Anyone jumping from that kind of altitude is going to be loaded down with a lot of life support equipment. Not much left over in terms of payload for weapons and operational equipment. There are other problems as well. When troops jump HALO(High Altitude Low Opening), what they do is jump out of the plane at every high altitiudes and freefall a very long ways before ever opening their chute. I think they jump from 14000 ft and don't open a chute til 500ft. Someone who knows the actual figures, please correct me. This happens for two reasons: A soldier dangling from a parachute has a very large visual and radar signature. And, the soldiers can jump out over friendly territory and drift during the freefall into the enemy's area. This is ideal for any kind of covert operation, or even just for any action in an enemy's rear.
Jumping from a stratospheric altitude is going to require that several chutes be opened at various altitudes to slow the jumper down, They're going to be very visible a every stage. And, that is going eliminate the primary motivation for parachute operations: stealth and suprise. Not to mention, there's a limit to how much chute you carry relative to its stopping power. Paratroopers carry a _lot_ of equipment, but there's only so much. Add life support to that, plus all the chutes for this kind of jump and you won't have much left over on the ground to fight a battle. Not to mention, the jumper is going to have to get out of their space suit once their on the ground. Presumably, the enemy is going to be looking for the jumper if not shooting at him while he's doing that.
In contrast, the force Heinlein envsioned was basically a tank force. Granted the tanks were anthropmorphic vehicles that operator wore, but the MI still had the kind of signature and hitting power of an armored force. Nothing very subtle about that. The enemy would most certainly notice the warships coming into orbit, followed by the massive signature of the MI hitting the atmosphere. To the MI that doesn't matter because they hit the ground fighting. Contemporary paratroopers can't do that. They have to secure their equipment, find their teamates, form up, check their location, and so on before they can even begin to fight. Any time paratroops have jumped into a prepared and entrenched enemy they've been cut down or captured. Meanwhile when dropped in an enemy's rear the lightly armed paratroops can use their advantage of surprise to wreak massive damage on the enemy's support and command and control systems.
According to the History Channel documentary on Project Man High, the test pilot who jumped had problems with his suit. Actually, I think he had hurt his hand and he couldn't put his glove on over his now swollen hand. So, he just went up with a glove. He also had some serious problems with going into a spin on the way down. But, eventually he stopped spinning and made it down with a little bit of frost bite and a few bruises.
This sort of skydiving has, of course been done before. Back in the early(?) fifties the Air Force had a project called Man High that was tasked with developing escape systems for high altitude aircraft. It started by hauling crash test dummies up in weather balloons and dropping them with various parachute systems to test them. Man High is occasianlly cited as being partially responsible for the whole alien body legend for this reason. The projected culminated with a live test pilot dropping out of one of these weather balloon. He had one wild ride. The History Channel did a good documentary on this programmer which was a forerunner to the US manned space program. If you go to your favorite search engin and search for Man High, you can also find a good web site with info on the project. You'll also find a whole lot gay porn sites in the hitlist, so be careful which links you follow.
Great. As if cel phones aren't a big enough distraction for drivers. I've about had it with cel phone implanted yuppies in sport UTs running me off the road. Now this. Just wonderful. Its Mad Max time.
Why the hell was this marked as troll? The guy makes a good point here. The way our tax code is set up, money brings tax breaks. Sure millionaires have a %40 tax rate, but there's a lot a tax break for things like real estate investments and business ventures. If you doubt me on that, just incorporate and make an attempt to do something with the business. When you go see your accountant at the end of the year, just wait and see how many tax breaks he'll find for you. Of course, you have to have money to do this. I started my micro label with a about a grand and got $700 or so in tax writeoffs. This just scales the more money you have. And, if you have enough money to get into real estate, you're in tax write off heaven. The point here is that wage laborers pay the greatest share of taxes. Those people who have money to throw at investment and business ventures on large scale can write off at least the cost of doing business and often much more than that. There's a book out there entitled "America: Who Reall Pays the Taxes". I've only read excerpts of it, but its enough to make you want to use your second ammendment rights.
I heard a news story recently that estate tax repeal or no, there's another bill moving through commitee that will ease the estate burden on farmers and a few other small business people. This is sensible. The wholesale repeal is not. I do not want to see aristocracy in this country. And that's just what an estate tax repeal would do.
I have one small concern with using this as a crowd deterrent. When using irritants like tear gas, pepper spray, or watter cannons, the crowd sees or otherwise senses what's happening. They know that the uniforms(whoever they may be) are doing something, and their basic reaction will be to run _away_ from the uniforms. With this, its invisible, silent, and has no smell. All of a suddent, people's skin begins to burn. This is panic grade material here. There's a good chance that members of the crowd will run towards the weapon, taking them into a greater flux of energy, leading to serious injury pretty quickly. I think the basic idea is sound, but the proposed application of this idea may not be a winner. I think this might be a good weapon used against single agitators or small groups of them. Against a crowd? Like I said, what happens if they panic because for no discernible reason, their skin begins to burn.
I think the Marines and other armed services might want to check notes with correctional agencies around the country. There's been a lot of development in this area. The systems developed for use in correctional systems focus on breaking the mob mentality by causing a shocking pain to snap their individuals back to themselves. Of course, the effectiveness and the legitamcy of such techniques are up for debate, as well as the ethics of those employing them. No non lethal system is inherently non lethal. When used correctly, they stand a good chance of being non-lethal, but when misused they become lethal instruments of torture and terror.
Given that I basically use my job to finance my life, things that impact my quality of life are more important than salary. That's one reason why I work for the university instead of one the high tech firms in my area. I want a decent, but not massive salary and enough time to pursue outside interests. Now, if there were laws in the state that impacted the way I want to live my life, I wouldn't even consider going to that state. Utah's liquor laws aren't an issue for me since I'm pretty much a tea-totaler, but the state is largely Mormon. Now, I don't have anything against Mormons, but you're dealing with a group of people who have fairly rigid beliefs, and vote to shape the state's laws around those beliefs. No problem in and of itself. I mean that's democracy in action more or less. However, I have very different values and I don't know that I'd feel comfortable or compatible with the local culture. Salt Lake City is a bit different because that's a fairly large city and is characterized by the same multi cultural patterns as other American cities. I might live in Salt Lake City, but I don't know how well I'd get along in the rest of the state.
There's other considerations to be sure. For instance, No. Cal is out because of the rents and property prices in the area. In order to live in the area, I'd probably have a long commute by car and that's not something I'm into. I'll ride an hour on my bike, but not by car. Its my own little hypocrisy. For me it all depends on how good of a life I can have in the area, and that life is shaped by the values I carry. Some things I'd look at are: morality and reproductive laws, access to higher education, sprawl and commuting, racial distribution, and the arts scene. Basically I hate commuting and detest sprawl. Someday I wanna go back and get my graduate degree and I love the arts. I also grew up in very racially mixed town and am comfortable with a variety of people. So, I'm looking at either a midwestern town with a major university or a city--not a burb--in the Northeast or west coast. If it ain't one of those places, I don't care how much money they're offering I won't go. They can't offer me the life I want to lead.
The question of benefits in remote administration depends on what you want to manage. Remote administration is greate for taking care of devices. I haven't done too much of this aside from admin of internetworking devices through SNMP, but even that can be very powerful. Managing devices directly does indeed streamline the troubleshooting process as well as speed up maintenance and upgrading, but I doubt it can replace the phone support line. So many calls a help desk gets from a user are not the 'my computer is broken' calls, but rather the 'how do I do this' variety. Even so, I figure remote admin capablities can shorten the time to resolve problems, making the user and the help desk staff happier. That said, there are limits to what remote admin can fix. Remote administration cannot address faulty user behavior and the problems that arise from such. It can be argued that nothing can help that, but I'm not that pessimistic. Remote administration can deal with machines, but you still need people to admin users.
I think we're going to see a lot more layoffs across the industry. We're watching the industry, and the underlying technology, mature. A lot of the boom in the 90's was due to people experimenting with the next new thing. Now we have a better idea of what the strengths and weaknesses of Internet tech are. The people who take advantage of the strengths of the technology are settling back to regular if not so spectacular revenue. The ones who discovered the weaknesses are failing or getting bought up. As for the ones who simply didn't understand, they disappeared last year.
Then there's also a certain level of saturation. We've probably gotten everybody hooked up to the Internet that wants to be hooked up and has the means to be hooked up. So, there's simply not a demand for new installations. That means less of a demand for infrastructure and so on down the food chain. I think this holds true for the rest of the economy as well. Everyone who wanted a new car and fancy house has pretty much gotten them. What happens to an economy when its succeeded in delivering all the goods and services to the people? I don't know if there is a precedent for the kind of economic slowing we're seeing now. Given that, I don't know how much tax relief will help. If Americans use the extra cash to save or pay back their own personal debt, then there can be some long term good out of that, but if we are in a crisis of supply, then don't expect too much. Of course, this also means we can expect another up cycle in a few years as durable things begin to wear out, and as the tech sector comes up with the next big thing. I dunno. I'm just using the downturn to pick up stocks and other equity at bargain rates before we get another boom.
I don't know so much if its age or the communication styles that older people--relative term here--use. Young people, especially teens, tend to be agressive and absolutist in communication style. When you communicate this way with your peers in age its just the way you talk, but at least on subconscious level, most older folks tend to think you're just being young and reckless. The communication stlyes used by older, read established professionals in say their late thirties, is quieter and more inclusive. Arrgh... I hate these vague terms, but its like I know it when I hear it. Anyway, before you even communicate, take a look at what you want to say and try to find a way to say that comes off as humble and less cocky. Demonstrate in your arguement that you've thought through all the points, and avoid stating that you know what's best or 'what's best period'. Instead show the merits of your idea and consequences of the rivals. And, avoid challenging a person. I used to do this alot at work and it gained me something of a bad rep. Instead, come at the position in a way that gives ther person credit while pointing out problems with their position. Its a tough skill to learn, but it can save your butt as a young professional, and will allow you to forge alliances within your organization.
And that's another point: Young techies often have superb technical skills, superior skills at that, but seldom have little in they way of social skills. I cannot emphasize to everyone here that people skills are critical to your success as a professional. You may be right, or you have an inovative idea that will save the world, but it doesn't mean jack unless you can convince other people of that. And, having convinced other people of that, you still need allies who believe in you as a person to help move the idea along. A lot of geeks like to pretend that people skills don't matter and that its all technical prowess and experience. Hate to burst your bubble, but people have not changed all that much in the last fifty odd years that computers have been changing the world, and you still have to know how to deal with them.
NASA is open about such things, but based on my experience with the UARS satellite, much of the protocols were one shot solutions applicable only to the particular mission or mission family. If the thing's still up and running you've got a good shot of getting everything on the web. However, if it's been shut down for more than a couple of years, they probably tossed the binders containing the documentation. That was a big problem even on a working project like HRDI and UARS were during the early 90s. Namely it had been running for a several years already, the software was getting long in the tooth and it needed updating. A lot of my job was tweaking legacy code to to bring it in line with language updates and whatnot. Its really frustrating to be able to find no documentation whatsoever on a critical piece of running code. And, thats from the programmer's point of view. I don't wanna think about ther operations engineers would have done if they had to restart it. Anyway, searching for lost documentation would be an original science history project. It'd also be fun to go through the old software archives and take a peek at the code. Mind you for something this old who knows how its stored--punch cards? It kinda gives the creeps to know that someday a historian may draw an image of me based solely on a bunch kludgy Fortran 66 and VAX DCL programs.
I have access to the full article and gave it a read. Its a perfect example of why physicists shouldn't write articles about the real world. They are assumed that all nodes of the network are equal. This is most definitely not the case with the Internet. There nodes upon which others depend. And, as if that wasn't enough, there are also choke points in the real Internet. I liked the LA Freeway analogy that another poster gave. Let me elaborate on this analogy. Half the traffic, maybe more, takes the Harbor Freeway to the Hollywood Freeway to get out to the SF Valley. The other half or so use the 405 to the West. The geography breaks down so that if you live SE, you take the Harbor, Hollywood. If you live SW you take 405. Now, the interchange from Harbor to Hollywood is a narrow two lane affair left over from the fifties. If that goes down from an accident, no one on the east can get to the valley. The same thing can, but is less likely, to happen on the Internet. Take out Downer's Grove and one or two other spots, and whammo, the Internet is segmented and cut off.
Just wish I could find a functioning link to this one. Anyway, given Turing's insight, and the period the paper would almost have to be novel and original. Why its still classified, who knows? Maybe the offical secrets office or whatever they call themselves. What strkes me about WWII is that almost everything we now do with signals and communication comes out of that one time. Well okay, maybe not satellite and digital, but even so, the foundations were laid then. Lot of innovation in a very short time.
Granted the net has changed since I last did Netop work, but there's still some practical concerns that I dunno if the article addressed. Yeah, globally the net is up with 1% of the routers going, but locally you're screwed. Here's a couple of cases in point. Several years ago there was a fire at Downer's Grove in Illinois. Downer's Grove besides being a suburb of Chicago is home to a large portion of the telecommunications interconnections in the country. From my view, it seemed as if Downer's Grove connected every thing east of the Missippi to the western part of the country. Sorta like the corpus callosum--I know I mispelled it-- in the brain. So the fire took out a couple of MCI's backbone routers--more than that. From my point of view it looked a whole lot like the country had been split. The west was fine. The east was fine, but when the two tried to talk there was nothin going through. It was a mess. No one knew why, what or where. I dunno if it is still possible to have this kind of break, but I have to wonder if the article takes into account the phsical topography of the net vs the network topography. The fact is that if the net still runs the way it did, and I'm pretty sure it does, the distributed nature of the net is misleading. Truth is that the major infrastructure is piecemeal centralized in physical locations. I'm talking about places like Downer's Grove, Arlington, and Denver--I think. These cities support a lot of the net's critical backbone routers. What's more an awful lot of them are centralized in single POPs. That means they're in a single building a lot of the time. So, when we say there's connectivity with 1% of the routers, I have to ask what if we still have connectivity with 99% of the routers. It all boils down to which ones. This incident was Octoberish '94 for those who wanna go digging through trouble ticket archives. Another incident happened in like 92. There was a bug in Gated that caused a routing problem in Boulder to propagate all across the NSFNet backbone. Everything went down. A few of the more robust machines came back up on their own and the net lurched forward, but for practical intents, unless you had a big 'ol cisco connecting your lan, you were off the net. Anyway, I should actually read the article before shooting my mouth off. Besides I'm sure a lot of people can find other cautionary tales by digging through their trouble tickets.
Definitely not. I have and use this book all the time, but I use it for specfic cgi questions and problems. To learn Perl, I wouldn't really bother with a class. I'd just get the O'Reily Perl CDROM bookshelf and start with Learning Perl. This is a good deal, there's six books on the cd that will take you from novice to adept and provide enough quick reference material to solve any problem. The cgi book on the other hand is a great book for someone who's got a pretty good foundation in Perl, but is new to cgi programming.
The problem is that none of the people who ultimately make space policy get it. If they did, they'd pretty much be developing better ground to orbit tech and launching the kind of survey missions you mentioned. Right now, NASA is nothing more than a showcase of national prestige intended to generate flashy TV and magazine spots. Those results do not justify the cost, and what;s worse they actually set back the whole idea of space exploration by depicting the whole enterprise as nothing more than an ornament. Its a pitty too because we're very close on many fronts to being able get into space easily. At least if you believe all the optimism in Lockheed's info packets on the Venturstar. BTW is this project still being funded? Anyway, what we need is for one of the policy makers to set a clear achievable goal in this area. That's the big reason why NASA succeeded at sending guys to the moon. They had a clear goal to guide mission planning for the balance of a decade. Of course, the goal has to be sensible. In my opinion going to the moon wasn't really. A better goal would have been to develop a good reusable ground to orbit system and a truly useful space station--one that could be used as a forward base orbital transfer vehicles for mining asteroids. Hey, that'd be a pretty decent goal for today.
I dunno about that. One of the biggest complaints I heard from various engin and science departments at the UofM is that there were few American students even applying for these specialties. Infact when I designed the admissions database for the biosciences programs, I noticed that there were very few American applicants into those programs. Most of the names were foreignish--hard to tell in our melting pot--and a goodly number of the citizenship fields were marked as international. What it seemed to me is that we had mostly immigrants and sons and daughters of naturalized immigrants applying into this scientific department. I have a strong suspicion that this has to do with the way Americans perceive educational achievement and sciences in general. Many americans look at anyone with a high level of academic achievement as elitist, and they often look at scientists as being beyond human. That sort of psychological distinction between scientists and normal people I think lays down a real barrier to entry into those fields for your average freshman. You don't see that in immigrants and their first generation descendents. They equate technical education with success in life. Along with this trend is that trend in comp sci majors to go pro before they get their degrees these days. Can't say I blame 'em. You can always go back and finish the degree, so why not do it with stock and a nice cash savings? I also have to wonder about the level of high school preparation of incoming freshman. I think a lot of them don't have the prep to enter a science program. I was just such a student and had to take a mess of remedial classes before I could enter my major. It wasn't because I was screw up, but because my school didn't provide much in the way of science and math prep. Frankly it was a fluke I even got interest in science and math. Given the above, is that we're giving away degree to foreigners or are they just filling a vaccum left by the Americans?
If Novell's still selling it, look into Groupwise. It's got all the email, all the calendaring, and all the sharing of outlook. I don't think its got the security problems, and it works pretty nicely. It may be a pain to administer tho. It's also got a decent API that lets you interface other programs with it. In my case I tied in the medical campus event calendar on the web into groupwise to let people post events to their own calendars. The work was straight forward. I'd also look into open source solutions for this same feature. There's something out there called "V Card" if I have the name right--probably don't.
Point out that the recent batch of email viruses have targeted exclusively microsoft products. I may not have my facts straight on this, but if memory serves me right only outlook was vulnerable. Even if this was not the case, outlook was especially vulnerable. You should also find out why this politically forceful wants to standardize on MS products. They may have some concerns that you can address legitimatly without switching over.
I haven't been affected directly in terms of my job/career since I work in academia, but I have been investing most of this--err rather the previous--decade. The tech stock scene looked like a gold rush. You had a lot of hopeful prospectors rushing in hoping to make a million on the the new big thing. Most of them went or are in the process of going bust because the new big thing wasn't that big. It was and still is big, but not big enough to support anyone who's read Small Businesses for Dummies and can put togehter a business plan. So, the people who are still around and going to be around are either the true visionary innovators or the people who build the roads and provide the services that all the prospectors use. So, the dot coms are coming apart, but the Ciscos, the Oracles Red Hats, and the rest are still around, and getting bigger. So, as an investor, I had healthy mix of things and made a quite a return on investments during this period, but because I have a mix, the downturns didn't hit me very hard. The tech stock boom on the NASDAQ has helped turn a modest savings into a sizeable nest egg, but the diversity of my portfolio has cushioned the down turns. I'm doing good as we come out of this rush, and looking for the next opportunity to put a small part of my money in.
There's another flip side to the tech stock boom. As the 1990s progressed, the number of new technologies I had to learn at any given time skyrocketed. The boom meant that a lot of people were developing a lot things. The past five years turned most of computer science upside down and shook it. When I last looked at my resume, I have well over a dozen languages listed. Most of these I've learned in the past three or four years. The other affect of the boom is the amount of new information services you see people offering at all levels and all sectors. It's been a wild ride from a purely technical point of view too.
Would be very different. Software would probably be customized to the point of the being unique to a particular application. I do not think the computer revolution would have happened. Remember, hardware accounted only for half of it. The more important half in terms of the way we function now as opposed to twenty years ago--geez am I really that old?--is the development of software that anyone could take out of a box and use. From the first killer app, the spread sheet, to the the most modern mathcad, software has increasingly been developed to solve universal problems. Prior to the PC revolution, most computer programs were written for a very specific purpose and for a very small audience. The company comptroller for instance. As a side note, I am not this old, but one of my first computer jobs at the end of college dealt with legacy code written in FORTRAN 66 and FORTRAN 77. Such software was not portable, not maintainable, and was not usable by the world at large. My older colleagues told me that all software was written that way. In the end, we had to scrap the code and rewrite it all based on specifications. What caused the software revolution that gave us real world software? That somethig was the copyright. Copyrights give the developer the incentive to develop universal--I use the term for want of a better one--software that anyone can use. With a copyright the developer recoups the cost and effort of developing complex software and can even make a profit. The open source movement in contrast is rebellion against abusive copyright enforcement, and monopolistic copyright holders. Amazingly the movement has gained momentum to the point that people are figuring out how to make money on code they essentially give away. But, without the ablity to copyright and charge users for the commodity of software, I think software would still be where it was twenty and more years ago.
The picture would be even more divergent for artists. Authors of the fiction we love to read, musicians, and others who create consumable works rely on copyrights to make a living. Without a copyright, an artist would have to rely on patrons or performances. While musicians can, and do make their living mainly off of performances, an author has not such option. The only way an author can make a living writing is to sell their works, or to acquire a patron. Since a it gives the artist a legal right to exclusive sell his or her work, a world without copyright in some sense would take us back a couple hundred years. At least I think it would. I honestly don't know how long the notion of a legal copyright has been with us. While big publishing and music companies have abused copyrights, copyrights are also what makes it possible for a person to be a full time author, make it easier to be a full time musician, or a full time film maker.
This is a stupid idea, but here goes. Find a chat room or IRC channel where HS students are likely to hang out, find one, and ask him/her to hit your site from school. If the usage stats are to be believed, one or two under 18 guinea pigs should be a good test.
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Anyone jumping from that kind of altitude is going to be loaded down with a lot of life support equipment. Not much left over in terms of payload for weapons and operational equipment. There are other problems as well. When troops jump HALO(High Altitude Low Opening), what they do is jump out of the plane at every high altitiudes and freefall a very long ways before ever opening their chute. I think they jump from 14000 ft and don't open a chute til 500ft. Someone who knows the actual figures, please correct me. This happens for two reasons: A soldier dangling from a parachute has a very large visual and radar signature. And, the soldiers can jump out over friendly territory and drift during the freefall into the enemy's area. This is ideal for any kind of covert operation, or even just for any action in an enemy's rear.
Jumping from a stratospheric altitude is going to require that several chutes be opened at various altitudes to slow the jumper down, They're going to be very visible a every stage. And, that is going eliminate the primary motivation for parachute operations: stealth and suprise. Not to mention, there's a limit to how much chute you carry relative to its stopping power. Paratroopers carry a _lot_ of equipment, but there's only so much. Add life support to that, plus all the chutes for this kind of jump and you won't have much left over on the ground to fight a battle. Not to mention, the jumper is going to have to get out of their space suit once their on the ground. Presumably, the enemy is going to be looking for the jumper if not shooting at him while he's doing that.
In contrast, the force Heinlein envsioned was basically a tank force. Granted the tanks were anthropmorphic vehicles that operator wore, but the MI still had the kind of signature and hitting power of an armored force. Nothing very subtle about that. The enemy would most certainly notice the warships coming into orbit, followed by the massive signature of the MI hitting the atmosphere. To the MI that doesn't matter because they hit the ground fighting. Contemporary paratroopers can't do that. They have to secure their equipment, find their teamates, form up, check their location, and so on before they can even begin to fight. Any time paratroops have jumped into a prepared and entrenched enemy they've been cut down or captured. Meanwhile when dropped in an enemy's rear the lightly armed paratroops can use their advantage of surprise to wreak massive damage on the enemy's support and command and control systems.
According to the History Channel documentary on Project Man High, the test pilot who jumped had problems with his suit. Actually, I think he had hurt his hand and he couldn't put his glove on over his now swollen hand. So, he just went up with a glove. He also had some serious problems with going into a spin on the way down. But, eventually he stopped spinning and made it down with a little bit of frost bite and a few bruises.
This sort of skydiving has, of course been done before. Back in the early(?) fifties the Air Force had a project called Man High that was tasked with developing escape systems for high altitude aircraft. It started by hauling crash test dummies up in weather balloons and dropping them with various parachute systems to test them. Man High is occasianlly cited as being partially responsible for the whole alien body legend for this reason. The projected culminated with a live test pilot dropping out of one of these weather balloon. He had one wild ride. The History Channel did a good documentary on this programmer which was a forerunner to the US manned space program. If you go to your favorite search engin and search for Man High, you can also find a good web site with info on the project. You'll also find a whole lot gay porn sites in the hitlist, so be careful which links you follow.
Great. As if cel phones aren't a big enough distraction for drivers. I've about had it with cel phone implanted yuppies in sport UTs running me off the road. Now this. Just wonderful. Its Mad Max time.
Why the hell was this marked as troll? The guy makes a good point here. The way our tax code is set up, money brings tax breaks. Sure millionaires have a %40 tax rate, but there's a lot a tax break for things like real estate investments and business ventures. If you doubt me on that, just incorporate and make an attempt to do something with the business. When you go see your accountant at the end of the year, just wait and see how many tax breaks he'll find for you. Of course, you have to have money to do this. I started my micro label with a about a grand and got $700 or so in tax writeoffs. This just scales the more money you have. And, if you have enough money to get into real estate, you're in tax write off heaven. The point here is that wage laborers pay the greatest share of taxes. Those people who have money to throw at investment and business ventures on large scale can write off at least the cost of doing business and often much more than that. There's a book out there entitled "America: Who Reall Pays the Taxes". I've only read excerpts of it, but its enough to make you want to use your second ammendment rights.
I heard a news story recently that estate tax repeal or no, there's another bill moving through commitee that will ease the estate burden on farmers and a few other small business people. This is sensible. The wholesale repeal is not. I do not want to see aristocracy in this country. And that's just what an estate tax repeal would do.
I have one small concern with using this as a crowd deterrent. When using irritants like tear gas, pepper spray, or watter cannons, the crowd sees or otherwise senses what's happening. They know that the uniforms(whoever they may be) are doing something, and their basic reaction will be to run _away_ from the uniforms. With this, its invisible, silent, and has no smell. All of a suddent, people's skin begins to burn. This is panic grade material here. There's a good chance that members of the crowd will run towards the weapon, taking them into a greater flux of energy, leading to serious injury pretty quickly. I think the basic idea is sound, but the proposed application of this idea may not be a winner. I think this might be a good weapon used against single agitators or small groups of them. Against a crowd? Like I said, what happens if they panic because for no discernible reason, their skin begins to burn.
I think the Marines and other armed services might want to check notes with correctional agencies around the country. There's been a lot of development in this area. The systems developed for use in correctional systems focus on breaking the mob mentality by causing a shocking pain to snap their individuals back to themselves. Of course, the effectiveness and the legitamcy of such techniques are up for debate, as well as the ethics of those employing them. No non lethal system is inherently non lethal. When used correctly, they stand a good chance of being non-lethal, but when misused they become lethal instruments of torture and terror.
Given that I basically use my job to finance my life, things that impact my quality of life are more important than salary. That's one reason why I work for the university instead of one the high tech firms in my area. I want a decent, but not massive salary and enough time to pursue outside interests. Now, if there were laws in the state that impacted the way I want to live my life, I wouldn't even consider going to that state. Utah's liquor laws aren't an issue for me since I'm pretty much a tea-totaler, but the state is largely Mormon. Now, I don't have anything against Mormons, but you're dealing with a group of people who have fairly rigid beliefs, and vote to shape the state's laws around those beliefs. No problem in and of itself. I mean that's democracy in action more or less. However, I have very different values and I don't know that I'd feel comfortable or compatible with the local culture. Salt Lake City is a bit different because that's a fairly large city and is characterized by the same multi cultural patterns as other American cities. I might live in Salt Lake City, but I don't know how well I'd get along in the rest of the state.
There's other considerations to be sure. For instance, No. Cal is out because of the rents and property prices in the area. In order to live in the area, I'd probably have a long commute by car and that's not something I'm into. I'll ride an hour on my bike, but not by car. Its my own little hypocrisy. For me it all depends on how good of a life I can have in the area, and that life is shaped by the values I carry. Some things I'd look at are: morality and reproductive laws, access to higher education, sprawl and commuting, racial distribution, and the arts scene. Basically I hate commuting and detest sprawl. Someday I wanna go back and get my graduate degree and I love the arts. I also grew up in very racially mixed town and am comfortable with a variety of people. So, I'm looking at either a midwestern town with a major university or a city--not a burb--in the Northeast or west coast. If it ain't one of those places, I don't care how much money they're offering I won't go. They can't offer me the life I want to lead.
I find it worrying that 4% of the population of the "Last Superpower" don't just believe in UFOs, they beleive they've been abducted by one.
Wonder how long it will be til some politican starts pandering to them? Maybe it will make politics entertaining enough to pay attention to.
The question of benefits in remote administration depends on what you want to manage. Remote administration is greate for taking care of devices. I haven't done too much of this aside from admin of internetworking devices through SNMP, but even that can be very powerful. Managing devices directly does indeed streamline the troubleshooting process as well as speed up maintenance and upgrading, but I doubt it can replace the phone support line. So many calls a help desk gets from a user are not the 'my computer is broken' calls, but rather the 'how do I do this' variety. Even so, I figure remote admin capablities can shorten the time to resolve problems, making the user and the help desk staff happier. That said, there are limits to what remote admin can fix. Remote administration cannot address faulty user behavior and the problems that arise from such. It can be argued that nothing can help that, but I'm not that pessimistic. Remote administration can deal with machines, but you still need people to admin users.
I think we're going to see a lot more layoffs across the industry. We're watching the industry, and the underlying technology, mature. A lot of the boom in the 90's was due to people experimenting with the next new thing. Now we have a better idea of what the strengths and weaknesses of Internet tech are. The people who take advantage of the strengths of the technology are settling back to regular if not so spectacular revenue. The ones who discovered the weaknesses are failing or getting bought up. As for the ones who simply didn't understand, they disappeared last year.
Then there's also a certain level of saturation. We've probably gotten everybody hooked up to the Internet that wants to be hooked up and has the means to be hooked up. So, there's simply not a demand for new installations. That means less of a demand for infrastructure and so on down the food chain. I think this holds true for the rest of the economy as well. Everyone who wanted a new car and fancy house has pretty much gotten them. What happens to an economy when its succeeded in delivering all the goods and services to the people? I don't know if there is a precedent for the kind of economic slowing we're seeing now. Given that, I don't know how much tax relief will help. If Americans use the extra cash to save or pay back their own personal debt, then there can be some long term good out of that, but if we are in a crisis of supply, then don't expect too much. Of course, this also means we can expect another up cycle in a few years as durable things begin to wear out, and as the tech sector comes up with the next big thing. I dunno. I'm just using the downturn to pick up stocks and other equity at bargain rates before we get another boom.
I don't know so much if its age or the communication styles that older people--relative term here--use. Young people, especially teens, tend to be agressive and absolutist in communication style. When you communicate this way with your peers in age its just the way you talk, but at least on subconscious level, most older folks tend to think you're just being young and reckless. The communication stlyes used by older, read established professionals in say their late thirties, is quieter and more inclusive. Arrgh... I hate these vague terms, but its like I know it when I hear it. Anyway, before you even communicate, take a look at what you want to say and try to find a way to say that comes off as humble and less cocky. Demonstrate in your arguement that you've thought through all the points, and avoid stating that you know what's best or 'what's best period'. Instead show the merits of your idea and consequences of the rivals. And, avoid challenging a person. I used to do this alot at work and it gained me something of a bad rep. Instead, come at the position in a way that gives ther person credit while pointing out problems with their position. Its a tough skill to learn, but it can save your butt as a young professional, and will allow you to forge alliances within your organization.
And that's another point: Young techies often have superb technical skills, superior skills at that, but seldom have little in they way of social skills. I cannot emphasize to everyone here that people skills are critical to your success as a professional. You may be right, or you have an inovative idea that will save the world, but it doesn't mean jack unless you can convince other people of that. And, having convinced other people of that, you still need allies who believe in you as a person to help move the idea along. A lot of geeks like to pretend that people skills don't matter and that its all technical prowess and experience. Hate to burst your bubble, but people have not changed all that much in the last fifty odd years that computers have been changing the world, and you still have to know how to deal with them.
NASA is open about such things, but based on my experience with the UARS satellite, much of the protocols were one shot solutions applicable only to the particular mission or mission family. If the thing's still up and running you've got a good shot of getting everything on the web. However, if it's been shut down for more than a couple of years, they probably tossed the binders containing the documentation. That was a big problem even on a working project like HRDI and UARS were during the early 90s. Namely it had been running for a several years already, the software was getting long in the tooth and it needed updating. A lot of my job was tweaking legacy code to to bring it in line with language updates and whatnot. Its really frustrating to be able to find no documentation whatsoever on a critical piece of running code. And, thats from the programmer's point of view. I don't wanna think about ther operations engineers would have done if they had to restart it. Anyway, searching for lost documentation would be an original science history project. It'd also be fun to go through the old software archives and take a peek at the code. Mind you for something this old who knows how its stored--punch cards? It kinda gives the creeps to know that someday a historian may draw an image of me based solely on a bunch kludgy Fortran 66 and VAX DCL programs.
I have access to the full article and gave it a read. Its a perfect example of why physicists shouldn't write articles about the real world. They are assumed that all nodes of the network are equal. This is most definitely not the case with the Internet. There nodes upon which others depend. And, as if that wasn't enough, there are also choke points in the real Internet. I liked the LA Freeway analogy that another poster gave. Let me elaborate on this analogy. Half the traffic, maybe more, takes the Harbor Freeway to the Hollywood Freeway to get out to the SF Valley. The other half or so use the 405 to the West. The geography breaks down so that if you live SE, you take the Harbor, Hollywood. If you live SW you take 405. Now, the interchange from Harbor to Hollywood is a narrow two lane affair left over from the fifties. If that goes down from an accident, no one on the east can get to the valley. The same thing can, but is less likely, to happen on the Internet. Take out Downer's Grove and one or two other spots, and whammo, the Internet is segmented and cut off.
Just wish I could find a functioning link to this one. Anyway, given Turing's insight, and the period the paper would almost have to be novel and original. Why its still classified, who knows? Maybe the offical secrets office or whatever they call themselves. What strkes me about WWII is that almost everything we now do with signals and communication comes out of that one time. Well okay, maybe not satellite and digital, but even so, the foundations were laid then. Lot of innovation in a very short time.
What was I thinking? Add two to the years cited. Damn not enough caffeine.
Granted the net has changed since I last did Netop work, but there's still some practical concerns that I dunno if the article addressed. Yeah, globally the net is up with 1% of the routers going, but locally you're screwed. Here's a couple of cases in point. Several years ago there was a fire at Downer's Grove in Illinois. Downer's Grove besides being a suburb of Chicago is home to a large portion of the telecommunications interconnections in the country. From my view, it seemed as if Downer's Grove connected every thing east of the Missippi to the western part of the country. Sorta like the corpus callosum--I know I mispelled it-- in the brain. So the fire took out a couple of MCI's backbone routers--more than that. From my point of view it looked a whole lot like the country had been split. The west was fine. The east was fine, but when the two tried to talk there was nothin going through. It was a mess. No one knew why, what or where. I dunno if it is still possible to have this kind of break, but I have to wonder if the article takes into account the phsical topography of the net vs the network topography. The fact is that if the net still runs the way it did, and I'm pretty sure it does, the distributed nature of the net is misleading. Truth is that the major infrastructure is piecemeal centralized in physical locations. I'm talking about places like Downer's Grove, Arlington, and Denver--I think. These cities support a lot of the net's critical backbone routers. What's more an awful lot of them are centralized in single POPs. That means they're in a single building a lot of the time. So, when we say there's connectivity with 1% of the routers, I have to ask what if we still have connectivity with 99% of the routers. It all boils down to which ones. This incident was Octoberish '94 for those who wanna go digging through trouble ticket archives. Another incident happened in like 92. There was a bug in Gated that caused a routing problem in Boulder to propagate all across the NSFNet backbone. Everything went down. A few of the more robust machines came back up on their own and the net lurched forward, but for practical intents, unless you had a big 'ol cisco connecting your lan, you were off the net. Anyway, I should actually read the article before shooting my mouth off. Besides I'm sure a lot of people can find other cautionary tales by digging through their trouble tickets.
Definitely not. I have and use this book all the time, but I use it for specfic cgi questions and problems. To learn Perl, I wouldn't really bother with a class. I'd just get the O'Reily Perl CDROM bookshelf and start with Learning Perl. This is a good deal, there's six books on the cd that will take you from novice to adept and provide enough quick reference material to solve any problem. The cgi book on the other hand is a great book for someone who's got a pretty good foundation in Perl, but is new to cgi programming.
The problem is that none of the people who ultimately make space policy get it. If they did, they'd pretty much be developing better ground to orbit tech and launching the kind of survey missions you mentioned. Right now, NASA is nothing more than a showcase of national prestige intended to generate flashy TV and magazine spots. Those results do not justify the cost, and what;s worse they actually set back the whole idea of space exploration by depicting the whole enterprise as nothing more than an ornament. Its a pitty too because we're very close on many fronts to being able get into space easily. At least if you believe all the optimism in Lockheed's info packets on the Venturstar. BTW is this project still being funded? Anyway, what we need is for one of the policy makers to set a clear achievable goal in this area. That's the big reason why NASA succeeded at sending guys to the moon. They had a clear goal to guide mission planning for the balance of a decade. Of course, the goal has to be sensible. In my opinion going to the moon wasn't really. A better goal would have been to develop a good reusable ground to orbit system and a truly useful space station--one that could be used as a forward base orbital transfer vehicles for mining asteroids. Hey, that'd be a pretty decent goal for today.
I dunno about that. One of the biggest complaints I heard from various engin and science departments at the UofM is that there were few American students even applying for these specialties. Infact when I designed the admissions database for the biosciences programs, I noticed that there were very few American applicants into those programs. Most of the names were foreignish--hard to tell in our melting pot--and a goodly number of the citizenship fields were marked as international. What it seemed to me is that we had mostly immigrants and sons and daughters of naturalized immigrants applying into this scientific department. I have a strong suspicion that this has to do with the way Americans perceive educational achievement and sciences in general. Many americans look at anyone with a high level of academic achievement as elitist, and they often look at scientists as being beyond human. That sort of psychological distinction between scientists and normal people I think lays down a real barrier to entry into those fields for your average freshman. You don't see that in immigrants and their first generation descendents. They equate technical education with success in life. Along with this trend is that trend in comp sci majors to go pro before they get their degrees these days. Can't say I blame 'em. You can always go back and finish the degree, so why not do it with stock and a nice cash savings? I also have to wonder about the level of high school preparation of incoming freshman. I think a lot of them don't have the prep to enter a science program. I was just such a student and had to take a mess of remedial classes before I could enter my major. It wasn't because I was screw up, but because my school didn't provide much in the way of science and math prep. Frankly it was a fluke I even got interest in science and math. Given the above, is that we're giving away degree to foreigners or are they just filling a vaccum left by the Americans?
If Novell's still selling it, look into Groupwise. It's got all the email, all the calendaring, and all the sharing of outlook. I don't think its got the security problems, and it works pretty nicely. It may be a pain to administer tho. It's also got a decent API that lets you interface other programs with it. In my case I tied in the medical campus event calendar on the web into groupwise to let people post events to their own calendars. The work was straight forward. I'd also look into open source solutions for this same feature. There's something out there called "V Card" if I have the name right--probably don't.
Point out that the recent batch of email viruses have targeted exclusively microsoft products. I may not have my facts straight on this, but if memory serves me right only outlook was vulnerable. Even if this was not the case, outlook was especially vulnerable. You should also find out why this politically forceful wants to standardize on MS products. They may have some concerns that you can address legitimatly without switching over.
I haven't been affected directly in terms of my job/career since I work in academia, but I have been investing most of this--err rather the previous--decade. The tech stock scene looked like a gold rush. You had a lot of hopeful prospectors rushing in hoping to make a million on the the new big thing. Most of them went or are in the process of going bust because the new big thing wasn't that big. It was and still is big, but not big enough to support anyone who's read Small Businesses for Dummies and can put togehter a business plan. So, the people who are still around and going to be around are either the true visionary innovators or the people who build the roads and provide the services that all the prospectors use. So, the dot coms are coming apart, but the Ciscos, the Oracles Red Hats, and the rest are still around, and getting bigger. So, as an investor, I had healthy mix of things and made a quite a return on investments during this period, but because I have a mix, the downturns didn't hit me very hard. The tech stock boom on the NASDAQ has helped turn a modest savings into a sizeable nest egg, but the diversity of my portfolio has cushioned the down turns. I'm doing good as we come out of this rush, and looking for the next opportunity to put a small part of my money in.
There's another flip side to the tech stock boom. As the 1990s progressed, the number of new technologies I had to learn at any given time skyrocketed. The boom meant that a lot of people were developing a lot things. The past five years turned most of computer science upside down and shook it. When I last looked at my resume, I have well over a dozen languages listed. Most of these I've learned in the past three or four years. The other affect of the boom is the amount of new information services you see people offering at all levels and all sectors. It's been a wild ride from a purely technical point of view too.
Would be very different. Software would probably be customized to the point of the being unique to a particular application. I do not think the computer revolution would have happened. Remember, hardware accounted only for half of it. The more important half in terms of the way we function now as opposed to twenty years ago--geez am I really that old?--is the development of software that anyone could take out of a box and use. From the first killer app, the spread sheet, to the the most modern mathcad, software has increasingly been developed to solve universal problems. Prior to the PC revolution, most computer programs were written for a very specific purpose and for a very small audience. The company comptroller for instance. As a side note, I am not this old, but one of my first computer jobs at the end of college dealt with legacy code written in FORTRAN 66 and FORTRAN 77. Such software was not portable, not maintainable, and was not usable by the world at large. My older colleagues told me that all software was written that way. In the end, we had to scrap the code and rewrite it all based on specifications. What caused the software revolution that gave us real world software? That somethig was the copyright. Copyrights give the developer the incentive to develop universal--I use the term for want of a better one--software that anyone can use. With a copyright the developer recoups the cost and effort of developing complex software and can even make a profit. The open source movement in contrast is rebellion against abusive copyright enforcement, and monopolistic copyright holders. Amazingly the movement has gained momentum to the point that people are figuring out how to make money on code they essentially give away. But, without the ablity to copyright and charge users for the commodity of software, I think software would still be where it was twenty and more years ago.
The picture would be even more divergent for artists. Authors of the fiction we love to read, musicians, and others who create consumable works rely on copyrights to make a living. Without a copyright, an artist would have to rely on patrons or performances. While musicians can, and do make their living mainly off of performances, an author has not such option. The only way an author can make a living writing is to sell their works, or to acquire a patron. Since a it gives the artist a legal right to exclusive sell his or her work, a world without copyright in some sense would take us back a couple hundred years. At least I think it would. I honestly don't know how long the notion of a legal copyright has been with us. While big publishing and music companies have abused copyrights, copyrights are also what makes it possible for a person to be a full time author, make it easier to be a full time musician, or a full time film maker.
This is a stupid idea, but here goes. Find a chat room or IRC channel where HS students are likely to hang out, find one, and ask him/her to hit your site from school. If the usage stats are to be believed, one or two under 18 guinea pigs should be a good test.