[YARANT] Okay "breathing air", was sort of a reference to the "turf" wars in science, but the point is still valid.
Assuming part of a person's "not-at-will" employment contract compensation clause with the government or a subcontractor of the government agency is to get a short term exclusive access to otherwize public data for a limited amount of time as a "bonus" or "fringe-benefit" I agree that this would be appropriate. Short-term exclusive access to data by an employee of the government, however, is not a "right". In the current social compact regime, you work, you get compensated with what you agree to. You do not have the right to "certain" compensation unless it is in an employment contract or written in the law.
Certainly, some things are customary and serve as attractions for employment (e.g., getting December 25th off, for example), but there is no "right" to get December 25th off.
Can you not see the difference?;^)
I doubt you are suggesting there is such a law or there should be such a law. I assume you are arguing that this is customary for attracting employment. Well, tough. Most people work hard, most people have to be in competion with people working harder faster or (yikes!) better...
Certainly science costs a scientist's time, but they are current PAID for that time. I think you are saying, this "bonus" compensation of exclusive access should also be PAID and it is a right, but I don't belive that is the case.
If I dare make another analogy, it's almost like saying "I spent a few extra hours on my computer at home to spell check an important presentation on off hours, therefore, I have a right give the presentation and get the glory." Maybe you will, maybe you won't, but it's certainly not a "right" and not even "customary". Maybe someone is better at the task or maybe someone asks the boss (or the person paying the bills) before you do and you get to sit in the back of the room an unacknowledged contributor to a group effort.
Every significant enterprise will require the effort of lots of unacknowledged people and it's not easy to split up the spoils of a successful enterprise. Science is not different in this respect. Perhaps this is how Mr. Stallman feels about Mr. Torvalds? I don't know for sure, but life is always a little bit of competition and sometimes from unexpected places and we all have to deal with it.
In addition, arguably, the unsung "public" put a lot of sweat and tears to earn the tax money that is spent on big science, what about them? I guess the needs of the many have to take seconds behind an individual's career in your world... [/YARANT]
Believe it or not, asking meaningless questions can be a good way to see if someone is being decietful...
Although this has been long known in the security "biz", in fact there is growing body of evidence to give this some scientific basis such as this recent article about MRI-ing folks when telling lies...
In this specific article they allude to the fact that you have to do some "positive control questioning" to have a proper calibration. Of course customs, immigration, and police have been using these techniques for quite a while without scientific validation.
Of course I'm a bit biased because I believe this is a valid questioning technique. Some people object to any questioning whatsoever and I doubt they would ever be convinced this is a good thing to do. Sadly I also believe there is a correlation to those same people and the size of their egos about their importance in the world (e.g., even though they let me slide by, if I don't stop this invasion of privacy, nobody will)...
[RANT] Sometimes I don't understand the academic types in their desire to "own" an area of knowledge. Knowledge that is discovered using public moneies cannot be "owned", and nobody has a "right" to publish something before someone-else, just because they were breathing air near their first.
I'm certain they "want" to publish first, and quite possibly they "own" their techniques to process the discovered information in their proprietary way, but that's a far cry from having the "right" to publish first.
This arguement was advanced during the human genome project. Somehow academics felt they had a right to publish it before the industrial folks (like celera which developed different and faster techniques to analyse the "public" discovery of DNA). I'm sure a few academics had their careers represented by the HG project and the fact that someone stepped on their turf was probably very infuriating, but that is life.
We've come a long way from the time when a few "priests" owned knowledge and kept it from the unwashed masses because they were the only ones "trained" to interpret it (conveniently by writing it in latin). Somehow some academics can't leave that era behind. "Big" science is funded today by public money and it's really hard to make the argument that raw images of important discoveries funded with public money aren't available to the public.
I tire of the high priest/priestess arguements made by the academic community. Why don't they just come up with something better and faster to make it worth waiting for, rather than complain that someone is doing it better and faster than them and they have some inherent "right" because they dabbled thier toes in that turf first?
Anyhow, how different is that than a "first post"? Normally, nobody reads them because they are often not interesting, but what if someone said something interesting and it just happened to be from an anonymous coward and first in the list? Should we be complaining that it was an anonymous coward and only people with/. id's under 3000 be allowed to say something first and not to expect any good posts in the future from important folks? Something to think about...;^);^b [/RANT]
The problem with centralization is that it inspires turf wars and stomps on innovation (I guess that is a political philosophical statement, but I find it's mostly true in my view of the world).
That's what's so great about a search engine (e.g., pick your favorite like google), they crawl the web so you can find the nooks and crannies like the blogs that have the messages you are talking about. Why create something new and a new bureaucracy (which after this crisis is over will search out totally random and inefficient things to do to maintain its survival/existence) when we already have something that works?
But depending on what state you work in, there may be statutory limits on what agreements you are able to sign away (so it won't depend on either your or their interpretation, but the limits of the law). For example, in california...
Sec. 2870. Employment agreements; assignment of rights
a. Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time without using the employer's equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information except for those inventions that either:
1. Relate at the time of the conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer; or
2. Result from any work performed by the employee for the employer.
b. To the extent a provision is an employment agreement purports to require an employee to assign an invention otherwise excluded from being required to be assigned under subdivision (a), the provision is against the public policy of the state and is unenforceable.
But of course, things will get sticky if the "other" companies are competitors and even worse if one of them is your own company...
Most real lawyers would probably suggest that you request an explicit waiver for this from your employeer to protect yourself, but since IANAL, I'll say that unless you think there is some specific thing that you worked on that is potentially in conflict (or in the rare instance you are god's gift to mankind and everything you touch is gold), don't rock the boat, most people are quite over themselves on the importance of the intellectual property they create, yet most of the stuff out there is crap. You do the math.
Not everyone can live at the shores of lake w03Bg0n...;^)
At the day of the grant, even if your company is not public, they have to make a fair estimate of the value of the share price.
Often when a company starts, they do something stupid like saying each share is worth $0.001 par value (1/10 of a cent), there are 10 founders, and a VC investment of $5M dollars and everyone gets some certain amount of shares and the company has the right to issue some more share in the future which potentially dillute the current shares. So at this time, if you are issued 10M shares, that's considered a $10,000 grant.
Then when the company raises the next round of financing they go through the process of saying, hey, this new investment is worth either more or less than the previous round (depending on factors like if the company is making money, or if they are spending it like it is going out of style and what the perception is on the future viability of the company), any they may say something like if you put in another $10M, we'll give you 100M shares. This instantly sets a new benchmark where each share is worth $0.10 (100x gain). This means that the $10,000 in options is only 100,000 in share this time. Usually before the company raises the next round, they anticipate when this will be required in the constantly updated business plan and interpolates the price per share between the financing rounds.
Why do they go through this complication? Well it's because theoretically the risk is higher earlier and the change in price/share is suppose to reflect the risk premium and the easiest way to try to determine this in a non-biased way is to factor in what new investors in a company think is the current price/share value. Also many of the corporate "agreements" between the investors and the management (like those written in stock plans and compensation policies, etc.) set guidelines and limits for issuance of options based on strike price ($/share) and % of ownership (usually it requires a good faith conversion must always be made of the current value of a share to prevent issuance of a strike price that is lower than say 85% of the current estimated value for a joe employee, or a 110% of the current estimated value for an executive).
Although this may seem completely aribtrary to do this interpolation based on the financing rounds, often these things need to be done to both attract future investment and to avoid certain personal and corporate tax consequences of a company issuing something of value to an employee w/o causing an employee tax liabilty (and triggering withholding taxes on that value), for more information on this you can read up on the so called qualified "incentive stock option" provisions or the qualified employee stock purchase plans in the relavent US IRS rules.
Of course, after a company goes public and is widely traded, the price per share does not usually need to be interpolated anymore...
until someone discovered a bug that redirects to a pwn3d auto-update site, click a button wait a few kb download and voila... Yeah that might not happen, but don't think it is out of the range of possibility...
Also, although maybe not the best reason in some programmer's opinion - it was easier to separate people by their SSN because STATA didn't present a way to compare strings in a useful enough manner so as to use a combination of name and zipcode.
[RANT]
Uhhm, BZZT, sorry, this excuse doesn't cut the mustard. Why didn't someone just encrypt the SSN digits using a simple program and a secret key or some sort of hash function, thrown away any keys (don't need them any more, and if they are around, someone might steal them) and then just used the then unique encrypted/hashed 9-digit numbers to massage the incoming data set. I see from your post that this was apparently tried this and somehow somebody failed to get it right. If the person didn't know how to make unique IDs, they are just inexperienced. If they didn't know enough to seek out experience when they got in over their head they are just incompetent. I wouldn't call the the people working this "rock solid". Maybe just well intentioned, but woefully incompentent.
I think it's a total cop-out to only blame IT for this fiasco. This is like blaming security for someone stealing your wallet sitting on top of your desk on your unlocked window office. Sure you can say security should have run around to checking every office door and looking into every window office just to see if some moron left their wallet sitting for all to see on the desk, but perhaps just putting the damn wallet in the desk instead of leaving it on top would have been a simple step the person could have taken and probably been effective and at least shown that there was no intention for the wallet to get stolen.
Jeez, why is that some people always want to blame someone else instead of sucking it in. In your post, you blame the governor, berkeley IT, windows 2kpro and make it seem like they are somehow responsible for someone's incompetence. ROCK SOLID PEOPLE TAKE OWNERSHIP OF THEIR FAILURES! That is the only way to learn anything at all from mistakes. The whiners blame their failures on others and never learn a thing.
In fact, if I were a lawyer (and thank god I'm not), I would say this borders on WILLFUL NEGLIGENCE since it is apparent someone thought that using SSNs wasn't a good idea, tried to generate encrypted identifiers, failed, willfully elected to NOT take any common sense precautions (e.g. consulting with a person knowledgeable in the field) knowing that it wasn't a good idea and something bad might happen because it was easier. Lo-and-behold something bad did happened. Can you say class action suit, and triple damages baby?
Hmm, there's been quite a few high-profile accidents in NASCAR and there hasn't been any overregulation response. Why would there be one here?
Just yesterday, I saw on the news that during an airshow, there was a crash. Don't see congress legislating against doing hammerhead turns yet.
What I don't understand is this notion that everything must be "safe". What's important is clear information, not safety, and for people to make informed choices...
OF COURSE someone will probably sacrifice their safety margin in an attempt to one-up the competition, but then again, the pilots are generally in the best position to make this call (not congress). But remember the margin is there to protect against the unknown. You won't know where the danger line really is until you have a few data points to interpolate.
Strangley, as with car racing, I see this as an opportunity to IMPROVE safety. No matter how good a designer you are, you can't think of everything so having enough experience with varying designs is really the best way to advance the safety of a device. Eventually best practices will emerge, and those that don't have them will either emulate them or get darwin'ed out of existence (lose sponsors, lose pilots either by expiry or quitting).
Can't make an omlette unless you break a few eggs.
A bit trollish (and tongue in cheek), but I'll bite.
Although I'd be the first to say that when there's a "monetary incentive to keep it cheap" (in the not high quality sense), that it has a good chance at being statistically more dangerous, that in itself doesn't mean it's way worse for everyone. Ideally there's some minimum quality threshold to meet so that you can rationally explain the risk to a common person so that they are taking an educated risk, but after that, there's always an affordability vs safety tradeoff that society needs to make.
There are numererous example, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, cars, airplanes, food, TV sets, computers, etc... If we took away any monetary axis from the development of these products, my guess is that they might be safer (and that is debatable), and in some higher quality (although the quality would probably tend towards average), but mostly probably the price would be out of the affordability range of many people.
As a silly example, imagine a world where you could get this really nutritious tomato that had 0% defects, no possibility of e-coli/salmanella, no pesticides, not bioengineered at $10/each and that was the only tomato available. By introducing a monetary axis into the tradeoff and a free market, it's quite likely that there will be tomatos avaialble at various price points and various quality levels. Presumably with enough information (and information is a key point), the consumers can make an informed decision (assuming there's a minimum standard that's within the understanding of the common person) and everyone can get what they feel is a good tradeoff. Maybe I'd wash the 20 cent tomato to got off most of the pesticide residue and dismiss the bio-engineer hazard reports, and realize it's not as nutritious as the "ideal" tomato, but it makes a good spagetti sauce and I'd rather spend my money on pharmaceuticals for my chronic pain condition. Although you might argue that I shouldn't have to make that choice, would I want the government to make that choice for me? No.
On the debris crashes, malfunctions and whatnot" issue, I'm not sure that there's a good case to be made that a space shuttle is safer than spaceshipone (the jury is still out since the sample size is too small), but we can certainly say the space shuttle wasn't stellar in this area
Of course the problem with many allegedly free markets is the lack of information and understanding by the consumer. However, I don't think that there is a lack of information in this case. I'm sure everyone knows how dangerous it is and the possibilities of death and destruction, but some people don't want to spend $20mil on a NASA/RKA approved one-size fits all space vehicle.
Well, of course no industry is consistantly profitable over ALL time, but an interesting time where a person would consider investing in a career between technological epochs (e.g. passenger train designer up to the time where they are obsoleted by airplane designer). I guess everyone wants to nitpick...
Considering the orignal poster posited changing majors to something to do with aerospace presumably investing in some schooling in this area, I wonder how many people who did that in the early 80's regretted that decision (and worked for grumman or mc-donald-douglas and probably even some of the surviors at boeing and airbus) if they were trying to make a quick buck out of it and found themselves unemployed at 35 looking for a new career?
Anyhow, if you want to work in a profitable Ryanair as a gate agent or a baggage handler...
Note that I'm assuming Ryanair feeds off of older/larger airlines and various government investments in airports, traffic control towers and other infrastructure. Sure they make a marginal profit, but an industry that can make enough to make a continuing investment in R&D (say like the bio-tech industry, the semi-conductor industry, or the movie-making industry) is probably something more interesting for the technological leaning crowd to invest their first career in, but that's just my myopic opinion...
But if you are really good at being an aerospace engineer or automotive engineer and you really like it, there are certainly jobs for top people to be had and is probably a reasonable thing to do as a career...
Not to say that a few people shouldn't try to eek out some bucks in a startup, but on the other hand it's easy to forget the aerospace crash of the '80s and the dotbombs in the 00's to realize that you really need to have underlying value to sustain something in the long run.
Do what you want to do and be the best at it you can, don't take a java class and hope for a dot-com million (unless you are already the type that regularly plays the local lottery). That's a bit of free advice (of course you get what you pay for).
Also it's interesting to note that no mass transit system in history has been consistantly profitable over time (e.g., busses, trains, airplanes, ferries). There are some isolated local successes, but overall the failure rate is really high and it's often the government (or a government licenced monopoly) that comes in an ends up picking up the slack (usually justified as infrastructure investment).
Some food for thought on your future career choice.
So even if more people recognized it, what could they do?
I remember lots of folks comparing the dotcom to the tulup craze during the run up (read lots of business articles on this in 1999/2000) and I know that many well respected folks were crying wolf on the whole thing (e.g. Warren Buffet who tried to avoid the whole thing), so it's one thing to recognize it, but to make a crazy analogy, how would you stop people bidding up the price of beanie babies on ebay?
In many respects, many of the folks that could have done something about it were about as powerless as a 10-year old to stop it before it got out of control (even Warren Buffet and Alan Greenspan).
Certainly the talking heads on MSNBC and other media were talking about defying gravity and revoking business cycles, but my guess is they were pretty much preaching to the choir of the converted. If your neighbor had a friend who made a few bucks in the market or a colleague in a rival investment banker firm made a killing, it's only natural for someone who is competitive to think that my 10-year old is way smarter than those sorry idiots are and should be able to make as much money doing what they did with 1 hand tied behind her back (ok, that was sort of a cheap shot to make a point about the mentality of the competitive person).
Many economists (in retrospect) blame the rules of the game (a common scapegoat is the margin requirements for stock transactions). Of course if the rules of a system are inherently unstable, it doesn't take much to send things out of whack. That probably doesn't explain it all, but it's really easy to see how it could make a bad situation worse and out of control.
However, personally, unlike the tulip analogy, I like to draw on the grade inflation analogy when I think about the latest bubble. Abstractly, grades are supposed to measure students relative to a standard like stock prices are abstractly supposed to measure companies relative to a standard, however, once you get parents, teachers, activists involved, somehow everyones grades seems to go up (like lake wobegone), not unlike when you get stock brokers, analysts, talking heads, and bragging 20-year old CEOs together stock prices go up. Eventually, grades and stock price get to the point where they don't actually measure anything any some fraction of kids have to do remedial english when they get to college and we get a big stock market correction...
Such is life, almost everyone wants everything that they are associated with to be (way, way) above the median, but of course half of things are below the median. There's more parity in the NFL that most (american) football fanatics would like to believe and that is true of life as well...
Re:Nice flamebait re: FDR
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 4, Informative
FDR wasn't quite the saint that many portray him to be. Perhaphs a little research on FDR and his tenure as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson may dissuade you of that notion...
Basically President Woodrow Wilson "decided" that Haiti would be a strategic port in case of war, and pretty much directed the US to take over the country. FDR lead the occupation of that country and was effectively the "administrator of Haiti" during that occupation. By many accounts, it was a boondogle of Iraq proportions (prison abuse scandels, contract skimming scandels, etc.) At one time he tried a "gore-ism" claiming that he single handedly wrote the Haiti constitution.
As president FDR, during the London Economic Conference in 1933 which called to coordinate efforts stabilize the world wide economy, he pretty much unilaterally pulled out angering and alienating all the European delegates and eventually leading to the breakdown of the conference. Some historians feel that this breakdown of this conference contributed to prolonging the recession/depression in europe and led to the rise of dictators in some countries which eventually led to WWII.
As part of the "good neigbor" policy of the FDR administration, he helped to push through the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934, which tried to increase export trade and decrease tariffs into the United States with central and south american countries. I'm sure some of the "job protectionist anti-wto democrats" would take great issue with that type of stance today.
Later on in his tenure as president (after he broke the 2-term "tradition"), FDR had quite a few run-ups with the supreme court and was probably the only president with enough gall to try to stack the court (by trying to simply appoint new justices instead of waiting for them to retire and maintaining the "traditional number"). Not really the spirit of the law type person (I guess since he never got to practice law, he wasn't too concerned about all this law stuff).
History has a mixed report on FDR, certainly the US was in need of a change during that time to shake things up, but it's hard to know if any of his policies were really effective since the general consensous is that it was really the WWII that had the bigger impact on the state of the country at that time than anything FDR did.
By the way, one of FDR's biggest legacies is the Federal Income Tax (instead of a traditional property tax or wealth tax). Although originally targetted only at the wealthy, has since become essentially a tax on the middle class. Of course the wealthy get to defer their income by purchasing property which goes up in value w/o being taxed, and since the relative tax burden of income vs property has shifted, they in fact get a defacto tax break. Yeah, that morgage interest deduction is a token that gets thrown the middle class's way, but if you look at the percentage of wealth of individuals and the percentage of federal income tax collected from those individuals, you can easily see how the Federal Income tax has slowly but surely become the tax on the middle class that keeps the poor from entering the middle class and the middle class from becoming more wealthy (by introducing an artificial economic class structure in its progressive rate structure).
Just replace Halliburton with Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Ball Aerospace, etc, etc...
Also, it's interesting that people somehow think their porkbarrel spending programs won't have the bureaucratic waste that those other porkbarrel spending programs have...
Bureaucratic waste is a fact of government existence and needs to be factored into any program.
social engineering a better tool
on
Steel Bolt Hacking
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This all reminds me of my old caltech days when as freshman, everyone seemed to be fascinated with lockpicking...
And then day, a few of us somehow got the idea to "kidnap" the big-bob statue when we noticed on a late night dining trip it was just made of fibreglass (light enough to carry away) and locked to the sidewalk with a sliding metal rod key padlock.
Instead of picking the padlock (which we probably could have done very easily as we practiced all the time), my buddy decided to just copy down model number and the serial number and take it to a local locksmith and claim we lost the key to the lock and needed a new key. After some convincing, the locksmith went to the back office and pulled out a book, looked up the serial number, cut us a key with his key cutter by pin-code. We borrowed a convertable one night, unlocked the lock, picked bob up, and brought him back to campus. And nobody had to keep lookout why we were attempting to pick the lock... That didn't turn out so well (although caltech laywers were on our side, the big-boy corporation wasn't very amused by our humorous note and eventually we negociated a return in exchange for a no prosecution agreement, but I digress).
Sometime later in life, I ended up losing the only set of keys to my car during a business trip (I gave the other set to my friend who was out of town that weekend). Angry at myself, I took a cab home and fumed for a couple hours. Then thinking back to my college days, I hitched a ride to nearest car dealer (of the same make, but not the same one I bought the car from, don't want to single a vendor out for a security lapse) told the guy in the replacement parts department I lost my car key, but I knew the VIN code to the car (duh, you can see that through the windscreen), he looked up the VIN code in their national database (I bought my car new) found my name, I showed him my ID and he then cut me a key by pin code and I had a brand spanking new key to my car. If I was a bit more convincing, I'll bet I could have convinced him to do it for me even w/o an id, by just knowing the name of the original owner...
The lesson I learned from all this is that the most essential tool for most things is often just your mouth (and chutzpah) when it comes to locks...
employee vs contractor is not a "choice" anyone can arbitrarily make, it is a designation/classification based on your relationship with your employer.
- do you provide your own tools? - do you set your own work hours? - does your employer supervise your work, or just audit your work product? - can you hire subcontractors to do your work?
If an employer doesn't want this type of relationship, regardless of if you want to (or they want to) call you a "contractor" you are NOT a contractor, but an employee, regardless of the compensation they pay you.
This is a very common misunderstanding (by both employers and prospective contractors).
Also "exempt" vs "non-exempt" is another commonly misunderstood designation which is a topic for another post....
Silicon valley has been around much longer than 199x... That's quite a short sighted dot-bomb perspective.
Not saying that silicon valley does or doesn't have it's best years behind it (maybe, maybe not), but I always find it amusing how people forget about Fairchild/Intel, HP/Apple, and focus on the last business cycle...
The main thing keeping Si valley anchored where it is today isn't technology or technology people at all (there are tech people everywhere), it is the venture capital $$$ from firms based in the mid-pennisula area (eg. Palo Alto). They all seem to want to invest near home. That maybe change slowly (just as it moved from new york/new jersey to boston/route128 to paloalto/siliconvalley over time, money tends to move pretty slowly over time unlike technology...
Probably the same way Mr. Gangbanger is protected against lawsuits when he sends in Bubba, to break some knuckles... When you are breaking the law anyways, it's hard to call in the police, and if you do call them, well they don't really care much if the small guys beat each other up.
On a more practical note, who is going to pay the lawyers to do discovery? Yeah, that's right, you can only sue people with deep pockets...
I'm pretty sure most of the cost of a nasa program these days goes into paying employees (either directly by nasa, or by nasa paying contractors which pays their employees). This is why delays cost so much (haven't you wondered about that).
My guess is to tool back up and build another one of these babies would be at least $270 million since it probably won't get built any faster (since these are all 1-off custom tooled projects), and you have to use all the same materials, and the mission would have to last the same amount of time.
By the time you factor in inflation, the fact that nobody remembers how it works anymore (try to remember what you worked on 29 months ago), and the fact that they'll have 3 extra supervisory committee to make sure that the same thing doesn't go wrong again, I'll bet that $270 million is a conservative estimate...
Since radio waves and light are basically the same (electromagnetic waves), the problem is not that of possibility, but basically an energy issue...
photon energy is proportional to frequency
So for a given amount of energy you can get either more photons at a lower frequency or fewer photons at a higher frequency.
Since visible light is in the THz range (10^12) and radio waves are in the say MHz range (10^6), that's a factor a million less photons emitted per unit of energy.
Since we are essentially detecting a bunch of photons, this is the gist of the problem.
Of course it follows that the odds of finding one of a million needles in trillions of haystacks is easier than finding 1 needle in a trillion haystacks...
Of course if you are living on a pulsar, then energy (from gravitational collapse) is not a worry (pulsars tend to emit frequencies all over the spectrum from radio up to x-ray), but I don't think "intellegent" civilizations are going to be tossing around that much energy w/o thinking about it.
Note that a signal from a pulsar is very different from an omnidirectional phase-coherent electromagnetic "pulse". A pulsar spews pretty much incoherent EM, but from hotspots on a fast spining object (think about a person with a gardenhose spinning around really fast, you'll see how a stationary observer will see "pulses" of water drenching her when in fact the garden hose is just spraying incoherent water).
However, it is technically possible to generate a reasonably coherent, mostly omnidirectional EM pulse from a process known as superfluorescence.
I suppose it's feasible that this would be able to be repeatable enough to generate a pulse train (imagine a spherical lasing cavity around a superfluoresenct object). For some basic info on this, check this out...
http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~lvov/OSF.html
However, given the "energy" argument above, I doubt any intellegent aliens would have turned on a beacon like that (Did you see the movie independence day? Maybe turning on a beacon isn't such a great idea)...
Slashdot Mirror
[YARANT]
;^)
Okay "breathing air", was sort of a reference to the "turf" wars in science, but the point is still valid.
Assuming part of a person's "not-at-will" employment contract compensation clause with the government or a subcontractor of the government agency is to get a short term exclusive access to otherwize public data for a limited amount of time as a "bonus" or "fringe-benefit" I agree that this would be appropriate. Short-term exclusive access to data by an employee of the government, however, is not a "right". In the current social compact regime, you work, you get compensated with what you agree to. You do not have the right to "certain" compensation unless it is in an employment contract or written in the law.
Certainly, some things are customary and serve as attractions for employment (e.g., getting December 25th off, for example), but there is no "right" to get December 25th off.
Can you not see the difference?
I doubt you are suggesting there is such a law or there should be such a law. I assume you are arguing that this is customary for attracting employment. Well, tough. Most people work hard, most people have to be in competion with people working harder faster or (yikes!) better...
Certainly science costs a scientist's time, but they are current PAID for that time. I think you are saying, this "bonus" compensation of exclusive access should also be PAID and it is a right, but I don't belive that is the case.
If I dare make another analogy, it's almost like saying "I spent a few extra hours on my computer at home to spell check an important presentation on off hours, therefore, I have a right give the presentation and get the glory." Maybe you will, maybe you won't, but it's certainly not a "right" and not even "customary". Maybe someone is better at the task or maybe someone asks the boss (or the person paying the bills) before you do and you get to sit in the back of the room an unacknowledged contributor to a group effort.
Every significant enterprise will require the effort of lots of unacknowledged people and it's not easy to split up the spoils of a successful enterprise. Science is not different in this respect. Perhaps this is how Mr. Stallman feels about Mr. Torvalds? I don't know for sure, but life is always a little bit of competition and sometimes from unexpected places and we all have to deal with it.
In addition, arguably, the unsung "public" put a lot of sweat and tears to earn the tax money that is spent on big science, what about them? I guess the needs of the many have to take seconds behind an individual's career in your world...
[/YARANT]
Although this has been long known in the security "biz", in fact there is growing body of evidence to give this some scientific basis such as this recent article about MRI-ing folks when telling lies...
http://www.rsna.org/daily/monday/fmri.html
In this specific article they allude to the fact that you have to do some "positive control questioning" to have a proper calibration. Of course customs, immigration, and police have been using these techniques for quite a while without scientific validation.
Of course I'm a bit biased because I believe this is a valid questioning technique. Some people object to any questioning whatsoever and I doubt they would ever be convinced this is a good thing to do. Sadly I also believe there is a correlation to those same people and the size of their egos about their importance in the world (e.g., even though they let me slide by, if I don't stop this invasion of privacy, nobody will)...
[RANT]
/. id's under 3000 be allowed to say something first and not to expect any good posts in the future from important folks? Something to think about... ;^) ;^b
Sometimes I don't understand the academic types in their desire to "own" an area of knowledge. Knowledge that is discovered using public moneies cannot be "owned", and nobody has a "right" to publish something before someone-else, just because they were breathing air near their first.
I'm certain they "want" to publish first, and quite possibly they "own" their techniques to process the discovered information in their proprietary way, but that's a far cry from having the "right" to publish first.
This arguement was advanced during the human genome project. Somehow academics felt they had a right to publish it before the industrial folks (like celera which developed different and faster techniques to analyse the "public" discovery of DNA). I'm sure a few academics had their careers represented by the HG project and the fact that someone stepped on their turf was probably very infuriating, but that is life.
We've come a long way from the time when a few "priests" owned knowledge and kept it from the unwashed masses because they were the only ones "trained" to interpret it (conveniently by writing it in latin). Somehow some academics can't leave that era behind. "Big" science is funded today by public money and it's really hard to make the argument that raw images of important discoveries funded with public money aren't available to the public.
I tire of the high priest/priestess arguements made by the academic community. Why don't they just come up with something better and faster to make it worth waiting for, rather than complain that someone is doing it better and faster than them and they have some inherent "right" because they dabbled thier toes in that turf first?
Anyhow, how different is that than a "first post"? Normally, nobody reads them because they are often not interesting, but what if someone said something interesting and it just happened to be from an anonymous coward and first in the list? Should we be complaining that it was an anonymous coward and only people with
[/RANT]
The problem with centralization is that it inspires turf wars and stomps on innovation (I guess that is a political philosophical statement, but I find it's mostly true in my view of the world).
That's what's so great about a search engine (e.g., pick your favorite like google), they crawl the web so you can find the nooks and crannies like the blogs that have the messages you are talking about. Why create something new and a new bureaucracy (which after this crisis is over will search out totally random and inefficient things to do to maintain its survival/existence) when we already have something that works?
But depending on what state you work in, there may be statutory limits on what agreements you are able to sign away (so it won't depend on either your or their interpretation, but the limits of the law). For example, in california...
;^)
Sec. 2870. Employment agreements; assignment of rights
a. Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time without using the employer's equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information except for those inventions that either:
1. Relate at the time of the conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer; or
2. Result from any work performed by the employee for the employer.
b. To the extent a provision is an employment agreement purports to require an employee to assign an invention otherwise excluded from being required to be assigned under subdivision (a), the provision is against the public policy of the state and is unenforceable.
But of course, things will get sticky if the "other" companies are competitors and even worse if one of them is your own company...
Most real lawyers would probably suggest that you request an explicit waiver for this from your employeer to protect yourself, but since IANAL, I'll say that unless you think there is some specific thing that you worked on that is potentially in conflict (or in the rare instance you are god's gift to mankind and everything you touch is gold), don't rock the boat, most people are quite over themselves on the importance of the intellectual property they create, yet most of the stuff out there is crap. You do the math.
Not everyone can live at the shores of lake w03Bg0n...
At the day of the grant, even if your company is not public, they have to make a fair estimate of the value of the share price.
Often when a company starts, they do something stupid like saying each share is worth $0.001 par value (1/10 of a cent), there are 10 founders, and a VC investment of $5M dollars and everyone gets some certain amount of shares and the company has the right to issue some more share in the future which potentially dillute the current shares. So at this time, if you are issued 10M shares, that's considered a $10,000 grant.
Then when the company raises the next round of financing they go through the process of saying, hey, this new investment is worth either more or less than the previous round (depending on factors like if the company is making money, or if they are spending it like it is going out of style and what the perception is on the future viability of the company), any they may say something like if you put in another $10M, we'll give you 100M shares. This instantly sets a new benchmark where each share is worth $0.10 (100x gain). This means that the $10,000 in options is only 100,000 in share this time. Usually before the company raises the next round, they anticipate when this will be required in the constantly updated business plan and interpolates the price per share between the financing rounds.
Why do they go through this complication? Well it's because theoretically the risk is higher earlier and the change in price/share is suppose to reflect the risk premium and the easiest way to try to determine this in a non-biased way is to factor in what new investors in a company think is the current price/share value. Also many of the corporate "agreements" between the investors and the management (like those written in stock plans and compensation policies, etc.) set guidelines and limits for issuance of options based on strike price ($/share) and % of ownership (usually it requires a good faith conversion must always be made of the current value of a share to prevent issuance of a strike price that is lower than say 85% of the current estimated value for a joe employee, or a 110% of the current estimated value for an executive).
Although this may seem completely aribtrary to do this interpolation based on the financing rounds, often these things need to be done to both attract future investment and to avoid certain personal and corporate tax consequences of a company issuing something of value to an employee w/o causing an employee tax liabilty (and triggering withholding taxes on that value), for more information on this you can read up on the so called qualified "incentive stock option" provisions or the qualified employee stock purchase plans in the relavent US IRS rules.
Of course, after a company goes public and is widely traded, the price per share does not usually need to be interpolated anymore...
content scrambling system circa 1994/1995
cascading style sheets circa 1997/1998
Of course your milage may vary...
As an ex inmos person, I can only hope they will be more successful at promoting thier programming solution/architecture for parallel/cell processing.
Occam/CSP was an interesting diversion, but never became anything interesting...
until someone discovered a bug that redirects to a pwn3d auto-update site, click a button wait a few kb download and voila... Yeah that might not happen, but don't think it is out of the range of possibility...
[RANT]
Uhhm, BZZT, sorry, this excuse doesn't cut the mustard. Why didn't someone just encrypt the SSN digits using a simple program and a secret key or some sort of hash function, thrown away any keys (don't need them any more, and if they are around, someone might steal them) and then just used the then unique encrypted/hashed 9-digit numbers to massage the incoming data set. I see from your post that this was apparently tried this and somehow somebody failed to get it right. If the person didn't know how to make unique IDs, they are just inexperienced. If they didn't know enough to seek out experience when they got in over their head they are just incompetent. I wouldn't call the the people working this "rock solid". Maybe just well intentioned, but woefully incompentent.
I think it's a total cop-out to only blame IT for this fiasco. This is like blaming security for someone stealing your wallet sitting on top of your desk on your unlocked window office. Sure you can say security should have run around to checking every office door and looking into every window office just to see if some moron left their wallet sitting for all to see on the desk, but perhaps just putting the damn wallet in the desk instead of leaving it on top would have been a simple step the person could have taken and probably been effective and at least shown that there was no intention for the wallet to get stolen.
Jeez, why is that some people always want to blame someone else instead of sucking it in. In your post, you blame the governor, berkeley IT, windows 2kpro and make it seem like they are somehow responsible for someone's incompetence. ROCK SOLID PEOPLE TAKE OWNERSHIP OF THEIR FAILURES! That is the only way to learn anything at all from mistakes. The whiners blame their failures on others and never learn a thing.
In fact, if I were a lawyer (and thank god I'm not), I would say this borders on WILLFUL NEGLIGENCE since it is apparent someone thought that using SSNs wasn't a good idea, tried to generate encrypted identifiers, failed, willfully elected to NOT take any common sense precautions (e.g. consulting with a person knowledgeable in the field) knowing that it wasn't a good idea and something bad might happen because it was easier. Lo-and-behold something bad did happened. Can you say class action suit, and triple damages baby?
[/RANT]
Hmm, there's been quite a few high-profile accidents in NASCAR and there hasn't been any overregulation response. Why would there be one here?
Just yesterday, I saw on the news that during an airshow, there was a crash. Don't see congress legislating against doing hammerhead turns yet.
What I don't understand is this notion that everything must be "safe". What's important is clear information, not safety, and for people to make informed choices...
OF COURSE someone will probably sacrifice their safety margin in an attempt to one-up the competition, but then again, the pilots are generally in the best position to make this call (not congress). But remember the margin is there to protect against the unknown. You won't know where the danger line really is until you have a few data points to interpolate.
Strangley, as with car racing, I see this as an opportunity to IMPROVE safety. No matter how good a designer you are, you can't think of everything so having enough experience with varying designs is really the best way to advance the safety of a device. Eventually best practices will emerge, and those that don't have them will either emulate them or get darwin'ed out of existence (lose sponsors, lose pilots either by expiry or quitting).
Can't make an omlette unless you break a few eggs.
A bit trollish (and tongue in cheek), but I'll bite.
Although I'd be the first to say that when there's a "monetary incentive to keep it cheap" (in the not high quality sense), that it has a good chance at being statistically more dangerous, that in itself doesn't mean it's way worse for everyone. Ideally there's some minimum quality threshold to meet so that you can rationally explain the risk to a common person so that they are taking an educated risk, but after that, there's always an affordability vs safety tradeoff that society needs to make.
There are numererous example, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, cars, airplanes, food, TV sets, computers, etc... If we took away any monetary axis from the development of these products, my guess is that they might be safer (and that is debatable), and in some higher quality (although the quality would probably tend towards average), but mostly probably the price would be out of the affordability range of many people.
As a silly example, imagine a world where you could get this really nutritious tomato that had 0% defects, no possibility of e-coli/salmanella, no pesticides, not bioengineered at $10/each and that was the only tomato available. By introducing a monetary axis into the tradeoff and a free market, it's quite likely that there will be tomatos avaialble at various price points and various quality levels. Presumably with enough information (and information is a key point), the consumers can make an informed decision (assuming there's a minimum standard that's within the understanding of the common person) and everyone can get what they feel is a good tradeoff. Maybe I'd wash the 20 cent tomato to got off most of the pesticide residue and dismiss the bio-engineer hazard reports, and realize it's not as nutritious as the "ideal" tomato, but it makes a good spagetti sauce and I'd rather spend my money on pharmaceuticals for my chronic pain condition. Although you might argue that I shouldn't have to make that choice, would I want the government to make that choice for me? No.
On the debris crashes, malfunctions and whatnot" issue, I'm not sure that there's a good case to be made that a space shuttle is safer than spaceshipone (the jury is still out since the sample size is too small), but we can certainly say the space shuttle wasn't stellar in this area
Of course the problem with many allegedly free markets is the lack of information and understanding by the consumer. However, I don't think that there is a lack of information in this case. I'm sure everyone knows how dangerous it is and the possibilities of death and destruction, but some people don't want to spend $20mil on a NASA/RKA approved one-size fits all space vehicle.
Yes, but the USPTO did accept Bill's patent on the door hinge...
FWIW, I remembed this one from a few years back...
So in a way there were 2 people on the flight. Anyhow, I thought that was an interesting bit of trivia...
Well, of course no industry is consistantly profitable over ALL time, but an interesting time where a person would consider investing in a career between technological epochs (e.g. passenger train designer up to the time where they are obsoleted by airplane designer). I guess everyone wants to nitpick...
Considering the orignal poster posited changing majors to something to do with aerospace presumably investing in some schooling in this area, I wonder how many people who did that in the early 80's regretted that decision (and worked for grumman or mc-donald-douglas and probably even some of the surviors at boeing and airbus) if they were trying to make a quick buck out of it and found themselves unemployed at 35 looking for a new career?
Anyhow, if you want to work in a profitable Ryanair as a gate agent or a baggage handler...
Note that I'm assuming Ryanair feeds off of older/larger airlines and various government investments in airports, traffic control towers and other infrastructure. Sure they make a marginal profit, but an industry that can make enough to make a continuing investment in R&D (say like the bio-tech industry, the semi-conductor industry, or the movie-making industry) is probably something more interesting for the technological leaning crowd to invest their first career in, but that's just my myopic opinion...
But if you are really good at being an aerospace engineer or automotive engineer and you really like it, there are certainly jobs for top people to be had and is probably a reasonable thing to do as a career...
Not to say that a few people shouldn't try to eek out some bucks in a startup, but on the other hand it's easy to forget the aerospace crash of the '80s and the dotbombs in the 00's to realize that you really need to have underlying value to sustain something in the long run.
Do what you want to do and be the best at it you can, don't take a java class and hope for a dot-com million (unless you are already the type that regularly plays the local lottery). That's a bit of free advice (of course you get what you pay for).
Also it's interesting to note that no mass transit system in history has been consistantly profitable over time (e.g., busses, trains, airplanes, ferries). There are some isolated local successes, but overall the failure rate is really high and it's often the government (or a government licenced monopoly) that comes in an ends up picking up the slack (usually justified as infrastructure investment).
Some food for thought on your future career choice.
So even if more people recognized it, what could they do?
I remember lots of folks comparing the dotcom to the tulup craze during the run up (read lots of business articles on this in 1999/2000) and I know that many well respected folks were crying wolf on the whole thing (e.g. Warren Buffet who tried to avoid the whole thing), so it's one thing to recognize it, but to make a crazy analogy, how would you stop people bidding up the price of beanie babies on ebay?
In many respects, many of the folks that could have done something about it were about as powerless as a 10-year old to stop it before it got out of control (even Warren Buffet and Alan Greenspan).
Certainly the talking heads on MSNBC and other media were talking about defying gravity and revoking business cycles, but my guess is they were pretty much preaching to the choir of the converted. If your neighbor had a friend who made a few bucks in the market or a colleague in a rival investment banker firm made a killing, it's only natural for someone who is competitive to think that my 10-year old is way smarter than those sorry idiots are and should be able to make as much money doing what they did with 1 hand tied behind her back (ok, that was sort of a cheap shot to make a point about the mentality of the competitive person).
Many economists (in retrospect) blame the rules of the game (a common scapegoat is the margin requirements for stock transactions). Of course if the rules of a system are inherently unstable, it doesn't take much to send things out of whack. That probably doesn't explain it all, but it's really easy to see how it could make a bad situation worse and out of control.
However, personally, unlike the tulip analogy, I like to draw on the grade inflation analogy when I think about the latest bubble. Abstractly, grades are supposed to measure students relative to a standard like stock prices are abstractly supposed to measure companies relative to a standard, however, once you get parents, teachers, activists involved, somehow everyones grades seems to go up (like lake wobegone), not unlike when you get stock brokers, analysts, talking heads, and bragging 20-year old CEOs together stock prices go up. Eventually, grades and stock price get to the point where they don't actually measure anything any some fraction of kids have to do remedial english when they get to college and we get a big stock market correction...
Such is life, almost everyone wants everything that they are associated with to be (way, way) above the median, but of course half of things are below the median. There's more parity in the NFL that most (american) football fanatics would like to believe and that is true of life as well...
FDR wasn't quite the saint that many portray him to be. Perhaphs a little research on FDR and his tenure as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson may dissuade you of that notion...
Basically President Woodrow Wilson "decided" that Haiti would be a strategic port in case of war, and pretty much directed the US to take over the country. FDR lead the occupation of that country and was effectively the "administrator of Haiti" during that occupation. By many accounts, it was a boondogle of Iraq proportions (prison abuse scandels, contract skimming scandels, etc.) At one time he tried a "gore-ism" claiming that he single handedly wrote the Haiti constitution.
As president FDR, during the London Economic Conference in 1933 which called to coordinate efforts stabilize the world wide economy, he pretty much unilaterally pulled out angering and alienating all the European delegates and eventually leading to the breakdown of the conference. Some historians feel that this breakdown of this conference contributed to prolonging the recession/depression in europe and led to the rise of dictators in some countries which eventually led to WWII.
As part of the "good neigbor" policy of the FDR administration, he helped to push through the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934, which tried to increase export trade and decrease tariffs into the United States with central and south american countries. I'm sure some of the "job protectionist anti-wto democrats" would take great issue with that type of stance today.
Later on in his tenure as president (after he broke the 2-term "tradition"), FDR had quite a few run-ups with the supreme court and was probably the only president with enough gall to try to stack the court (by trying to simply appoint new justices instead of waiting for them to retire and maintaining the "traditional number"). Not really the spirit of the law type person (I guess since he never got to practice law, he wasn't too concerned about all this law stuff).
History has a mixed report on FDR, certainly the US was in need of a change during that time to shake things up, but it's hard to know if any of his policies were really effective since the general consensous is that it was really the WWII that had the bigger impact on the state of the country at that time than anything FDR did.
By the way, one of FDR's biggest legacies is the Federal Income Tax (instead of a traditional property tax or wealth tax). Although originally targetted only at the wealthy, has since become essentially a tax on the middle class. Of course the wealthy get to defer their income by purchasing property which goes up in value w/o being taxed, and since the relative tax burden of income vs property has shifted, they in fact get a defacto tax break. Yeah, that morgage interest deduction is a token that gets thrown the middle class's way, but if you look at the percentage of wealth of individuals and the percentage of federal income tax collected from those individuals, you can easily see how the Federal Income tax has slowly but surely become the tax on the middle class that keeps the poor from entering the middle class and the middle class from becoming more wealthy (by introducing an artificial economic class structure in its progressive rate structure).
Just replace Halliburton with Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Ball Aerospace, etc, etc...
Also, it's interesting that people somehow think their porkbarrel spending programs won't have the bureaucratic waste that those other porkbarrel spending programs have...
Bureaucratic waste is a fact of government existence and needs to be factored into any program.
Here's one for ya just for grins...
This all reminds me of my old caltech days when as freshman, everyone seemed to be fascinated with lockpicking...
And then day, a few of us somehow got the idea to "kidnap" the big-bob statue when we noticed on a late night dining trip it was just made of fibreglass (light enough to carry away) and locked to the sidewalk with a sliding metal rod key padlock.
Instead of picking the padlock (which we probably could have done very easily as we practiced all the time), my buddy decided to just copy down model number and the serial number and take it to a local locksmith and claim we lost the key to the lock and needed a new key. After some convincing, the locksmith went to the back office and pulled out a book, looked up the serial number, cut us a key with his key cutter by pin-code. We borrowed a convertable one night, unlocked the lock, picked bob up, and brought him back to campus. And nobody had to keep lookout why we were attempting to pick the lock... That didn't turn out so well (although caltech laywers were on our side, the big-boy corporation wasn't very amused by our humorous note and eventually we negociated a return in exchange for a no prosecution agreement, but I digress).
Sometime later in life, I ended up losing the only set of keys to my car during a business trip (I gave the other set to my friend who was out of town that weekend). Angry at myself, I took a cab home and fumed for a couple hours. Then thinking back to my college days, I hitched a ride to nearest car dealer (of the same make, but not the same one I bought the car from, don't want to single a vendor out for a security lapse) told the guy in the replacement parts department I lost my car key, but I knew the VIN code to the car (duh, you can see that through the windscreen), he looked up the VIN code in their national database (I bought my car new) found my name, I showed him my ID and he then cut me a key by pin code and I had a brand spanking new key to my car. If I was a bit more convincing, I'll bet I could have convinced him to do it for me even w/o an id, by just knowing the name of the original owner...
The lesson I learned from all this is that the most essential tool for most things is often just your mouth (and chutzpah) when it comes to locks...
employee vs contractor is not a "choice" anyone can arbitrarily make, it is a designation/classification based on your relationship with your employer.
- do you provide your own tools?
- do you set your own work hours?
- does your employer supervise your work, or just audit your work product?
- can you hire subcontractors to do your work?
If an employer doesn't want this type of relationship, regardless of if you want to (or they want to) call you a "contractor" you are NOT a contractor, but an employee, regardless of the compensation they pay you.
This is a very common misunderstanding (by both employers and prospective contractors).
Also "exempt" vs "non-exempt" is another commonly misunderstood designation which is a topic for another post....
> Silicon valley CA USA 199x-200x
What a young'n...
Silicon valley has been around much longer than 199x... That's quite a short sighted dot-bomb perspective.
Not saying that silicon valley does or doesn't have it's best years behind it (maybe, maybe not), but I always find it amusing how people forget about Fairchild/Intel, HP/Apple, and focus on the last business cycle...
The main thing keeping Si valley anchored where it is today isn't technology or technology people at all (there are tech people everywhere), it is the venture capital $$$ from firms based in the mid-pennisula area (eg. Palo Alto). They all seem to want to invest near home. That maybe change slowly (just as it moved from new york/new jersey to boston/route128 to paloalto/siliconvalley over time, money tends to move pretty slowly over time unlike technology...
> How is he protected against lawsuits?
Probably the same way Mr. Gangbanger is protected against lawsuits when he sends in Bubba, to break some knuckles... When you are breaking the law anyways, it's hard to call in the police, and if you do call them, well they don't really care much if the small guys beat each other up.
On a more practical note, who is going to pay the lawyers to do discovery? Yeah, that's right, you can only sue people with deep pockets...
I'm pretty sure most of the cost of a nasa program these days goes into paying employees (either directly by nasa, or by nasa paying contractors which pays their employees). This is why delays cost so much (haven't you wondered about that).
My guess is to tool back up and build another one of these babies would be at least $270 million since it probably won't get built any faster (since these are all 1-off custom tooled projects), and you have to use all the same materials, and the mission would have to last the same amount of time.
By the time you factor in inflation, the fact that nobody remembers how it works anymore (try to remember what you worked on 29 months ago), and the fact that they'll have 3 extra supervisory committee to make sure that the same thing doesn't go wrong again, I'll bet that $270 million is a conservative estimate...
Since radio waves and light are basically the same (electromagnetic waves), the problem is not that of possibility, but basically an energy issue...
photon energy is proportional to frequency
So for a given amount of energy you can get either more photons at a lower frequency or fewer photons at a higher frequency.
Since visible light is in the THz range (10^12) and radio waves are in the say MHz range (10^6), that's a factor a million less photons emitted per unit of energy.
Since we are essentially detecting a bunch of photons, this is the gist of the problem.
Of course it follows that the odds of finding one of a million needles in trillions of haystacks is easier than finding 1 needle in a trillion haystacks...
Of course if you are living on a pulsar, then energy (from gravitational collapse) is not a worry (pulsars tend to emit frequencies all over the spectrum from radio up to x-ray), but I don't think "intellegent" civilizations are going to be tossing around that much energy w/o thinking about it.
Note that a signal from a pulsar is very different from an omnidirectional phase-coherent electromagnetic "pulse". A pulsar spews pretty much incoherent EM, but from hotspots on a fast spining object (think about a person with a gardenhose spinning around really fast, you'll see how a stationary observer will see "pulses" of water drenching her when in fact the garden hose is just spraying incoherent water).
However, it is technically possible to generate a reasonably coherent, mostly omnidirectional EM pulse from a process known as superfluorescence.
I suppose it's feasible that this would be able to be repeatable enough to generate a pulse train (imagine a spherical lasing cavity around a superfluoresenct object). For some basic info on this, check this out...
http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~lvov/OSF.html
However, given the "energy" argument above, I doubt any intellegent aliens would have turned on a beacon like that (Did you see the movie independence day? Maybe turning on a beacon isn't such a great idea)...