Funny, it was the opposite in the NASA division where I worked. My second level supervisor has a computer that was the oldest and slowest of the bunch - a 5-6 years old triple hand-me down with a 15" monitor. His secretary was one step better, maybe 4 years old, same monitor. My boss had a 17" monitor and a 2-3 year old ocmputer. The cad guys all sat in front of 21" monitors (this is early 90s, btw) on brand new intel processors - some dual ppros.
Then again, we got real work done in that branch. (And it was the cad guys and working engineers closed their doors, turned off the lights and fragged the hell out of one another for an hour, instead of eating lunch on Fridays.)
While an extremely busy shop is a deterrent to customers, so is an empty shop. If the wifi keeps people in some of the seats, they'll bring in paying customers
Well, since the GS-9 level is entered at STEP 1 ($43,600), generally, and the first three steps require 1 year each to attain, the next three 2 years each, and the final three 3 years each, it'll be a long time before you hit a step 10. As you know (as a former cs), the steps are there to provide above-COLA merit increases within a capped GS level job. With work experience, you can get hired in at a higher step, but your salary growth is still limited.
If the system is similar to techincal jobs at NASA, the usual track is GS-7 with a BS, 6-8mo to a GS-9, another year to an 11. MS doesn't buy you much except starting at GS-9, and then a year to get to an 11. (This, btw, is really old data - maybe 12-15 years ago). GS-12 requires a "real" promotion, and usually take a couple of years, and 13 is as high as you'll go without being in management (highly tenure based), or on a "dual track" and being a demonstrated national or international expert in your field (GS-14 and 15 respectively). I son't even know if USPTO has the dual track system, though.
Also, it's 10 gov't holidays. Well, 10.5 if you count the customary Christmas Eve for those who plan to work all day on the 24th. In return, your annual salary gets divided by 2087 to determine your hourly rate (corporate standared is 2080, but Reagan figured out he could save a little money by using the 2087 hours in an average year as the basis).
The leave, I gotta say, is the part you won't find in private industry anymore. With most corps shifting from 2wk vacation +2wk sick leave to 3 weeks of "personal time off", and you get an extra day of leave after every three years, leave is sweet.
It's sad about the survival of the worst policy, but all to true. Some people just can't leave wihtout a boot in their ass, and the government doesn't own many ass-kicking-boots in personnel.
A qeustion to ask is, "Was ISS violating the terms of the (EU)LA for Cisco Software?" The research, paid for by ISS, clearly required the reverse-engineering. It appears that ISS and Cisco are both okay with this process in ISSs line of work.
The sticking point is whether Lynn actually has a specific contractual obligation with his (former) employer, ISS, which limits dissemination of information he acquires during his research.
By the look of it, Cisco has relinquished their right to enforcement of the licencse agreement concerning r-e/decryption/decompiling when they (asked/allowed) ISS to perform their security work, when they had full knowledge of the intent of ISS. By that standard, the copy of software at ISS is not bound by the that particular requirement, no matter who looks at it.
Well, it would take a whole roll of tin foil to start worrying about satellite tracking. Still, 1m readability is enough to read from the jamb of most doorways in buildings.
The convenience of them is fantastic, but the potential abuse is just so overwhelming.
...tatoo'd on your forarm or torso (base of neck, maybe?) for dead body IDs. It requires no expensive reader or propritary implant. But that's not very techological, and not politically correct.
Okay, this sounds pretty simple. Michael Lynn finds a (new) explit of Cisco routers and its a doosey. He informs ISS, who informs Cisco. Cisco management can't believe that such a serious flaw exists, since they've know about the possibility, but its been written off as minor in the past. Lynn presses his case to his supers, and they get down and dirty with Cicso. Cisco craps its pants because the flaw is everywhere, and it's going to cost real money to fix, and could hurt company Q results.
Cisco agrees with ISS taht they're going to do something about it, but it's going to take a bunch of resesarch and time. They'll keep it quiet for a few years while they put th fix in the pipline for new models. They'll work on a firmware fix, but its back burner as long as the explot isn't public. If ISS keeps its mouth shut, they can still do work for Cisco.
Lynn hears that his research is to be hush-hush, and that Cisco will work on it, but it could be a while before there's an actual patch. No arguing that the flaw is critical will make ISS management, with a financial gun to its head, budge.
Lynn flips ISS the bird, 'cause he thinks its a major security issue, and presents his research anyway. Cisco and ISS claim they're working ont it, and that its and old flaw, and nothing really serious. And they're quietly looking for a man to fir Lynn with concrete shoes for blowing their cover.
Actually, iirc from a previous discusion about LCDs on AVSforum, the larger a crystal, the longer it takes to reorient. The little pixels in a 17" display (or, even better, the 15.4" WUXGA on my laptop) can be switched pretty fast, but you put up a 1024x768 array over 40 or 50 inches and you're talking big pixels.
Typically, the overhead required to put humans into a massivly parallel environment is enormous. Doubling the number of scientists will never double the rate of discovery. It takes so much time for individuals to process information, and so much effort (in terms of management) to herd them in a particular direction, that there is a great deal of inefficiency in armies of scientists.
Thats not to say that China doesn't have a leg up, having a significantly larger population. But its still more about the quality of the researchers than the quantity. I've hear it said that the US is where it is today because it got most/best of the german scientists after WWII (this was an aerospace-nerd dinner). Progress is made by hard work, and is infinitely slower than innovation - which is usually accomplished by a very few.
The summary is nearly as long as the actual article, and contains practically all the information. It can't get any better for/. readers - even those that don't RTFA have all the information available.
That said, this is about as useful as,well, nothing. A spam collector ad? At least the previous/. ads were for products. Wake me when there's news. And when DirecTV supports this.
So at 10 petaflops, it will only take 3.5 months of constant training before the computer keeps asking why to every response you give it? A year and a half before it can learn to drive a car? Speaking of which, is there a possibility that - given enough training - it can lear to talk on the phone and drive at the same time? Now THAT would be superhuman processing.
That would be awful. Which timeslice do I get? Or does my 70s super-disco format get voted down by a majority of the shareholders and I get squat for my "membership". No, a better condition would be to reduce the number of stations owned by a company in a given area to , say, 1. Or, make station ownership local (i.e. no foreign corporations or foreign ownership greater than 5%; foreign = out of state, btw).
I'm afraid communist radio is doomed to fail like local government. Apathy of the poplace will tend to result in a power structure that benfits a few. Look at most local governments - they're disfunctional at best. I can't imagine radio done this way be any better.
Sorry, I wasn't referring to the "job" as an actual employee doing a task, but rather the "Job" of the TSA to make air travel safe. The justification from the administration was to keep people from flying more airplanes into buildings.
As the thread says, Scope Creep is what I'm not happy about. (okay, I'm not happy about the TSA, and I don't fly much. I think marshalls could be added to all planes over 80 passengers for less total budget, but that's not politcally correct either)
No, the "elites" are those with enough money and influence that they don't have to put themselves through all this crap.
If you are rich enough, you will mostly fly private jets, and avoid all of this sillyness with the TSA. Most top executives do, if only under the guise of "convenience" of scheduling. (It's true. If you bill $400-$1000/hr, waiting hours for a plane flight and connections will cost more than your private charter).
If you are rich enough, you can pretty much avoid all scrutiny. Sen.Bob Dole doesnt' ahve to mess with all the money hassles of credit cards and spending tracking. He pays in cash*. In fact, he was flagged once because he withdraws several thousnd dollars of pocket money each month. Of course, he has influnce, too, to he whipped out his Senator ID and told the gov't he wasn't a terrorist, so they went away.
You see, there is no special club of elites, but they do exist. They have people to deal with the day to day stuff, and should they get in a jam, they just whip out the "I'm Teddy Kennedy, godddamnit" line and get on the airplane. And have that person fired later. The rest of us have to deal with this crap.
*Bob Dole pays for everything with cash, by his own admission, because he doesn't want people knowing how he spends his money. I don't have the link to the article handy. After I found out his spending habit, it made the Visa Check card commercials that much funnier (since he would never use one).
Yes, yes, its good they caught a druggie. The problem is, that's not their job, and they went beyond their authority. I agree with you, but deceided to post here instead of to the children.
The whole idea of the TSA was to prevent airplane hijackings and bombs. Make the skies safe. The bargain was - you relinquish a bit of privacy, and in turn well make it harder for terrorists to kill people using airplanes.
For all of you who think that its okay that they turned this guy over to the DEA with no more than a suspicious package, I suggest you lobby your congressman for random door-to-door seraches, to be carried out at least once per month, along with mandatory traffic stops on all roads for full searches of persons and vehicles. I would also suggest automotive balck boxes in every car - antique to just off the assembly line. A weekly stop at the DMV for an outomated print out of your traffic violations would get you straight pretty fast. I mean, imagine all the crime we could prevent. People with unapproved gasoline containers, homeowners bungled wiring jobs, all the way up to dead bodies in basements. I mean, we could be looking at a 30 or 40% drop in crime. But is it worth your freedom? Is it worth prosecuting minor infractions? Where does it stop.
Before you claim your innocence and lack of fear, I suggest you take a close look at your life. I would venture to say that every human over the age of 3 has violated the law at some point in this country, and more tha 95% do so more than once a week. It may be minor, and is probably has absolutly no impact, which is why it doesn't matter. Are you willing to take the chance that you, or one of your family, is the one to be made an "example" of? I'm not.
I'm shocked, shocked that people chose to invest based on derivation instead of valuation. It's almost as if they think the stock market is some sort of free market...
No, not free market - gambling house. You see, the stock market has become a place to gamble. Instead of horses, or blackjack, or dogs, you get to bet on companies. It's great fun, and quite exciting, watching the ticker every few minutes to see if you're "winning". But it's not investing.
Slashdot Mirror
You made up those first five, didn't you.
Far easier than that. The google patent, and I quote:
/.
"QWER V@#$KL@LKJ@ @ l2kjl2kjlk j@!# JKGE 2lkjt
2g lwekr2234:KLjg j2jg;sldkjf; g3lklg sdf on the internet, with an RSS feed."
Of course, that's just the abstract, as the entire application is far too long for me to type here on
How does this not get approved, really?
Funny, it was the opposite in the NASA division where I worked. My second level supervisor has a computer that was the oldest and slowest of the bunch - a 5-6 years old triple hand-me down with a 15" monitor. His secretary was one step better, maybe 4 years old, same monitor. My boss had a 17" monitor and a 2-3 year old ocmputer. The cad guys all sat in front of 21" monitors (this is early 90s, btw) on brand new intel processors - some dual ppros.
Then again, we got real work done in that branch. (And it was the cad guys and working engineers closed their doors, turned off the lights and fragged the hell out of one another for an hour, instead of eating lunch on Fridays.)
You've hit on a key point...
While an extremely busy shop is a deterrent to customers, so is an empty shop. If the wifi keeps people in some of the seats, they'll bring in paying customers
One of my favorite scenes, possibly of all time. Then again, I found Undercover Brother hilarious.
I'm of Jewish decent...that's exactly where my comment was going.
Well, since the GS-9 level is entered at STEP 1 ($43,600), generally, and the first three steps require 1 year each to attain, the next three 2 years each, and the final three 3 years each, it'll be a long time before you hit a step 10. As you know (as a former cs), the steps are there to provide above-COLA merit increases within a capped GS level job. With work experience, you can get hired in at a higher step, but your salary growth is still limited.
If the system is similar to techincal jobs at NASA, the usual track is GS-7 with a BS, 6-8mo to a GS-9, another year to an 11. MS doesn't buy you much except starting at GS-9, and then a year to get to an 11. (This, btw, is really old data - maybe 12-15 years ago). GS-12 requires a "real" promotion, and usually take a couple of years, and 13 is as high as you'll go without being in management (highly tenure based), or on a "dual track" and being a demonstrated national or international expert in your field (GS-14 and 15 respectively). I son't even know if USPTO has the dual track system, though.
Also, it's 10 gov't holidays. Well, 10.5 if you count the customary Christmas Eve for those who plan to work all day on the 24th. In return, your annual salary gets divided by 2087 to determine your hourly rate (corporate standared is 2080, but Reagan figured out he could save a little money by using the 2087 hours in an average year as the basis).
The leave, I gotta say, is the part you won't find in private industry anymore. With most corps shifting from 2wk vacation +2wk sick leave to 3 weeks of "personal time off", and you get an extra day of leave after every three years, leave is sweet.
It's sad about the survival of the worst policy, but all to true. Some people just can't leave wihtout a boot in their ass, and the government doesn't own many ass-kicking-boots in personnel.
A qeustion to ask is, "Was ISS violating the terms of the (EU)LA for Cisco Software?" The research, paid for by ISS, clearly required the reverse-engineering. It appears that ISS and Cisco are both okay with this process in ISSs line of work.
The sticking point is whether Lynn actually has a specific contractual obligation with his (former) employer, ISS, which limits dissemination of information he acquires during his research.
By the look of it, Cisco has relinquished their right to enforcement of the licencse agreement concerning r-e/decryption/decompiling when they (asked/allowed) ISS to perform their security work, when they had full knowledge of the intent of ISS. By that standard, the copy of software at ISS is not bound by the that particular requirement, no matter who looks at it.
Well, it would take a whole roll of tin foil to start worrying about satellite tracking. Still, 1m readability is enough to read from the jamb of most doorways in buildings.
The convenience of them is fantastic, but the potential abuse is just so overwhelming.
C'mon mods, I'm one overrated away from a -1 insightful.
/. rulebook handy)
BTW - does a -1, Insightful or a +5, Troll count if you posted AC? (I don't have my
...tatoo'd on your forarm or torso (base of neck, maybe?) for dead body IDs. It requires no expensive reader or propritary implant. But that's not very techological, and not politically correct.
Same thing, different method.
Okay, this sounds pretty simple. Michael Lynn finds a (new) explit of Cisco routers and its a doosey. He informs ISS, who informs Cisco. Cisco management can't believe that such a serious flaw exists, since they've know about the possibility, but its been written off as minor in the past. Lynn presses his case to his supers, and they get down and dirty with Cicso. Cisco craps its pants because the flaw is everywhere, and it's going to cost real money to fix, and could hurt company Q results.
Cisco agrees with ISS taht they're going to do something about it, but it's going to take a bunch of resesarch and time. They'll keep it quiet for a few years while they put th fix in the pipline for new models. They'll work on a firmware fix, but its back burner as long as the explot isn't public. If ISS keeps its mouth shut, they can still do work for Cisco.
Lynn hears that his research is to be hush-hush, and that Cisco will work on it, but it could be a while before there's an actual patch. No arguing that the flaw is critical will make ISS management, with a financial gun to its head, budge.
Lynn flips ISS the bird, 'cause he thinks its a major security issue, and presents his research anyway. Cisco and ISS claim they're working ont it, and that its and old flaw, and nothing really serious. And they're quietly looking for a man to fir Lynn with concrete shoes for blowing their cover.
Seems pretty clear to me.
Actually, iirc from a previous discusion about LCDs on AVSforum, the larger a crystal, the longer it takes to reorient. The little pixels in a 17" display (or, even better, the 15.4" WUXGA on my laptop) can be switched pretty fast, but you put up a 1024x768 array over 40 or 50 inches and you're talking big pixels.
Yeah, I was with you 'til 8. Apple without DRM is like, well, I don't know. It just can't exist - its in their blood.
Typically, the overhead required to put humans into a massivly parallel environment is enormous. Doubling the number of scientists will never double the rate of discovery. It takes so much time for individuals to process information, and so much effort (in terms of management) to herd them in a particular direction, that there is a great deal of inefficiency in armies of scientists.
Thats not to say that China doesn't have a leg up, having a significantly larger population. But its still more about the quality of the researchers than the quantity. I've hear it said that the US is where it is today because it got most/best of the german scientists after WWII (this was an aerospace-nerd dinner). Progress is made by hard work, and is infinitely slower than innovation - which is usually accomplished by a very few.
Dead wrong. The stock market is a paramutuel betting house (sorry if I spelled it wrong, I don't play the ponies):
1. The only money in the system comes from the players.
2. The "house", known as the brokers, take a small commission on every bet^H^H^Htrade.
3. The total sum of money made and lost must be 1 after brokers commissions.
The only difference is that the game never ends. More players are always joining, and cashing out the retiring players.
The summary is nearly as long as the actual article, and contains practically all the information. It can't get any better for /. readers - even those that don't RTFA have all the information available.
/. ads were for products. Wake me when there's news. And when DirecTV supports this.
That said, this is about as useful as,well, nothing. A spam collector ad? At least the previous
So at 10 petaflops, it will only take 3.5 months of constant training before the computer keeps asking why to every response you give it? A year and a half before it can learn to drive a car? Speaking of which, is there a possibility that - given enough training - it can lear to talk on the phone and drive at the same time? Now THAT would be superhuman processing.
That would be awful. Which timeslice do I get? Or does my 70s super-disco format get voted down by a majority of the shareholders and I get squat for my "membership". No, a better condition would be to reduce the number of stations owned by a company in a given area to , say, 1. Or, make station ownership local (i.e. no foreign corporations or foreign ownership greater than 5%; foreign = out of state, btw).
I'm afraid communist radio is doomed to fail like local government. Apathy of the poplace will tend to result in a power structure that benfits a few. Look at most local governments - they're disfunctional at best. I can't imagine radio done this way be any better.
Enforcement requires an adminitrative stance that profit is secondary to the law. That policy is not curretnly in effect.
Let me guess, you'll do it for half price, right?
Sorry, I wasn't referring to the "job" as an actual employee doing a task, but rather the "Job" of the TSA to make air travel safe. The justification from the administration was to keep people from flying more airplanes into buildings.
As the thread says, Scope Creep is what I'm not happy about. (okay, I'm not happy about the TSA, and I don't fly much. I think marshalls could be added to all planes over 80 passengers for less total budget, but that's not politcally correct either)
No, the "elites" are those with enough money and influence that they don't have to put themselves through all this crap.
If you are rich enough, you will mostly fly private jets, and avoid all of this sillyness with the TSA. Most top executives do, if only under the guise of "convenience" of scheduling. (It's true. If you bill $400-$1000/hr, waiting hours for a plane flight and connections will cost more than your private charter).
If you are rich enough, you can pretty much avoid all scrutiny. Sen.Bob Dole doesnt' ahve to mess with all the money hassles of credit cards and spending tracking. He pays in cash*. In fact, he was flagged once because he withdraws several thousnd dollars of pocket money each month. Of course, he has influnce, too, to he whipped out his Senator ID and told the gov't he wasn't a terrorist, so they went away.
You see, there is no special club of elites, but they do exist. They have people to deal with the day to day stuff, and should they get in a jam, they just whip out the "I'm Teddy Kennedy, godddamnit" line and get on the airplane. And have that person fired later. The rest of us have to deal with this crap.
*Bob Dole pays for everything with cash, by his own admission, because he doesn't want people knowing how he spends his money. I don't have the link to the article handy. After I found out his spending habit, it made the Visa Check card commercials that much funnier (since he would never use one).
Yes, yes, its good they caught a druggie. The problem is, that's not their job, and they went beyond their authority. I agree with you, but deceided to post here instead of to the children.
The whole idea of the TSA was to prevent airplane hijackings and bombs. Make the skies safe. The bargain was - you relinquish a bit of privacy, and in turn well make it harder for terrorists to kill people using airplanes.
For all of you who think that its okay that they turned this guy over to the DEA with no more than a suspicious package, I suggest you lobby your congressman for random door-to-door seraches, to be carried out at least once per month, along with mandatory traffic stops on all roads for full searches of persons and vehicles. I would also suggest automotive balck boxes in every car - antique to just off the assembly line. A weekly stop at the DMV for an outomated print out of your traffic violations would get you straight pretty fast. I mean, imagine all the crime we could prevent. People with unapproved gasoline containers, homeowners bungled wiring jobs, all the way up to dead bodies in basements. I mean, we could be looking at a 30 or 40% drop in crime. But is it worth your freedom? Is it worth prosecuting minor infractions? Where does it stop.
Before you claim your innocence and lack of fear, I suggest you take a close look at your life. I would venture to say that every human over the age of 3 has violated the law at some point in this country, and more tha 95% do so more than once a week. It may be minor, and is probably has absolutly no impact, which is why it doesn't matter. Are you willing to take the chance that you, or one of your family, is the one to be made an "example" of? I'm not.
I'm shocked, shocked that people chose
to invest based on derivation instead
of valuation. It's almost as if they
think the stock market is some sort of
free market...
No, not free market - gambling house. You see, the stock market has become a place to gamble. Instead of horses, or blackjack, or dogs, you get to bet on companies. It's great fun, and quite exciting, watching the ticker every few minutes to see if you're "winning". But it's not investing.