Last year, about this time, I was getting paid TONS of overtime - but there was a change in California law, and they had to re-classify my job, and they were no longer able to pay me for my overtime. Though - the parameters of our contract, and what we were trying to accomplish for our customer didn't change - my role on the project didn't change. I was just no longer considered a "grunt" for exempt/nonexempt purposes.
So you bet your sweet ass I went to work somewhere else. Now I pretty much have the same deal, but at least I'm on a project that does not have insane deadlines that require constant 60-70hr weeks. I can work 40hr weeks most of the time, and yes, a couple weeks back, I did work an uncompensated 60hr week. But after that week, that was it. At my old employer, 50+ was the norm. It was fine when I was getting paid for that time.
too effin true. Every single teacher I've had so far insists: Notepad and javac.exe. (jokes on them, I use Notepad++).
My favorite IDE for java development is XCode (when I have the pleasure of using a Mac), though I guess I like Eclipse just fine. Every time I change employers, there's a new Java IDE that's "everyone's favorite" (ie. the one mgt pays for). Oracle JDeveloper, NetBeans, now, IntelliJ.
Well, considering that Japan is not obligated to fund its own national defense (ie. Military Industrial Complex), I'd say that they have a huge advantage.
It's worse than just a bad-lending-practices crisis. It's a Media Monopoly crisis. Haven't you watched CNN/Fox/MSNBCBS? The problem isn't the lenders, the problem is just a few bad borrowers (subprime) and the fact that all these mortgage backed securities bundled the subprimes in too complexly, so that risk cannot be assessed on these securities. THAT'S the "official" story.
And the problem with this is - we will NOT learn from this mistake. Just like we did not learn from our past mistakes of the S&L crisis of the late 1980's. The media has SO distorted what the cause of the problem is: (Bad monetary policy, along with the fact that, when these private banks and lenders fail, taxpayers bail them out - but when the borrowers fail, nobody bails them out, and they're still obligated as taxpayers to bail out the failed lenders! - and the borrow/lend expertise is supposed to be the DOMAIN of the lender, not the borrower, yet it's the borrower who is being punished for a bad loan? Not the lender?).
This will be a wholesale raping of the American middle class, the taxpayer, the treasury, the value of the US dollar - and in 10 years, this nation will be wholly owned by foreign corporate interests.
That on/off switch is called "The War on (some) Drugs".
Also known as "Free Market" prices for food. (better yet; elimination of food and housing costs from computation of CPI statistics - they can cause you pain, and then claim you're not in pain.)
I think that in large part, when torture is used, the torturers don't care if they leave marks, in fact, they WANT to leave marks. This is why torture victims are often not killed, or if they are killed, their bodies are discarded in public places where everyone can see what happens to people who "step out of line". (or who are born Sunni - as is the case in Iraq, where dozens of people are dumped in vacant lots or intersections DAILY with power-drill holes in their heads, electric burns, etc.)
Torture is a weapon of terror.
It's even more convenient now that the torturers and terrorizers can simply mount this "pain ray" weapon on a telephone pole, or a bell tower, or cell-phone tower, along with a closed-circuit surveillance video camera, and just blast away at anyone who "needs pain" - any time.
Of course, this technology has been available for some time. I've heard that operators of antiaircraft missile batteries (like HAWK, and others) can cook small animals and people at ranges of several hundred yards, just by pointing the antennae in the right direction - and these stories have circulated since the 1970's. If all you want to do is cause pain, anonymously, and if you don't care about lasting damage - then they've been able to do this for a long time.
Having spent a fair amount of time on Mountain Bikes Made Of Exotic Materials, and having experienced (nay- CAUSED) catastrophic failures of various alloys of steel, crome-moly, aluminum, and structural members of carbon-fiber, I'll just relate my experience:
When an aluminum BIKE part gets nicked, or scratched, by brushing up against a rock, or having another bike lay down on top of it, there's a pretty decent chance that you're going to have to live with a nasty, ugly nick on that part for many, many years, (unless you sand it down and polish it, or whatever). Mind you; aluminum bike parts are make much beefier than aluminum airplane parts - probably different alloy as well.
When a carbon-fiber part suffers even a very minor nick or scratch, it does not take many more hours of riding before that nick develops into a fracture, and that fracture unzips into a full-on shear-crack all the way through.
The last used Mountain Bike I bought, came with a carbon fiber handle bar that the Previous Owner thought was cool. I took it off, gave it back to him, and bought an aluminum one. If I need to save 2 oz of weight, I'll take a piss before I ride. That way, I get to maybe keep all my teeth a bit longer.
That said; the potential weight savings of one carbon fiber handlebar, ridden maybe once a week, versus a fleet of carbon fiber planes, each flying perhaps 3-5 trips a day, the savings are more significant.
But if these carbon fiber fusalages have the same wear and tear characteristics as cf used in cycling applications, then I suspect it won't be more than a year or two before we start seeing catastrophic airframe failures, just from pressure-cycling these things. Hopefully, I never have to fly in one before the FAA figures that out and grounds the fuckers. Carbon Fiber scares the crap out of me. Show me a 99.9999% safety record over 10 years before I change my mind.
BS, at my American public school, in 1983, in (required) US History class, we spent 3 months on the Vietnam Conflict. They taught us the phony Gulf of Tonkin incident, the French colonial involvement (and smarmy handoff), war profiteering, the whole 9 yards. Don't tell me they don't teach kids this stuff. That's bullshit. The problem with this is, kids take this lesson, go to college, join the young republicans, or watch FoxNews, and learn that the reason we didn't win in Vietnam, was because we didn't clap loud enough (not because it was immoral, or the wrong approach to assymetric warfare...) . So these same bastards are standing around watching the Iraq war, shouting at the rest of us "Clap louder!" -
We're not in Iraq because we've forgotten history, or because we didn't teach it. It's because we let it get spun the wrong way, then we put these incredibly misguided people back in power; (Bush, etc.) after we KNEW that they wanted a Vietnam re-do; because by their many public statements since their time in the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 41 administrations (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove) - they've made it plain that this is what they believe. Were American voters stupid to trust this team? Recycled miscreants from Watergate? Yes, absofucking lutely. And that's what we got. 8 more years of VietNam, Watergate, Iran Contra. I would have been happier with 8 more years of Monica (hopefully, Gore would have chosen a more attractive intern?)
hm. fair-use value of 50,000 copies of a P2P-shared $1.20 Britney Spears single.
versus:
fair-use value of 50,000 copies of a P2P-shared $120 Physics Textbook.
Calculate the benefit to us all from the outcome of such unrestricted sharing. In the first case, Britney Spears doesn't get paid, and perhaps stops producing music. In the second, 50,000 kids learn physics, maybe grow up and write their own textbooks.
First: Price a scope of at least 11" - this is the minimum aperture. Trust me.
Next: With this investment as a barrier in mind, instead, spend about $100 on a quality pair of binoculars. After you move. Go sit outside a few nights there. Make sure you have decent weather.
Then: Make sure that you actually LIKE to sit outside, quietly, patiently, for hours and hours and hours, alone, in the dark, looking up at the stars. If the weather is foggy, or dusty, or if you find that you don't have the stomach for hanging out with the coyotes, then maybe spending the $5000+++ on a decent telescope isn't such a great idea.
Luckily, I was just mouthing off to my wife about liking astronomy, and she thought it would be neat to buy me one of those low-end automount celestrons, which are nice and all, (120mm), but not really useful for seeing anything really cool (like comets or asteroids, or ANY galaxies other than Andromeda). So, the good thing about this was, I also had moved to a rural location - but there was STILL some pretty significant light pollution (neighborhood streetlights). And, frequent marine-layer fog. But most of all, I found that on any given night, at 2am, I didn't really feel like being outside watching the stars. I preferred being in my nice warm bed, gazing at the insides of my eyelids.
Heh - I removed all the sound shielding from the engine compartment of my Jetta, so my diesel sounds like a diesel. Don't tell me there's no damn diesel culture in this country. You can hear it clear from sea to shining sea damn it!
It's not the foreign policy issue that I would worry about.
If China builds a large manufacturing base and military machine, and becomes economically dependent upon it as the US and Russia, and the UK has - THEN I would worry. Because THAT is what will then drive economic and foreign policy. (and I think that that has already begun to happen in China).
What you see happening in countries like Iran, where you've got a loudmouth trying to cling to power using transparent nationalistic appeal propaganda - that's a different game, and really, less of a threat, because it's a small number of people without much of a stake in the game.
But when you've got a large chunk of the population with their livelihoods invested in the military industrial complex, you'll find they're willing to delude themselves quite deeply, to fight to protect that livelihood, as we have done in the US for three generations.
Yeah - this is what blows me away - not only about this particular issue (and others from Microsoft) but also, some of the issues we've seen with the US executive administration (Bush White House) where they openly talked about certain things via email - got in trouble, because there are laws (Hatch Act) about archiving and review of these emails - so they started using an outside email server (belonging to their political party), in violation of law, (as well as national security policy - because the email traffic discussed national security matters in-the-clear, on assets that were not owned by the government). . . they were SOOO stupid about their corruption - and yet they STILL are getting away with it.
Well, there's Alzheimer's, and then there's Senile Dementia, and the two can actually be independent syndromes, affecting the same person at different times. Senile Dementia is usually much less severe, progresses over a much longer period of time. It's also more of a description of a set of symptoms, than a diagnosis of a condition. All of my grandparents had Senile Dementia but not Alzheimer's- and my mother's starting to show signs in her 70's. She knows it. One of the problems with SD is stubborn, fiesty, denial.
When I have a clear set of problems to solve, a clear direction, I can cycle code, compile, test, code, compile, test for 8, 10, 16 hours STRAIGHT. Then document it, check it in, write test cases, etc. Unfortunately - this "ideal" set of circumstances happens so infrequently in many work environments. It's really sad, because it's the most challenging and rewarding kind of development work there is.
When you get into large projects where you're coordinating with other developers, perhaps geographically distributed, and testers, and maybe a documentation team, or if there's funding issues, or you can't access the hardware for political reasons, etc. - these kinds of things can generate a lot of downtime and frustration. And they say that a mature engineer "finds" things to work on; but in some organizations, you're not *permitted* to work on things outside of a certain tightly-defined charge-code. Situations like these; it doesn't surprise me when people cyberslack.
I've worked for too many managers who just have no freaking clue how to properly put together a schedule for a project - and every single time, you see the examples and rules documented in THIS BOOK, violated, and you end up with a disaster.
Workers who are not permitted to succeed, are unhappy workers.
No matter what you pay them.
Please read this book, and put it into practice. Your workers will thank you. Your customers will thank you. Your superiors will probably fire you.
Yeah - lucky me, before I had to fire the guy - I mean REALLY had to, the customer cut off funding for the project and we ALL got fired. Ironically, we were the ONLY project out of the 4 projects the customer had going, that was actually ON SCHEDULE, we were the smallest project, and the shortest. We were a 6-month job, 2 weeks from completion; representing an upgrade effort to a component of a 5-year contract that was going on its 10th year (and, I believe, just started its 11th year last month). - oh, it's a sick, sick world. And I'm not sure I'm cut out to be a manager in it. I can lead projects. But I can't fire people.
People who are genuinely trying, but just aren't up to snuff - I can't do it.
People who CAN do the work, but refuse to, I'll fire those guys. No problem.
Currently - the economic terms are based on how much oil we can pump out of the ground in a given time-frame.
When oil (fossil fuels) ceases to be the primary driver of economies - it looks like solar is poised to take over as the #1 technology (with wind/nuclear/geothermal coming in somewhere next); and solar will likely be a function of square-footage-of-sunlight-per-year. The more land a person owns, in a sunny energy-producing region, the more wealth, over time, that person can create. Simply by covering it with solar panels, the more efficient, the better, and praying for sun. Electricity will be a market, there will always be buyers. Locale will probably produce different market rates, because of transmission losses. People will eventually start floating solar farms at sea, and putting them into space (though those, apparently don't scale DOWN well, you need a certain MINIMUM to beam the power via microwaves, efficiently).
But you're right. The $/kw-h calculation looks quite silly when you have solar power. There was a lot of FUD about solar about 5-10 years ago, that solar cells had a reputation for "wearing out" after 10-15 years, or losing power over time. This caused some solar-opponents to create a $/kw-h calculation; how much power you could expect to get out of a solar cell over the lifetime of the cell. Some even claimed that they cost more energy to manufacture than they'd ever produce. This was dead wrong then, and it's dead wrong now: there were some specific kinds of solar cells made in the 1970's that had defects, with dyes that turned brown, etc. Other solar cells went "bad" when their glass enclosures cracked, or their solder joints failed, etc - all things that could be repaired, or engineered for better longevity. These are no longer issues in any modern solar technology. We don't know about these new nanotechnology or thin-film based solar panels. Only time will tell. But it's not likely that they're going to "wear out" like this. For all effective purposes - you manufacture a solar cell, and it produces electricity "forever".
Um - correction - my bad; big aperture!=more depth of field, small aperture does.
Speculative point on HDR cinema still holds. (though I don't know how it would be accomplished, specifically - if I knew that, then I would have invented it myself. . . )
And there is widespread disagreement on which factions were "mainstream" and which were marginalized extremists. And the landscape tended to shift as the war went on and on and on, and as different representatives of different factions either succeeded or failed at achieving various goals that mainstream Irish people found popular.
By and large - having been raised in Chicago, having known some Irish-Americans, some who were tuned in to the conflict, some who very much participated, both funding, and materially supporting these terrorist activities - during most of the 1970's, and some of the 1980's, it was considered to be very unacceptable to target civilians, and great pains were taken to avoid harming them. Though I'm aware of other times in the long history of the conflict when there were factions that were really pissed off at the British, and the goal was not political separation, but physical annihilation (as childish or unrealistic as that may be).
If you want any indication of what the British have gone through; just watch the movie Braveheart; that's the Scottish - who eventually pretty much reconciled (though, they're talking about separating again). The British have also gone through this with the Welsh, to a lesser degree, and of course, the Falkland Islands, and Hong Kong, India, they're currently pulling out of Basra for the second miserable time this century. . . poor blokes! And then the Germans and the French are always beating up on them. Is it their breath? Who knows? In the case of the Scottish, the disagreement doesn't even seem to have anything to do with religion, and that war has been pretty brutal and barbaric in the past.
Yeah, I'm just waitin for you to walk out in front of a bus, or to accidentally forget to unplug your laptop the next time you take it into the bathtub with you. . .
Well, I can't disagree with you that telecom is infrastructure. It clearly is. But where does that infrastructure end? In the US, the changeover, at least on the telephone handset side, was one of the most successful examples I can think of. You used to have to lease the damn telephone from the company, there was basically one style, maybe 3 colors, they were large, clunky, way overdesigned (but at least they were rugged as hell). After the monopoly was broken up, companies started selling phones, people could buy their own, and choose from hundreds of different kinds from dozens of manufacturers, now with innovative features like caller id, built-in answering machines, cordless, etc. NONE of this technology existed in the market without the competition, before.
So while I agree, that for things like roads and bridges, you must have state-run infrastructure. But for things like cars, maybe a free-market system to manufacture them is better. (but on that note - I *do* think that a nationalized energy infrastructure is probably a better solution than a for-profit private energy infrastructure - it's such a crucial lynchpin of the entire economy, they've got everyone by the balls, there's just too much motive for behaviors that can really screw things up; price-fixing, hoarding, market-diversion, ignorance of emissions-costs, etc.)
personally, I think she misunderstood the technology they're shooting for; I think what they're probably doing is HDR cinema - where they're not doing infinite depth of field, (which is actually fairly easy to obtain with a wide aperture), but rather, a high dynamic range, which is a fairly new technology in digital photography, and some automatic cameras with this feature are just starting to appear. It wouldn't surprise me if there weren't people experimenting with it in cinema. The color effect would very likely be very Anime-like, from some of the HDR photography I've seen.
Slashdot Mirror
Last year, about this time, I was getting paid TONS of overtime - but there was a change in California law, and they had to re-classify my job, and they were no longer able to pay me for my overtime. Though - the parameters of our contract, and what we were trying to accomplish for our customer didn't change - my role on the project didn't change. I was just no longer considered a "grunt" for exempt/nonexempt purposes.
So you bet your sweet ass I went to work somewhere else. Now I pretty much have the same deal, but at least I'm on a project that does not have insane deadlines that require constant 60-70hr weeks. I can work 40hr weeks most of the time, and yes, a couple weeks back, I did work an uncompensated 60hr week. But after that week, that was it. At my old employer, 50+ was the norm. It was fine when I was getting paid for that time.
too effin true. Every single teacher I've had so far insists: Notepad and javac.exe. (jokes on them, I use Notepad++).
My favorite IDE for java development is XCode (when I have the pleasure of using a Mac), though I guess I like Eclipse just fine. Every time I change employers, there's a new Java IDE that's "everyone's favorite" (ie. the one mgt pays for). Oracle JDeveloper, NetBeans, now, IntelliJ.
Oh yeah, and BlueJ sucks ass.
Well, considering that Japan is not obligated to fund its own national defense (ie. Military Industrial Complex), I'd say that they have a huge advantage.
It's worse than just a bad-lending-practices crisis. It's a Media Monopoly crisis. Haven't you watched CNN/Fox/MSNBCBS? The problem isn't the lenders, the problem is just a few bad borrowers (subprime) and the fact that all these mortgage backed securities bundled the subprimes in too complexly, so that risk cannot be assessed on these securities. THAT'S the "official" story.
And the problem with this is - we will NOT learn from this mistake. Just like we did not learn from our past mistakes of the S&L crisis of the late 1980's. The media has SO distorted what the cause of the problem is: (Bad monetary policy, along with the fact that, when these private banks and lenders fail, taxpayers bail them out - but when the borrowers fail, nobody bails them out, and they're still obligated as taxpayers to bail out the failed lenders! - and the borrow/lend expertise is supposed to be the DOMAIN of the lender, not the borrower, yet it's the borrower who is being punished for a bad loan? Not the lender?).
This will be a wholesale raping of the American middle class, the taxpayer, the treasury, the value of the US dollar - and in 10 years, this nation will be wholly owned by foreign corporate interests.
That on/off switch is called "The War on (some) Drugs".
Also known as "Free Market" prices for food. (better yet; elimination of food and housing costs from computation of CPI statistics - they can cause you pain, and then claim you're not in pain.)
I think that in large part, when torture is used, the torturers don't care if they leave marks, in fact, they WANT to leave marks. This is why torture victims are often not killed, or if they are killed, their bodies are discarded in public places where everyone can see what happens to people who "step out of line". (or who are born Sunni - as is the case in Iraq, where dozens of people are dumped in vacant lots or intersections DAILY with power-drill holes in their heads, electric burns, etc.)
Torture is a weapon of terror.
It's even more convenient now that the torturers and terrorizers can simply mount this "pain ray" weapon on a telephone pole, or a bell tower, or cell-phone tower, along with a closed-circuit surveillance video camera, and just blast away at anyone who "needs pain" - any time.
Of course, this technology has been available for some time. I've heard that operators of antiaircraft missile batteries (like HAWK, and others) can cook small animals and people at ranges of several hundred yards, just by pointing the antennae in the right direction - and these stories have circulated since the 1970's. If all you want to do is cause pain, anonymously, and if you don't care about lasting damage - then they've been able to do this for a long time.
Having spent a fair amount of time on Mountain Bikes Made Of Exotic Materials, and having experienced (nay- CAUSED) catastrophic failures of various alloys of steel, crome-moly, aluminum, and structural members of carbon-fiber, I'll just relate my experience:
When an aluminum BIKE part gets nicked, or scratched, by brushing up against a rock, or having another bike lay down on top of it, there's a pretty decent chance that you're going to have to live with a nasty, ugly nick on that part for many, many years, (unless you sand it down and polish it, or whatever). Mind you; aluminum bike parts are make much beefier than aluminum airplane parts - probably different alloy as well.
When a carbon-fiber part suffers even a very minor nick or scratch, it does not take many more hours of riding before that nick develops into a fracture, and that fracture unzips into a full-on shear-crack all the way through.
The last used Mountain Bike I bought, came with a carbon fiber handle bar that the Previous Owner thought was cool. I took it off, gave it back to him, and bought an aluminum one. If I need to save 2 oz of weight, I'll take a piss before I ride. That way, I get to maybe keep all my teeth a bit longer.
That said; the potential weight savings of one carbon fiber handlebar, ridden maybe once a week, versus a fleet of carbon fiber planes, each flying perhaps 3-5 trips a day, the savings are more significant.
But if these carbon fiber fusalages have the same wear and tear characteristics as cf used in cycling applications, then I suspect it won't be more than a year or two before we start seeing catastrophic airframe failures, just from pressure-cycling these things. Hopefully, I never have to fly in one before the FAA figures that out and grounds the fuckers. Carbon Fiber scares the crap out of me. Show me a 99.9999% safety record over 10 years before I change my mind.
BS, at my American public school, in 1983, in (required) US History class, we spent 3 months on the Vietnam Conflict. They taught us the phony Gulf of Tonkin incident, the French colonial involvement (and smarmy handoff), war profiteering, the whole 9 yards. Don't tell me they don't teach kids this stuff. That's bullshit. The problem with this is, kids take this lesson, go to college, join the young republicans, or watch FoxNews, and learn that the reason we didn't win in Vietnam, was because we didn't clap loud enough (not because it was immoral, or the wrong approach to assymetric warfare...) . So these same bastards are standing around watching the Iraq war, shouting at the rest of us "Clap louder!" -
We're not in Iraq because we've forgotten history, or because we didn't teach it. It's because we let it get spun the wrong way, then we put these incredibly misguided people back in power; (Bush, etc.) after we KNEW that they wanted a Vietnam re-do; because by their many public statements since their time in the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 41 administrations (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove) - they've made it plain that this is what they believe. Were American voters stupid to trust this team? Recycled miscreants from Watergate? Yes, absofucking lutely. And that's what we got. 8 more years of VietNam, Watergate, Iran Contra. I would have been happier with 8 more years of Monica (hopefully, Gore would have chosen a more attractive intern?)
hm. fair-use value of 50,000 copies of a P2P-shared $1.20 Britney Spears single.
versus:
fair-use value of 50,000 copies of a P2P-shared $120 Physics Textbook.
Calculate the benefit to us all from the outcome of such unrestricted sharing.
In the first case, Britney Spears doesn't get paid, and perhaps stops producing music.
In the second, 50,000 kids learn physics, maybe grow up and write their own textbooks.
First:
Price a scope of at least 11" - this is the minimum aperture. Trust me.
Next:
With this investment as a barrier in mind, instead, spend about $100 on a quality pair of binoculars. After you move. Go sit outside a few nights there. Make sure you have decent weather.
Then:
Make sure that you actually LIKE to sit outside, quietly, patiently, for hours and hours and hours, alone, in the dark, looking up at the stars. If the weather is foggy, or dusty, or if you find that you don't have the stomach for hanging out with the coyotes, then maybe spending the $5000+++ on a decent telescope isn't such a great idea.
Luckily, I was just mouthing off to my wife about liking astronomy, and she thought it would be neat to buy me one of those low-end automount celestrons, which are nice and all, (120mm), but not really useful for seeing anything really cool (like comets or asteroids, or ANY galaxies other than Andromeda). So, the good thing about this was, I also had moved to a rural location - but there was STILL some pretty significant light pollution (neighborhood streetlights). And, frequent marine-layer fog. But most of all, I found that on any given night, at 2am, I didn't really feel like being outside watching the stars. I preferred being in my nice warm bed, gazing at the insides of my eyelids.
Heh -
I removed all the sound shielding from the engine compartment of my Jetta, so my diesel sounds like a diesel. Don't tell me there's no damn diesel culture in this country. You can hear it clear from sea to shining sea damn it!
It's not the foreign policy issue that I would worry about.
If China builds a large manufacturing base and military machine, and becomes economically dependent upon it as the US and Russia, and the UK has - THEN I would worry. Because THAT is what will then drive economic and foreign policy. (and I think that that has already begun to happen in China).
What you see happening in countries like Iran, where you've got a loudmouth trying to cling to power using transparent nationalistic appeal propaganda - that's a different game, and really, less of a threat, because it's a small number of people without much of a stake in the game.
But when you've got a large chunk of the population with their livelihoods invested in the military industrial complex, you'll find they're willing to delude themselves quite deeply, to fight to protect that livelihood, as we have done in the US for three generations.
Yeah - this is what blows me away - not only about this particular issue (and others from Microsoft) but also, some of the issues we've seen with the US executive administration (Bush White House) where they openly talked about certain things via email - got in trouble, because there are laws (Hatch Act) about archiving and review of these emails - so they started using an outside email server (belonging to their political party), in violation of law, (as well as national security policy - because the email traffic discussed national security matters in-the-clear, on assets that were not owned by the government). . . they were SOOO stupid about their corruption - and yet they STILL are getting away with it.
These are supposed to be our best and brightest.
Well, there's Alzheimer's, and then there's Senile Dementia, and the two can actually be independent syndromes, affecting the same person at different times. Senile Dementia is usually much less severe, progresses over a much longer period of time. It's also more of a description of a set of symptoms, than a diagnosis of a condition. All of my grandparents had Senile Dementia but not Alzheimer's- and my mother's starting to show signs in her 70's. She knows it. One of the problems with SD is stubborn, fiesty, denial.
I don't think that's necessarily true.
When I have a clear set of problems to solve, a clear direction, I can cycle code, compile, test, code, compile, test for 8, 10, 16 hours STRAIGHT. Then document it, check it in, write test cases, etc. Unfortunately - this "ideal" set of circumstances happens so infrequently in many work environments. It's really sad, because it's the most challenging and rewarding kind of development work there is.
When you get into large projects where you're coordinating with other developers, perhaps geographically distributed, and testers, and maybe a documentation team, or if there's funding issues, or you can't access the hardware for political reasons, etc. - these kinds of things can generate a lot of downtime and frustration. And they say that a mature engineer "finds" things to work on; but in some organizations, you're not *permitted* to work on things outside of a certain tightly-defined charge-code. Situations like these; it doesn't surprise me when people cyberslack.
From just a couple of days ago;S ense-Rules-082207/
r actice-OReilly/dp/0596007868/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-8 644951-0733743?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1188403226&sr=8 -1
http://www.insidecrm.com/features/Manager-Common-
Also, I'd recommend the book:
http://www.amazon.com/Project-Management-Theory-P
The Art of Project Management (by Scott Berkun).
I've worked for too many managers who just have no freaking clue how to properly put together a schedule for a project - and every single time, you see the examples and rules documented in THIS BOOK, violated, and you end up with a disaster.
Workers who are not permitted to succeed, are unhappy workers.
No matter what you pay them.
Please read this book, and put it into practice. Your workers will thank you. Your customers will thank you. Your superiors will probably fire you.
Yeah - lucky me, before I had to fire the guy - I mean REALLY had to, the customer cut off funding for the project and we ALL got fired. Ironically, we were the ONLY project out of the 4 projects the customer had going, that was actually ON SCHEDULE, we were the smallest project, and the shortest. We were a 6-month job, 2 weeks from completion; representing an upgrade effort to a component of a 5-year contract that was going on its 10th year (and, I believe, just started its 11th year last month). - oh, it's a sick, sick world. And I'm not sure I'm cut out to be a manager in it. I can lead projects. But I can't fire people.
People who are genuinely trying, but just aren't up to snuff - I can't do it.
People who CAN do the work, but refuse to, I'll fire those guys. No problem.
Yes, absolutely!
By all means, invite Lawrence Lessig as well!
Ah - but it DOES have a meaning.
Or it WILL have a meaning.
Currently - the economic terms are based on how much oil we can pump out of the ground in a given time-frame.
When oil (fossil fuels) ceases to be the primary driver of economies - it looks like solar is poised to take over as the #1 technology (with wind/nuclear/geothermal coming in somewhere next); and solar will likely be a function of square-footage-of-sunlight-per-year. The more land a person owns, in a sunny energy-producing region, the more wealth, over time, that person can create. Simply by covering it with solar panels, the more efficient, the better, and praying for sun. Electricity will be a market, there will always be buyers. Locale will probably produce different market rates, because of transmission losses. People will eventually start floating solar farms at sea, and putting them into space (though those, apparently don't scale DOWN well, you need a certain MINIMUM to beam the power via microwaves, efficiently).
But you're right. The $/kw-h calculation looks quite silly when you have solar power. There was a lot of FUD about solar about 5-10 years ago, that solar cells had a reputation for "wearing out" after 10-15 years, or losing power over time. This caused some solar-opponents to create a $/kw-h calculation; how much power you could expect to get out of a solar cell over the lifetime of the cell. Some even claimed that they cost more energy to manufacture than they'd ever produce. This was dead wrong then, and it's dead wrong now: there were some specific kinds of solar cells made in the 1970's that had defects, with dyes that turned brown, etc. Other solar cells went "bad" when their glass enclosures cracked, or their solder joints failed, etc - all things that could be repaired, or engineered for better longevity. These are no longer issues in any modern solar technology. We don't know about these new nanotechnology or thin-film based solar panels. Only time will tell. But it's not likely that they're going to "wear out" like this. For all effective purposes - you manufacture a solar cell, and it produces electricity "forever".
Um - correction - my bad; big aperture!=more depth of field, small aperture does.
Speculative point on HDR cinema still holds.
(though I don't know how it would be accomplished, specifically - if I knew that, then I would have invented it myself. . . )
There were factions within the IRA.
And there is widespread disagreement on which factions were "mainstream" and which were marginalized extremists. And the landscape tended to shift as the war went on and on and on, and as different representatives of different factions either succeeded or failed at achieving various goals that mainstream Irish people found popular.
By and large - having been raised in Chicago, having known some Irish-Americans, some who were tuned in to the conflict, some who very much participated, both funding, and materially supporting these terrorist activities - during most of the 1970's, and some of the 1980's, it was considered to be very unacceptable to target civilians, and great pains were taken to avoid harming them. Though I'm aware of other times in the long history of the conflict when there were factions that were really pissed off at the British, and the goal was not political separation, but physical annihilation (as childish or unrealistic as that may be).
If you want any indication of what the British have gone through; just watch the movie Braveheart; that's the Scottish - who eventually pretty much reconciled (though, they're talking about separating again). The British have also gone through this with the Welsh, to a lesser degree, and of course, the Falkland Islands, and Hong Kong, India, they're currently pulling out of Basra for the second miserable time this century. . . poor blokes! And then the Germans and the French are always beating up on them. Is it their breath? Who knows? In the case of the Scottish, the disagreement doesn't even seem to have anything to do with religion, and that war has been pretty brutal and barbaric in the past.
Yeah, I'm just waitin for you to walk out in front of a bus, or to accidentally forget to unplug your laptop the next time you take it into the bathtub with you. . .
Not so fast, whipper-snapper!
Well, I can't disagree with you that telecom is infrastructure. It clearly is. But where does that infrastructure end? In the US, the changeover, at least on the telephone handset side, was one of the most successful examples I can think of. You used to have to lease the damn telephone from the company, there was basically one style, maybe 3 colors, they were large, clunky, way overdesigned (but at least they were rugged as hell). After the monopoly was broken up, companies started selling phones, people could buy their own, and choose from hundreds of different kinds from dozens of manufacturers, now with innovative features like caller id, built-in answering machines, cordless, etc. NONE of this technology existed in the market without the competition, before.
So while I agree, that for things like roads and bridges, you must have state-run infrastructure. But for things like cars, maybe a free-market system to manufacture them is better. (but on that note - I *do* think that a nationalized energy infrastructure is probably a better solution than a for-profit private energy infrastructure - it's such a crucial lynchpin of the entire economy, they've got everyone by the balls, there's just too much motive for behaviors that can really screw things up; price-fixing, hoarding, market-diversion, ignorance of emissions-costs, etc.)
personally, I think she misunderstood the technology they're shooting for; I think what they're probably doing is HDR cinema - where they're not doing infinite depth of field, (which is actually fairly easy to obtain with a wide aperture), but rather, a high dynamic range, which is a fairly new technology in digital photography, and some automatic cameras with this feature are just starting to appear. It wouldn't surprise me if there weren't people experimenting with it in cinema. The color effect would very likely be very Anime-like, from some of the HDR photography I've seen.