Interesting that the parent gets modded "troll". Slashdot modding at its best.
Note that "for years now" should be "for decades now".
Stick the term "NSA line eater" into google groups and see the output in 1986.
Echelon has been around a long time, people. It's been pretty widely known for a long time as well.
It's fine to debate whether the program is wise, or legal, or whether it should be legal. But implying this is something relatively new and shocking is reminiscent of Claude Raines in Casablanca.
The more interesting question is, what were the specifics of the bypassing of the FIS court, and what the reasons for that were. Was there a new interpretation for the existing exceptions, or did the increasing ability of technology turn an existing exception into something beyond the original intent of FISA? This isn't clear to me. Frankly, this is a case where details matter, and they are quite lacking.
As is common, those that know the full story aren't talking, and that that are talking, largely don't know the full story.
Why would a high quality sysadmin or coder stay in the rural areas?
Ok, I'll bite.
I stay in the rural area I currently live in, and work lower paying jobs for a lot of reasons:
I own my house here. It's 9 room, on a large lot. The taxes on it are small.
I have no traffic to deal with heavier than a few farm trucks.
I can watch the rabbits in my back yard, see green rather than stone canyons, spray my fruit trees, park a backhoe next to my garage, put up any ham antenna I want, run a small business from my house, all without violating any zoning requirements or neighborhood association regs, etc, etc...
And, the cost of living is so low that I usually only have to work part time to make ends meet.
Can you say semi-retired at 43?
It's hard to do that in the city unless you've made some major bucks. I've got the time to play with the toys, not just leave them sitting while I try to make money to pay a goddawful rent and such.
Attention all readers: TigerTime is officially so ignorant...(blather, blah)
At least he puts a name to it rather than going anon.
If you're going to flame, at least own up to it. Are you so scared that some ignorant poor powerless southerner might mod you down that you have to hide?
Maybe we should award you the Croix De Guerre and give a ticker tape parade for your bravery.
So, it's fine to look down on southerners because A southerner shot Lincoln?
That's exactly as bigoted and ignorant as saying jews deserve to be looked down upon since some jewish high priests arranged for the death of Jesus of Nazareth.
I'd hope you'd agree that someone who is bigoted against jews for that reason is reprehensible.
The problem is, you can't see that your attitiude has problems as well.
I think you miss the moderator's point of view. It was quite a successful post. It got 275 comments so far. It means that eyes were looking at the pages, and thus, they were justified in charging the ad revenues.
You just have to understand where the concern lies. Slashdot's a business.
Just like Action News (tm), pushing crap pays off in ratings.
Next, we should be building the advanced Integral Fast Reactors (IFR's) which Argonne Labs designed by about 1994. The program was shut down by Clinton.
Yes, closing down the Integral Fast Test Reactor was a pretty crass move. The Bush administration isn't the only one that opposes research for political reasons.
If we string together some dead bacteria and produce humidity sensor it's a good thing, but if we come up with ANY novel applications for discarded human embryos and dead fetuses it's a bad thing.
The bacteria just have a very poor advocacy group.
In this case, it doesn't really matter as to the Newsweek article referenced.
There was indeed in the mid 70s a flury of popular media about the world being on the way to entering a period of cooling. They were fretting about a new ice age.
The media often goes in fads about what the current expected disaster is.
(I was in Jr. High at the time and being a science geek followed it a bit.)
I've seen the cycle go round a few times in the area of food. In the 60s, were were warned about starchy foods. In the 70s-90s we were warned about fat. In the early 2000s, the media was preaching the gospel of Atkins, so were were back to worrying about starchy foods and fat was ok again.
I'm quite happy to switch the fuel sources over to something that doesn't emit CO2, but a good part of that is that I don't like burning these wonderful chemical feedstocks (oil, gas, coal) etc that societies of the future will need for better uses.
I'd like to use nuclear power in large amounts, but that's an anathema to quite a number of groups who can block it with endless lawsuits. *shrug*
Rural areas run the gamut, just like neighborhoods in a big city run the gamut. Some are great, some are terrible. Just as you choose a neighborhood to live in in a city, you have to use some choice about where you live in rural areas.
You paint a pretty bleak picture compared to what I've seen living in rural areas of the US for 40 odd years. I'm in a town of 1200 and have better cable modem throughput than a lot of people in cities.
One thing I notice about rural areas, is that what poverty there is is less shoved off to the side than in cities and suburbs. When the town is a half mile square, the other side of the tracks is still just up the block. In some ways, I think that's healthier than in some of the Chicago suburbs I visit where the only minimum wage earners you see are the ones working in fast food joints. The poverty there is miles away, and easy to ignore.
You don't think that _every_ drug that the pharmaceuticals comes up with cost them millions of dollars in research?
Pretty much, actually.
Even if they don't have to do basic research for it, there's still the safety testing work that the FDA needs to have done before a new drug is allowed on the market. That's not cheap.
It's similar to what's done at much lower frequencies with surface acoustic wave (SAW) devices. There, you convert the electrical signal to a sound wave in a material, process it (filter it, spread out the signal components, etc) with structures in the material, then convert it back to an electrical signal.
In this, the material itself converts the light signal into a vibration in the surface electrons, you have structures set up that process it, then it converts back to light when it's reemitted from the surface.
Also, how does stacking the insulator layers increase the bandwidth?
A common trick to make extremely small solid state devices more broadbanded is to put a number of them close enough together so that they interact a bit.
It's kinda like hooking multiple springs together. Each has its own prefered vibration frequency, but when they're hooked together, the system can vibrate at not only those original frequencies, but also other ones as well.
When you have very large numbers of interacting springs, the ranges of frequencies allowed tend to smear out. This effectively means that the device can handle a whole range of frequencies, not just the original one.
Just as springs have vibrations, these plasmons are vibrations. Just like springs have preferred frequencies to vibrate at, these waveguides have preferred frequencies. You put the waveguides close enough that they interact a bit, and it tends to allow more frequencies. Stack up a whole bunch of the waveguide layers, and you can smear out the response so that it's more broadbanded.
This sort of thing is done in a lot of systems based on vibrations.
(There are more details to it, but that's the general idea, and the best I can do at the moment with a cold making it hard to think.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Too many run ins with that fat fuck
:)
You got injured because he weighs more than you?
I've got a hamburger/potato/cheese casserole recipe that'll help. Even more effective than double thick milk shakes.
Course, my cardiologist doesn't like it much.
They would counter that NY City and surroundings is full of short-sighted selfish idiots.
The rest of the country would strongly agree with both arguments.
And if he tries to turn it into an iPod, he's gonna be in for a fight!
He's definitely got a lot of good stuff.
The Santaroga Barrier is one of my favorites.
I'm glad I wasn't the only one who thought of that.
I think the challenge is finding an engineer with both the CS and the bio background to take advantage
Aubrey DeGrey?
I know he's controversial, but that's exactly his background.
I'm sure he'd be enthusiastic.
Interesting that the parent gets modded "troll". Slashdot modding at its best.
Note that "for years now" should be "for decades now".
Stick the term "NSA line eater" into google groups and see the output in 1986.
Echelon has been around a long time, people. It's been pretty widely known for a long time as well.
It's fine to debate whether the program is wise, or legal, or whether it should be legal. But implying this is something relatively new and shocking is reminiscent of Claude Raines in Casablanca.
The more interesting question is, what were the specifics of the bypassing of the FIS court, and what the reasons for that were. Was there a new interpretation for the existing exceptions, or did the increasing ability of technology turn an existing exception into something beyond the original intent of FISA? This isn't clear to me. Frankly, this is a case where details matter, and they are quite lacking.
As is common, those that know the full story aren't talking, and that that are talking, largely don't know the full story.
Go to google groups and search for "NSA line Eater".
Prepare for entries going back to at least 1986.
Why would a high quality sysadmin or coder stay in the rural areas?
Ok, I'll bite.
I stay in the rural area I currently live in, and work lower paying jobs for a lot of reasons:
I own my house here. It's 9 room, on a large lot. The taxes on it are small.
I have no traffic to deal with heavier than a few farm trucks.
I can watch the rabbits in my back yard, see green rather than stone canyons, spray my fruit trees, park a backhoe next to my garage, put up any ham antenna I want, run a small business from my house, all without violating any zoning requirements or neighborhood association regs, etc, etc...
And, the cost of living is so low that I usually only have to work part time to make ends meet.
Can you say semi-retired at 43?
It's hard to do that in the city unless you've made some major bucks. I've got the time to play with the toys, not just leave them sitting while I try to make money to pay a goddawful rent and such.
Attention all readers: TigerTime is officially so ignorant...(blather, blah)
At least he puts a name to it rather than going anon.
If you're going to flame, at least own up to it. Are you so scared that some ignorant poor powerless southerner might mod you down that you have to hide?
Maybe we should award you the Croix De Guerre and give a ticker tape parade for your bravery.
So, it's fine to look down on southerners because A southerner shot Lincoln?
That's exactly as bigoted and ignorant as saying jews deserve to be looked down upon since some jewish high priests arranged for the death of Jesus of Nazareth.
I'd hope you'd agree that someone who is bigoted against jews for that reason is reprehensible.
The problem is, you can't see that your attitiude has problems as well.
I think you miss the moderator's point of view. It was quite a successful post. It got 275 comments so far. It means that eyes were looking at the pages, and thus, they were justified in charging the ad revenues.
You just have to understand where the concern lies. Slashdot's a business.
Just like Action News (tm), pushing crap pays off in ratings.
It's about the only sensible reason I can think of for so many of these crackpot stories hitting the front page lately.
Next, we should be building the advanced Integral Fast Reactors (IFR's) which Argonne Labs designed by about 1994. The program was shut down by Clinton.
Yes, closing down the Integral Fast Test Reactor was a pretty crass move. The Bush administration isn't the only one that opposes research for political reasons.
If we string together some dead bacteria and produce humidity sensor it's a good thing, but if we come up with ANY novel applications for discarded human embryos and dead fetuses it's a bad thing.
The bacteria just have a very poor advocacy group.
In this case, it doesn't really matter as to the Newsweek article referenced.
There was indeed in the mid 70s a flury of popular media about the world being on the way to entering a period of cooling. They were fretting about a new ice age.
The media often goes in fads about what the current expected disaster is.
(I was in Jr. High at the time and being a science geek followed it a bit.)
I've seen the cycle go round a few times in the area of food. In the 60s, were were warned about starchy foods. In the 70s-90s we were warned about fat. In the early 2000s, the media was preaching the gospel of Atkins, so were were back to worrying about starchy foods and fat was ok again.
I'm quite happy to switch the fuel sources over to something that doesn't emit CO2, but a good part of that is that I don't like burning these wonderful chemical feedstocks (oil, gas, coal) etc that societies of the future will need for better uses.
I'd like to use nuclear power in large amounts, but that's an anathema to quite a number of groups who can block it with endless lawsuits. *shrug*
Rural areas run the gamut, just like neighborhoods in a big city run the gamut. Some are great, some are terrible. Just as you choose a neighborhood to live in in a city, you have to use some choice about where you live in rural areas.
You paint a pretty bleak picture compared to what I've seen living in rural areas of the US for 40 odd years. I'm in a town of 1200 and have better cable modem throughput than a lot of people in cities.
One thing I notice about rural areas, is that what poverty there is is less shoved off to the side than in cities and suburbs. When the town is a half mile square, the other side of the tracks is still just up the block. In some ways, I think that's healthier than in some of the Chicago suburbs I visit where the only minimum wage earners you see are the ones working in fast food joints. The poverty there is miles away, and easy to ignore.
Isn't that always the goal of a research scientist?
Yes, but there's a more fundamental one. To write the grant proposal so it gets funding and you keep getting paid.
It's not cheap, but it's not particularly innovative.
Most research work isn't wildly innovative. Much of it's drudgery that just needs to be done.
You don't think that _every_ drug that the pharmaceuticals comes up with cost them millions of dollars in research?
Pretty much, actually.
Even if they don't have to do basic research for it, there's still the safety testing work that the FDA needs to have done before a new drug is allowed on the market. That's not cheap.
Ok, so you're heavily influenced by Bollywood or whatever the local culture purveyors in your home, and are incapable of independent thought?
:)
(Sorry, but you left yourself wide open for that one.
It's similar to what's done at much lower frequencies with surface acoustic wave (SAW) devices. There, you convert the electrical signal to a sound wave in a material, process it (filter it, spread out the signal components, etc) with structures in the material, then convert it back to an electrical signal.
In this, the material itself converts the light signal into a vibration in the surface electrons, you have structures set up that process it, then it converts back to light when it's reemitted from the surface.
Also, how does stacking the insulator layers increase the bandwidth?
;)
A common trick to make extremely small solid state devices more broadbanded is to put a number of them close enough together so that they interact a bit.
It's kinda like hooking multiple springs together. Each has its own prefered vibration frequency, but when they're hooked together, the system can vibrate at not only those original frequencies, but also other ones as well.
When you have very large numbers of interacting springs, the ranges of frequencies allowed tend to smear out. This effectively means that the device can handle a whole range of frequencies, not just the original one.
Just as springs have vibrations, these plasmons are vibrations. Just like springs have preferred frequencies to vibrate at, these waveguides have preferred frequencies. You put the waveguides close enough that they interact a bit, and it tends to allow more frequencies. Stack up a whole bunch of the waveguide layers, and you can smear out the response so that it's more broadbanded.
This sort of thing is done in a lot of systems based on vibrations.
(There are more details to it, but that's the general idea, and the best I can do at the moment with a cold making it hard to think.
Only on Tuesdays, eh?
Interesting screen name. Do I know you?