If you can't do the math without a calculator, you should not be doing it!
Its that kind of attitude towards teaching that has caused the USA to be such a laughing-stock when it comes to elementary education. Some people simply don't have the thought patterns to handle abstract math easily. For those people, you need to show them as many tricks and cheats as possible, and show them how it applies to problems they want to solve. I guarantee that no matter how bad a person is at math, they can count money. Just a matter of applying the knowledge to something interesting to the person...
Wow, that was overkill. You guys need a quick lesson in standardized testing: My thought process was
50*3
And pick the closest looking number. 3 of the four answers were not even close to this, so it simplified things tremendously. With standardized testing, 3 of the 4 answers are usually garbage answers, so getting close is good enough. Remember standardized tests are timed, so running out of time can be worse than getting a few wrong here and there. Accurate only counts so much, fast is a factor too.
Even after you take out the pension costs entirely, the USPS is still loosing almost a billion per year over the last 4 years. Their last year in the black was 2006, and that was only because they weren't funding their pension properly, which is why congress stepped in and changed the pension requirements for the USPS.
Except for the billions of dollars in no interest loans from the fed. The USPS currently owes the fed in excess of USD 13Bn in 0% interest loans. If the USPS goes under, the tax payers get to foot that bill... In the mean time, the USPS is not paying a single penny of interest on that money. Its a subsidy any way you try to hide what its called. Just a few years ago, congress voted to excuse the USPS from $4Bn worth of those loans. Just because they claim to be self sufficient doesn't make it true.
The USPS sucks at delivering packages? And doesn't provide adequate tracking? What country do you live in?
* UPS does not typically deliver on the weekend unless the sender pays extra. USPS does.
Not for much longer
* I can go to the USPS website to track my packages.
Only the premium ones. UPS and FEDEX provide tracking for all packages in extreme detail
* Anecdotally, UPS packages seem to take longer to deliver than USPS. They don't seem to be able to accurately predict delivery time either. With USPS, a priority package arrives in 3 days, and often 2.
UPS offers guaranteed time in transit on *all* packages. not just premium services. USPS does not guarantee delivery on anything.
* If I am required to sign for a USPS package and I'm not home, I just have to drive to post office within 1/4 mile of my house. If I miss a UPS delivery, I have to drive 5 miles to the next town to their shipping terminal.
Only until the USPS closes down the 50% of sort facilities, then you'll have to drive the same 5 miles...
I'll take the USPS any day over UPS. The reason USPS is hurting is that UPS is allowed to cherry-pick the profitable package business while avoiding the daily mail responsibility. Seems like in order for the competition to be fair, anyone competing should have to play by the same rules.
UPS delivers to everywhere the USPS does every day. Any valid US postal address in the US (if the fire dept and police can find you, UPS will), and bunches of places that the USPS only delivers to as P.O. Boxes.
I know half of you are screaming at your monitors that "security through obscurity is no security at all"
And some of us are quietly thinking that security through obscurity is one of the best tools in a security arsenal. By itself, it is not all that good, but coupled with other strong security measures, security through obscurity is the most effective security there is. The trouble is that obscurity is not directly within the control of the security professional, and cannot stand alone.
That which is never assaulted is never breached, everything else is a holding action.
This is false. Sufficiently strong security measures mean that only the most determined adversary can obtain the information if they wanted. In practice this means that the information will be available to intelligence agencies of the most advanced nation-states and nobody else (for example, who has detailed thermonuclear weapons design knowledge? there is apparently one 1960's era secret not at all yet publicly revealed.).
While I do not possess detailed plans, I have enough general knowledge that I could build a thermonuclear device that when detonated would produced a very significant yield (probably not even close to 50% efficient, but when you're talking tens of kilotons in the terrorist sense who cares about order of magnitude). The production of the fuel is not trivial, and is the only reason terrorist have not successfully created a bomb of their own. Note that Stuxnet had nothing to do with the production of nuclear weapons, but was designed to disrupt the creation of the fuel... The Ulam-Teller design is an open secret, and there is enough detail on the web to rebuild the device to good enough specifications to get at least a couple of tens of kilotons. The only remaining obstacle is cost, which thankfully is still prohibitive for anyone except a nation (mostly due to fuel costs).
Getting critical mass is easy. Keeping from getting critical mass until "go time" is harder but still not that difficult. Fortunately mistakes in this field tend to be lethal...
The article reads like an undergraduate who wants to write a shit-kicking thesis and is really oooh excited about things but has entirely failed to do anything more than throw a few disjointed ideas in a bucket. It is peppered with lines that sound good but don't stand up to a couple of seconds examination: " So once the Napster litigation made P2P programmers aware of the rules about knowledge and control, they simply coded Napster's successors to eliminate them." I mean WHAT? Programmers coded out rules of "knowledge and control"???? No, the rules of law on knowledge and control exist independently in jurisprudence. How do you "code out" something that's entirely outwith software? Nonsense.
I understood perfectly what the author was writing about in reference to knowledge and control.
Specifically, in regards to knowledge: The authors of Kazaa and Napster had the means, as a consequence of the design of their systems, to know what was being transmitted, by whom, and to whom it was going. This constituted knowledge of their customers actions. Most modern P2P software has no central server and no communications between the users of the software and the authors of the software. In short, the authors have no idea who is using their software, where they got it from, or what they are using it for. More importantly: they have no practical way of knowing.
Control is even easier to understand in this context. Napster and Kazaa relied on a central server to provide the service. These services had the ability to control what was being listed, or transmitted using their software. By virtue of their licensing, they had the ability to control who even used it. P2P eliminated almost all central control by way of servers, and the open source licensing ensured that anyone could use the software regardless of their intent. This means that even if the makers of xyz P2P software wanted to halt its use entirely, they would be legally (and logistically) incapable of doing so. They no longer have any practical control over their software, its users, or how they use it.
And at the heart of it, the article offers no causative argument that litigation spurred on file sharing. At best it observes that file sharing increased in the era after litigation but it falls down entirely in showing any causation rather than correlation. There are other daft arguments about the Supreme Court making laws: it doesn't, de Tocqueville et al were rather insistent it couldn't; rather its interpretation of law clarifies the law already in place, which show the author is floundering on the subject matter.
The article made a fairly persuasive argument about the likely underlying reasons for growth of online piracy *in spite* of the massive legal efforts of the **AA organizations. The articles unstated assumption is, that when faced with and defeated by such a large scale legal assault, the pervasiveness of piracy should have decreased. instead, as we know it increased. The article then provides a very persuasive explanation for the reasons why this legal assault failed. In the past many other similar assaults on piracy have succeeded. You don't see a whole lot of counterfeit goods in this country because of the reasons listed in the article. Online piracy is rampant however.
Weak.
Better than your response which was weak and trollish.
It comes down to cost. Trying the plan for that last 5% of disasters that only happen 1% of the time is cost prohibitive. At some point, sad as it may seem, money does become more important than the consequences. I don't think Fukishama will be the last, nor the worst, disaster this population ever sees but it will make engineers a little more careful. For a while.
Money is all important because it is a limited resource. Lets say you have the choice of spending 1.5 Trillion Dollars to avoid another Chernobyl (estimated death toll: 10,000, and overall cost of cleanup 100 Billion Dollars). Would this be worth it?
Hint: This is a trick question. The answer is a resounding no. The reason is that with all things, the name of the game is risk management. You can spend that 1.4 Trillion and save 10,000 Lives, or you can spend that money on other things, like free mammograms for all (cost: $15 Billion / year, lives saved: 40,000 / year).
If you look at the cost/life saved, there are literally thousands of better ways to spend our money. Past a certain point, additional safety costs more than it is worth.
The real issue with Fukushima is that the reactors survived the earthquake and tsunami. What caused the meltdown was loss of electrical power to reactors that required active pumped water cooling and valve control.
Actually, there is a growing bit of evidence That the meltdown was an inevitable result of quake damage, and the tsunami only hastened the disaster.
If you dont like my link, Google Fukushima quake damage and see for yourself. The gist of the story is that certain radiation and instrument readings could only be the result of damage before the tsunami hit, and that those readings imply damage that would have eventually led to meltdown. The tsunami pretty much just sealed the deal, and guaranteed that everything else was in vain.
>> I work at a physics lab, and I can assure you that the cold fusion effect is very real, but nobody can explain yet why it works,...sometimes
I doubt this. You don't even realize that 1 MW is not a measure of energy.
Now that's kind of picking nits. I'm pretty sure you knew what he was trying to say, and converting to joules, or explaining the concept in terms of the flow of energy would just complicate the matter more than was necessary. This is Slashdot, not the Nobel committee: close enough is good enough. 99%of the value of being an expert is being able to relate useful information to laymen.
Because MS will use the default nature of their browser on their 90% market share to push users to their web portal (bing). Because the vast majority of users don't know there is a choice, they will effectively be rendered into using MS other service offerings artificially. This will make it artificially easier for MS to compete in areas outside of their core in spite of any quality failings of these other products. In short it allows MS to compete effectively even if their product offering is vastly inferior to the competition. Thus MS can basically avoid any standardization, provide a crappy product and still drive their competition out of business, all without having to invest any significant capital in R&D. In short, in the end it is all the things that antitrust was designed to prevent because it is the consumers who ultimately get hosed.
Another aspect to note it that engineering groups are teams, and they tend to be very self selecting teams. You'll find that most engineering groups select new members by having one or more engineers interview applicants as a final step to the process. They are looking for your abilities and skills, but they are also interested in your personality. After all, they have to spend at least 40 hours a week with you, maybe significantly more. Being a workaholic bore doesn't cut it with most of them, I have worked with a number of engineering teams, and every one of them was also a social group. What I did in my spare time was *always* a question that came up in interviews.
I have also been an interviewer for two non-engineering groups, and in both cases, social skills played the majority part in the selection process. I wanted to know two things: Can I teach this person the skills they need, and can I get along with this person. If the answer was anything other than an absolute yes, then I sent them packing.
One last thing to note: The private space industry is very young. It cant really afford to take on unnecessary risks. As a new graduate, you would be just such an unnecessary risk. It is very unlikely that, by the time you graduate, this situation will have changed much. Your best bet is to go to school for a dual degree in electrical/embedded systems engineering and mechanical or aerospace engineering. These general skills will make you a viable candidate for a job in a similar field, which will get you the experience you will need to cross over into the private space industry. Breaking into the industry straight out of college is, unfortunately, very unlikely no matter your educational background.
film is more expensive to edit and change and digital does that easily; but film has its place and pretty much always will.
Now you are letting your personal bias show through: Analog storage in any form (be it film, or magnetic tape, etc...) is a far *less* preferable alternative on so may levels that its surprising that it took digital media as long as it did to overtake it. Film will go completely out of use soon. Film is a mature technology and really isn't improving anymore. Digital on the other hand is still improving fast, and it is already competitive with analog on almost every measure, and far superior on many. Resolution of digital cameras can be bought up to any scale desired, and cost is the only factor. Its just a matter of time before the cost curve comes down to the point where everyone can afford movie quality resolution movie cameras, and digital currently makes all the other movie production costs so much lower that it is currently worth digital recording almost no matter the cost of the camera.
Film is doomed to a niche market of crazed die hard artists, much like authors that still use the typewriter, photographers who work in black and white, and musicians who use cassette tape. Its over, deal with it.
why even bother to switch over if Bing's already loaded?
One word: Principle
The biggest difference between MS and Google: Microsoft's business model is ruthless domination of any market they can get a foothold in. Google's business model is try to put out good products without being "evil".
Microsoft is ruthless and evil and they are good at it.
Google is "don't be evil" and they are bad at it.
The end result is very similar but for very different reasons. One will probably get better, the other is irredeemably bad.
The postal service does deliver parcels but letter volume far exceeds parcel delivery. How many parcels does an average person receive a year vs letters, bills, etc.?
The problem for the USPS, when it comes to parcel delivery, is that they are very bad at it. They cant touch the private carriers in terms of cost or reliability. Even DHL did a better job of parcel delivery than the USPS, and those were the people who didn't think twice about blowing away a couple billion a year for a decade to "test the waters" of US domestic package delivery.
Long story short, the USPS cant compete on price, service, or time in transit. They are bottom of the stack in everything they do, and their continued existence serves as a warning to the other would be package delivery companies of what not to do.
Assume that the USPS has enough mail carriers to cope with 100% of todays deliveries (ie each carrier works a full day, and that the USPS doesn't carry excess workers). Now reduce the delivery days by 50%, but the public does not change its habits. Now each mail carrier is only working 3 days a week, but has double the amount of mail to deliver. So in the interim you have to hire another set of workers to carry the additional load, or get the current workers to work twice as hard.
Its an interesting problem from a logistics standpoint. There are two separate factors that affect required staffing. The first is mail volume. (Packages letters, etc...) The second is delivery locations. Almost every delivery address gets at least one piece of mail per day, but the total volume is dropping. That means that each mail carrier is still doing all of the things that take them the longest: Walking or driving from stop to stop. If you doubled the packages for each delivery point, it would still take them about the same amount of time, because the handling of the parcels is almost completely insignificant compared to the time it takes to travel from stop to stop. So if you only delivered every other day, you cut the number of stops in half (cutting the time required in half), but the income from postage remains the same (cost per piece). Its sort of the reverse of economy of scale. The problem is that this is likely to help cause the further collapse of mail volume and shunt a large portion of their package volume to other carriers who provide a shorter end to end delivery window.
At the end of the day, I think the post office' problems are likely insurmountable, both logistically and politically. The best bet for the economy is to make sure that the pensions are fully funded so that the workers don't get screwed any worse than they already are, and start planning the quickest viable offloading of the entire postal volume to private carriers. Then liquidate. Either that or congress needs to completely deregulate the USPS and relinquish all connections/control, and let the post office try to swim without being strapped to a concrete donkey.
The failure of the US government to act on behalf of the interests of the greater good of its citizens lies with said citizens.
When Democracy came to the north American continent, it was better than the alternative. It took 200 years, but the bad elements have figured out how to completely game the system. The fault lies with the system, not its constituents. When democracy requires the active involvement of a majority of its citizens to function properly, then it is a failure. Government is supposed to keep bad people off the backs of common people. If people have to work to keep government *and* bad people off their own backs, then what the hell do they need government for?
1) Sue Google
2) Win , but be delisted
3) Wait for Bing to pay a license fee for their content
4) Profit !
Bing will easily attract the million of viewers that Google was providing.
More likely, Bing will go the way of most of Microsofts "also-ran" products (Silverlight, Bob, Zune, etc). 5 years from now Bing will likely be dropped for failing to achieve its business goals, and be quietly discontinued.
Our legal system is directly influenced by the politics of our day, and as anyone in politics will tell you, perception is reality. The image our courts have of not being able to provide an unbiased decision, is a direct result of and reflection of the failings of our legal system. Judges have routinely failed to recuse themselves when they should on the grounds that they do not understand the underlying principles, nor the ramifications of their decisions. A judge taking the time to learn about the things they are being asked to decide is far less common than the alternative.
Our legal system needs an overhaul badly, and all parts of the intellectual property laws need to be removed, and subsequently / expressly forbidden by amendment to the constitution. Nothing less than that will restore the faith of the citizens that the government works for them, not for big business.
When you walk away from a job there is nothing more satisfying than letting it fall to shit after you go. Doing something on the way out or after you leave just proves you didn't have any positive effect on the business.
That is only from a "man in the trenches" perspective. A better measure of a manager, is how well the place runs when they are away for vacations, and right after they leave / get transferred or promoted. A good manager will setup their operation to run well especially when they are not there. A poor manager micromanages, and everything turns to s#!t when they are not there because no one will make a decision without the boss.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can't do the math without a calculator, you should not be doing it!
Its that kind of attitude towards teaching that has caused the USA to be such a laughing-stock when it comes to elementary education. Some people simply don't have the thought patterns to handle abstract math easily. For those people, you need to show them as many tricks and cheats as possible, and show them how it applies to problems they want to solve. I guarantee that no matter how bad a person is at math, they can count money. Just a matter of applying the knowledge to something interesting to the person...
-=Geoskd
Wow, that was overkill. You guys need a quick lesson in standardized testing: My thought process was
50*3
And pick the closest looking number. 3 of the four answers were not even close to this, so it simplified things tremendously. With standardized testing, 3 of the 4 answers are usually garbage answers, so getting close is good enough. Remember standardized tests are timed, so running out of time can be worse than getting a few wrong here and there. Accurate only counts so much, fast is a factor too.
-=Geoskd
Even after you take out the pension costs entirely, the USPS is still loosing almost a billion per year over the last 4 years. Their last year in the black was 2006, and that was only because they weren't funding their pension properly, which is why congress stepped in and changed the pension requirements for the USPS.
-=Geoskd
Actually, 0% of the USPS funding is through taxes. As an entity, it is entirely self supporting. See: http://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-facts/welcome.htm#H12
Except for the billions of dollars in no interest loans from the fed. The USPS currently owes the fed in excess of USD 13Bn in 0% interest loans. If the USPS goes under, the tax payers get to foot that bill... In the mean time, the USPS is not paying a single penny of interest on that money. Its a subsidy any way you try to hide what its called. Just a few years ago, congress voted to excuse the USPS from $4Bn worth of those loans. Just because they claim to be self sufficient doesn't make it true.
-=Geoskd
The USPS sucks at delivering packages? And doesn't provide adequate tracking? What country do you live in?
* UPS does not typically deliver on the weekend unless the sender pays extra. USPS does.
Not for much longer
* I can go to the USPS website to track my packages.
Only the premium ones. UPS and FEDEX provide tracking for all packages in extreme detail
* Anecdotally, UPS packages seem to take longer to deliver than USPS. They don't seem to be able to accurately predict delivery time either. With USPS, a priority package arrives in 3 days, and often 2.
UPS offers guaranteed time in transit on *all* packages. not just premium services. USPS does not guarantee delivery on anything.
* If I am required to sign for a USPS package and I'm not home, I just have to drive to post office within 1/4 mile of my house. If I miss a UPS delivery, I have to drive 5 miles to the next town to their shipping terminal.
Only until the USPS closes down the 50% of sort facilities, then you'll have to drive the same 5 miles...
I'll take the USPS any day over UPS. The reason USPS is hurting is that UPS is allowed to cherry-pick the profitable package business while avoiding the daily mail responsibility. Seems like in order for the competition to be fair, anyone competing should have to play by the same rules.
UPS delivers to everywhere the USPS does every day. Any valid US postal address in the US (if the fire dept and police can find you, UPS will), and bunches of places that the USPS only delivers to as P.O. Boxes.
-=Geoskd
I know half of you are screaming at your monitors that "security through obscurity is no security at all"
And some of us are quietly thinking that security through obscurity is one of the best tools in a security arsenal. By itself, it is not all that good, but coupled with other strong security measures, security through obscurity is the most effective security there is. The trouble is that obscurity is not directly within the control of the security professional, and cannot stand alone.
That which is never assaulted is never breached, everything else is a holding action.
-=Geoskd
This is false. Sufficiently strong security measures mean that only the most determined adversary can obtain the information if they wanted. In practice this means that the information will be available to intelligence agencies of the most advanced nation-states and nobody else (for example, who has detailed thermonuclear weapons design knowledge? there is apparently one 1960's era secret not at all yet publicly revealed.).
While I do not possess detailed plans, I have enough general knowledge that I could build a thermonuclear device that when detonated would produced a very significant yield (probably not even close to 50% efficient, but when you're talking tens of kilotons in the terrorist sense who cares about order of magnitude). The production of the fuel is not trivial, and is the only reason terrorist have not successfully created a bomb of their own. Note that Stuxnet had nothing to do with the production of nuclear weapons, but was designed to disrupt the creation of the fuel... The Ulam-Teller design is an open secret, and there is enough detail on the web to rebuild the device to good enough specifications to get at least a couple of tens of kilotons. The only remaining obstacle is cost, which thankfully is still prohibitive for anyone except a nation (mostly due to fuel costs).
Getting critical mass is easy. Keeping from getting critical mass until "go time" is harder but still not that difficult. Fortunately mistakes in this field tend to be lethal...
-=Geoskd
The article reads like an undergraduate who wants to write a shit-kicking thesis and is really oooh excited about things but has entirely failed to do anything more than throw a few disjointed ideas in a bucket. It is peppered with lines that sound good but don't stand up to a couple of seconds examination: " So once the Napster litigation made P2P programmers aware of the rules about knowledge and control, they simply coded Napster's successors to eliminate them." I mean WHAT? Programmers coded out rules of "knowledge and control"???? No, the rules of law on knowledge and control exist independently in jurisprudence. How do you "code out" something that's entirely outwith software? Nonsense.
I understood perfectly what the author was writing about in reference to knowledge and control.
Specifically, in regards to knowledge: The authors of Kazaa and Napster had the means, as a consequence of the design of their systems, to know what was being transmitted, by whom, and to whom it was going. This constituted knowledge of their customers actions. Most modern P2P software has no central server and no communications between the users of the software and the authors of the software. In short, the authors have no idea who is using their software, where they got it from, or what they are using it for. More importantly: they have no practical way of knowing.
Control is even easier to understand in this context. Napster and Kazaa relied on a central server to provide the service. These services had the ability to control what was being listed, or transmitted using their software. By virtue of their licensing, they had the ability to control who even used it. P2P eliminated almost all central control by way of servers, and the open source licensing ensured that anyone could use the software regardless of their intent. This means that even if the makers of xyz P2P software wanted to halt its use entirely, they would be legally (and logistically) incapable of doing so. They no longer have any practical control over their software, its users, or how they use it.
And at the heart of it, the article offers no causative argument that litigation spurred on file sharing. At best it observes that file sharing increased in the era after litigation but it falls down entirely in showing any causation rather than correlation. There are other daft arguments about the Supreme Court making laws: it doesn't, de Tocqueville et al were rather insistent it couldn't; rather its interpretation of law clarifies the law already in place, which show the author is floundering on the subject matter.
The article made a fairly persuasive argument about the likely underlying reasons for growth of online piracy *in spite* of the massive legal efforts of the **AA organizations. The articles unstated assumption is, that when faced with and defeated by such a large scale legal assault, the pervasiveness of piracy should have decreased. instead, as we know it increased. The article then provides a very persuasive explanation for the reasons why this legal assault failed. In the past many other similar assaults on piracy have succeeded. You don't see a whole lot of counterfeit goods in this country because of the reasons listed in the article. Online piracy is rampant however.
Weak.
Better than your response which was weak and trollish.
-=Geoskd
It comes down to cost. Trying the plan for that last 5% of disasters that only happen 1% of the time is cost prohibitive. At some point, sad as it may seem, money does become more important than the consequences. I don't think Fukishama will be the last, nor the worst, disaster this population ever sees but it will make engineers a little more careful. For a while.
Money is all important because it is a limited resource. Lets say you have the choice of spending 1.5 Trillion Dollars to avoid another Chernobyl (estimated death toll: 10,000, and overall cost of cleanup 100 Billion Dollars). Would this be worth it?
Hint: This is a trick question. The answer is a resounding no. The reason is that with all things, the name of the game is risk management. You can spend that 1.4 Trillion and save 10,000 Lives, or you can spend that money on other things, like free mammograms for all (cost: $15 Billion / year, lives saved: 40,000 / year). If you look at the cost/life saved, there are literally thousands of better ways to spend our money. Past a certain point, additional safety costs more than it is worth.
-=Geoskd
The real issue with Fukushima is that the reactors survived the earthquake and tsunami. What caused the meltdown was loss of electrical power to reactors that required active pumped water cooling and valve control.
Actually, there is a growing bit of evidence That the meltdown was an inevitable result of quake damage, and the tsunami only hastened the disaster.
If you dont like my link, Google Fukushima quake damage and see for yourself. The gist of the story is that certain radiation and instrument readings could only be the result of damage before the tsunami hit, and that those readings imply damage that would have eventually led to meltdown. The tsunami pretty much just sealed the deal, and guaranteed that everything else was in vain.
-=Geoskd
>> I work at a physics lab, and I can assure you that the cold fusion effect is very real, but nobody can explain yet why it works, ...sometimes
I doubt this. You don't even realize that 1 MW is not a measure of energy.
Now that's kind of picking nits. I'm pretty sure you knew what he was trying to say, and converting to joules, or explaining the concept in terms of the flow of energy would just complicate the matter more than was necessary. This is Slashdot, not the Nobel committee: close enough is good enough. 99%of the value of being an expert is being able to relate useful information to laymen.
-=Geoskd
Why does this really matter anymore?
Because MS will use the default nature of their browser on their 90% market share to push users to their web portal (bing). Because the vast majority of users don't know there is a choice, they will effectively be rendered into using MS other service offerings artificially. This will make it artificially easier for MS to compete in areas outside of their core in spite of any quality failings of these other products. In short it allows MS to compete effectively even if their product offering is vastly inferior to the competition. Thus MS can basically avoid any standardization, provide a crappy product and still drive their competition out of business, all without having to invest any significant capital in R&D. In short, in the end it is all the things that antitrust was designed to prevent because it is the consumers who ultimately get hosed.
-=Geoskd
Another aspect to note it that engineering groups are teams, and they tend to be very self selecting teams. You'll find that most engineering groups select new members by having one or more engineers interview applicants as a final step to the process. They are looking for your abilities and skills, but they are also interested in your personality. After all, they have to spend at least 40 hours a week with you, maybe significantly more. Being a workaholic bore doesn't cut it with most of them, I have worked with a number of engineering teams, and every one of them was also a social group. What I did in my spare time was *always* a question that came up in interviews.
I have also been an interviewer for two non-engineering groups, and in both cases, social skills played the majority part in the selection process. I wanted to know two things: Can I teach this person the skills they need, and can I get along with this person. If the answer was anything other than an absolute yes, then I sent them packing.
One last thing to note: The private space industry is very young. It cant really afford to take on unnecessary risks. As a new graduate, you would be just such an unnecessary risk. It is very unlikely that, by the time you graduate, this situation will have changed much. Your best bet is to go to school for a dual degree in electrical/embedded systems engineering and mechanical or aerospace engineering. These general skills will make you a viable candidate for a job in a similar field, which will get you the experience you will need to cross over into the private space industry. Breaking into the industry straight out of college is, unfortunately, very unlikely no matter your educational background.
-=Geoskd
my old 35mm negs still scan very well, too.
film is more expensive to edit and change and digital does that easily; but film has its place and pretty much always will.
Now you are letting your personal bias show through: Analog storage in any form (be it film, or magnetic tape, etc...) is a far *less* preferable alternative on so may levels that its surprising that it took digital media as long as it did to overtake it. Film will go completely out of use soon. Film is a mature technology and really isn't improving anymore. Digital on the other hand is still improving fast, and it is already competitive with analog on almost every measure, and far superior on many. Resolution of digital cameras can be bought up to any scale desired, and cost is the only factor. Its just a matter of time before the cost curve comes down to the point where everyone can afford movie quality resolution movie cameras, and digital currently makes all the other movie production costs so much lower that it is currently worth digital recording almost no matter the cost of the camera.
Film is doomed to a niche market of crazed die hard artists, much like authors that still use the typewriter, photographers who work in black and white, and musicians who use cassette tape. Its over, deal with it.
-=Geoskd
They need to compete on features, because business no longer goes to them by default.
Of course not, their routers are down, duh...
why even bother to switch over if Bing's already loaded?
One word: Principle
The biggest difference between MS and Google: Microsoft's business model is ruthless domination of any market they can get a foothold in. Google's business model is try to put out good products without being "evil".
Microsoft is ruthless and evil and they are good at it.
Google is "don't be evil" and they are bad at it.
The end result is very similar but for very different reasons. One will probably get better, the other is irredeemably bad.
-=Geoskd
The postal service does deliver parcels but letter volume far exceeds parcel delivery. How many parcels does an average person receive a year vs letters, bills, etc.?
The problem for the USPS, when it comes to parcel delivery, is that they are very bad at it. They cant touch the private carriers in terms of cost or reliability. Even DHL did a better job of parcel delivery than the USPS, and those were the people who didn't think twice about blowing away a couple billion a year for a decade to "test the waters" of US domestic package delivery.
Long story short, the USPS cant compete on price, service, or time in transit. They are bottom of the stack in everything they do, and their continued existence serves as a warning to the other would be package delivery companies of what not to do.
-=Geoskd
Assume that the USPS has enough mail carriers to cope with 100% of todays deliveries (ie each carrier works a full day, and that the USPS doesn't carry excess workers). Now reduce the delivery days by 50%, but the public does not change its habits. Now each mail carrier is only working 3 days a week, but has double the amount of mail to deliver. So in the interim you have to hire another set of workers to carry the additional load, or get the current workers to work twice as hard.
Its an interesting problem from a logistics standpoint. There are two separate factors that affect required staffing. The first is mail volume. (Packages letters, etc...) The second is delivery locations. Almost every delivery address gets at least one piece of mail per day, but the total volume is dropping. That means that each mail carrier is still doing all of the things that take them the longest: Walking or driving from stop to stop. If you doubled the packages for each delivery point, it would still take them about the same amount of time, because the handling of the parcels is almost completely insignificant compared to the time it takes to travel from stop to stop. So if you only delivered every other day, you cut the number of stops in half (cutting the time required in half), but the income from postage remains the same (cost per piece). Its sort of the reverse of economy of scale. The problem is that this is likely to help cause the further collapse of mail volume and shunt a large portion of their package volume to other carriers who provide a shorter end to end delivery window.
At the end of the day, I think the post office' problems are likely insurmountable, both logistically and politically. The best bet for the economy is to make sure that the pensions are fully funded so that the workers don't get screwed any worse than they already are, and start planning the quickest viable offloading of the entire postal volume to private carriers. Then liquidate. Either that or congress needs to completely deregulate the USPS and relinquish all connections/control, and let the post office try to swim without being strapped to a concrete donkey.
-=Geoskd
While they weren't able to make rain fall they did make 34 pigeons, 12 sparrows, 334 bees and 1 hanglider fall from the sky...
I've said it before and I'll say it again...
Stop trying to solve engineering problems with frickin' laser beams.
-=Geoskd
Facebook must go away. -Online anonymous
The failure of the US government to act on behalf of the interests of the greater good of its citizens lies with said citizens.
When Democracy came to the north American continent, it was better than the alternative. It took 200 years, but the bad elements have figured out how to completely game the system. The fault lies with the system, not its constituents. When democracy requires the active involvement of a majority of its citizens to function properly, then it is a failure. Government is supposed to keep bad people off the backs of common people. If people have to work to keep government *and* bad people off their own backs, then what the hell do they need government for?
-=Geoskd
Here is the business plan of these newspapers:
1) Sue Google 2) Win , but be delisted 3) Wait for Bing to pay a license fee for their content 4) Profit !
Bing will easily attract the million of viewers that Google was providing.
More likely, Bing will go the way of most of Microsofts "also-ran" products (Silverlight, Bob, Zune, etc). 5 years from now Bing will likely be dropped for failing to achieve its business goals, and be quietly discontinued.
-=Geoskd
The problem is government .
There, Fixed that for you.
-=Geoskd
Emotional-driven generalization != truth.
Our legal system is directly influenced by the politics of our day, and as anyone in politics will tell you, perception is reality. The image our courts have of not being able to provide an unbiased decision, is a direct result of and reflection of the failings of our legal system. Judges have routinely failed to recuse themselves when they should on the grounds that they do not understand the underlying principles, nor the ramifications of their decisions. A judge taking the time to learn about the things they are being asked to decide is far less common than the alternative.
Our legal system needs an overhaul badly, and all parts of the intellectual property laws need to be removed, and subsequently / expressly forbidden by amendment to the constitution. Nothing less than that will restore the faith of the citizens that the government works for them, not for big business.
-=Geoskd
When you walk away from a job there is nothing more satisfying than letting it fall to shit after you go. Doing something on the way out or after you leave just proves you didn't have any positive effect on the business.
That is only from a "man in the trenches" perspective. A better measure of a manager, is how well the place runs when they are away for vacations, and right after they leave / get transferred or promoted. A good manager will setup their operation to run well especially when they are not there. A poor manager micromanages, and everything turns to s#!t when they are not there because no one will make a decision without the boss.
-=Geoskd