I'm disappointed that the FCC even cares about HAM radio operators. FEMA, NTIA, and the Department of Homeland Security have all filed with the FCC proposals 03-104 and 04-37 in favor of BPL if reasonable precautions are taken.
I'm a amateur radio operator, and I'm in favor if BPL if reasonable precautions are taken. In other words, hold the BPL companies to the same part 15 rules that all other unlicensed users of licensed portions have to follow (Short version: unlicensed devices operating under part 15 of the FCC rules cannot cause interfearance to licensed services, and must cease operation if interfearance occurs until the cause of the interfearance can be fixed.).
The problem is that I never see this happening. Lets say that I find my local utility is generating interfearance that renders significant portions of the bands allocated to amateur radio unusable. I call the power company and report the problem. When the line workers show up, we manage to agree that the interfearing signal is from their BPL system. (In reality, I imagine that it would take a lot of work to convince the power company that it is their problem). Most likely, the only soluction to the problem will be for the power company to either reduce the power of the BPL signal on the offending portion of the power lines, or to use a filter to notch out the offending frequencies. Either option would degrade BPL service to some of their customers. I seriously doubt that either the power companies will voluntariy degrade service to solve interfearance problems or the FCC will force the power companies to degrade their BPL service in order to solve interfearance problems.
The other issue is that the frequencies which BPL providers will use can quite easily propagate around the world. Lets say that a BPL signal is found to interfear with some licensed service. (amateur, fixed, maritime, land mobile, military, etc.) How do you determine the source of the interfearance when it could be any of a large number of BPL providers accross the country?
I have nothing agaist the use of BPL withing existing part 15 rules. I simply doubt that it will be possible to solve any interfearance problems that occur.
If one can make 17" OLED display, where is the engineering complexity in making a 40" display?
It probably has to do with manufacturing yield. For every pixel and/or unit of area on the display, their is a certain probability that there will be a defect in that pixel/area. Say your process is known to produce one defect per 10-million pixel-sized areas on a 17" 1024x768 display. For each screen, you have about an 8% chance there will be at least one bad pixel. If you scale that up to a 40" display, which would have 5 times the area, you would have about a 34% chance there will be at least one bad pixel. Of course, a certain small number of bad pixels per display is probably acceptable. Point is, however, that as the area of the display increases, the number of manufacturing defects per display also increases. At some point, you're throwing too many displays away due to bad pixels to be profitable.
Why does Ford/GM/et al hang the codes on a light? Why not have a spot on the dash that prints out the codes ASCII? check gas cap, water temp sensor bad, cold start injector not working.
Probably because its cheap. It should be noted that some vehicles are beginning to display more detailed diagnostics on the dash. I couple of months ago, I drove a 2005 GM Randevouz which had a tri-color dot-matrix display on the middle of the dash that would display messages such as low tire pressure, low battery, etc, with the color of the background yellow or red depending on the severity.
Why hide the results of the code from the owner?
First of all, I wouldn't consider most codes hidden: There are a number of online references for different vehicles that show what codes mean. Second, I'm not sure the automakes themselves always know what all of the codes mean. The engine computer is most likely made by a supplier such as Hitachi or Bosch. While the OEM probably specifies most of the error codes, it is very possible that the engine computer has additional error codes or that the error codes set vary from revision to revision of the hardware or software.
1. Maintainance worker sees circuit boards, gas baloons, etc. in circuit-board-guy's apartment.
2. Thinking he's a hero and is about to foil a major terrorist plot, worker over-reacts and calls the FBI. (Note that the appropriate action if the worker suspects illegal activity would most likely be to call the local police.)
3. FBI takes worker's report, along with many other reports of people possing items that might be used in an attack, but are probably harmless. They don't want to pull resources off of other, probably more important tasts, in order to check out circuit-board-guy. Instead, they relay the report to the local police (who should have been contacted instead of the FBI in the first place), just in case circuit-board-guy really is planning some kind of attack.
4. Local police also assume that circuit-board-guy is harmless, but want to go take a peak just to be sure.
5. Local police show up at circuit-board-guy's door. They tell him what's going on (why not, he's probably innocent). Circuit-board-guy explains his hobby, and everybody goes away happy.
They way I read it, the FBI and the local police handled it well. Nobody had their door kicked down or property searched/seized involuntarily. The only place where something went wrong was worker's decision to call the FBI over a circuit board.
There are a number of comments to the effect that circuit-board-guy should have told the police to f*** off unless they had a warrant. While that would have been circuit-board-guy's right, I don't think it would have helped anything. By letting the police in and explaining his activities, circuit-board-guy did two good things. First, he defused suspicion (hopefully) that he might be planning some kind of attack. Second, showed the police that there are valid reasons for innocent people to have circuit boards and soldering irons hangin around their homes.
I got the impression that much of the pamphlet was aimed at promoting underground/pirate radio vs. the current rules that make such activity illegal.
Let the FCC regulate low-power broadcasting. Low-power station operators would then be licensed, just like any other radio service. This license would grant the operator the right to broadcast below a certain power level on any FM broadcast frequency not in use in their area. Once an hour, the low-power station would have to identify with its call-letters and state how the operator can be contacted to resolve any interfearance issues. If a low-power station interfears with a commercial station, the low-power station would have the responsibility to correct the situation by changing frequency, reducing power, or changing radiation pattern of their antenna. Low power stations would have no protection from interfearance from commercial stations or other low-power stations.
Basically, the low-power license would allow anyone who can demonstrate the requisite techinical knownledge to operate a low-power station so long as doing so does not create any interfearance.
I don't know about you, but everywhere I've ever lived, local bus service is a monopoly granted by the local government. Sure, there are other transportion options, such as personal vehicles, taxis, bicycles, etc, but none necessarily serve the same market.
What makes the auto industry's "transportation fee" acceptable in my mind is that is is clearly disclosed as part of the sticker price. The telco industry's practice, at least in my mind, is unacceptabe because the fees are not normally disclosed ahead of time. I've never had a problem, however, asking exactly what all the fees are when I sign up for a plan. Usually, with a bit of prodding, they will give you the totoal.
Of course, such is big business. When you buy a car, you pay a "transportation fee" for getting the car from the factory to the dealership.
As far as I'm concerned, there is nothing wrong with these practices so long as the fees are disclosed to the purcahser before they have to commit to the purchase (or lease, other contract). In the case of the trasportion fee on new cars, it is listed on the sticker, and is a part of the sticker price.
This would be equivalant to the telco companies simply stating that $17.47 of your $59.99/month plan goes towards regulatory compliance.
Imagine: I am a spammer. I must now host a server which has the capability to receive $millions of hits from all my wonderful spam-receiving customers. This is the first thing which begins shifting the burden of sending of email back onto the sender.
The problem with this idea is that, on a per e-mail basis, spammers actually need fewer resources than non-spammers. Compare a spammer whose domain sends 1 Million e-mails a day, and a legitimate domain who also sends 1 Million e-mails a day. For the legitimate domain, most of the e-mails sent will be unique, most will be read, and it is probably vitally importatnt that the readers be able to access the sending server at all uptimes. This means the legitimate domain must maintain a mail server which can store millions of messages, which has a very fast connection, and which has a very high availaibility. The spammer, on the otherhand, is going to send out many copies of the same message, only a few of which will actually be read, and really doesn't care if his server is down for a few hours (after all, the same suckers who read the e-mail the first time will probably read another spam sent to their address). As a result, the spammer can get by with much more basic hardware. Which brings us to the second point:
if I were a spammer, I'd probably have all my malware-infected robots be the hosts for sent emails.
Here we have the basic hardware. Since the spammer doesn't need much storage, the user won't notice their computer hard-drive is filling up. All they will notice is that (if the spammer is successful) their connection is slower than normal. This will probably be blamed on the p2p software of the week the user's teenage daughter installed.
Trustee 1: "Hey, how can we waste a lot of money really fast?"
You know: I just don't understand where that attitude among university administrators and boards of * comes from. The college I just graduated from spent a large sum of money rehabing an old industrial building on campus into a really nice lab/classroom building. The money was well-spent, except for one item: They insisted on replacing the existing brick facade with a red brick which matched the color and type of brick used on the rest of the campus. Apparently, this was a significant portion of the budget for rehabing the building, and was not required from a structural standpoint. It makes even less sense when one considers that the building predates the near-by campus buildings which it just had to match by over twenty years and that the existing brick facade matched the other nearby non-campus buildings.
Many colleges and universities offer (or even require) internships as part of their engineering degree programs. Even if your school doesn't have an official internship programs, it is in your best interest to find a company to intern for during the summer or even part-time during the school year.
When you talk to potential internship employers, make sure that you find out how they handle their internship programs. You probably don't want an internship where all you do is clerical and go-for work, especially if you're beyond your first or second year. Instead, find an employer who gives their interns actual projects/responsibilities as part of their experiance. "Implemented an automated end-of-line test system for [insert widget here]" looks much better on your resume then "Reorganized storage rooms". While a certain amount of clerical/go-for work is part of almost any internship, it should not be the only thing you do.
Well, I've never had any problem either reading a PDF created with third-party tools in Acrobat Reader or reading a PDF created with Acrobat with various third party readers.
I can't say the same about most of the MS Office formats. If you create a DOC file in Open-Office, it may not display properly in Word, or vice-versa.
As long as employers are clear about how many hours people are allowed to work, they shouldn't be required to shell out for people who go over.
In a perfect world, I would agree. In reality, I can see a situation where an employee is told they can only work n hours a week, but are expected to work as many hours as necessary to complete their tasks.
For example, while you were scheduled to work 40 hours this week unloading trucks in the warehouse, there were a couple of days where trucks arrived late, and you ended up working 45 hours. You're told to only report 40, since that is all you had been officially authorized to work. Unofficially, your supervisor has made it clear that there will be retailation against employees who aren't willing to work extra hours without overtime.
If the cost per kWh from the setup and maintenance of the equipment needs to be x cents / kWh and using renewable / clean sources of electricity can generate at x/5 cents / kWh then it wont fly.
Step 1: Figure out if/how it is possible to extract more energy from a fussion reaction than was needed to initiate the reaction.
Step 2: Figure out how to scale the laboratory apparatus up to something capable of generating a useful amount of energy.
Step 3: Actually build a commercial scale fusion power plant, if a business case can be made for its operation.
Repeat steps 1 through 3 as progress allows.
Saying that fussion research is pointless since other renewable/clean power sources are cheap is kind of like telling the Wright Brothers (or other early aviation researchers) not to bother with aeroplanes, since trains are a much cheaper method of transport than their one-man flying machines.
You're right, though, we won't see any fusion plants until fusion is cheaper than onther availabile energy sources (clean, renewable, or otherwise.)
I'd imagine that any CLI vs. GUI comparison is going to depend a lot on the task at hand.
Task 1: Delete a file in the current folder: GUI probably wins, since this specific task was anticipated by the GUI designers.
Task 2: Rename 30 files changing underscores to dashes and change the first character of the filename to 'f' if the first character is 'd': CLI probably wins, primarily due to the fact that it is easier to pipe different tools together to achieve the desired result.
There is also the matter of how quickly the GUI can display the data. As a real-life example, part of my job involves analyizing test results from product testing. Typically, the test systems maintain a log file identifying when specific events occured, and then store the actual recorded values (i.e. all samples from 1 second before the event to 1 second after the event) in a seperate file, one file per event. When I want to open the log file, I typically point-and-click my way to the file. When I want to open the recorded waveform, I typically type the filename at a command-line. Why? It can take several seconds to retrieve the directory contents if the directory contains several thousand waveforms, while it only takes me a couple of keystrokes to change the prevous filename to the next one I want to look at.
Keep in mind that many useful inventions and technologies are discovered which searching for something else. Drug-delivery is one possible use, however, now that they've published their results, somebody else may think of a more realistic use.
The test results that would have taken a couple of technicians and/or engineers a few days (or more) to analize, now are analyzied by the computer in real time. Suspicious test cycles are automatically flagged for further review. Now, withing 5 minutes of sitting down at my desk in the morning, I can determine whether any parts I have on test failed over night, see how they failed, and begin brainstorming how to fix any problems that occur.
That's just the test results.
Consider all the time saved by looking up information on line, or by asking a question in a community forum, or getting the data from the part supplier in your e-mail.
That in the USA we have different voltages, frequencies and plug shapes for power than you do in the UK.
Of course that is something to keep in mind, however a lot of newer laptops have power supplies that autorange (or are at least switchable) and work at 50Hz-60Hz and 90-220V.
Well, start giving advertising the legal weight of a contract. If I buy a product which says "Supports Feature X" only to find out that it doesn't support feature X out of the box, I can go to small-claims court and attempt to recover whatever portion of the purchase price I feel feature X was worth.
There's also the issue of how to send a corporation to prison.
That's a very tough issue. Assigning guilt is going to be very hard to to in many cases. If you fine the company into oblivion, you are going to hurt many of the companies employees, customers, and suppliers who had nothing to due with the problem. Here's my thought: Doctors, Lawyers, Professional Engineers, and may others can be sued for malpractice if they perform their job in an incompetant or illegal manner. I think we need the concept of a Professional Manager. If you fail to keep your employees within the law, you can be held responsible. Extend the liability all the way to the board of directors. To extend the previous example, if a company has a habit of listing "Supports Feature X" on the box without actually supporting feature X, let the FTC (or their equivalants) go after the company. Determine who approved the working "Supports Feature X", and divide the fines equally among the approvers manager, the manager's manager,..., the board of directors.
wouldn't all the keyless entry systems be affected?
Most likely not. There are a number of manufacturers of such systems, and each manufactuer probably has a couple of different levels of product. (i.e. the keyless entry goes into a BMW probably is a little better build than one that goes into a Ford Fuckus). Unless the products are very similar, they will all respond a bit differently to a given source of interfearance. Most likely, you would need a high-power, wide-bandwith signal in order to take out every keyless entry systm in a given area.
A few things. First, Mr Hiibel was not in his car. Second, his daugher had been driving, not Mr. Hiibel. IIRC, the reason you mush show ID is if you are operating the vehicle, in which case you must show that you are licensed to do so.
So you mean to tell me that the police officer has no right to ask for identification from any party when dispatched to a possible domestic violence situation?
The officer has every right to ask for ID. Until you are actually under arrest you don't have to provide identification under most circumstances (at least according to the ACLU, YMMV).
Here is my question for you: How did not showing ID prevent or interfear with the officers investigation? The way I see it, the officer could have compleated his investigation (i.e. determine if he had physically attacked his daughter) without knowing who the man was:
Officer: We got a report that you may have physically attacked your daughter. May I see your ID?
Man: No, unless I'm under arrest, I do not consent to provide identification.
Officer: OK, that is your right. Please stay here while I talk to your daughter.
Man: OK
Officer: (To Daughter) We had a report that your father attacked you. Is that the case?
Daugher: No, we were having a verbal argument, and my father want to get out of the truck, so I pulled over and let him out.
Officer: (Seeing no visible injuries) OK, have a good evening, you are both free to go.
See how easy that could have been? Nobody has to show I.D. Nobody gets arrested. Everybody goes home happy.
Even if there is code that is exactly the same in both linux and SCO's code, that does not mean that linux copied SCO. A number of other possibilities:
1. SCO copied linux
2. SCO and linux both copied somebody else
3. SCO and linux both arrived at similar implementations of a common standard.
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I'm disappointed that the FCC even cares about HAM radio operators. FEMA, NTIA, and the Department of Homeland Security have all filed with the FCC proposals 03-104 and 04-37 in favor of BPL if reasonable precautions are taken.
I'm a amateur radio operator, and I'm in favor if BPL if reasonable precautions are taken. In other words, hold the BPL companies to the same part 15 rules that all other unlicensed users of licensed portions have to follow (Short version: unlicensed devices operating under part 15 of the FCC rules cannot cause interfearance to licensed services, and must cease operation if interfearance occurs until the cause of the interfearance can be fixed.).
The problem is that I never see this happening. Lets say that I find my local utility is generating interfearance that renders significant portions of the bands allocated to amateur radio unusable. I call the power company and report the problem. When the line workers show up, we manage to agree that the interfearing signal is from their BPL system. (In reality, I imagine that it would take a lot of work to convince the power company that it is their problem). Most likely, the only soluction to the problem will be for the power company to either reduce the power of the BPL signal on the offending portion of the power lines, or to use a filter to notch out the offending frequencies. Either option would degrade BPL service to some of their customers. I seriously doubt that either the power companies will voluntariy degrade service to solve interfearance problems or the FCC will force the power companies to degrade their BPL service in order to solve interfearance problems.
The other issue is that the frequencies which BPL providers will use can quite easily propagate around the world. Lets say that a BPL signal is found to interfear with some licensed service. (amateur, fixed, maritime, land mobile, military, etc.) How do you determine the source of the interfearance when it could be any of a large number of BPL providers accross the country?
I have nothing agaist the use of BPL withing existing part 15 rules. I simply doubt that it will be possible to solve any interfearance problems that occur.
KC8DEI
If one can make 17" OLED display, where is the engineering complexity in making a 40" display?
It probably has to do with manufacturing yield. For every pixel and/or unit of area on the display, their is a certain probability that there will be a defect in that pixel/area. Say your process is known to produce one defect per 10-million pixel-sized areas on a 17" 1024x768 display. For each screen, you have about an 8% chance there will be at least one bad pixel. If you scale that up to a 40" display, which would have 5 times the area, you would have about a 34% chance there will be at least one bad pixel. Of course, a certain small number of bad pixels per display is probably acceptable. Point is, however, that as the area of the display increases, the number of manufacturing defects per display also increases. At some point, you're throwing too many displays away due to bad pixels to be profitable.
Why does Ford/GM/et al hang the codes on a light? Why not have a spot on the dash that prints out the codes ASCII? check gas cap, water temp sensor bad, cold start injector not working.
Probably because its cheap. It should be noted that some vehicles are beginning to display more detailed diagnostics on the dash. I couple of months ago, I drove a 2005 GM Randevouz which had a tri-color dot-matrix display on the middle of the dash that would display messages such as low tire pressure, low battery, etc, with the color of the background yellow or red depending on the severity.
Why hide the results of the code from the owner?
First of all, I wouldn't consider most codes hidden: There are a number of online references for different vehicles that show what codes mean. Second, I'm not sure the automakes themselves always know what all of the codes mean. The engine computer is most likely made by a supplier such as Hitachi or Bosch. While the OEM probably specifies most of the error codes, it is very possible that the engine computer has additional error codes or that the error codes set vary from revision to revision of the hardware or software.
So the real reason for the nacells on Star Trek is to generate electrostatic fields?
I imagine the reason for the nacells on Start Trek is somebody thought they would give the ships a cool futuristic look.
It probably goes something like this.
1. Maintainance worker sees circuit boards, gas baloons, etc. in circuit-board-guy's apartment.
2. Thinking he's a hero and is about to foil a major terrorist plot, worker over-reacts and calls the FBI. (Note that the appropriate action if the worker suspects illegal activity would most likely be to call the local police.)
3. FBI takes worker's report, along with many other reports of people possing items that might be used in an attack, but are probably harmless. They don't want to pull resources off of other, probably more important tasts, in order to check out circuit-board-guy. Instead, they relay the report to the local police (who should have been contacted instead of the FBI in the first place), just in case circuit-board-guy really is planning some kind of attack.
4. Local police also assume that circuit-board-guy is harmless, but want to go take a peak just to be sure.
5. Local police show up at circuit-board-guy's door. They tell him what's going on (why not, he's probably innocent). Circuit-board-guy explains his hobby, and everybody goes away happy.
They way I read it, the FBI and the local police handled it well. Nobody had their door kicked down or property searched/seized involuntarily. The only place where something went wrong was worker's decision to call the FBI over a circuit board.
There are a number of comments to the effect that circuit-board-guy should have told the police to f*** off unless they had a warrant. While that would have been circuit-board-guy's right, I don't think it would have helped anything. By letting the police in and explaining his activities, circuit-board-guy did two good things. First, he defused suspicion (hopefully) that he might be planning some kind of attack. Second, showed the police that there are valid reasons for innocent people to have circuit boards and soldering irons hangin around their homes.
I got the impression that much of the pamphlet was aimed at promoting underground/pirate radio vs. the current rules that make such activity illegal.
Let the FCC regulate low-power broadcasting. Low-power station operators would then be licensed, just like any other radio service. This license would grant the operator the right to broadcast below a certain power level on any FM broadcast frequency not in use in their area. Once an hour, the low-power station would have to identify with its call-letters and state how the operator can be contacted to resolve any interfearance issues. If a low-power station interfears with a commercial station, the low-power station would have the responsibility to correct the situation by changing frequency, reducing power, or changing radiation pattern of their antenna. Low power stations would have no protection from interfearance from commercial stations or other low-power stations.
Basically, the low-power license would allow anyone who can demonstrate the requisite techinical knownledge to operate a low-power station so long as doing so does not create any interfearance.
I don't know about you, but everywhere I've ever lived, local bus service is a monopoly granted by the local government. Sure, there are other transportion options, such as personal vehicles, taxis, bicycles, etc, but none necessarily serve the same market.
What makes the auto industry's "transportation fee" acceptable in my mind is that is is clearly disclosed as part of the sticker price. The telco industry's practice, at least in my mind, is unacceptabe because the fees are not normally disclosed ahead of time. I've never had a problem, however, asking exactly what all the fees are when I sign up for a plan. Usually, with a bit of prodding, they will give you the totoal.
Of course, such is big business. When you buy a car, you pay a "transportation fee" for getting the car from the factory to the dealership.
As far as I'm concerned, there is nothing wrong with these practices so long as the fees are disclosed to the purcahser before they have to commit to the purchase (or lease, other contract). In the case of the trasportion fee on new cars, it is listed on the sticker, and is a part of the sticker price.
This would be equivalant to the telco companies simply stating that $17.47 of your $59.99/month plan goes towards regulatory compliance.
Imagine: I am a spammer. I must now host a server which has the capability to receive $millions of hits from all my wonderful spam-receiving customers. This is the first thing which begins shifting the burden of sending of email back onto the sender.
The problem with this idea is that, on a per e-mail basis, spammers actually need fewer resources than non-spammers. Compare a spammer whose domain sends 1 Million e-mails a day, and a legitimate domain who also sends 1 Million e-mails a day. For the legitimate domain, most of the e-mails sent will be unique, most will be read, and it is probably vitally importatnt that the readers be able to access the sending server at all uptimes. This means the legitimate domain must maintain a mail server which can store millions of messages, which has a very fast connection, and which has a very high availaibility. The spammer, on the otherhand, is going to send out many copies of the same message, only a few of which will actually be read, and really doesn't care if his server is down for a few hours (after all, the same suckers who read the e-mail the first time will probably read another spam sent to their address). As a result, the spammer can get by with much more basic hardware. Which brings us to the second point:
if I were a spammer, I'd probably have all my malware-infected robots be the hosts for sent emails.
Here we have the basic hardware. Since the spammer doesn't need much storage, the user won't notice their computer hard-drive is filling up. All they will notice is that (if the spammer is successful) their connection is slower than normal. This will probably be blamed on the p2p software of the week the user's teenage daughter installed.
Trustee 1: "Hey, how can we waste a lot of money really fast?"
You know: I just don't understand where that attitude among university administrators and boards of * comes from. The college I just graduated from spent a large sum of money rehabing an old industrial building on campus into a really nice lab/classroom building. The money was well-spent, except for one item: They insisted on replacing the existing brick facade with a red brick which matched the color and type of brick used on the rest of the campus. Apparently, this was a significant portion of the budget for rehabing the building, and was not required from a structural standpoint. It makes even less sense when one considers that the building predates the near-by campus buildings which it just had to match by over twenty years and that the existing brick facade matched the other nearby non-campus buildings.
One thing to add to you list: Internships.
Many colleges and universities offer (or even require) internships as part of their engineering degree programs. Even if your school doesn't have an official internship programs, it is in your best interest to find a company to intern for during the summer or even part-time during the school year.
When you talk to potential internship employers, make sure that you find out how they handle their internship programs. You probably don't want an internship where all you do is clerical and go-for work, especially if you're beyond your first or second year. Instead, find an employer who gives their interns actual projects/responsibilities as part of their experiance. "Implemented an automated end-of-line test system for [insert widget here]" looks much better on your resume then "Reorganized storage rooms". While a certain amount of clerical/go-for work is part of almost any internship, it should not be the only thing you do.
Why are you not raving about PDF ??
Well, I've never had any problem either reading a PDF created with third-party tools in Acrobat Reader or reading a PDF created with Acrobat with various third party readers.
I can't say the same about most of the MS Office formats. If you create a DOC file in Open-Office, it may not display properly in Word, or vice-versa.
Water jet may cause severe injury or death. Avoid directing water jet towards any oriface...
The label then proceeded to list specific bodily orifices towards which the wather jet should not be directed.
As long as employers are clear about how many hours people are allowed to work, they shouldn't be required to shell out for people who go over.
In a perfect world, I would agree. In reality, I can see a situation where an employee is told they can only work n hours a week, but are expected to work as many hours as necessary to complete their tasks.
For example, while you were scheduled to work 40 hours this week unloading trucks in the warehouse, there were a couple of days where trucks arrived late, and you ended up working 45 hours. You're told to only report 40, since that is all you had been officially authorized to work. Unofficially, your supervisor has made it clear that there will be retailation against employees who aren't willing to work extra hours without overtime.
If the cost per kWh from the setup and maintenance of the equipment needs to be x cents / kWh and using renewable / clean sources of electricity can generate at x/5 cents / kWh then it wont fly.
Step 1: Figure out if/how it is possible to extract more energy from a fussion reaction than was needed to initiate the reaction.
Step 2: Figure out how to scale the laboratory apparatus up to something capable of generating a useful amount of energy.
Step 3: Actually build a commercial scale fusion power plant, if a business case can be made for its operation.
Repeat steps 1 through 3 as progress allows.
Saying that fussion research is pointless since other renewable/clean power sources are cheap is kind of like telling the Wright Brothers (or other early aviation researchers) not to bother with aeroplanes, since trains are a much cheaper method of transport than their one-man flying machines.
You're right, though, we won't see any fusion plants until fusion is cheaper than onther availabile energy sources (clean, renewable, or otherwise.)
I'd imagine that any CLI vs. GUI comparison is going to depend a lot on the task at hand.
Task 1: Delete a file in the current folder: GUI probably wins, since this specific task was anticipated by the GUI designers.
Task 2: Rename 30 files changing underscores to dashes and change the first character of the filename to 'f' if the first character is 'd': CLI probably wins, primarily due to the fact that it is easier to pipe different tools together to achieve the desired result.
There is also the matter of how quickly the GUI can display the data. As a real-life example, part of my job involves analyizing test results from product testing. Typically, the test systems maintain a log file identifying when specific events occured, and then store the actual recorded values (i.e. all samples from 1 second before the event to 1 second after the event) in a seperate file, one file per event. When I want to open the log file, I typically point-and-click my way to the file. When I want to open the recorded waveform, I typically type the filename at a command-line. Why? It can take several seconds to retrieve the directory contents if the directory contains several thousand waveforms, while it only takes me a couple of keystrokes to change the prevous filename to the next one I want to look at.
Keep in mind that many useful inventions and technologies are discovered which searching for something else. Drug-delivery is one possible use, however, now that they've published their results, somebody else may think of a more realistic use.
Let me take a crack at this...
The test results that would have taken a couple of technicians and/or engineers a few days (or more) to analize, now are analyzied by the computer in real time. Suspicious test cycles are automatically flagged for further review. Now, withing 5 minutes of sitting down at my desk in the morning, I can determine whether any parts I have on test failed over night, see how they failed, and begin brainstorming how to fix any problems that occur.
That's just the test results.
Consider all the time saved by looking up information on line, or by asking a question in a community forum, or getting the data from the part supplier in your e-mail.
My goodness -- how much time do we save each day.
That in the USA we have different voltages, frequencies and plug shapes for power than you do in the UK.
Of course that is something to keep in mind, however a lot of newer laptops have power supplies that autorange (or are at least switchable) and work at 50Hz-60Hz and 90-220V.
Where's the criminal act?
..., the board of directors.
Well, start giving advertising the legal weight of a contract. If I buy a product which says "Supports Feature X" only to find out that it doesn't support feature X out of the box, I can go to small-claims court and attempt to recover whatever portion of the purchase price I feel feature X was worth.
There's also the issue of how to send a corporation to prison.
That's a very tough issue. Assigning guilt is going to be very hard to to in many cases. If you fine the company into oblivion, you are going to hurt many of the companies employees, customers, and suppliers who had nothing to due with the problem. Here's my thought: Doctors, Lawyers, Professional Engineers, and may others can be sued for malpractice if they perform their job in an incompetant or illegal manner. I think we need the concept of a Professional Manager. If you fail to keep your employees within the law, you can be held responsible. Extend the liability all the way to the board of directors. To extend the previous example, if a company has a habit of listing "Supports Feature X" on the box without actually supporting feature X, let the FTC (or their equivalants) go after the company. Determine who approved the working "Supports Feature X", and divide the fines equally among the approvers manager, the manager's manager,
wouldn't all the keyless entry systems be affected?
Most likely not. There are a number of manufacturers of such systems, and each manufactuer probably has a couple of different levels of product. (i.e. the keyless entry goes into a BMW probably is a little better build than one that goes into a Ford Fuckus). Unless the products are very similar, they will all respond a bit differently to a given source of interfearance. Most likely, you would need a high-power, wide-bandwith signal in order to take out every keyless entry systm in a given area.
A few things. First, Mr Hiibel was not in his car. Second, his daugher had been driving, not Mr. Hiibel. IIRC, the reason you mush show ID is if you are operating the vehicle, in which case you must show that you are licensed to do so.
So you mean to tell me that the police officer has no right to ask for identification from any party when dispatched to a possible domestic violence situation?
The officer has every right to ask for ID. Until you are actually under arrest you don't have to provide identification under most circumstances (at least according to the ACLU, YMMV).
Here is my question for you: How did not showing ID prevent or interfear with the officers investigation? The way I see it, the officer could have compleated his investigation (i.e. determine if he had physically attacked his daughter) without knowing who the man was:
Officer: We got a report that you may have physically attacked your daughter. May I see your ID?
Man: No, unless I'm under arrest, I do not consent to provide identification.
Officer: OK, that is your right. Please stay here while I talk to your daughter.
Man: OK
Officer: (To Daughter) We had a report that your father attacked you. Is that the case?
Daugher: No, we were having a verbal argument, and my father want to get out of the truck, so I pulled over and let him out.
Officer: (Seeing no visible injuries) OK, have a good evening, you are both free to go.
See how easy that could have been? Nobody has to show I.D. Nobody gets arrested. Everybody goes home happy.
No.
Even if there is code that is exactly the same in both linux and SCO's code, that does not mean that linux copied SCO. A number of other possibilities:
1. SCO copied linux
2. SCO and linux both copied somebody else
3. SCO and linux both arrived at similar implementations of a common standard.