Well, now you have. I voluntarily worked as a member of IATSE. You know why? Because they offered me a better job than non-union shops. No coercion needed. Certainly people work in that industry who aren't members, but they get paid less, and get less work. They don't get beat up; you obviously have a warped idea of how unions work. I'm no longer union, but that's because in my current job I haven't felt one to be needed. Management is fair, so we don't need CB. Still proud to have worked union, even if it was only for a couple years.
There's really only one modern penalty for working as a scab (note - most union shops will NOT allow non-union workers to work there, and have this as a condition of their CBA, for very good reasons, so I define working as a scab as working in a union-breaking sense - when a striking union is out, taking a union job). In the bad old days, yes, unions would break heads - but so would the companies involved. These days things are more civilized.
Penalty 1 - You can get blackballed from ever working in a union shop, which can (in some industries) either severely restrict your employment or eliminate the possibility of employment altogether. This is not coercion. Simply stated - you don't want to work for the union, you don't have to, but the union may control the jobs. Essentially, the union is operating as a subcontractor, and you work for the subcontractor, who drafts contracts with the contractor (the original corporation).
Penalty 2 is that you generally get treated worse as a scab, in the long run, than as a union member.
That's it. You work as a scab, the union will do its very best to ensure that your future employment suffers. No physical threats. The way unions maintain their power against the company is by presenting a unified front against the corporation; allowing scabs removes that power, so simply put, they can't.
Bleh. SBC is my carrier, too, which makes it all the more sad that I don't know the acronym, but I still think of them as Ameritech (and somewhere, in the back of my mind, I miss Michigan Bell).
"We want a raise. If you don't give us a raise, NO ONE will come to work."
Its totally legit, and you can do it at your job legally as well. However, at your job, unless you can:
a) Convince no one else to show up if you don't get what you want/get fired. b) Convince any potential replacements that they'll get a better paycheck if they join your strike.
Then management will laugh at you.
Unions are a method of using the collective legal power of the workers (the threat of withholding labor) to counterbalance the economic power of the corporation (the threat of withholding a job/paycheck from a single worker).
Science becomes applied when the desired end result is an application, as opposed to extension of the field of knowledge. Incidental applied research in the course of a pure research project doesn't really count - look at Gravity Probe B. Although a lot of applied research went into construction of the experiment, the experiment itself remains a pure science experiment (test some of Einstein's predictions re: the warping of space).
Most research is applied, I don't argue; I just think that most scientists are really just glorified engineers.
I said quicksort can't legally be a patent, if the patent is on "sorting with quicksort."
However, patenting (e.g.) a quicksort-based database sort which allows for a new use of databases (if I had an idea about QS+dbsorting novel enough to be patentable, I'd be patenting it, not exposing it here!) is a totally legit use of patents. A more understandable example of this is:
The mathematical transforms used in the MP3 encoding process are not patentable. Application of those transforms for the purpose of lossy compression of music *is*.
(Fat line? I'm electrical, not CS, so I don't know what you're referring to...)
Interestingly enough, however, playing a song over the radio is not controlled by the sound recording copyright (the right which controls almost all other forms of distribution) but by the song writer's copyright.
This is *only* true in the US.
Re:Let's play the substitution game, kids!
on
Safe and Insecure?
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· Score: 1
I'm not even a paralegal
And it shows... sentencing is solely a criminal concept.
The applicability distinction is important. Applied science *is* engineering, and anyone who tells you otherwise is just an 'applied scientist' trying to prop themselves up.
You can't patent that because:
a) It isn't novel. Using complex analysis in AC circuits is old hat.
b) That isn't actually a use. Just like you can't patent quicksort for the purpose of sorting, you can't patent j-notation for complex potentials. You could patent the end result of a complex analysis, though - if breaking the oscillating potential into j-notation allowed you to, for example, more precisely control a motor, that is a patentable application (except that it too would have problems w/r/t novelty).
Engineering is the skill of applying pure mathematics/science to real world problems.
As such, since a patent is (supposed to) protect an *application of an idea*, not the idea itself, patents are very applicable to engineering, and not at all to math/science. You can't patent an algorithm; however, you can patent applying that algorithm to a problem in a novel way.
I.E. - turbo coding? Not patentable. Using turbo codes as your coding method for voice over RF? Patentable, but only if the use of turbo codes enables significant advances over the current state of voice over RF. This is arguable.
That's why engineering is different from science.
Now, why is software engineering different from classical engineering? It isn't. However, a lot of bad software patents have been granted. If you're going to grant patents, you need to grant software patents as well; there is nothing fundamentally different about software allowing it to be treated differently than a circuit board. However:
The implication of patentable software is threefold:
1) Reverse-engineering of patented software to determine how it works must be legal under any circumstance. 2) There must be no copyright protection for source code. 3) The entire source code must be included in the patent application.
This places software on a level with hardware, which is where it belongs.
Re:is this just an excuse to write sloppy code
on
Hardened PHP
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· Score: 1
Extensive work in the manufacturing industry has shown that in fact, it is far better than good practice. It works, while trying to train all your workers to work perfectly does not.
When you can trust the process, you don't need to be able to trust the worker anywhere near as far. Things like Hardened PHP, NX-protection, etc., are not only a substitute for good practice, but eventually software circles will figure out they are in fact more important than good practice.
That said, the two together are still better than either one seperately.
Re:is this just an excuse to write sloppy code
on
Hardened PHP
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It's more than that, though. Mechanical and electrical engineers (usually) learn a concept called design for manufacturability, which encompasses things like designing such that when you try to fit tab A into slot B, it is physically impossible to fit them in the wrong way. For the non-engineer, good examples of this are keyed ATA-IDE connectors; the old ones weren't keyed, and you had to check the cable for the red wire and the board for the 1 pin, to make sure you had it in right. Now you just line the slot with the tab and its correct. That's DFM, and the idea is that you physically CANNOT fuck it up, making a 75 IQ and a 150 IQ functionally equivalent.
Its all about the process, and very little about the worker, if you designed the process right. Similarly, if Hardened PHP can make it so that exploitable code simply can't run, you've cut down your probability of breach whether you have great programmers or George W. writing your code.
Surprisingly, I'm usually very careful about that sort of thing. It just happened to slip this once. As usual, calling someone out on their grammar is a jackass thing to do.
I do no VHDL and no Verilog right now, though learning Verilog would have its uses for me. Never took a course in it yet, though.
I do control systems design. It uses the 3 controls courses I took, some of the signals courses I took, both of my DSP courses, and a few other things very heavily. In addition, since it's controls design for ASICs, I do need to reference a little bit of my semiconductors and digital logic courses. I use C to program embedded hardware to emulate our ASICs sometimes, but that's about it for programming.
Find the right position. There are plenty of people I work with who spend a lot of their time doing circuit analysis for analog circuits, using transistor equations and shit like that. If your company is mainly doing VHDL/Verilog/C++, and you don't want to, find a new company.
The rule is - make the battery as big as you can fit/convince the customer to carry.
I've drained more than a few li-ion cell batteries; digital cameras which use non-rechargeable AAs are a prime candidate for this behavior, but CD players do a good job too. AA/AAAs are generally a good balance of capacity and size.
As to your linkable/stackable idea - stackable is easy, but linkable is not. Think about it - most devices need serially stacked batteries. If you do edge linking, you're either going to need to parallel stack (unusable in many situations) or you're going to need to assign different edges different polarities, which will require that you key them to make sure people don't fuck up insertion, at which point you're better off just using a larger cell/cellstack anyway. I don't see the benefits, except in ultra-mini devices, and most of those already run on internal non-replaceable prismatic packs or on watch batteries and the like.
I learned lots of useful things in undergrad. I use them roughly 7-9 hours a day, doing a job I actually enjoy.
And I got an EE degree. Maybe it's because I'm not a programmer.
Maybe you just worked for a shitty company? (And before you get pissy about it, I work for a Fortune 100 company - it ain't just small company's that can be decent to work for.)
Right, but a LiIon chemistry cell using the full space inside of a AA battery will last longer than, say, a NiMH or NiCAD. AFAIK, they don't shrink the cells inside of a LiIon-based AA; voltage is a chemistry issue, not a size issue. Standardized cell sizes are used for convenience.
The point was that LiIon energy densities are higher, so going to a watch cell over a AA-sized battery *within a given battery chemistry* will lose you runtime.
It wasn't intended to be funny. It was intended to be accurate - the Canadians never had Canadian nukes, they had access to American ones in a limited sense. This is verifiable and true.
You're cute. You're actually claiming that BestBuy and Walmart and similar mega-stores, or Amazon, have better customer service, than a decent record store?
Chicago record stores (Hard Boiled, Reckless, Gramaphone, etc.) are generally a lot better than online. Why? They don't have shitty clerks. They have people who work there because they like music, because they sure as hell aren't there for the money they're getting paid. If you need to ask an employee about something, they're right there; no navigating a touchtone jail.
The people in the record store know about music. If they don't know about exactly what you're interested in, they probably know exactly which one of their coworkers does. They probably have some idea of when the band whose CD you just bought is going to be in town, or when their new record is coming out.
Amazon and such online are good if I know exactly what I want, it isn't a local musician, and I don't mind waiting for it to show up. For some styles of music, Amazon isn't acceptable at all; they'll never replace my once per year trip to Other Music in NYC for noise records. If I just want to flip through records, no online store will ever take the place of walking into the stacks and doing just that - flipping through records until something catches my eye. And let's not forget that I can listen to it as soon as I walk out of the store (or when I get home and rip it to MP3).
And Google doesn't know a damn thing about what's going on locally; generally the best way to find out about local shows is through the Reader (or local equivalent in other cities) and through knowing people who are putting those shows on.
Pulling content only works if you know what you want; and most people would prefer real personal contact to listening to some Belle and Sebastian-listening tool rant on a chatboard. Even if I have to listen to the music store clerk rant about Belle and Sebastian, at least I can punch him in the mouth.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, now you have. I voluntarily worked as a member of IATSE. You know why? Because they offered me a better job than non-union shops. No coercion needed. Certainly people work in that industry who aren't members, but they get paid less, and get less work. They don't get beat up; you obviously have a warped idea of how unions work. I'm no longer union, but that's because in my current job I haven't felt one to be needed. Management is fair, so we don't need CB. Still proud to have worked union, even if it was only for a couple years.
There's really only one modern penalty for working as a scab (note - most union shops will NOT allow non-union workers to work there, and have this as a condition of their CBA, for very good reasons, so I define working as a scab as working in a union-breaking sense - when a striking union is out, taking a union job). In the bad old days, yes, unions would break heads - but so would the companies involved. These days things are more civilized.
Penalty 1 - You can get blackballed from ever working in a union shop, which can (in some industries) either severely restrict your employment or eliminate the possibility of employment altogether. This is not coercion. Simply stated - you don't want to work for the union, you don't have to, but the union may control the jobs. Essentially, the union is operating as a subcontractor, and you work for the subcontractor, who drafts contracts with the contractor (the original corporation).
Penalty 2 is that you generally get treated worse as a scab, in the long run, than as a union member.
That's it. You work as a scab, the union will do its very best to ensure that your future employment suffers. No physical threats. The way unions maintain their power against the company is by presenting a unified front against the corporation; allowing scabs removes that power, so simply put, they can't.
Bleh. SBC is my carrier, too, which makes it all the more sad that I don't know the acronym, but I still think of them as Ameritech (and somewhere, in the back of my mind, I miss Michigan Bell).
Actually, the union isn't saying that.
They're saying:
"We want a raise. If you don't give us a raise, NO ONE will come to work."
Its totally legit, and you can do it at your job legally as well. However, at your job, unless you can:
a) Convince no one else to show up if you don't get what you want/get fired.
b) Convince any potential replacements that they'll get a better paycheck if they join your strike.
Then management will laugh at you.
Unions are a method of using the collective legal power of the workers (the threat of withholding labor) to counterbalance the economic power of the corporation (the threat of withholding a job/paycheck from a single worker).
SBC = (Something - Southern, maybe?) Bell Company, one of the Big Bells, provides service throughout the Midwest.
CWA = Communications Workers of America, big union including all your telco repair folks.
Science becomes applied when the desired end result is an application, as opposed to extension of the field of knowledge. Incidental applied research in the course of a pure research project doesn't really count - look at Gravity Probe B. Although a lot of applied research went into construction of the experiment, the experiment itself remains a pure science experiment (test some of Einstein's predictions re: the warping of space).
Most research is applied, I don't argue; I just think that most scientists are really just glorified engineers.
I said quicksort can't legally be a patent, if the patent is on "sorting with quicksort."
However, patenting (e.g.) a quicksort-based database sort which allows for a new use of databases (if I had an idea about QS+dbsorting novel enough to be patentable, I'd be patenting it, not exposing it here!) is a totally legit use of patents. A more understandable example of this is:
The mathematical transforms used in the MP3 encoding process are not patentable. Application of those transforms for the purpose of lossy compression of music *is*.
(Fat line? I'm electrical, not CS, so I don't know what you're referring to...)
Yes, but Linux poured sugar in your gas tank while anally raping your goats.
Interestingly enough, however, playing a song over the radio is not controlled by the sound recording copyright (the right which controls almost all other forms of distribution) but by the song writer's copyright.
This is *only* true in the US.
And it shows... sentencing is solely a criminal concept.
The applicability distinction is important. Applied science *is* engineering, and anyone who tells you otherwise is just an 'applied scientist' trying to prop themselves up.
You can't patent that because:
a) It isn't novel. Using complex analysis in AC circuits is old hat.
b) That isn't actually a use. Just like you can't patent quicksort for the purpose of sorting, you can't patent j-notation for complex potentials. You could patent the end result of a complex analysis, though - if breaking the oscillating potential into j-notation allowed you to, for example, more precisely control a motor, that is a patentable application (except that it too would have problems w/r/t novelty).
Engineering is the skill of applying pure mathematics/science to real world problems.
As such, since a patent is (supposed to) protect an *application of an idea*, not the idea itself, patents are very applicable to engineering, and not at all to math/science. You can't patent an algorithm; however, you can patent applying that algorithm to a problem in a novel way.
I.E. - turbo coding? Not patentable. Using turbo codes as your coding method for voice over RF? Patentable, but only if the use of turbo codes enables significant advances over the current state of voice over RF. This is arguable.
That's why engineering is different from science.
Now, why is software engineering different from classical engineering? It isn't. However, a lot of bad software patents have been granted. If you're going to grant patents, you need to grant software patents as well; there is nothing fundamentally different about software allowing it to be treated differently than a circuit board. However:
The implication of patentable software is threefold:
1) Reverse-engineering of patented software to determine how it works must be legal under any circumstance.
2) There must be no copyright protection for source code.
3) The entire source code must be included in the patent application.
This places software on a level with hardware, which is where it belongs.
Extensive work in the manufacturing industry has shown that in fact, it is far better than good practice. It works, while trying to train all your workers to work perfectly does not.
When you can trust the process, you don't need to be able to trust the worker anywhere near as far. Things like Hardened PHP, NX-protection, etc., are not only a substitute for good practice, but eventually software circles will figure out they are in fact more important than good practice.
That said, the two together are still better than either one seperately.
It's more than that, though. Mechanical and electrical engineers (usually) learn a concept called design for manufacturability, which encompasses things like designing such that when you try to fit tab A into slot B, it is physically impossible to fit them in the wrong way. For the non-engineer, good examples of this are keyed ATA-IDE connectors; the old ones weren't keyed, and you had to check the cable for the red wire and the board for the 1 pin, to make sure you had it in right. Now you just line the slot with the tab and its correct. That's DFM, and the idea is that you physically CANNOT fuck it up, making a 75 IQ and a 150 IQ functionally equivalent.
Its all about the process, and very little about the worker, if you designed the process right. Similarly, if Hardened PHP can make it so that exploitable code simply can't run, you've cut down your probability of breach whether you have great programmers or George W. writing your code.
Surprisingly, I'm usually very careful about that sort of thing. It just happened to slip this once. As usual, calling someone out on their grammar is a jackass thing to do.
I do no VHDL and no Verilog right now, though learning Verilog would have its uses for me. Never took a course in it yet, though.
I do control systems design. It uses the 3 controls courses I took, some of the signals courses I took, both of my DSP courses, and a few other things very heavily. In addition, since it's controls design for ASICs, I do need to reference a little bit of my semiconductors and digital logic courses. I use C to program embedded hardware to emulate our ASICs sometimes, but that's about it for programming.
Find the right position. There are plenty of people I work with who spend a lot of their time doing circuit analysis for analog circuits, using transistor equations and shit like that. If your company is mainly doing VHDL/Verilog/C++, and you don't want to, find a new company.
The rule is - make the battery as big as you can fit/convince the customer to carry.
I've drained more than a few li-ion cell batteries; digital cameras which use non-rechargeable AAs are a prime candidate for this behavior, but CD players do a good job too. AA/AAAs are generally a good balance of capacity and size.
As to your linkable/stackable idea - stackable is easy, but linkable is not. Think about it - most devices need serially stacked batteries. If you do edge linking, you're either going to need to parallel stack (unusable in many situations) or you're going to need to assign different edges different polarities, which will require that you key them to make sure people don't fuck up insertion, at which point you're better off just using a larger cell/cellstack anyway. I don't see the benefits, except in ultra-mini devices, and most of those already run on internal non-replaceable prismatic packs or on watch batteries and the like.
Funny.
I learned lots of useful things in undergrad. I use them roughly 7-9 hours a day, doing a job I actually enjoy.
And I got an EE degree. Maybe it's because I'm not a programmer.
Maybe you just worked for a shitty company? (And before you get pissy about it, I work for a Fortune 100 company - it ain't just small company's that can be decent to work for.)
Mandrake won't recognize my USB keyboard.
I have no idea if it will recognize anything else, because I HAVE NO FREAKING KEYBOARD.
And for the record, Gentoo detects it fine; it's a MS USB keyboard, not exactly a strange piece of hardware.
Right, but a LiIon chemistry cell using the full space inside of a AA battery will last longer than, say, a NiMH or NiCAD. AFAIK, they don't shrink the cells inside of a LiIon-based AA; voltage is a chemistry issue, not a size issue. Standardized cell sizes are used for convenience.
The point was that LiIon energy densities are higher, so going to a watch cell over a AA-sized battery *within a given battery chemistry* will lose you runtime.
Haha!
How long do you think they last right now?
(Correct answer - 1 to 2 years for LiIon, depending on your usage patterns).
Watch batteries last longer because watches use tiny, tiny amounts of current.
Try to run your MP3 player on a watch battery and see how long it runs.
You need $10 to give to the kid down the street to sit there with the hose while it fills, while you get drunk on Bud.
It wasn't intended to be funny. It was intended to be accurate - the Canadians never had Canadian nukes, they had access to American ones in a limited sense. This is verifiable and true.
It's DMCA. Not DCMA.
Other than that, well said.
You're cute. You're actually claiming that BestBuy and Walmart and similar mega-stores, or Amazon, have better customer service, than a decent record store?
Chicago record stores (Hard Boiled, Reckless, Gramaphone, etc.) are generally a lot better than online. Why? They don't have shitty clerks. They have people who work there because they like music, because they sure as hell aren't there for the money they're getting paid. If you need to ask an employee about something, they're right there; no navigating a touchtone jail.
The people in the record store know about music. If they don't know about exactly what you're interested in, they probably know exactly which one of their coworkers does. They probably have some idea of when the band whose CD you just bought is going to be in town, or when their new record is coming out.
Amazon and such online are good if I know exactly what I want, it isn't a local musician, and I don't mind waiting for it to show up. For some styles of music, Amazon isn't acceptable at all; they'll never replace my once per year trip to Other Music in NYC for noise records. If I just want to flip through records, no online store will ever take the place of walking into the stacks and doing just that - flipping through records until something catches my eye. And let's not forget that I can listen to it as soon as I walk out of the store (or when I get home and rip it to MP3).
And Google doesn't know a damn thing about what's going on locally; generally the best way to find out about local shows is through the Reader (or local equivalent in other cities) and through knowing people who are putting those shows on.
Pulling content only works if you know what you want; and most people would prefer real personal contact to listening to some Belle and Sebastian-listening tool rant on a chatboard. Even if I have to listen to the music store clerk rant about Belle and Sebastian, at least I can punch him in the mouth.
Ukraine inherited delivery systems. All warheads were delivered to Russia. That was a condition of START-1.
No, you didn't.
You had US nukes that we were kind enough to loan you.