It's not an attractive way to raise the issue, but it's true: artists should be rewarded for their work. Look at how the studios screwed the Gilligan's Island people, who languished in poverty after the networks ran episodes for decades.
So the actors on Gilligan's Island worked there for three years for free? Oh, wait... They were paid for their work.
It's more likely they languished in poverty because they were either not too good as actors or because they were has beens hired cheap . Or both.
I really don't blame him for being upset, sounds like he tried to go through friendly channels for awhile.
We're talking Harlan Ellison here - who wouldn't know a friendly channel if he was neck deep in it. He has two operating modes, off and complete thermonuclear warfare. (And who also isn't responsible for much of the episode in question beyond the title and a few of the basic concepts anyhow - he threatened at one point, after multiple rewrites, to pull his name off the episode. Not that that has stopped him from taking all the credit in the years since it first aired.)
From a woodworking point of view, it's not all that impressive. It's not well finished, and if you look at the picture of it closed you can plainly see the marks from running through a planer.
It seems to me that the best practice would be to have a feed for each event that's re-used annually, rather than a feed for each event each year. Presumably folks interested in a given event in 2008 remain so in 2009.
But similarly, who can afford them? They aren't just sold for $10 at Wal-Mart. And generally those who can afford them and buy them will be the people who know much more about rockets then either you or me.
No, the people who will buy them are the people who can afford them. Being able to afford them is no guarantor of knowledge or common sense. Consider the number of people able to afford GPS navigators - and follow them off into la la land as has been reported here repeatedly on Slashdot. Consider the audiophiles who'll spend hundreds of dollars on wooden knobs for their stereo equipment.
The thought that because these things are regulated will suddenly make them be only in the hands of those who are good is a myth, it will only make getting them a pain.
The OP didn't claim they should be regulated to keep them out of the hands of terrorists - but to keep them out of the hands of the clueless.
What this chumwits fail to realize is that geek is bigger and broader than ever. Consider the inroads computers and video games have made into the landscape. Video games are an umpty-billion dollar a year industry and are either threatening to or have already surpassed music and movies as the biggest consumer entertainment market.
More correctly, the number of people doing geek like stuff is larger than ever... but that doesn't make them geeks.
Paper money simply puts the control of money into the hands of a central authority, which always abuses it's power and inflates it intentionally.
I always find it amusing that people who rant about paper money and fiat currency have never actually studied how hard currency behaves - and how that behavior is utterly unlike their fantasies.
How is it MS needs to lay-off employees but can throw 36.5 million on this?
The state should not give tax payer money to a monopolistic company damaging the local economy by laying off people when clearly they didn't financially need to.
In the same way I didn't buy a new $1000 table saw, but instead put $3000 into my mini van. I don't need a new table saw, but my van did need work.
comparing the stability of gold to paper is a joke. Paper money has been highly unstable and since it's introduction there has been nothing but inflation.
The US dollar is worth about 3 or 4 cents compared to what it was in 1913, when the Federal Reserve was created.
While you're at it - compare the value of the (gold backed) US Dollar in 1909 with the (gold backed) US Dollar of 1813. You'll find that inflation isn't solely a property of paper money, nor a artifact of the presence of the Federal Reserve.
I always find it amusing that people who rant about paper money and fiat currency have never actually studied how hard currency behaves - and how that behavior is utterly unlike their fantasies.
I visited my alma mater recently, and I was stuck by how much changed in just ten years time. The students are doing "cool" projects that I can only dream of doing in the real world. (Example - Programming a robot to swim across a lake and collect trash.) It makes me wonder if they will be disappointed with their first jobs, which will mostly consist of sitting at a cubicle all day and writing documents.
I don't consider myself a narcissistic student, but I wonder, what's the point of going through years of education, if not to use it?
How is sitting in a cubicle and writing documentation in your field not using your education? Like the guy upthread who envisioned himself in R&D, you don't seem to realize that even the coolest of jobs entail 10% cool and 90% uncool.
Even if you are in R&D - you'll spend a lot of time doing uncool drone work. You've got to plan what you are going to do and how, and then document what did happen after you do it. "Cool" projects, like those discussed by the OP (as well as the increasing trend toward edutainment in primary education), give the student a seriously warped view of what the real world is like. And leads straight towards the narcissistic attitude that spawned this discussion.
Education is dumb because you work really hard to accumulate all this knowledge only to be placed in management and never use it again.
If you're the kind of manager that doesn't use the experience and education you've accumulated - you're the kind of clueless manager that leads other engineers to pin Dilbert cartoons up in their cubicles.
What's this business in the article about it being "nearly impossible to see"? A 450 foot dirigible at an altitude of 65,000 feet would subtend an angle of 0.4 degrees from ground-level directly underneath, just a little smaller than the full Moon.
Better do your math again - because a 747 at 10,000 feet subtends an angle much smaller than the full moon. You've dropped a decimal place, or three, somewhere.
Yeah, ground based lasers capable of focusing enough energy on an object 12 miles away to damage it are real common. I've got two under tarps in my garage.
I understand that as a geek it's really hard to let go of bit twiddling. I had the same struggle 25 years ago before I got out as a ET1. However, you I have to tell you that you never understood one very basic fact of enlisted service in the USN.
As a PO2, your primary job was to train the PO3s, SNs, SAs, and SRs to replace you.
At sea my primary job was to stand my assigned watch (usually as a PO2 that meant the top watch) and keep the gear up and only secondarily to train my juniors in watchstanding (preparing guys standing the junior watch for the senior, and preparing unqualified guys for the junior watch) and system operation. (We stood watch 24/7 in three six hour sections. No office hours.)
There were no non rates, 0000 NECs, or SN and below in my field. New guys (to the boat) in my field had been through a bruising two year pipeline with a forty percent drop out/fail out rate, hence they were much closer to unglazed pottery than raw clay.
You were supposed to be passing on your skills to others. Your secondary job was to supervise that same group of individuals to take care of the gear. Your tertiary job was to be "called when the gear and chips were down and the clock ticking..." Your Div O knew that, but clearly didn't know how to tell you that.
At the particular (shore) duty station in question, under that particular div O, I *was* the junior guy despite being a very senior 2nd (five years in rate) at the time of the incident in question. When I first got there, with only two years in rate, I was considered too junior to be there at all! During my entire three years there I was never more than about a third of the way up from the bottom in a four man division. (The minimum rate for that billet was PO2.) My assigned job there was to keep the gear up - because if the trainers weren't up, the schoolhouse couldn't run.
The one thing that I'm really puzzled by is why your chief or LPO didn't pull you aside to explain this most basic of facts of Navy life to you? They should have known this.
You're puzzled because you assume I was in the same situation as most of the rest of the Navy - when I wasn't. Not only was I a submariner, I was in a highly specialized subfield - strategic weapons fire control. During the years I served (1981-91), at its largest, the FTB rate was only around 800-900 bodies... and that included the hundred odd kids in the 'C' schools. The rules for us were different because the demographics, circumstances, and size of our rate and divisions were radically different from the rest of the fleet. (Even so, at a full complement of seven people we weren't the smallest division on the boat.)
I deleted about three paragraphs of explanation of my specific circumstances, but it can be summarized thusly: The div O was not only unfamiliar with how submarines worked (having previously been on a carrier and whose smallest division was not only ten times the size of mine but operations oriented, not maintenance) but who was also wearing two hats, and spent most of his time on a different shift running a far larger division who didn't also perform maintenance (they were all instructors). Combine this with a chief and a two firsts who spent more time working on career advancement out of the office than in running proper interference between me and the div O or training the div O... A veritable perfect storm if you will.
Except that Alan Turing didn't crack Enigma, the Poles did a couple of years before Turing came on the scene. What Turing, the prototype computer geek, did was slightly refine someone else's design for a code breaking computer and design a specific section of its hardware.
Unfortunately, at some point you get forced to put down the wrench and pick up the pen, and then its just not fun anymore.
That's the key reason I was stuck at, and eventually got out as, a 2nd Class PO. I loved (and was dammed good at) the technical aspects of my real job, but had zero interest in the administrivia. My last div O used to bitch about me not 'taking my responsibility' and getting involved with the administrivia. He sometimes inferred that I was useless weight in the division because of it - but when I asked him who he called when the gear and chips were down and the clock ticking... he'd change the subject. Quickly.
Yep. Right here up the road from me they have DoD rent-a-cops manning the base gates. But there's a shitload of Marines on alert 24/7, Marines regularly sweeping the perimeter, and the Marines and sailors man the inner gates to the important stuff. (Not to mention a shitload of electronic monitoring.) Anytime something is going on that requires real security, like a weapons move, it's Marines in full battle gear, locked and loaded providing the security.
Even if they had military guys on the gates, the gate force is too small to stop any serious assault. Having rent-a-cops on the gates is no big deal, they're expendable tripwires (a honeypot if you will) to alert the real defenses further inside.
I was coming from the angle that the military technical specialties, especially the ones not desk bound and doubly especially for those who aren't civilians in uniform, provide a high level of challenging and interesting work. I'm out on the tail of the geek/nerd bell curve because I don't have people interface problems so the social aspect escaped me entirely.
I was also in the submarine service where there is a higher bond of brotherhood due to the environment and where the social interaction protocols are significantly different. Submarines tend to be meritocracies more than the autocratic/feudalish model of the rest of the armed services.
True, very true. The prima donna attitude to which I referred evolved during the brief period when conditions were otherwise - something most Slashdotters don't realize was a temporary aberration.
Alternatively, there are certain nerds who enjoy military culture and do fine there.
I was about to say much the same thing - most of of the highly technical jobs in the [US] Submarine Service were filled by nerds and geeks of various stripes when I was in (1981-1991) and we did just fine. The currently serving ones I've seem to be doing fine as well.
Slashdot needs to keep in mind that their stereotype of the nerd/geek as a highly strung prima donna is just that, a stereotype. They seem to be prevalent in the Hivemind because most Slashdotters 'came of age' during the unusual conditions of the Dot Com/Bomb era when briefly they (nerds/geeks) were treated as such because of the high and competitive demand, as well as because the Hivemind seems to self select for that kind of personality.
Slashdot Mirror
So the actors on Gilligan's Island worked there for three years for free? Oh, wait... They were paid for their work.
It's more likely they languished in poverty because they were either not too good as actors or because they were has beens hired cheap . Or both.
We're talking Harlan Ellison here - who wouldn't know a friendly channel if he was neck deep in it. He has two operating modes, off and complete thermonuclear warfare. (And who also isn't responsible for much of the episode in question beyond the title and a few of the basic concepts anyhow - he threatened at one point, after multiple rewrites, to pull his name off the episode. Not that that has stopped him from taking all the credit in the years since it first aired.)
From a woodworking point of view, it's not all that impressive. It's not well finished, and if you look at the picture of it closed you can plainly see the marks from running through a planer.
It seems to me that the best practice would be to have a feed for each event that's re-used annually, rather than a feed for each event each year. Presumably folks interested in a given event in 2008 remain so in 2009.
No, the people who will buy them are the people who can afford them. Being able to afford them is no guarantor of knowledge or common sense. Consider the number of people able to afford GPS navigators - and follow them off into la la land as has been reported here repeatedly on Slashdot. Consider the audiophiles who'll spend hundreds of dollars on wooden knobs for their stereo equipment.
The OP didn't claim they should be regulated to keep them out of the hands of terrorists - but to keep them out of the hands of the clueless.
More correctly, the number of people doing geek like stuff is larger than ever... but that doesn't make them geeks.
Slashdot is a subset of the "techno-savvy crowd", and not representative of the whole.
So what? Outside of the consumer products, equipment and vehicles in the real world routinely stay in service for decades.
I always find it amusing that people who rant about paper money and fiat currency have never actually studied how hard currency behaves - and how that behavior is utterly unlike their fantasies.
In the same way I didn't buy a new $1000 table saw, but instead put $3000 into my mini van. I don't need a new table saw, but my van did need work.
While you're at it - compare the value of the (gold backed) US Dollar in 1909 with the (gold backed) US Dollar of 1813. You'll find that inflation isn't solely a property of paper money, nor a artifact of the presence of the Federal Reserve.
I always find it amusing that people who rant about paper money and fiat currency have never actually studied how hard currency behaves - and how that behavior is utterly unlike their fantasies.
How is sitting in a cubicle and writing documentation in your field not using your education? Like the guy upthread who envisioned himself in R&D, you don't seem to realize that even the coolest of jobs entail 10% cool and 90% uncool.
Even if you are in R&D - you'll spend a lot of time doing uncool drone work. You've got to plan what you are going to do and how, and then document what did happen after you do it. "Cool" projects, like those discussed by the OP (as well as the increasing trend toward edutainment in primary education), give the student a seriously warped view of what the real world is like. And leads straight towards the narcissistic attitude that spawned this discussion.
If you're the kind of manager that doesn't use the experience and education you've accumulated - you're the kind of clueless manager that leads other engineers to pin Dilbert cartoons up in their cubicles.
Right. The glass lenses on my face are a figment of my imagination.
In you hurry to be snide and sound smarter than you are - you seem to have missed that ABL class lasers are scarce and expensive.
Better do your math again - because a 747 at 10,000 feet subtends an angle much smaller than the full moon. You've dropped a decimal place, or three, somewhere.
Yeah, ground based lasers capable of focusing enough energy on an object 12 miles away to damage it are real common. I've got two under tarps in my garage.
Get glasses lenses instead of plastic and learn to friggin' take care of your glasses.
Mainland USA.
At sea my primary job was to stand my assigned watch (usually as a PO2 that meant the top watch) and keep the gear up and only secondarily to train my juniors in watchstanding (preparing guys standing the junior watch for the senior, and preparing unqualified guys for the junior watch) and system operation. (We stood watch 24/7 in three six hour sections. No office hours.)
There were no non rates, 0000 NECs, or SN and below in my field. New guys (to the boat) in my field had been through a bruising two year pipeline with a forty percent drop out/fail out rate, hence they were much closer to unglazed pottery than raw clay.
At the particular (shore) duty station in question, under that particular div O, I *was* the junior guy despite being a very senior 2nd (five years in rate) at the time of the incident in question. When I first got there, with only two years in rate, I was considered too junior to be there at all! During my entire three years there I was never more than about a third of the way up from the bottom in a four man division. (The minimum rate for that billet was PO2.) My assigned job there was to keep the gear up - because if the trainers weren't up, the schoolhouse couldn't run.
You're puzzled because you assume I was in the same situation as most of the rest of the Navy - when I wasn't. Not only was I a submariner, I was in a highly specialized subfield - strategic weapons fire control. During the years I served (1981-91), at its largest, the FTB rate was only around 800-900 bodies... and that included the hundred odd kids in the 'C' schools. The rules for us were different because the demographics, circumstances, and size of our rate and divisions were radically different from the rest of the fleet. (Even so, at a full complement of seven people we weren't the smallest division on the boat.)
I deleted about three paragraphs of explanation of my specific circumstances, but it can be summarized thusly: The div O was not only unfamiliar with how submarines worked (having previously been on a carrier and whose smallest division was not only ten times the size of mine but operations oriented, not maintenance) but who was also wearing two hats, and spent most of his time on a different shift running a far larger division who didn't also perform maintenance (they were all instructors). Combine this with a chief and a two firsts who spent more time working on career advancement out of the office than in running proper interference between me and the div O or training the div O... A veritable perfect storm if you will.
Except that Alan Turing didn't crack Enigma, the Poles did a couple of years before Turing came on the scene. What Turing, the prototype computer geek, did was slightly refine someone else's design for a code breaking computer and design a specific section of its hardware.
That's the key reason I was stuck at, and eventually got out as, a 2nd Class PO. I loved (and was dammed good at) the technical aspects of my real job, but had zero interest in the administrivia. My last div O used to bitch about me not 'taking my responsibility' and getting involved with the administrivia. He sometimes inferred that I was useless weight in the division because of it - but when I asked him who he called when the gear and chips were down and the clock ticking... he'd change the subject. Quickly.
Yep. Right here up the road from me they have DoD rent-a-cops manning the base gates. But there's a shitload of Marines on alert 24/7, Marines regularly sweeping the perimeter, and the Marines and sailors man the inner gates to the important stuff. (Not to mention a shitload of electronic monitoring.) Anytime something is going on that requires real security, like a weapons move, it's Marines in full battle gear, locked and loaded providing the security.
Even if they had military guys on the gates, the gate force is too small to stop any serious assault. Having rent-a-cops on the gates is no big deal, they're expendable tripwires (a honeypot if you will) to alert the real defenses further inside.
Voyager was launched in 1977 - pretty difficult to harden 'em when you join JPL years after they have been developed and launched.
I was coming from the angle that the military technical specialties, especially the ones not desk bound and doubly especially for those who aren't civilians in uniform, provide a high level of challenging and interesting work. I'm out on the tail of the geek/nerd bell curve because I don't have people interface problems so the social aspect escaped me entirely.
I was also in the submarine service where there is a higher bond of brotherhood due to the environment and where the social interaction protocols are significantly different. Submarines tend to be meritocracies more than the autocratic/feudalish model of the rest of the armed services.
True, very true. The prima donna attitude to which I referred evolved during the brief period when conditions were otherwise - something most Slashdotters don't realize was a temporary aberration.
I was about to say much the same thing - most of of the highly technical jobs in the [US] Submarine Service were filled by nerds and geeks of various stripes when I was in (1981-1991) and we did just fine. The currently serving ones I've seem to be doing fine as well.
Slashdot needs to keep in mind that their stereotype of the nerd/geek as a highly strung prima donna is just that, a stereotype. They seem to be prevalent in the Hivemind because most Slashdotters 'came of age' during the unusual conditions of the Dot Com/Bomb era when briefly they (nerds/geeks) were treated as such because of the high and competitive demand, as well as because the Hivemind seems to self select for that kind of personality.