Drop the partisan crap - neither the GP or the GGP said anything about Obama vs. Romney. I'm not a teabagger or a neo-con. I voted for Obama in 2008 (and Stein in 2012), and I say the same things about Obama. The thing about actually winning the election is you actually deserve the blame for whatever you do wrong.
For a country one who claims to boast its own national exceptionalism and moral superiority. Yet, forgets to mention they are the holders of the largest national debt known to man. If you ask me. I find this fact hardly exceptional or superior...
WTF does that have to do with exceptionalism. BTW, debt as a burden or potential problem is measured in proportion to income (GDP), in which case the US is far from exceptional.
.. heck it's not even moral!
This is about the government of a supposedly free country electronically snooping up the butt of every citizen, and you're concerned that the national debt is immoral? Get a grip man (or at least stay OT).
You're right. To be more precise, it's a validation that what many (most?) people thought was crazy paranoia, isn't, and wasn't. It's scary when people previously dismissed as tin foil hatters turned out to have been right. Other than the exact wording though, which I don't think matters that much since his intent was clear, the GP's point stands.
What surprises me is not that this is being done, but the massive scale on which it's being done. It's no secret that, for example, the FBI bugged the rooms and tapped the phones of MLK. It's revolting that that was done to someone who wasn't even the slightest threat to the United States (in fact I'd argue that he was, amongst other things, a true patriot for wanting to enforce the Constitution). But he was a high profile person, as were many of the others who were bugged. This is different though - it's everyone! That is a characteristic of a police state. Many people say "police state" is overused, but here it's appropriate. This is the kind of crap that the KGB and the Stasi did. During the Cold War we rightly considered the United States superior because it didn't do that. Even after the revelations by the Church Committee about the extensive bugging, it was still only a few high profile people. We didn't have an army of spooks looking up everyone's butt. Now we do, and the fact that it's in electronic form makes it worse, not better. Sometimes I miss the Cold War, because at least it gave us countries that we had to credibly claim we were better than. Now they don't give a damn.
it sounds like their gizmo is measuring in 3 dimensions the actual movement of air molecules caused by the sound wave, and deriving the wavefront travel direction from that
Intuitively I can see how that works (although intuition isn't always good physics of course). But if you could get decent resolution this way, why don't they use something like this on subs instead of large phased arrays? Acoustic waves in both air and water are longitudinal waves, so you should be able to sense direction the same way. It seems like the inventive part of this thing is the MEMS technique, the heated wires, etc. I find it hard to believe that with lots of room and power available (e.g. on a sub) you couldn't have created something that does this sort of sensing years ago.
You have machines making the decisions and people trusting the machines.
The disease originated with MBA's and mindless bureaucrats, but has now become an epidemic. People who confuse mindless, only occasionally correct and rarely useful correlations, or figures of merit based on formulas drawn from someone's unwashed posterior, with actual judgments of reality. Interestingly, it's often technical people who are most skeptical of these things. Actually understanding the technology will do that.
With all our "law enforcement" concentrating on intercepting phone calls, email and IM, they probably wouldn't notice a gunfight in front of their office. One thing Schneier was definitely right about was when he said you don't find a needle in a haystack by adding more hay.
Governments have always had the technical means to be invasive, they are restrained by common decency and the law of the land.
They are?
If you want to set up a big acoustic array at the beach
Were I to surveil the beach, I'd be more interested in visual than auditory information. YMMV.
All joking aside, I'm skeptical of the technical claims of superiority, other than small size. That's tempered by my lack of knowledge of acoustics. I think of it in terms of analogies to optics or radar (as a physicist I once knew said, a wave is a wave is a wave). You need an array to locate the direction something is coming from. Roughly speaking the larger the array relative to the wavelength, the more precisely you can determine direction, and the more you can spatially filter that source from other sources. You can do that with small optical sensors (e.g. a camera or your eye) only because of the short wavelength of light. Radar antennas with the same directionality and resolution need to be much larger. At 1kHz (a frequency you definitely need to understand conversation) the wavelength of a sound wave is 343mm. For radio waves that's the wavelength you'd get at 875MHz. You need a fairly big antenna to get decent resolution. That can be accomplished by widely spaced sensors (antenna elements, whatever) and some serious signal processing. I don't see how one of these sensors can have any serious directionality by itself, or having three in the same place pointing at x, y and z directions can do much.
One difference I can think of between electromagnetic radiation and sound waves is that the former are transverse waves and the latter are longitudinal waves. Does that make much of a difference for these purposes?
Are programmers from outside the Bay Area prevented from applying to work at companies like Google/Facebook?
I know the salaries are higher, but if you want to do something radical like buy a modest house to raise a family in, the salary difference doesn't even comes close to compensating for the higher cost of real estate.
However, if you're looking for a guy to write your next database engine/compiler/OS kernel/Internet-scale search engine, you will hit a shortage.
Not if you realize that there are actually parts of the country besides the bay area. For example, there is a lot of top notch software talent in Pittsburgh, who'll happily work for less than in the bay area. Or are companies that claim their technologies connect the world unable to think of terms of doing development outside of one small part of the country?
The average H-1B "worker" does not have any skills that are in particularly short supply in the US. That's a myth created by tech companies to up the quota and suppress wages. It's aided and abetted by academia, which wants more customers (called "students" in their business) and their own cheap labor. It's a line parroted by politicians and pundits, but not supported by, uh, you know, actual facts.
If you want immigrants that are more highly skilled than we have now, then adopt the Australian system, which gives preference to skills that are in particularly high demand, as demonstrated by actual labor statistics rather than the say-so of tech billionaires. For example, a while ago Australia was giving preference to hair stylists. People joked about it, but there was a genuinely high demand for them. Maybe it's all that sun and surf. Regardless, if there is a high demand for hair stylists but not programmers, then hairstylist is a more valuable skill. Your opinion of programmers as highly skilled is irrelevant. Professors of Medieval French Literature are also highly skilled and educated, but there's no shortage of them.
Lastly, if what you're looking for is skilled immigrants, then why have a guest worker program like the H-1B instead of an immigration program?
huge mistake by putting IT people and programmers in the same bucket
Do you suffer from lack of oxygen by sticking your nose so far up in the air? They're different, but both are affected by the H-1B program.
In my experience working in the Bay Area, there really is a shortage of competent high-skill systems developers/programmers
Here's a hint: there are parts of the US outside of the bay area. Bay area provincialism may have blinded you to that fact, so consider this a helpful reminder.
A company's sole purpose is to increase shareholder value
And since they have such a single-minded and potentially abusive purpose, and no conscience, we've historically had laws and regulations to limit their behavior.
Whenever CEO's tell us the market for talent is a global one, they mean that they should get paid more, or else they leave.
Perhaps American CEO's should compete in the global labor market, because CEO's in other countries are lucky to get 1/10'th, and often more like 1/20th or less of what American CEO's do. It's probably because those foreigners have it easy. What idiot couldn't run a simple outfit like Mitsubishi or Siemens?
Nobody is terribly concerned about H-1B's from Germany (for anyone who's unaware, Karlsruhe is a German city). That's not because of bigotry, but simply because Germans don't work cheap.
Slashdot Mirror
You misspelled "Teller".
Drop the partisan crap - neither the GP or the GGP said anything about Obama vs. Romney. I'm not a teabagger or a neo-con. I voted for Obama in 2008 (and Stein in 2012), and I say the same things about Obama. The thing about actually winning the election is you actually deserve the blame for whatever you do wrong.
Romney isn't president, so it makes sense to complain about the guy who is.
Farmers can easily avoid this problem by using manure fertilizer. Also, I wear dirty socks when traveling by air.
Mettle detector - a device for checking the ability of someone to cope in a situation.
Metal detector - a device for detecting metals.
What the TSA does is clearly dual-purpose.
For a country one who claims to boast its own national exceptionalism and moral superiority. Yet, forgets to mention they are the holders of the largest national debt known to man. If you ask me. I find this fact hardly exceptional or superior ...
WTF does that have to do with exceptionalism. BTW, debt as a burden or potential problem is measured in proportion to income (GDP), in which case the US is far from exceptional.
.. heck it's not even moral!
This is about the government of a supposedly free country electronically snooping up the butt of every citizen, and you're concerned that the national debt is immoral? Get a grip man (or at least stay OT).
This isn't validation of crazy paranoia.
You're right. To be more precise, it's a validation that what many (most?) people thought was crazy paranoia, isn't, and wasn't. It's scary when people previously dismissed as tin foil hatters turned out to have been right. Other than the exact wording though, which I don't think matters that much since his intent was clear, the GP's point stands.
What surprises me is not that this is being done, but the massive scale on which it's being done. It's no secret that, for example, the FBI bugged the rooms and tapped the phones of MLK. It's revolting that that was done to someone who wasn't even the slightest threat to the United States (in fact I'd argue that he was, amongst other things, a true patriot for wanting to enforce the Constitution). But he was a high profile person, as were many of the others who were bugged. This is different though - it's everyone! That is a characteristic of a police state. Many people say "police state" is overused, but here it's appropriate. This is the kind of crap that the KGB and the Stasi did. During the Cold War we rightly considered the United States superior because it didn't do that. Even after the revelations by the Church Committee about the extensive bugging, it was still only a few high profile people. We didn't have an army of spooks looking up everyone's butt. Now we do, and the fact that it's in electronic form makes it worse, not better. Sometimes I miss the Cold War, because at least it gave us countries that we had to credibly claim we were better than. Now they don't give a damn.
This is not a microphone, it's a differential hot wire anemometer
An anemometer with sufficient bandwidth is a microphone.
it sounds like their gizmo is measuring in 3 dimensions the actual movement of air molecules caused by the sound wave, and deriving the wavefront travel direction from that
Intuitively I can see how that works (although intuition isn't always good physics of course). But if you could get decent resolution this way, why don't they use something like this on subs instead of large phased arrays? Acoustic waves in both air and water are longitudinal waves, so you should be able to sense direction the same way. It seems like the inventive part of this thing is the MEMS technique, the heated wires, etc. I find it hard to believe that with lots of room and power available (e.g. on a sub) you couldn't have created something that does this sort of sensing years ago.
I just got back from a pleasure trip. I took my mother-in-law to the airport.
You have machines making the decisions and people trusting the machines.
The disease originated with MBA's and mindless bureaucrats, but has now become an epidemic. People who confuse mindless, only occasionally correct and rarely useful correlations, or figures of merit based on formulas drawn from someone's unwashed posterior, with actual judgments of reality. Interestingly, it's often technical people who are most skeptical of these things. Actually understanding the technology will do that.
Validate me, respond to my pictures and comments and tell me what an interesting person I am
Something like habitual Slashdot posters, except w/ less pedantry and "look at me, I'm so smart".
Jokes get modded down? Is a reincarnated Puritan moderating tonight?
With all our "law enforcement" concentrating on intercepting phone calls, email and IM, they probably wouldn't notice a gunfight in front of their office. One thing Schneier was definitely right about was when he said you don't find a needle in a haystack by adding more hay.
That wouldn't be a problem on Brazilian streets.
Ethics does a lot to keep me from eavesdropping on my neighbors, but an even greater deterrent is fear of incredible boredom.
Governments have always had the technical means to be invasive, they are restrained by common decency and the law of the land.
They are?
If you want to set up a big acoustic array at the beach
Were I to surveil the beach, I'd be more interested in visual than auditory information. YMMV.
All joking aside, I'm skeptical of the technical claims of superiority, other than small size. That's tempered by my lack of knowledge of acoustics. I think of it in terms of analogies to optics or radar (as a physicist I once knew said, a wave is a wave is a wave). You need an array to locate the direction something is coming from. Roughly speaking the larger the array relative to the wavelength, the more precisely you can determine direction, and the more you can spatially filter that source from other sources. You can do that with small optical sensors (e.g. a camera or your eye) only because of the short wavelength of light. Radar antennas with the same directionality and resolution need to be much larger. At 1kHz (a frequency you definitely need to understand conversation) the wavelength of a sound wave is 343mm. For radio waves that's the wavelength you'd get at 875MHz. You need a fairly big antenna to get decent resolution. That can be accomplished by widely spaced sensors (antenna elements, whatever) and some serious signal processing. I don't see how one of these sensors can have any serious directionality by itself, or having three in the same place pointing at x, y and z directions can do much.
One difference I can think of between electromagnetic radiation and sound waves is that the former are transverse waves and the latter are longitudinal waves. Does that make much of a difference for these purposes?
Are programmers from outside the Bay Area prevented from applying to work at companies like Google/Facebook?
I know the salaries are higher, but if you want to do something radical like buy a modest house to raise a family in, the salary difference doesn't even comes close to compensating for the higher cost of real estate.
However, if you're looking for a guy to write your next database engine/compiler/OS kernel/Internet-scale search engine, you will hit a shortage.
Not if you realize that there are actually parts of the country besides the bay area. For example, there is a lot of top notch software talent in Pittsburgh, who'll happily work for less than in the bay area. Or are companies that claim their technologies connect the world unable to think of terms of doing development outside of one small part of the country?
The average H-1B "worker" does not have any skills that are in particularly short supply in the US. That's a myth created by tech companies to up the quota and suppress wages. It's aided and abetted by academia, which wants more customers (called "students" in their business) and their own cheap labor. It's a line parroted by politicians and pundits, but not supported by, uh, you know, actual facts.
If you want immigrants that are more highly skilled than we have now, then adopt the Australian system, which gives preference to skills that are in particularly high demand, as demonstrated by actual labor statistics rather than the say-so of tech billionaires. For example, a while ago Australia was giving preference to hair stylists. People joked about it, but there was a genuinely high demand for them. Maybe it's all that sun and surf. Regardless, if there is a high demand for hair stylists but not programmers, then hairstylist is a more valuable skill. Your opinion of programmers as highly skilled is irrelevant. Professors of Medieval French Literature are also highly skilled and educated, but there's no shortage of them.
Lastly, if what you're looking for is skilled immigrants, then why have a guest worker program like the H-1B instead of an immigration program?
H-1B visas need to be restricted even more.
The best way to restrict H-1B visas is to completely eliminate the program. It was never needed in the first place.
I've got a bridge to sell you.
huge mistake by putting IT people and programmers in the same bucket
Do you suffer from lack of oxygen by sticking your nose so far up in the air? They're different, but both are affected by the H-1B program.
In my experience working in the Bay Area, there really is a shortage of competent high-skill systems developers/programmers
Here's a hint: there are parts of the US outside of the bay area. Bay area provincialism may have blinded you to that fact, so consider this a helpful reminder.
A company's sole purpose is to increase shareholder value
And since they have such a single-minded and potentially abusive purpose, and no conscience, we've historically had laws and regulations to limit their behavior.
Whenever CEO's tell us the market for talent is a global one, they mean that they should get paid more, or else they leave.
Perhaps American CEO's should compete in the global labor market, because CEO's in other countries are lucky to get 1/10'th, and often more like 1/20th or less of what American CEO's do. It's probably because those foreigners have it easy. What idiot couldn't run a simple outfit like Mitsubishi or Siemens?
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Nobody is terribly concerned about H-1B's from Germany (for anyone who's unaware, Karlsruhe is a German city). That's not because of bigotry, but simply because Germans don't work cheap.