buses. They have long, articulated buses. They have trolley buses powered from overhead lines. They have street cars running on rails. None of those are very maneuverable. So blocked transit lanes are a big deal, more so than in most cities.
Hamza Kashgari is a Saudi. The offense was committed in Saudi Arabia, from which he fled to Malaysia. That's a standard fugitive situation.
He was in transit to New Zealand where he apparently intended to request political asylum.
"On your birthday I find you in front of me wherever I go, I love many things about you and hate others, and there are many things about you I don't understand.
On your birthday I won't bow in front of you, I won't kiss your hand. Instead, I will shake it as an equal, I will smile at you and you will smile back and I will talk to you as a friend, no more.
All the great gods that we worship, all the great fears that we dread, all the desires that we wait for impatiently are but figments of our imagination.
No Saudi women will go to hell, because it's impossible to go there twice."
It's amazing how touchy the Islamic theocracies are about this sort of thing. It's as if they're terrified that their whole religious edifice will collapse if there's any criticism. Islam has never had a Martin Luther.
No, you don't put in salt water and get energy and fresh water out. You put in salt water and energy and get somewhat less salty water out.
As with most desalinization systems, getting rid of the salt and other crud is a big problem. They haven't solved that yet. "Researchers need to find ways to remove sulfates from seawater, lower the cost of the electrodes, and protect the system from deposits of biofilm and scale that could cripple the device." It took a long time (from 1748 to 1965) before reverse osmosis membranes were developed that could handle that problem. Reverse osmosis systems require an occasional freshwater flush, but this takes far less water than the system produces. It's not clear how the numbers work out on this new approach.
And this costs GoDaddy what, $2.95? It's just domain registration. Wikipedia isn't hosted by GoDaddy.
There's a hierarchy of registrars. At the top is MarkMonitor, which registers domains like "ford.com". If you have to ask how much their registration costs, you can't afford it. This is where you register a "must stay up" domain. If anything goes wrong with a MarkMonitor registration, alarms go off and teams of DNS admins and lawyers swing into action.
Network Solutions is a reasonable registrar for corporate domains. They have "amazon.com", for example. If something goes wrong, you can usually get them ont he phone and get them to do something.
Much further down is GoDaddy. But they're not the bottom. Below GoDaddy are the bulk registrars, like Enom. That's where you register junk domains for link farms, domaining, and other dubious activities.
At the bottom are the registrars in the ICANN list that don't even have valid contact information. It's not clear what they're doing, but it's probably not good.
Google is scraping the bottom of the barrel on search "signals" here. Originally Google used links as a metric, and those were spammed with link farms. In 2010, they started using more "social signals". Google Places turned into a spam farm, and Yelp filled up with obviously bogus reviews. As Google used more "social" signals, Twitter filled up with spam tweets, Facebook got phony "likes", and a market developed in Google "+1"'s.
Social spam is worse than link spam. With link spam, spammers had to pay to set up and maintain link farms of fake sites. There were ways to recognize link farms. With social spam, the social networks host the fake accounts and their spam for free, and fake accounts are harder to recognize. Google tried a tough "real names" policy for Google+, and had to back down in the face of user and political opposition.
I don't use Google services, except occasionally as a developer. I'm only logged in when I'm doing development uploads to Chrome add-ons. (And that's a port of something I have for Mozilla). Mail is handled by my own web sites, filtered by Spam Assassin, retrieved with IMAP, and filed in Thunderbird. Open source code is on Sourceforge. Backups are on a paid service. Videos are on blip.tv. Documents and spreadsheets are in Open Office/Libre Office. 3D work is in Autodesk Inventor or Blender. I have Facebook and LinkedIn accounts for social networking. I used to use Google Voice for an SMS project, but Google's connection to the phone network (which is through a weird third party provider) had trouble telling which numbers could send and receive SMS, and I switched that project to Twilio.
Google has a nice search engine, but I don't see any need to use any of their other services targeted to individuals.
The MIT Space Cadet keyboard was a response to the Stanford SAIL keyboard., which had CONTROL, TOP, SHIFT, and META shifts. The SAIL character set had a reasonable set of math symbols, reached via the TOP key, and there were programming environments that used them. Here's a paper by John McCarthy on the SAIL character set.
I've used both of those systems. The math symbols on the SAIL keyboard were nice, since they had display glyphs to go with them. All those function and shift keys on the Symbolics 3600 keyboard were not all that useful. Most of them didn't do much.
I'm typing on a Windows Natural Keyboard, which was the upper limit of excessive buttons for Windows. There are 19 extra function keys. The "calculator" button really brings up the calculator. The "Menu" button brings up a menu. The "Mail" button brings up Thunderbird. None of this is particularly useful.
Unlike Best Buy, Radio Shack, etc.: they have a decent inventory of stuff, and don't presume to be helpful. In other words, they cater to people who would buy online, if "online" were a fifteen minute drive. For those of us who generally know what we're looking for before going to the store, this is a godsend.
Actually, no. The Palo Alto Frys store cut their parts inventory space in half last year. Also, a big fraction of their inventory bears stickers indicating it's a return. Since this is Silicon Valley, if something was returned, it's probably because it was defective, not that the customer couldn't figure it out. I haven't bought anything there in years.
Costco has better prices on appliances and consumer electronics. We still have Central Computer, a good place to buy computers, with knowledgeable people, good prices, and no extra charge for a "no crapware" install.
Right. He's had one top 40 album of his own, and several top 100 albums.
His own stuff is closer to acoustic folk than rock, which is why he's likely to care about subtle audio quality. Pink Floyd could be played through a bullhorn without much loss.
The therapy industry is shooting itself in the foot with this. If therapy can be done remotely, it can be outsourced. They're turning their business into a call center job.
(This is probably the future of medicine. You'll talk to somebody in a call center, and if it's a serious problem, you get escalated to second or third level support.)
The Mozilla Foundation is hiring. They even have a billboard on 101 near San Francisco: "Work for mankind, not for the man".
Most of the hosting, "cloud", data mining, and data warehousing industry is Linux based. The infrastructures of the big players like Google and Facebook are all Linux.
Once you get off the desktop, Microsoft isn't dominant.
This looks like an intermediate prototype of the LS3.
The specs call for a quieter power plant, which has to run on standard military diesel fuel. There's a subcontractor working on that. Clearly, that hasn't been integrated yet.
The LS3 is supposed to be about the same size as BigDog, but with with much stronger legs. That's clearly what's being tested here. BigDog wasn't strong enough to get up from the ground, while the video here shows this machine getting up. It took a lot of custom hydraulics to do that, which is why Boston Dynamics teamed with a hydraulics company.
Also, the sensor suite is much more elaborate, indicating that the autonomy level is being increased. BigDog handled balance and locomotion, but was guided by a human with a remote.
What we're seeing here is that some of the hard problems have been solved. Now the design will presumably be cleaned up for production.
Spending thousands of dollars on a virtual pet? Please. That's more than a dog or cat costs to operate, and is getting into the range for horse owners.
Arguably, though, if Google marketing materials encouraged people to invest money in virtual pets, they may have some responsibility for devaluing the asset.
(Social networking for people with no life is profoundly depressing. I'm currently doing some analysis of spam on Twitter. So I have to look at Twitter's feed of randomly selected public tweets. The typical content is so banal that the ones the spam filter selects as spam, based on domains in links, are more interesting than the non-spam. Spam is written by pros, while tweets are written by amateurs.)
If you think the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission got it wrong, read what came out of the Heritage Foundation at the time:"The low levels of radiation currently being released will likely have no biological or environmental impact. Humans are constantly exposed to background radiation that likely exceeds that being released.
The Chernobyl disaster was caused by an inherent design problem and communist operator error that is not present at any of the nuclear plants in Japan."
Google has been optimizing their system to provide better answers to dumb questions. This reflects the most popular searches asked of Google. Google has strengthened their emphasis on currency, locality, and popularity, at the expense of depth. The general observation is that Google has been "dumbed down".
That emphasis puts Google in direct competition with social networks, which are, of course, focused on currency, locality, and popularity. That's a problem for Google. Especially since the social networks all have their own internal search capabilities.
Google still has some big competitive advantages. The biggest is that ads on search results are presented when someone is looking for something, and thus aren't an annoyance. Ads on social networks just get in the way. Ad clutter on Myspace was a major factor in their demise. Spam on Twitter is becoming more of a problem. Facebook traffic stopped growing in mid-2011. The social networks may be hitting a wall on advertising revenue.
From a business perspective, Google has the problem that they don't pay a dividend. They try to pretend they are still in their growth phase. But their stock peaked in 2007. There's nothing wrong with being a profitable company, #1 in the field, and paying a dividend. But Google keeps trying to grow in other areas, none of which make money. Google's revenues are 96% ads, 4% everything else. Investors would prefer they get out of phones and social and focus on their core business. Meanwhile, Bing nibbles off another 2% or so of Google's market share each year. Microsoft has staying power - the entire first generation XBox effort lost money. Now they're winning in game consoles, while Sega is nowhere and Sony is in trouble.
As a language, Javascript is easy. The hassles all come from dealing with the environment it runs in, which is usually a browser. You're making calls to a big, frequently updated, multi-platform thing that almost works. As someone else pointed out, the big headache is testing. Cross-browser compatibility is getting better; you can probably ignore the horror that was Internet Explorer 6 for any new work.
The big difference for someone coming from C is that you don't have to devote half of your attention to worrying about the two big headaches in C - "who owns what", and "how big is this array".You can afford to be more aggressive about data structure design.
Javascript is uglier than Python but less ugly than Perl. The JIT compilers are now quite good, and performance is better than you might expect. A huge number of people program in Javascript (although many of them not very well) so it's not a particularly valuable skill.
I'm currently writing in Javascript (browser add-ons), Python (server-side) and C/C++ (embedded control). After decades of C/C++, I think we should have moved to something better by now for low-level programming. Python is clean, but the implementations are slow. Javascript is in the middle, and adequate for what it's usually used for.
The thing has a privacy policy and an end-user license agreement. Remember, this thing is a slave to a server at the manufacturer, and they can download new firmware. So they have total remote control over your furnace. They disclaim all liability. There is no warranty. (Honeywell normally offers a 5-year warranty). They can discontinue the service at any time.
You can't even resell the thing. The software license doesn't transfer. So if you sell your house, the thermostat has to be replaced.
Large buildings already have control systems that do this, and Honeywell manufactures many of them.
The "Nest" device may well be mostly hype. (What is "far-field motion detection", anyway?) There's only so much you can do with input from one location and nothing but on/off control over heating and cooling.
Compare the EcoBee, which does the same job, and probably better. EcoBee can handle remote sensors for outdoor air temperature. It measures humidity, which "Next" doesn't claim to do. It can be set up to control fans and dampers. (One of the biggest wins in HVAC management is figuring out how much air to take from outside and how much to recirculate.)
Nest is a status symbol, not a HVAC management system. It looks cool. It creates the illusion that it's doing something "green". It probably helps a little.
The funniest thing I've found so far is a little example on page 11 where a 250 meg clock with a too-small implementation divider means you literally cannot run 300 baud RS232 with this dude.
As one of the people who needs 45 baud (I restore Teletype machines from the 1920s and 1930s) this is mildly annoying. It's also irksome that in Linux, you specify one of a set of standard named constants for well known speeds. In Windows, you specify a baud rate to the driver as an integer, which allows nonstandard baud rates UNIX was built for the PDP-11, which had a serial device with 14 fixed baud rates (16 with an external clock.)
DOS was designed for the IBM PC, which used an 8250 UART, of which the 16550 is a successor, and could be set to any baud rate in its range by setting the divisor. That distinction persists three decades later in Linux and Windows 7.
OK, now they're hanging cable in the telecommunications area of the pole, where it's supposed to go. Putting it up with the power lines was a stupid idea to begin with. You don't work up there unless you have to, and then you have to turn off the power or use long "hot sticks".
The ocean frontier - not
on
Remembering Sealab
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
There was the idea in the 1960s that the ocean was as important a frontier as space. There was talk of undersea cities. Today, zilch. There are pretty renderings of underwater hotels on the web, but none of them actually got built. The one "underwater hotel" in the world is a recycled two room research habitat.
Drilling wells in the ocean floor is a big business, but that's about as far as it's gone.
Top tie regional artists can usually do well enough to pay the bills, but much below that at it rapidly becomes more of a hobby than an occupation.
Most glamor jobs are like that. If you've spent any time in LA, you've encountered the actress/model/waitress types. The average acting income of a SAG member is a few thousand a year. Modeling is worse; below the top 100 or so supermodels, nobody is making enough to buy a house.
Slashdot Mirror
Online dating was really cool for about six months in 1998. Since then, it's been a scam.
The history of Friendfinder (which now owns Penthouse and tried to buy Playboy) is interesting, in the litigation sense.
This seems like a good idea. I live near SF, and see bus lanes blocked occasionally, usually by double-parked delivery trucks.
SF Muni operates more than typical buses. They have long, articulated buses. They have trolley buses powered from overhead lines. They have street cars running on rails. None of those are very maneuverable. So blocked transit lanes are a big deal, more so than in most cities.
Hamza Kashgari is a Saudi. The offense was committed in Saudi Arabia, from which he fled to Malaysia. That's a standard fugitive situation. He was in transit to New Zealand where he apparently intended to request political asylum.
Al Jazeera has images of his Twitter feed, with English translations. Here's the full text:
"On your birthday I find you in front of me wherever I go, I love many things about you and hate others, and there are many things about you I don't understand. On your birthday I won't bow in front of you, I won't kiss your hand. Instead, I will shake it as an equal, I will smile at you and you will smile back and I will talk to you as a friend, no more. All the great gods that we worship, all the great fears that we dread, all the desires that we wait for impatiently are but figments of our imagination. No Saudi women will go to hell, because it's impossible to go there twice."
It's amazing how touchy the Islamic theocracies are about this sort of thing. It's as if they're terrified that their whole religious edifice will collapse if there's any criticism. Islam has never had a Martin Luther.
No, you don't put in salt water and get energy and fresh water out. You put in salt water and energy and get somewhat less salty water out.
As with most desalinization systems, getting rid of the salt and other crud is a big problem. They haven't solved that yet. "Researchers need to find ways to remove sulfates from seawater, lower the cost of the electrodes, and protect the system from deposits of biofilm and scale that could cripple the device." It took a long time (from 1748 to 1965) before reverse osmosis membranes were developed that could handle that problem. Reverse osmosis systems require an occasional freshwater flush, but this takes far less water than the system produces. It's not clear how the numbers work out on this new approach.
And this costs GoDaddy what, $2.95? It's just domain registration. Wikipedia isn't hosted by GoDaddy.
There's a hierarchy of registrars. At the top is MarkMonitor, which registers domains like "ford.com". If you have to ask how much their registration costs, you can't afford it. This is where you register a "must stay up" domain. If anything goes wrong with a MarkMonitor registration, alarms go off and teams of DNS admins and lawyers swing into action.
Network Solutions is a reasonable registrar for corporate domains. They have "amazon.com", for example. If something goes wrong, you can usually get them ont he phone and get them to do something.
Much further down is GoDaddy. But they're not the bottom. Below GoDaddy are the bulk registrars, like Enom. That's where you register junk domains for link farms, domaining, and other dubious activities. At the bottom are the registrars in the ICANN list that don't even have valid contact information. It's not clear what they're doing, but it's probably not good.
the best and the brightest of Iranian youth will find a way to emigrate because they don't want to live in an isolated theocracy.
They already did, decades ago. When the US-supported Shah of Iran was overthrown, many Iranians came to the US.
Google is scraping the bottom of the barrel on search "signals" here. Originally Google used links as a metric, and those were spammed with link farms. In 2010, they started using more "social signals". Google Places turned into a spam farm, and Yelp filled up with obviously bogus reviews. As Google used more "social" signals, Twitter filled up with spam tweets, Facebook got phony "likes", and a market developed in Google "+1"'s.
Social spam is worse than link spam. With link spam, spammers had to pay to set up and maintain link farms of fake sites. There were ways to recognize link farms. With social spam, the social networks host the fake accounts and their spam for free, and fake accounts are harder to recognize. Google tried a tough "real names" policy for Google+, and had to back down in the face of user and political opposition.
Anything Google uses as a signal gets turned to shit. Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social.
I don't use Google services, except occasionally as a developer. I'm only logged in when I'm doing development uploads to Chrome add-ons. (And that's a port of something I have for Mozilla). Mail is handled by my own web sites, filtered by Spam Assassin, retrieved with IMAP, and filed in Thunderbird. Open source code is on Sourceforge. Backups are on a paid service. Videos are on blip.tv. Documents and spreadsheets are in Open Office/Libre Office. 3D work is in Autodesk Inventor or Blender. I have Facebook and LinkedIn accounts for social networking. I used to use Google Voice for an SMS project, but Google's connection to the phone network (which is through a weird third party provider) had trouble telling which numbers could send and receive SMS, and I switched that project to Twilio.
Google has a nice search engine, but I don't see any need to use any of their other services targeted to individuals.
The MIT Space Cadet keyboard was a response to the Stanford SAIL keyboard., which had CONTROL, TOP, SHIFT, and META shifts. The SAIL character set had a reasonable set of math symbols, reached via the TOP key, and there were programming environments that used them. Here's a paper by John McCarthy on the SAIL character set.
I've used both of those systems. The math symbols on the SAIL keyboard were nice, since they had display glyphs to go with them. All those function and shift keys on the Symbolics 3600 keyboard were not all that useful. Most of them didn't do much.
I'm typing on a Windows Natural Keyboard, which was the upper limit of excessive buttons for Windows. There are 19 extra function keys. The "calculator" button really brings up the calculator. The "Menu" button brings up a menu. The "Mail" button brings up Thunderbird. None of this is particularly useful.
Unlike Best Buy, Radio Shack, etc.: they have a decent inventory of stuff, and don't presume to be helpful. In other words, they cater to people who would buy online, if "online" were a fifteen minute drive. For those of us who generally know what we're looking for before going to the store, this is a godsend.
Actually, no. The Palo Alto Frys store cut their parts inventory space in half last year. Also, a big fraction of their inventory bears stickers indicating it's a return. Since this is Silicon Valley, if something was returned, it's probably because it was defective, not that the customer couldn't figure it out. I haven't bought anything there in years.
Costco has better prices on appliances and consumer electronics. We still have Central Computer, a good place to buy computers, with knowledgeable people, good prices, and no extra charge for a "no crapware" install.
Right. He's had one top 40 album of his own, and several top 100 albums.
His own stuff is closer to acoustic folk than rock, which is why he's likely to care about subtle audio quality. Pink Floyd could be played through a bullhorn without much loss.
There's a note that Jobs once held a TOP SECRET clearance while at Pixar. I wonder what Pixar was doing for the Government.
The therapy industry is shooting itself in the foot with this. If therapy can be done remotely, it can be outsourced. They're turning their business into a call center job.
(This is probably the future of medicine. You'll talk to somebody in a call center, and if it's a serious problem, you get escalated to second or third level support.)
The Mozilla Foundation is hiring. They even have a billboard on 101 near San Francisco: "Work for mankind, not for the man".
Most of the hosting, "cloud", data mining, and data warehousing industry is Linux based. The infrastructures of the big players like Google and Facebook are all Linux. Once you get off the desktop, Microsoft isn't dominant.
This looks like an intermediate prototype of the LS3. The specs call for a quieter power plant, which has to run on standard military diesel fuel. There's a subcontractor working on that. Clearly, that hasn't been integrated yet.
The LS3 is supposed to be about the same size as BigDog, but with with much stronger legs. That's clearly what's being tested here. BigDog wasn't strong enough to get up from the ground, while the video here shows this machine getting up. It took a lot of custom hydraulics to do that, which is why Boston Dynamics teamed with a hydraulics company.
Also, the sensor suite is much more elaborate, indicating that the autonomy level is being increased. BigDog handled balance and locomotion, but was guided by a human with a remote.
What we're seeing here is that some of the hard problems have been solved. Now the design will presumably be cleaned up for production.
Spending thousands of dollars on a virtual pet? Please. That's more than a dog or cat costs to operate, and is getting into the range for horse owners. Arguably, though, if Google marketing materials encouraged people to invest money in virtual pets, they may have some responsibility for devaluing the asset.
(Social networking for people with no life is profoundly depressing. I'm currently doing some analysis of spam on Twitter. So I have to look at Twitter's feed of randomly selected public tweets. The typical content is so banal that the ones the spam filter selects as spam, based on domains in links, are more interesting than the non-spam. Spam is written by pros, while tweets are written by amateurs.)
If you think the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission got it wrong, read what came out of the Heritage Foundation at the time: "The low levels of radiation currently being released will likely have no biological or environmental impact. Humans are constantly exposed to background radiation that likely exceeds that being released. The Chernobyl disaster was caused by an inherent design problem and communist operator error that is not present at any of the nuclear plants in Japan."
Google has been optimizing their system to provide better answers to dumb questions. This reflects the most popular searches asked of Google. Google has strengthened their emphasis on currency, locality, and popularity, at the expense of depth. The general observation is that Google has been "dumbed down".
That emphasis puts Google in direct competition with social networks, which are, of course, focused on currency, locality, and popularity. That's a problem for Google. Especially since the social networks all have their own internal search capabilities.
Google still has some big competitive advantages. The biggest is that ads on search results are presented when someone is looking for something, and thus aren't an annoyance. Ads on social networks just get in the way. Ad clutter on Myspace was a major factor in their demise. Spam on Twitter is becoming more of a problem. Facebook traffic stopped growing in mid-2011. The social networks may be hitting a wall on advertising revenue.
From a business perspective, Google has the problem that they don't pay a dividend. They try to pretend they are still in their growth phase. But their stock peaked in 2007. There's nothing wrong with being a profitable company, #1 in the field, and paying a dividend. But Google keeps trying to grow in other areas, none of which make money. Google's revenues are 96% ads, 4% everything else. Investors would prefer they get out of phones and social and focus on their core business. Meanwhile, Bing nibbles off another 2% or so of Google's market share each year. Microsoft has staying power - the entire first generation XBox effort lost money. Now they're winning in game consoles, while Sega is nowhere and Sony is in trouble.
As a language, Javascript is easy. The hassles all come from dealing with the environment it runs in, which is usually a browser. You're making calls to a big, frequently updated, multi-platform thing that almost works. As someone else pointed out, the big headache is testing. Cross-browser compatibility is getting better; you can probably ignore the horror that was Internet Explorer 6 for any new work.
The big difference for someone coming from C is that you don't have to devote half of your attention to worrying about the two big headaches in C - "who owns what", and "how big is this array".You can afford to be more aggressive about data structure design.
Javascript is uglier than Python but less ugly than Perl. The JIT compilers are now quite good, and performance is better than you might expect. A huge number of people program in Javascript (although many of them not very well) so it's not a particularly valuable skill.
I'm currently writing in Javascript (browser add-ons), Python (server-side) and C/C++ (embedded control). After decades of C/C++, I think we should have moved to something better by now for low-level programming. Python is clean, but the implementations are slow. Javascript is in the middle, and adequate for what it's usually used for.
The thing has a privacy policy and an end-user license agreement. Remember, this thing is a slave to a server at the manufacturer, and they can download new firmware. So they have total remote control over your furnace. They disclaim all liability. There is no warranty. (Honeywell normally offers a 5-year warranty). They can discontinue the service at any time.
You can't even resell the thing. The software license doesn't transfer. So if you sell your house, the thermostat has to be replaced.
Large buildings already have control systems that do this, and Honeywell manufactures many of them.
The "Nest" device may well be mostly hype. (What is "far-field motion detection", anyway?) There's only so much you can do with input from one location and nothing but on/off control over heating and cooling.
Compare the EcoBee, which does the same job, and probably better. EcoBee can handle remote sensors for outdoor air temperature. It measures humidity, which "Next" doesn't claim to do. It can be set up to control fans and dampers. (One of the biggest wins in HVAC management is figuring out how much air to take from outside and how much to recirculate.)
Nest is a status symbol, not a HVAC management system. It looks cool. It creates the illusion that it's doing something "green". It probably helps a little.
The funniest thing I've found so far is a little example on page 11 where a 250 meg clock with a too-small implementation divider means you literally cannot run 300 baud RS232 with this dude.
As one of the people who needs 45 baud (I restore Teletype machines from the 1920s and 1930s) this is mildly annoying. It's also irksome that in Linux, you specify one of a set of standard named constants for well known speeds. In Windows, you specify a baud rate to the driver as an integer, which allows nonstandard baud rates UNIX was built for the PDP-11, which had a serial device with 14 fixed baud rates (16 with an external clock.) DOS was designed for the IBM PC, which used an 8250 UART, of which the 16550 is a successor, and could be set to any baud rate in its range by setting the divisor. That distinction persists three decades later in Linux and Windows 7.
OK, now they're hanging cable in the telecommunications area of the pole, where it's supposed to go. Putting it up with the power lines was a stupid idea to begin with. You don't work up there unless you have to, and then you have to turn off the power or use long "hot sticks".
There was the idea in the 1960s that the ocean was as important a frontier as space. There was talk of undersea cities. Today, zilch. There are pretty renderings of underwater hotels on the web, but none of them actually got built. The one "underwater hotel" in the world is a recycled two room research habitat.
Drilling wells in the ocean floor is a big business, but that's about as far as it's gone.
Top tie regional artists can usually do well enough to pay the bills, but much below that at it rapidly becomes more of a hobby than an occupation.
Most glamor jobs are like that. If you've spent any time in LA, you've encountered the actress/model/waitress types. The average acting income of a SAG member is a few thousand a year. Modeling is worse; below the top 100 or so supermodels, nobody is making enough to buy a house.