Nuclear reactions happen when you enough radioactive stuff close enough to itself so that it begins a chain reaction, right? So why don't they just make some mechanical failsafe device that pulls the chunks apart to a distance where the reaction doesn't occur? Even if the bars had explosive bottom caps that would go off at a certain (high) temperature - blasting the bars away from each other like bullets is better than the situation where they all melt together and create a runaway reaction... I would think...
The previous phone that I had bought for my parents had this very feature. It had a prominent "911" button right on the phone. During setup, you program the phone to take a certain action when that button is pressed. In this case, I set it up to send a generic "Help - I'm in need of assistance" message to me and both of my sisters. A year later, we naturally forgot about this. One morning, around 2AM I got this strange message from my parents with that message. My sister called me soon after but no one could reach my parents - we feared the worst and called the police. Long story short - my mother had received a "wrong number" phone call late that night. In fumbling around in the dark, she had inadvertently sent the 911 distress. It took us a few days to piece together what actually happened, as we (at that point) had completely forgotten about the feature and it's function. So - morale of the story is I guess it can be a good thing, but the ease of use of sending a distress can also make it easy to send a false alarm and get a lot of people very worried and upset.
I've had significantly less 'support calls' from my parents in recent years. Back in the XP days it seems like they caught a virus every month. So I'm not sure if it's security essentials or Windows 7, but things are much better these days. The worst thing that seems to happen nowadays is that they get tricked into installing some sort of application that it designed to look like it's either virus protection or something to speed them up. They were getting phone calls - the person was trying to get their credit card number out of them by scaring them with nonsense like "our monitoring on your computer is all lit up red...". Anyway, all I have to do these days is occasionally uninstall anything that they got tricked into installing and running through windows update to install non-critical updates. The MOST important thing, I believe, is setting Java and the Adobe products to auto update - as these are components that can allow malware to be installed from just browsing
I've often considered that there are more than just 3 (directional) dimensions in space. Gravity has the tendency to pull matter into as few dimensions as it can. Large balls of matter (planets/stars) are spherical (or really as much of a 1-dimensional point as is allowed by the inability for matter to occupy the same space). Solar systems and galaxies are eventually (more or less) 2 dimensional. Yes there are spherical galaxies, but "you're not thinking 4'th dimensionally" - they won't be that way eventually. The universe itself may have been many dimensions for some time after the big bang, but gravity has pulled most of the matter into the same 3 dimensions. It's possible that the universe is the analogous equivalent of a warped record - entire galaxies unseen to us because the light emitted by the stars aren't in the same 4'th dimension plane as our 3 dimensional eyes. Cosmic rays - pieces of matter that come at us from high speeds far away - could be oscillating back and forth through our plane, which would explain how they can pass through matter (they don't pass through our matter - they go around it). A lot of interesting ideas can be more easily realized if you reduce the number of dimensions. Pretend that we're 2 dimensional beings living on a 2 dimensional plane - with 2 dimensional light sources (sun). Anything slightly above or below that plane would be invisible to us - even though it's gravity would have an effect. We would really have no way to access these other physical directions - since our limbs and anything else that we have access to can only produce momentum in our 2 dimensions. Think about (I haven't been able to get this one) - if you were such a 2 dimensional being, how could you move yourself or some thing in that 3'rd dimension? What would you see?
How about take the kids that are actually fascinated by it, and do things to enrich them?
Then when they're ready to work, make sure they're in a position to use their talent and gift - instead of putting them in the "everyone is equal crowd" where everyone goes to meetings and discusses the various wrong way to do things?
I do this all the time in the winter but never knew it had a name. As I approach my driveway, I pull the E-Brake and make a more or less right angle turn into the driveway.
I thought it was more about static friction versus kinetic friction. That being, it takes more force to start an object sliding than it does to keep an object sliding. So if you're sliding, it's hard to regain control. ABS ensures that you're always in the realm of static friction.
But doctors love to save lives, teachers enjoy making that connection with a kid and watching his light bulb go on... People should love what they choose as a career path - but why is software engineering different? I DO love to code, but I feel as though I should be paid well to do it - since the fruits of my labor are making SOMEONE a lot of money. Why is it wrong to think that I deserve a piece of that? I honestly believe that software engineers are the worst business people in the world (as a generalization). My curse is that most of my colleagues think in the manner that you described, and thus I'm lumped in with them - treated more as a work horse than the scientific genius that I should be.
The idea of open source is good - take a product that is useful to you and have the ability to modify it as you see fit. Or contribute to an open source product with like minded people for the benefit of the whole.
In reality though, open source is destructive to innovation because of "the fine print". Programming is now less about writing good and innovative code than it is about the licensing. Companies have to find ways around this licensing in order to use the open source code in order to churn out a product that they can use to make a profit. When a software company can't make money selling software - they don't last long. After observing this model in action over the past years, open source is destructive to the laws of nature that drive innovative people to found companies based on a product that would otherwise thrive based on simple supply and demand.
Finally, open software and "free software" is most destructive to good software engineers themselves. What a foolish thing to do - to take your talent and assign it a NULL value. Being able to write good software is a gift that few people possess. We should be paid well to do it, but instead we are handing the ability to make money over to lawyers and sales crews. Engineering is now a group of replaceable cogs. If you're truly talented, you're wasting your time in this field.
Make software proprietary and of great value. Then we'd start to see gifted and talented people making an effort to use their talents in STEM careers.
Seems like this isn't the popular opinion, but the difference between DVD and BluRay on my 50" Panasonic plasma 1080p was remarkable and I am blown away by the picture. I can't imagine that another double of the resolution won't be just as great. The thing I'm curious about - last I checked Comcast wasn't even broadcasting 1080p - they were just doing 720p. Thus the only way to actually be able to fully appreciate the potential of my TV was to watch BluRays. Does Comcast now broadcast 1080p? I assume it will take them forever to get to 2160p. IMO, if you really want to see the difference - get "Planet Earth" on BluRay. All that said, I have friends that seem much more interested in brightness than in image quality, so perhaps I'm in the minority.
It all boils down to searching for a mate. Some percentage of the population chooses their profession because it's something that they love to do, or something that they happen to do exceptionally well. A lot of males end up being computer geeks because they lack the social skills or the looks to do anything that involves interaction with other people. In any tech company that I've been at, it's the sales guys that are raking in the money when things start to go well. Sales guys get the money because they're good at selling things - themselves. Software engineers are stupid enough to accept the role that they love what they're doing and that's reward enough. Maybe they'll get a pizza thrown their way for staying at work until 8PM - stupid. The women (other than the ones that become engineers because it's something they love) are certainly not going to gravitate toward computers for a reason of that's where they're going to find a man that can take care of them and their future offspring.
STEM is for losers. That's what our culture promotes (see "The Internship" for the latest example). Until we decide to start rewarding those who can use their brain instead of throwing a touchdown back in high school, STEM will continue to be for losers and women will steer clear.
I object to the all-encompassing title of "IT" that lumps together the different jobs of supporting the company infrastructure and those who write software. Not to lessen the importance of those who actually do IT, but I have always been good at writing computer software. More important than the EE degree was the fascination that I had as a 10 year old trying to write games in BASIC on my TRS80 CoCo. I believe that being able to write good software is a similar to being a good artist - it's not something that can be taught or trained as much as it's a skill that you're born with - your brain either works that way or it doesn't. IT, instead is something that you can be trained for. That said, there are good IT people - those who can solve complex problems, and bad ones - who simply know how to solve problems in the way that they were trained (reformat and reinstall).
Are you living the "American Dream"? That is - a wife, 2 kids, a dog, a cat and a house that is probably too expensive because you want to live in a town with an adequate school system? For most that I know, it's the nice car or the American dream. The exception is if your spouse also makes a comparable salary, in which case your kids are being raised by someone else.
...
"sold lawmakers on the need to improve 'America's access to high skilled foreign talent'. Smith added that Microsoft also wants to 'help American students and workers gain the skills needed for the jobs that will fuel the innovation economy"...
When will they understand that the access to foreign talent has a direct relationship to American students NOT WANTING these now undesirable jobs.
When people come here from a country where they're used to a lower standard of living, they accept a lower standard of living when they come here. American students don't want that - they aren't stupid - they want to do whatever it is that the people driving around in the nice cars are doing. It's not the programmers driving the nice cars.
Agreed, but it really bothers me to learn that cell phone providers are keeping complete record of your GPS coordinates - dutifully reported by your phone. Hernandez hadn't been accused of anything before his location was being stored. So when the state starts running low on money, will they simply go through the database and send tickets to everyone that had gone from point A to point B too fast?
But I thought that the magic was that you could change the spin on one and the other would be affected. If that's true then why couldn't you use it for zero latency communications? (minus the initial speed of light 'connection'). If it's false, well then I understand why everyone says that it's useless.
Once a product has been released, the product is out of the hands of development and becomes completely driven by marketing and sales. I've seen it happen a half a dozen times. So once it's released, you can kiss the idea of any new features good bye because all you'll be doing is fixing customer issues and adding features that sales guys get promised that a customer will buy a bunch of the product "if it had x". "x" always at that point gets implemented quick and dirty.
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Nuclear reactions happen when you enough radioactive stuff close enough to itself so that it begins a chain reaction, right? So why don't they just make some mechanical failsafe device that pulls the chunks apart to a distance where the reaction doesn't occur? Even if the bars had explosive bottom caps that would go off at a certain (high) temperature - blasting the bars away from each other like bullets is better than the situation where they all melt together and create a runaway reaction... I would think...
The previous phone that I had bought for my parents had this very feature. It had a prominent "911" button right on the phone. During setup, you program the phone to take a certain action when that button is pressed. In this case, I set it up to send a generic "Help - I'm in need of assistance" message to me and both of my sisters. A year later, we naturally forgot about this. One morning, around 2AM I got this strange message from my parents with that message. My sister called me soon after but no one could reach my parents - we feared the worst and called the police. Long story short - my mother had received a "wrong number" phone call late that night. In fumbling around in the dark, she had inadvertently sent the 911 distress. It took us a few days to piece together what actually happened, as we (at that point) had completely forgotten about the feature and it's function. So - morale of the story is I guess it can be a good thing, but the ease of use of sending a distress can also make it easy to send a false alarm and get a lot of people very worried and upset.
I've had significantly less 'support calls' from my parents in recent years. Back in the XP days it seems like they caught a virus every month. So I'm not sure if it's security essentials or Windows 7, but things are much better these days. The worst thing that seems to happen nowadays is that they get tricked into installing some sort of application that it designed to look like it's either virus protection or something to speed them up. They were getting phone calls - the person was trying to get their credit card number out of them by scaring them with nonsense like "our monitoring on your computer is all lit up red...". Anyway, all I have to do these days is occasionally uninstall anything that they got tricked into installing and running through windows update to install non-critical updates. The MOST important thing, I believe, is setting Java and the Adobe products to auto update - as these are components that can allow malware to be installed from just browsing
How can it be illegal to be racist? I mean - I know it's socially unacceptable and personally I know it's wrong to be racist - but illegal?
I've often considered that there are more than just 3 (directional) dimensions in space. Gravity has the tendency to pull matter into as few dimensions as it can. Large balls of matter (planets/stars) are spherical (or really as much of a 1-dimensional point as is allowed by the inability for matter to occupy the same space). Solar systems and galaxies are eventually (more or less) 2 dimensional. Yes there are spherical galaxies, but "you're not thinking 4'th dimensionally" - they won't be that way eventually. The universe itself may have been many dimensions for some time after the big bang, but gravity has pulled most of the matter into the same 3 dimensions. It's possible that the universe is the analogous equivalent of a warped record - entire galaxies unseen to us because the light emitted by the stars aren't in the same 4'th dimension plane as our 3 dimensional eyes. Cosmic rays - pieces of matter that come at us from high speeds far away - could be oscillating back and forth through our plane, which would explain how they can pass through matter (they don't pass through our matter - they go around it). A lot of interesting ideas can be more easily realized if you reduce the number of dimensions. Pretend that we're 2 dimensional beings living on a 2 dimensional plane - with 2 dimensional light sources (sun). Anything slightly above or below that plane would be invisible to us - even though it's gravity would have an effect. We would really have no way to access these other physical directions - since our limbs and anything else that we have access to can only produce momentum in our 2 dimensions. Think about (I haven't been able to get this one) - if you were such a 2 dimensional being, how could you move yourself or some thing in that 3'rd dimension? What would you see?
How about take the kids that are actually fascinated by it, and do things to enrich them? Then when they're ready to work, make sure they're in a position to use their talent and gift - instead of putting them in the "everyone is equal crowd" where everyone goes to meetings and discusses the various wrong way to do things?
I do this all the time in the winter but never knew it had a name. As I approach my driveway, I pull the E-Brake and make a more or less right angle turn into the driveway.
I thought it was more about static friction versus kinetic friction. That being, it takes more force to start an object sliding than it does to keep an object sliding. So if you're sliding, it's hard to regain control. ABS ensures that you're always in the realm of static friction.
But doctors love to save lives, teachers enjoy making that connection with a kid and watching his light bulb go on... People should love what they choose as a career path - but why is software engineering different? I DO love to code, but I feel as though I should be paid well to do it - since the fruits of my labor are making SOMEONE a lot of money. Why is it wrong to think that I deserve a piece of that? I honestly believe that software engineers are the worst business people in the world (as a generalization). My curse is that most of my colleagues think in the manner that you described, and thus I'm lumped in with them - treated more as a work horse than the scientific genius that I should be.
The idea of open source is good - take a product that is useful to you and have the ability to modify it as you see fit. Or contribute to an open source product with like minded people for the benefit of the whole. In reality though, open source is destructive to innovation because of "the fine print". Programming is now less about writing good and innovative code than it is about the licensing. Companies have to find ways around this licensing in order to use the open source code in order to churn out a product that they can use to make a profit. When a software company can't make money selling software - they don't last long. After observing this model in action over the past years, open source is destructive to the laws of nature that drive innovative people to found companies based on a product that would otherwise thrive based on simple supply and demand. Finally, open software and "free software" is most destructive to good software engineers themselves. What a foolish thing to do - to take your talent and assign it a NULL value. Being able to write good software is a gift that few people possess. We should be paid well to do it, but instead we are handing the ability to make money over to lawyers and sales crews. Engineering is now a group of replaceable cogs. If you're truly talented, you're wasting your time in this field. Make software proprietary and of great value. Then we'd start to see gifted and talented people making an effort to use their talents in STEM careers.
Seems like this isn't the popular opinion, but the difference between DVD and BluRay on my 50" Panasonic plasma 1080p was remarkable and I am blown away by the picture. I can't imagine that another double of the resolution won't be just as great. The thing I'm curious about - last I checked Comcast wasn't even broadcasting 1080p - they were just doing 720p. Thus the only way to actually be able to fully appreciate the potential of my TV was to watch BluRays. Does Comcast now broadcast 1080p? I assume it will take them forever to get to 2160p. IMO, if you really want to see the difference - get "Planet Earth" on BluRay. All that said, I have friends that seem much more interested in brightness than in image quality, so perhaps I'm in the minority.
Do you really believe that Kenyans don't possess genetics that tend to make them better runners?
Perhaps if computers worked via feelings, emotions and mood swings, things would be different?
It all boils down to searching for a mate. Some percentage of the population chooses their profession because it's something that they love to do, or something that they happen to do exceptionally well. A lot of males end up being computer geeks because they lack the social skills or the looks to do anything that involves interaction with other people. In any tech company that I've been at, it's the sales guys that are raking in the money when things start to go well. Sales guys get the money because they're good at selling things - themselves. Software engineers are stupid enough to accept the role that they love what they're doing and that's reward enough. Maybe they'll get a pizza thrown their way for staying at work until 8PM - stupid. The women (other than the ones that become engineers because it's something they love) are certainly not going to gravitate toward computers for a reason of that's where they're going to find a man that can take care of them and their future offspring. STEM is for losers. That's what our culture promotes (see "The Internship" for the latest example). Until we decide to start rewarding those who can use their brain instead of throwing a touchdown back in high school, STEM will continue to be for losers and women will steer clear.
I object to the all-encompassing title of "IT" that lumps together the different jobs of supporting the company infrastructure and those who write software. Not to lessen the importance of those who actually do IT, but I have always been good at writing computer software. More important than the EE degree was the fascination that I had as a 10 year old trying to write games in BASIC on my TRS80 CoCo. I believe that being able to write good software is a similar to being a good artist - it's not something that can be taught or trained as much as it's a skill that you're born with - your brain either works that way or it doesn't. IT, instead is something that you can be trained for. That said, there are good IT people - those who can solve complex problems, and bad ones - who simply know how to solve problems in the way that they were trained (reformat and reinstall).
hushmail.com. The servers are outside the country.
Are you living the "American Dream"? That is - a wife, 2 kids, a dog, a cat and a house that is probably too expensive because you want to live in a town with an adequate school system? For most that I know, it's the nice car or the American dream. The exception is if your spouse also makes a comparable salary, in which case your kids are being raised by someone else.
... "sold lawmakers on the need to improve 'America's access to high skilled foreign talent'. Smith added that Microsoft also wants to 'help American students and workers gain the skills needed for the jobs that will fuel the innovation economy" ...
When will they understand that the access to foreign talent has a direct relationship to American students NOT WANTING these now undesirable jobs.
When people come here from a country where they're used to a lower standard of living, they accept a lower standard of living when they come here. American students don't want that - they aren't stupid - they want to do whatever it is that the people driving around in the nice cars are doing. It's not the programmers driving the nice cars.
What the hell does QA do these days anyway?
I could imagine that some modules of a rocket could be assembled in a 'downward' facing orientation.
Agreed, but it really bothers me to learn that cell phone providers are keeping complete record of your GPS coordinates - dutifully reported by your phone. Hernandez hadn't been accused of anything before his location was being stored. So when the state starts running low on money, will they simply go through the database and send tickets to everyone that had gone from point A to point B too fast?
All the way up to infinity? Give me a few minutes to work on this...
Then x, y, and z can be anything. The way it's worded here, problem solved. Thanks - send cash please.
But I thought that the magic was that you could change the spin on one and the other would be affected. If that's true then why couldn't you use it for zero latency communications? (minus the initial speed of light 'connection'). If it's false, well then I understand why everyone says that it's useless.
Once a product has been released, the product is out of the hands of development and becomes completely driven by marketing and sales. I've seen it happen a half a dozen times. So once it's released, you can kiss the idea of any new features good bye because all you'll be doing is fixing customer issues and adding features that sales guys get promised that a customer will buy a bunch of the product "if it had x". "x" always at that point gets implemented quick and dirty.