I will happily sacrifice half the budget for the military industrial complex to invest in renewables and electric vehicles. I will aslo happily pay 5% mor in tax rates if it will apply to my bracket and higher.
Thank goodness I upgraded when I did, I barely managed to stay broadband by bumping from 15/5 Mbps to 30/5 Mbps, and somehow payed $5 less a month ($35/mo now).
I finally started liking our FiOS once I dropped the phone/internet and figured out how to stop the incessant beeping when the phone backup battery died. The FiOS box does not properly maintain the lead-acid battery and it runs flat after a year or so, so I found the buzzer on the PCB and smashed it. No more battery at all. None of our phones worked without line power anyway, and we switched to Vonage for the house phone that we can't quite bring ourselves to get rid of.
Seems to me they are just jealous that the zone of lawlessness is excluding them from the picture. All was fine in their minds if the main law violators were mostly within the CIA/NSA/FBI/etc. Now that they have been cut out of the party they are spreading FUD like crazy.
Speeding laws and their enforcement are corrosive to our sense of justice. Think of it as a gateway law to break.
Drive the speed limit and you get angry people tailgating you and angrily making unsafe passes even when you are in the slow lane. Clearly in most places the speed limits are too low. So most folks in decent highway conditions drive 10-15 mph over the limit, which makes them all law breakers.
Cops don't clearly state at what point they will pull someone over, or what cup size allows you to talk your way out of a ticket, which really erodes our sense of equal justice for all (and violates our constitutionally guaranteed right to equal protection under the law). In fact we all violate the law several times a day just to live like a normal citizens, and much of the time we are pretty unaware something was even against the law (a sure sign our legal system has gotten out of hand). Cops get to choose when to apply esoteric laws and when to ignore pretty basic ones (depends highly on skin color or the presence of a badge).
If they indeed can do this, I would have like to have seen a demonstrate interference pattern showing the beat note between the normal beam and the "slowed" beam. It should be roughly as simply as using a beam splitter, one though their mask, then back into a beam combiner. If coherent laser light is pump in the slower photons should create an interference pattern along the length of the beam that any crummy detector should be able to pick up.
Instead they compared time of arrival over a single distance (as best I can tell from TFA), which is subject to systematic offsets, such as the fixed delay to get through the mask.
Heisenberg's uncertainty limit does not say you can't know the speed and location at the same time, but rather there is a limit to the overall accuracy. So the more precisely you measure the speed, necessarily the amount of uncertainty on your measurement of location goes up. Heisenberg's limit it pretty damn small, FYI.
I read TFA and could not specifically find where they showed they adjusted the speed and not just added an initial delay. They ran it through a mask, then onto a ~1 meter long "race track" to compare. I really wanted a clear explanation that they ran the test over 2 lengths to factor out any static delay caused by the propagation through the mask itself.
Use tithing as a reference. Set the penalty upper limit at about 10% of yearly revenue pretax, and pre double irish. Cancel all outstanding executives bonuses at the C level up to and including today as well.
Execs should be held liable personally. Shareholders end up taking it in the shorts thanks to the excess legal shielding that incorporation provides, which lets wreckless management sink good companies while the guilty escape with golden parachutes. Oh well.
Once you have been out of school for a decade a lot of the fluff, like Diffy-Q, dissipates from severe lack of use. The main utility of having taken differential equations is to know that there is some good math to back up the shenanigans you are doing, but none of the experienced engineers I know can solve anything but the most trivial differential equations if they have been out of school for more than 5 years.
Frankly there was a lot of crap in college that was a wast of time in retrospect. Numerical Analysis would be a better class to have most EE's take rather than the third semester of Calculus for example. These days most hard problems are solved with burly simulators and simply cannot be solved directly with math, yet most folks with a EE degree never took a Numerical Analysis class that would help them understand the underlying engine in their Spice or FEM solver.
When you have interviewed that many people without success I would really encourage you to look in the mirror, something isn't right about your story. At the very least you need to do more phone screening (unless that is what you are calling an interview?).
My only thought is that it sounds like you are doing power electronics of some flavor, which at the moment is in a big upswing thanks to solar, EV's, and so on. Lots of converters and inverters are getting designed into things at the moment. As such, demand is going to outstrip supply for a bit.
In general, engineering has gotten much more specialized than when I started 17 years ago. It is harder to get any old EE and ask them to quickly go from analog circuits to switching power supplies than it used to be. So don't be surprised if you have to either train someone up, or throw money at someone to poach them.
I have long laughed at fake hood scoops (especially aftermarket adhesive attached ones), spinny wheels, Harley's, monster front grills that are more than half fake (physically blocked as part of the molding process), and so much more. Having fake engine sounds piped in just adds icing to the cake.
Car buyers are strangely aspirational, much more so than for other goods. There are tons of 4x4's that will NEVER be off road running around fair weather states depreciating like mad, and 500 hp Mustang's that will never see over 80 mph for almost any of their life time. People pay a ton either for "just in case", and for "I could if I would".
There is also a huge market for turning your Civic into some winged contraption (shopping carts as my friend calls them). I see 10 year old cars owned by 20 year olds who are clearly spending half their Target paycheck on throaty exhaust, race style hood clips, and fancy looking rims. Throwing a munch of money at an economy car to get it to look like a race car is the height of putting lip stick on a pig.
Agreed. I have been laid just once, but have left two companies who had done a couple rounds of layoffs. I've rather spend a couple months interviewing while I still have a salary than risk having to burn through my savings if it takes a while to find something after I get laid off. In the case of my one layoff, I volunteered because the place had become so toxic inside, so I don't know which category to put that one in really.
The last place I left seemed honestly hurt that I would leave. However they had done nothing like offer retention bonuses for their key people while they slashed people left and right. It turns out that the last round or two were merely to cook the books as they prepared for a secret merger, which actually made it worse in my mind. A decent number of folks got rehired after only a quarter once things got announced. Messing up peoples lives to goose perceived "shareholder value" is pretty nonredeemable.
In other developed countries (France, Germany, Japan, etc) there are a lot more hoops to jump through to lay someone off, and the layoff packages are legally set to be much greater. After that the safety net is much stronger while you look for more work. On the upswings companies hire less than a company in the US might, but layoffs are pretty small for even pretty big downturns. It ends up much better for the workers, though it can tie the hands of the companies when they are competing against the rapacious capitalists in the US or China.
I see such protections as an alternative to a union for workers who are very specialized.
Instead most workers are "At Will" employees. You can quit anytime, and can be cut loose at any time. Most full-time employees don't realize that they have less actual job security than the contractors they might be working with.
Sadly there is a double standard. If you have only been at your last couple jobs a couple years you get a lot of inquiry and scrutiny to justify yourself. Companies seem oblivious to the fact that they get rid of folks like tissue paper, while demanding the new employee act like they want to join for life.
The truly awful part of the shift mentality to "we are all temporary employees" is that it has infected companies well outside tech hubs. In Silicon Valley it is pretty easy to leave one collapsed startup and find something else to pay the bills, or for companies to scoop up extra people as you expand. Cost of living, as well as cost of hiring are a bit insane, but it allows workers lots of backup options, and companies a near sure fire way to expand simply by throwing money at the problem.
Tech companies elsewhere have joined the crowd in using layoffs as a way to cut the training budget and goose the stock price at will, but the laid off workers often find they are in a desert of opportunity leading to very long stretches of unemployment. Likewise, those left inside the company cannot often get enough decent local talent on the next up swing, making rehiring and rebuilding a group a long and painful process, only to have it all undone the next time there is a bad quarter.
Android and Apple have sewn up the smartphone market pretty well. Android fully raced to the bottom, so there is almost no chance to ever undercut short of paying people to use their phone OS. At best you will have a news funky OS on the same cheap junky hardware. How will that make the OS any better? I'd argue that MS's desperate attempt to get some toehold in mobile is just good money being thrown after bad.
Worse yet they screwed over their flagship Windows OS trying to chase mobile.
I would argue that they need to concentrate on keeping their cash cows going and stop sacrificing them on the altar of mobile/touch. The OS needs to be leaner and meaner. The interface should be streamline rather than abandoned for something new and shiny. Apple did not throw away the interface when they totally overhauled their OS with OSX, nor did they wholesale force the iOS interface onto the desktop (yes, some sharing has occurred, but it has been gradual). MS has does a good job pissing off its core customers needlessly over and over, and that is what needs to stop ASAP.
Until MS rebuilds their reputation to be a net positive, just being as cheap as Android will not be enough to get mobile market share. Instead people currently are cranky about the end of support for XP, still remember Vista, mostly like their Windows 7 box, are either avoiding or hating a new Windows 8 box, and are cautiously hoping they will just be able to get work done one whatever POS version 10 MS ships next. Oh yeah, and still despising the ribbon interface (WTF?!).
With all due respect, you don't make much sense. I took and passed a polygraph to work for the CIA about 15 years ago. Mine went easy, but the previous poster's experience was typical for about half the group who didn't do so well. One guy got screamed at be for clearly being a terrorist. Of course he still got to ride with the rest of us future employees back to the hotel in the un-marked blue van, telling you how much of a threat they deamed him. Polygraphs are a crock, and interogations are likely not much better, but thankfully I have never been on the wrong side of one of those.
All your claims about "real" polygraph tests sound like something you read on the interwebs.
Not all ranges are equal. The current Leaf was claimed to be a 200 km car (124 miles) in some regions where their test regimens are pretty wimpy, but the exact same car is only rated for 84 miles here in the USA. So the comments from the Nissan CEO recently of 400 km for a Leaf 2.0 likely translates to ~150-170 miles per the EPA testing, not 250 miles.
Given that this is a concept car, I would expect the 200 mile range claim to have very similar asterisks on it. Basically, wait a bit and see what really pans out for range and pricing. The original Volt 1.0 over hype saga should make everyone a skeptic of GM until proven otherwise. Also, wait and see what the battery warranty looks like. Leaf 2011 and 2012 drivers in warm climates really got a rude lesson on that one. I am hopeful that with more competition we will see good battery capacity warranties become the baseline.
I do agree. It is good that GM is playing in the game, but it would be nice if they offered something to get people away from the Teslas... even if there was a model with a generator and a small fuel tank for extended range.
You mean like a Volt? Or do you need something that has >50 miles of EV range but also has a gas extender?
Can't agree more. I got an Android phone a couple years back (late adopter...) and was initially pretty impressed compared to the price of an Apple widget given the specs and all. But the few updates that have been pushed have crippled the darn thing, and there is too much bloatware that I have no ability to remove without rooting the device.
The whole Android ecosystem is more of a Mad Max distopian free-for-all than I could have imagined. I am no Apple fanboi, but I am pretty sure my next phone won't be another orphaned Android POS. At least Apple gives a pretty decent support life of most of products.
We vote by mail here in Oregon. I like it. It give you a chance to sit down and research each issue (voter guide, google, etc). Compared to having to go to a polling place ONLY on a Tuesday I really prefer it. I just wish it was postage paid, or was mailable with just 1 Forever stamp.
I know I will annoy some naysayers here, but I really would like to see the polls open from Saturday through Tuesday for non vote by mail states. I hated having to track down a polling place when I used to live in California. It had to be in the evening after work, and usually had a long line thanks to everyone else having similar schedules. Kind of a hassle.
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I will happily sacrifice half the budget for the military industrial complex to invest in renewables and electric vehicles. I will aslo happily pay 5% mor in tax rates if it will apply to my bracket and higher.
Dropped the phone/TV, not the internet, sorry.
Thank goodness I upgraded when I did, I barely managed to stay broadband by bumping from 15/5 Mbps to 30/5 Mbps, and somehow payed $5 less a month ($35/mo now).
I finally started liking our FiOS once I dropped the phone/internet and figured out how to stop the incessant beeping when the phone backup battery died. The FiOS box does not properly maintain the lead-acid battery and it runs flat after a year or so, so I found the buzzer on the PCB and smashed it. No more battery at all. None of our phones worked without line power anyway, and we switched to Vonage for the house phone that we can't quite bring ourselves to get rid of.
Seems to me they are just jealous that the zone of lawlessness is excluding them from the picture. All was fine in their minds if the main law violators were mostly within the CIA/NSA/FBI/etc. Now that they have been cut out of the party they are spreading FUD like crazy.
Yep, we should hit them where they hurt. Such behavior should result in being disqualified for spectrum auctions, or similar censuring.
Speeding laws and their enforcement are corrosive to our sense of justice. Think of it as a gateway law to break.
Drive the speed limit and you get angry people tailgating you and angrily making unsafe passes even when you are in the slow lane. Clearly in most places the speed limits are too low. So most folks in decent highway conditions drive 10-15 mph over the limit, which makes them all law breakers.
Cops don't clearly state at what point they will pull someone over, or what cup size allows you to talk your way out of a ticket, which really erodes our sense of equal justice for all (and violates our constitutionally guaranteed right to equal protection under the law). In fact we all violate the law several times a day just to live like a normal citizens, and much of the time we are pretty unaware something was even against the law (a sure sign our legal system has gotten out of hand). Cops get to choose when to apply esoteric laws and when to ignore pretty basic ones (depends highly on skin color or the presence of a badge).
They claimed there was a 20 wavelength discrepancy. So it should allow a pattern every 5 cm along the length of the beam.
If they indeed can do this, I would have like to have seen a demonstrate interference pattern showing the beat note between the normal beam and the "slowed" beam. It should be roughly as simply as using a beam splitter, one though their mask, then back into a beam combiner. If coherent laser light is pump in the slower photons should create an interference pattern along the length of the beam that any crummy detector should be able to pick up.
Instead they compared time of arrival over a single distance (as best I can tell from TFA), which is subject to systematic offsets, such as the fixed delay to get through the mask.
Heisenberg's uncertainty limit does not say you can't know the speed and location at the same time, but rather there is a limit to the overall accuracy. So the more precisely you measure the speed, necessarily the amount of uncertainty on your measurement of location goes up. Heisenberg's limit it pretty damn small, FYI.
I read TFA and could not specifically find where they showed they adjusted the speed and not just added an initial delay. They ran it through a mask, then onto a ~1 meter long "race track" to compare. I really wanted a clear explanation that they ran the test over 2 lengths to factor out any static delay caused by the propagation through the mask itself.
Use tithing as a reference. Set the penalty upper limit at about 10% of yearly revenue pretax, and pre double irish. Cancel all outstanding executives bonuses at the C level up to and including today as well.
Execs should be held liable personally. Shareholders end up taking it in the shorts thanks to the excess legal shielding that incorporation provides, which lets wreckless management sink good companies while the guilty escape with golden parachutes. Oh well.
Once you have been out of school for a decade a lot of the fluff, like Diffy-Q, dissipates from severe lack of use. The main utility of having taken differential equations is to know that there is some good math to back up the shenanigans you are doing, but none of the experienced engineers I know can solve anything but the most trivial differential equations if they have been out of school for more than 5 years.
Frankly there was a lot of crap in college that was a wast of time in retrospect. Numerical Analysis would be a better class to have most EE's take rather than the third semester of Calculus for example. These days most hard problems are solved with burly simulators and simply cannot be solved directly with math, yet most folks with a EE degree never took a Numerical Analysis class that would help them understand the underlying engine in their Spice or FEM solver.
When you have interviewed that many people without success I would really encourage you to look in the mirror, something isn't right about your story. At the very least you need to do more phone screening (unless that is what you are calling an interview?).
My only thought is that it sounds like you are doing power electronics of some flavor, which at the moment is in a big upswing thanks to solar, EV's, and so on. Lots of converters and inverters are getting designed into things at the moment. As such, demand is going to outstrip supply for a bit.
In general, engineering has gotten much more specialized than when I started 17 years ago. It is harder to get any old EE and ask them to quickly go from analog circuits to switching power supplies than it used to be. So don't be surprised if you have to either train someone up, or throw money at someone to poach them.
Thanks for the insight.
I have long laughed at fake hood scoops (especially aftermarket adhesive attached ones), spinny wheels, Harley's, monster front grills that are more than half fake (physically blocked as part of the molding process), and so much more. Having fake engine sounds piped in just adds icing to the cake.
Car buyers are strangely aspirational, much more so than for other goods. There are tons of 4x4's that will NEVER be off road running around fair weather states depreciating like mad, and 500 hp Mustang's that will never see over 80 mph for almost any of their life time. People pay a ton either for "just in case", and for "I could if I would".
There is also a huge market for turning your Civic into some winged contraption (shopping carts as my friend calls them). I see 10 year old cars owned by 20 year olds who are clearly spending half their Target paycheck on throaty exhaust, race style hood clips, and fancy looking rims. Throwing a munch of money at an economy car to get it to look like a race car is the height of putting lip stick on a pig.
Agreed. I have been laid just once, but have left two companies who had done a couple rounds of layoffs. I've rather spend a couple months interviewing while I still have a salary than risk having to burn through my savings if it takes a while to find something after I get laid off. In the case of my one layoff, I volunteered because the place had become so toxic inside, so I don't know which category to put that one in really.
The last place I left seemed honestly hurt that I would leave. However they had done nothing like offer retention bonuses for their key people while they slashed people left and right. It turns out that the last round or two were merely to cook the books as they prepared for a secret merger, which actually made it worse in my mind. A decent number of folks got rehired after only a quarter once things got announced. Messing up peoples lives to goose perceived "shareholder value" is pretty nonredeemable.
In other developed countries (France, Germany, Japan, etc) there are a lot more hoops to jump through to lay someone off, and the layoff packages are legally set to be much greater. After that the safety net is much stronger while you look for more work. On the upswings companies hire less than a company in the US might, but layoffs are pretty small for even pretty big downturns. It ends up much better for the workers, though it can tie the hands of the companies when they are competing against the rapacious capitalists in the US or China.
I see such protections as an alternative to a union for workers who are very specialized.
Instead most workers are "At Will" employees. You can quit anytime, and can be cut loose at any time. Most full-time employees don't realize that they have less actual job security than the contractors they might be working with.
Sadly there is a double standard. If you have only been at your last couple jobs a couple years you get a lot of inquiry and scrutiny to justify yourself. Companies seem oblivious to the fact that they get rid of folks like tissue paper, while demanding the new employee act like they want to join for life.
The truly awful part of the shift mentality to "we are all temporary employees" is that it has infected companies well outside tech hubs. In Silicon Valley it is pretty easy to leave one collapsed startup and find something else to pay the bills, or for companies to scoop up extra people as you expand. Cost of living, as well as cost of hiring are a bit insane, but it allows workers lots of backup options, and companies a near sure fire way to expand simply by throwing money at the problem.
Tech companies elsewhere have joined the crowd in using layoffs as a way to cut the training budget and goose the stock price at will, but the laid off workers often find they are in a desert of opportunity leading to very long stretches of unemployment. Likewise, those left inside the company cannot often get enough decent local talent on the next up swing, making rehiring and rebuilding a group a long and painful process, only to have it all undone the next time there is a bad quarter.
To quote Frozen, "Let it go! Let it go!'
Android and Apple have sewn up the smartphone market pretty well. Android fully raced to the bottom, so there is almost no chance to ever undercut short of paying people to use their phone OS. At best you will have a news funky OS on the same cheap junky hardware. How will that make the OS any better? I'd argue that MS's desperate attempt to get some toehold in mobile is just good money being thrown after bad.
Worse yet they screwed over their flagship Windows OS trying to chase mobile.
I would argue that they need to concentrate on keeping their cash cows going and stop sacrificing them on the altar of mobile/touch. The OS needs to be leaner and meaner. The interface should be streamline rather than abandoned for something new and shiny. Apple did not throw away the interface when they totally overhauled their OS with OSX, nor did they wholesale force the iOS interface onto the desktop (yes, some sharing has occurred, but it has been gradual). MS has does a good job pissing off its core customers needlessly over and over, and that is what needs to stop ASAP.
Until MS rebuilds their reputation to be a net positive, just being as cheap as Android will not be enough to get mobile market share. Instead people currently are cranky about the end of support for XP, still remember Vista, mostly like their Windows 7 box, are either avoiding or hating a new Windows 8 box, and are cautiously hoping they will just be able to get work done one whatever POS version 10 MS ships next. Oh yeah, and still despising the ribbon interface (WTF?!).
With all due respect, you don't make much sense. I took and passed a polygraph to work for the CIA about 15 years ago. Mine went easy, but the previous poster's experience was typical for about half the group who didn't do so well. One guy got screamed at be for clearly being a terrorist. Of course he still got to ride with the rest of us future employees back to the hotel in the un-marked blue van, telling you how much of a threat they deamed him. Polygraphs are a crock, and interogations are likely not much better, but thankfully I have never been on the wrong side of one of those.
All your claims about "real" polygraph tests sound like something you read on the interwebs.
Most folks don't take Linux seriously at all.
Not all ranges are equal. The current Leaf was claimed to be a 200 km car (124 miles) in some regions where their test regimens are pretty wimpy, but the exact same car is only rated for 84 miles here in the USA. So the comments from the Nissan CEO recently of 400 km for a Leaf 2.0 likely translates to ~150-170 miles per the EPA testing, not 250 miles.
Given that this is a concept car, I would expect the 200 mile range claim to have very similar asterisks on it. Basically, wait a bit and see what really pans out for range and pricing. The original Volt 1.0 over hype saga should make everyone a skeptic of GM until proven otherwise. Also, wait and see what the battery warranty looks like. Leaf 2011 and 2012 drivers in warm climates really got a rude lesson on that one. I am hopeful that with more competition we will see good battery capacity warranties become the baseline.
I do agree. It is good that GM is playing in the game, but it would be nice if they offered something to get people away from the Teslas... even if there was a model with a generator and a small fuel tank for extended range.
You mean like a Volt? Or do you need something that has >50 miles of EV range but also has a gas extender?
Can't agree more. I got an Android phone a couple years back (late adopter...) and was initially pretty impressed compared to the price of an Apple widget given the specs and all. But the few updates that have been pushed have crippled the darn thing, and there is too much bloatware that I have no ability to remove without rooting the device.
The whole Android ecosystem is more of a Mad Max distopian free-for-all than I could have imagined. I am no Apple fanboi, but I am pretty sure my next phone won't be another orphaned Android POS. At least Apple gives a pretty decent support life of most of products.
We vote by mail here in Oregon. I like it. It give you a chance to sit down and research each issue (voter guide, google, etc). Compared to having to go to a polling place ONLY on a Tuesday I really prefer it. I just wish it was postage paid, or was mailable with just 1 Forever stamp.
I know I will annoy some naysayers here, but I really would like to see the polls open from Saturday through Tuesday for non vote by mail states. I hated having to track down a polling place when I used to live in California. It had to be in the evening after work, and usually had a long line thanks to everyone else having similar schedules. Kind of a hassle.