Not everyone with a need for programming has a CS background and enough experience to be aware of all the potential problems. You'd hope that someone working on a missile system would have though.
I would like to think that it would be a requirement... Furthermore, this would have been easily identified by a proper third party quality assurance program, but it would seem that lining Raytheons pockets was the most important goal of the Patriot system, not actually intercepting enemy rockets.
In this case, I think that the compensations system for Raytheon was at fault. The contract should have included Raytheon only getting paid for those missiles that successfully hit their target. You would then find the contract bid process to be very telling indeed.
Read the press release. Nokia has spent 40 billion euros in R&D over the last two decades. Wireless communication is probably not quite as simple as one click shopping.
One has to ask, what part of that 40B was related to the wireless technology, and what part isn't? I'm going to bet that developing the wireless functionality was a vanishingly small part oft he whole, and that a far larger chunk of money went to developing the phones OS, than to developing the wireless chips, (which by the way, is mostly a function of compute power these days. The amount of bandwidth is directly related to how fast you can get the statistical analysis done. Otherwise, its mostly just little tricks to speed up the process a bit.) More of the R&D money related to the wireless communications has gone into integrating it directly into the phones existing chips to keep the package small than has gone into actual research on the wireless part.
Was everything that happened in your life your decision?
No, but my reaction to those events were all 100% within my control.
A child has no self control, but learns that it cannot have whatever it wants, whenever it wants, and so develops self control. Even an adult can develop self control. There is no reason that each adult shouldn't be 100% responsible for their own actions. Any base emotion can be controlled by rational thought. Anything less is a cop-out by the individual involved. Anyone who wants to take the emotionally easy road and do whatever they want, whenever they want has failed understand there are consequences, in part because society has failed to reinforce those consequences...
Except that's not what's happening. Instead of competing, everyone's saying "we'll charge the same rate per message" while that same rate is still insanely high.
The problem comes down to the fact that *all* carriers instill a contract which requires that users stick with them for a specified period. This enables them to do all kinds of shoddy things with pricing because the typical phone dies *before* the contract is up meaning that consumers have to renew their contract in order to get the replacement phone at a reasonable cost.
And, yes, various regulatory bodies have noted that behavior as well...
It's more complicated than that. If housing prices are not rising, neither are rents. Work the scenario at the height of the bubble, the owner will face falling value, but the renter will face failing rents. (Although he may have to move to take advantage of them)
I'm not sure where you live, but I have owned rental property in three cities in two states, and lived in apartments in a third state, and I have never seen any situation where the rents go down. Not even the current situation is causing rents to drop, quite the contrary. An increase in demand has allowed me to increase rents on all of my units significantly above the usual 2-4%. The rents may stay stable for a while, but again, you have to take the long view, any one decade or other is irrelevant, only the 30+ year time-span is important when calculating the value of renting vs owning.
Renting is not more expensive than owning property. It's fairly borderline, depending on what you do with the money you save through renting. There are plenty of other ways to build equity.
Renting is absolutely more expensive than owning, by a *very* significant margin. When people figure the cost to own vs. cost to rent, the costs are almost always figured in the present tense, but you need to consider the cost over the lifetime of the occupant. If you are looking at a house that costs $150,000, and you can get 8.0% (not great, but not horrible for someone on the low end of the credit spectrum), then you will pay about $1000 / month in rent, plus about $290 / month in taxes. A fair observation is that the property will also cost you an additional $290 in maintenance and insurance, so your total monthly cost is $1580. Now, say you can rent the same property for $1100 / month today, saving you $480 / month.
Sounds like renting saves a bunch of money doesn't it... Now stop and figure in the rest of the equation. That mortgage will cost you that same $1000 for thirty years, so you paid $360,000 plus about $105,000 in taxes, and $105,000 in maintenance, for a total of $570,000: bottom line, you have $150,000 in equity (assuming no growth in the homes value, which is ridiculous over that kind of time scale) for a total cost of $420,000. Divide that by 360 months, and you have $1166 / month (about the same as you were paying in rent to begin with).
Now, the magic part comes when you remember that you will *not* be paying $1100 per month for the rest of your life, every year, the rent will increase by roughly 3%, so in thirty years, your rent will be $2670 / month. If you calculate the total cost of the rent over 30 years, it then comes to $678,000, which is much higher than the $420,000 you paid to own the same home above. This is the fundamental reason why investors are willing to buy a property even knowing that the rent is 30% or more below what their monthly costs are at the start. Even if the property never gains any value at all, the investment still makes money, and the increase in property value just sweetens the deal. Plus after thirty years, their monthly payments drop by 60%, but the rental income stays the same; making rental property ideal as a nest egg for retirement: It starts paying off big time right about when you're ready to retire. The trick is surviving the first years while the investment is still cash flow negative.
This basic investment strategy, and the lending practices that enabled it, caused our current woes. Most of these investors were affluent people with big paychecks, leveraged to the hilt, so when things turned a little ugly, it took them down whole. Add on top of that, the speculators buying and selling houses based purely on the expectation of rising home prices, and the whole thing looks like what it was: a big bad idea. A bunch of investors who just wanted their money to earn money and didn't feel that they had any responsibility to have to work for their earnings, coupled with a bunch of over ambitious "entrepreneurs", who saw the long term potential of investment property, and over estimated their short term ability to take a loss, and down it goes. I own rental property. I started five years ago, but I took a slightly different approach. I only bought the properties I knew I could get a positive return on investment on right from day one. It doesn't need to be much, in fact, I can live with break even for a long time to come, but i was *very* careful. I turned my nose up at plenty of deals that would have paid of big time in the long run because of the sure knowledge that a turn for the worse would bring me down just like the rest. The funny thing is that most of us in the business saw trouble coming early, and scrambled to make ourselves healthy, which had the perverse affect of adding fuel to the fire. (I myself cleared two of my riskiest buildings right at the height of it, and clearly remember my mortgage agent thi
This makes no sense. Even the deduction makes no sense, in context. TSK TSK those idiots who invented the mouse were engaging in risky behavior?! Let's demonstrate insight by mentioning an economic trend that has nothing to do with technical innovation? Why would radical experiments be conducted by redundant entities? I am scared to download the PDF, for fear it's got more insight that will frustrate and elicit vitriol from me.
Actually, If you had read the document, they do, in fact, spend a little time elaborating on the non-redundancy of current "cloud computing". The entire point of the document was that "cloud computing", as defined these days, solves a problem that has already been solved in a comparable fashion, with all of the critical details being the same except one: Who owns the infrastructure.
Their concept of cloud computing, while compelling, is ultimately unworkable, due to nothing more complicated than market forces. If there is no money to be made in it, no corporate entity will become associated with it.
I think we call can agree that current copyright is unreasonable and undemocratic (since it was bought for by the music/movie industry). But Manjoo's reasoning doesn't make a ton of sense either
Actually, I would say the GP has a valid point. The copyright holder should have some control over the distribution and profits involved with their work-product, but they have no right to control what one individual does with their legally purchased copy, so long as it does not involve anything that would deprive the copyright holder of their right to make profits from sales to others.
The basic problem is this. Copyright was meant to protect authors, and give them incentive to release their works to society, thereby benefiting society. The only reason to do this is to increase the overall benefit to society, *not* to improve the profitability of anyone or their assigns. That means that when copyright law is used to prevent society from benefiting from any given set of works, that copyright law is a failure and needs to be amended to correct the problem.
as an example, if someone makes copies of a product and offers it for sale, but gives the same amount of money for each copy sold, to the copyright holders, as they would have made from their own sale, then the copyright holders rights have been upheld in the spirit of the law, if not in the actual fact of the law.
That having been said, it is in societies best interests to have work product offered in whatever format the public wishes to have it in, such that they can use that work product for whatever personal uses they have dreamed up. Anything else is a violation of the original intent of copyright law, and should be treated as such. Come to think of it, the DMCA is in fact a violation of the original intent of copyright law. Most people know intrinsically that the DMCA was a failing of our legal system, but very few people have been able to put that reason into words.
what's the point of going through years of education, if not to use it?
The whole point of the exercise was to have as much fun as possible before entering the "real world". I enjoyed college to the utmost and managed to make it last almost 7 years before accidentally graduating. The point of college was not to get an education; I could do that by simply buying $500 in text books and becoming proficient with google. The point was to gain credentials and have as much fun doing it as possible. That is the secret that no one shared with you in advance.
Even in death, their prices are high and their service lousy. Why is their death sad?
Because: Once upon a time, they had decent service, and their prices were significantly better than Best Buy et al. Over the last few years, however, they managed to fail at pretty much everything, jack up their prices, and give up all semblance of their once exceptional service record.
Speak for yourself. There's no factual evidence that viewing sexually explicit material is harmful to anyone under any particular age. Calling it "inappropriate" is a matter of opinion, no different from calling political or religious material "inappropriate".
Allowing anyone to view sexually explicit material anytime they wish is quite harmful to the various Catholic denominations, as it undermines their "god-given" authority. They have a vested interest in preventing it, since the bible says so. If they allow it to go unchallenged then they are hypocrites. For that reason, there is a strong religious need to prevent others from doing the things they themselves are prohibited from doing in order to justify their own faith.
People don't have an inability to govern themselves, they have a fundamental inability to refrain from governing others.
The lack of a market for doodads away from major cities has nothing to do with the per-capita income, is has to do with the volumetric density of people. There simply are not enough people per square mile for anyone except the census takers to really care a huge amount about. That's why broadband is hard to come by away from the cities. Those that care move closer to a city. Those that don't live without. By and large its a decent system...
I think a lot of people here don't quite understand that once you get out of the city, there is no 3G data plans, there is no radio to speak of, and when you can get some reception, the AM/FM dial only has local sports & information on it.
You forgot one important thing that is conspicuously missing away form the cities as well... a market for expensive gadgetry.
(assuming im paying lots of money for an iphone (i wouldnt i have a blackberry bold) and i have a 1 gig limit on it per month.)
All nested comments aside, maybe you should consider and iPhone. I am well beyond this mythical 1GB / month limit of which you speak, and I have not had a problem with discontinuation of service... Perhaps you chose the wrong service plan?
i leave the car to go shopping and my wife is in the car still, what will she listen to...no thanks, stupid idea.
I'm assuming that if your wife is staying in the car, that you probably aren't going to spend an hour and a half shopping. I'm going to suggest that unless you need you phone (maybe it has the list of items you wish to get), you could probably live without your phone for the ten minutes you were inside. I would also submit the question: does you wife have a phone? if yes, then is it a smart phone as well? if no, why not? valentines day was yesterday. I got my wife an iPhone, what did you get for your wife?
is the internet going to pay the overhead cost of obtaining people such as Howard Stern, Oprah, the NFL, and MLB? I mean
Apperently you haven't seen any of the pay-for-content sites on the internet. I know your experiences as a slashdotter are quite limited, but surely you have come across one of those porn sites you have to give up a credit card number to get into... Same concept applies here. The internet is Free as in freedom, not Free as in beer, and it has always been that way.
Satellite radio has its own problems but the iPhone isn't one of them.
I don't think you fully understand the importance of the iPhone. The point isn't that everyone owns an iPhone, and they will simply start using it to get internet radio, the point is that the next generation of "normal people" phones (the generic ones that people with little money get) will be of the iPhone caliber, because no one wants the crappy half jobs anymore. More importantly, these devices are rapidly going to become the main connection method to the internet for most entertainment needs. Who wants to have to lug around a specialized piece of hardware for every single application. What people really want (and apple discovered they will pay a very high price for) are single devices that do it all. If I have to carry a cell phone anyway, it is damn convenient when it is also a music device that I can integrate into whatever stereo I happen to be near. Its also pretty nice when it is a PDA I can use to keep notes and reminders, and oh yeah, I really like the fact that it is also a GPS unit, and I can use it to look up information when i am no where near a "computer". The fact is that the future of stand-alone dedicated hardware is going away, and except for a few niches (dedicated game consoles, and PCs to name a few, although I'm not sure about the latter), all of that functionality will be absorbed by your cell phone. Since I got an iPhone, I use my PC about half as much as I used to, and I haven't listened to any kind of broadcast music at all. I get it all through my phone, and that phenomenon is going to get more common, not less.
It's even easier than that. All you really have to do is convince your employees that their suggestion might actually get used, and most of them would be perfectly happy to make suggestions just for the bragging rights of being able to say "that was my idea". any kind of public recognition is a bonus, monetary compensation would be top notch, but is by no means necessary.
The company I work for, by contrast, makes it quite plain that our ideas are not only unwanted but that we should stop trying to waste their time with our ramblings. So be it.
-=Geoskd
Re:Why people watch movies..
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Sure, if they needed to make that point though, they could have done it in so many better ways than trying to invent some impossible tech that's so ridiculous that even complete tech morons groaned at it.
Call me odd, but I'm not sure it really was all that ridiculous. Sonar works by sending and receiving high frequency pulses using relatively few transducers. The magic is in the processing power you throw at it to figure out what the sensors "saw". Radar is the same thing only with EM radiation instead of sound. Using cell phones is actually a neat idea. The hardware is all there, all you really need is three additional things: First, you need the local software on each of the phones (Not likely, but if you have a billion dollar R+D budget...), second, you need the coordinating software to compile all of those signals together and figure out the big picture. Last, you need a mainframe back end that can handle that level of computation. All of the parts are technically possible, although probably not to the high resolution they portrayed in the movie. There wasn't anything in this gimmick that was beyond current engineering techniques, as long as you had the budget and the access to the cell phone networks. Response time would be my big concern, but who knows what kind of local processing power is available at the cell tower location. If you had enough compute power at the tower, you could pull off some pretty impressive response times. Especially when you consider that for the high resolution stuff, he would only have needed local signals, not the whole city worth of data.
-=Geoskd
Re:Why people watch movies..
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Yea! I agree that they were trying to make a political statement here - which is completely out of context of the movie.
Did you watch the same Batman movie I did? Much of the premise of the last two movies was the idea that Bruce Wayne felt compelled to do "right" by the citizens of Gotham, and as such the cell phone thing, although very contrived and forced, was actually an integral part of the growth of the main character. I have to agree with the GP, they could have done a much better job of implementing this character development without destroying their credibility, but the ethical issues are very much central to the Batman character and thus to the movie as a whole. The question has always been: What is acceptable for Batman to do that Bruce Wayne can't, and what is not acceptable for either of them to do?
-=Geoskd
Re:Why people watch movies..
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It all boils down to what an average sitcom/movie viewer wants - and after a hard day at work, asking for him/her to digest a picture of how things really are results in the viewer changing the channel in search of some mind numbing soothing action. We do not want truth, we want fantasy and escapism, which explains why we want to see technology on screen as IP adresses taking half the monitors space, and every action a character takes on the computer give off some cool sound effect. The true picture is true picture, but this is not what people want on average.
I disagree. Simply take "Law and Order". They have survived many seasons by using the same tried and true format. The basic idea is to put out a basic plot and vary the details. They *generally* don't push into any areas that require suspension of disbelief, and the stories are interesting and well thought out. Many of the early episodes were based on actual trials (Hence the disclaimer at the beginning that the stories are *not* based on actual events)
-=Geoskd
Re:Why people watch movies..
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I don't really care about tech errors. The Hollywood 'nerd' character annoys me much more.
I can't agree more. Hollywood has little or no clue as to what reality looks like. Most programmers and engineers I know are differentiated from your typical grocery store clerk only by clothing and, possibly, number of teeth remaining.
My first experience in programming was from my neighbor. He taught me C. He was basically a biker and spent his spare time either beating the crap out of bar patrons or being beaten up (although not as frequently). Last I saw him, he was arrested and extradited to NYC where he was arraigned on weapons charges. The point is that Hollywood has no idea how a real "geek" looks or acts, and as long as your typical viewer is willing to overlook plot holes and bad acting, the producers have no incentive to fix the problem. Vote with your money, or give it up.
For lighter reading from an author who has a clear grasp of technical reality, I would recommend James P Hogan. Many of his early works are a little short on actual character depth, but his more recent works are quite excellent in all respects. For those hard core Sci-Fi fans, I would strongly recommend the Giants series, and anyone, who likes a good overall read, should try "The Two Faces of Tomorrow".
Finally somewhere in your post you mentioned that your current organization is not the best fit for you. Are you sure you want to get a part-time gig? It sounds like you are bored and you'd like a new job. Why not get a new position that pays more? I know that we are in a recession but if you're any good I am sure there will be a job opening.
Have you been living on another planet? The economy didn't just go into a recession, it tanked... The only jobs posted anywhere are the type of posting you see when a company needs to justify the H1B they have on staff. They aren't really looking, but have to post the job to keep their cheap employee... Otherwise, it's basically NULL program right now. If you don't like your job, and want something else, then you are going to take a significant pay cut to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
Not everyone with a need for programming has a CS background and enough experience to be aware of all the potential problems. You'd hope that someone working on a missile system would have though.
I would like to think that it would be a requirement... Furthermore, this would have been easily identified by a proper third party quality assurance program, but it would seem that lining Raytheons pockets was the most important goal of the Patriot system, not actually intercepting enemy rockets.
In this case, I think that the compensations system for Raytheon was at fault. The contract should have included Raytheon only getting paid for those missiles that successfully hit their target. You would then find the contract bid process to be very telling indeed.
-=Geoskd
Read the press release. Nokia has spent 40 billion euros in R&D over the last two decades. Wireless communication is probably not quite as simple as one click shopping.
One has to ask, what part of that 40B was related to the wireless technology, and what part isn't? I'm going to bet that developing the wireless functionality was a vanishingly small part oft he whole, and that a far larger chunk of money went to developing the phones OS, than to developing the wireless chips, (which by the way, is mostly a function of compute power these days. The amount of bandwidth is directly related to how fast you can get the statistical analysis done. Otherwise, its mostly just little tricks to speed up the process a bit.) More of the R&D money related to the wireless communications has gone into integrating it directly into the phones existing chips to keep the package small than has gone into actual research on the wireless part.
-=Geoskd
Was everything that happened in your life your decision?
No, but my reaction to those events were all 100% within my control.
A child has no self control, but learns that it cannot have whatever it wants, whenever it wants, and so develops self control. Even an adult can develop self control. There is no reason that each adult shouldn't be 100% responsible for their own actions. Any base emotion can be controlled by rational thought. Anything less is a cop-out by the individual involved. Anyone who wants to take the emotionally easy road and do whatever they want, whenever they want has failed understand there are consequences, in part because society has failed to reinforce those consequences...
-=Geoskd
Except that's not what's happening. Instead of competing, everyone's saying "we'll charge the same rate per message" while that same rate is still insanely high.
The problem comes down to the fact that *all* carriers instill a contract which requires that users stick with them for a specified period. This enables them to do all kinds of shoddy things with pricing because the typical phone dies *before* the contract is up meaning that consumers have to renew their contract in order to get the replacement phone at a reasonable cost.
And, yes, various regulatory bodies have noted that behavior as well...
-=Geoskd
Who ever stole it reformatted and is using it for bit torrent porn downloads now.
And in an odd quirk of fate, filling it back up with the original contents...
It's more complicated than that. If housing prices are not rising, neither are rents. Work the scenario at the height of the bubble, the owner will face falling value, but the renter will face failing rents. (Although he may have to move to take advantage of them)
I'm not sure where you live, but I have owned rental property in three cities in two states, and lived in apartments in a third state, and I have never seen any situation where the rents go down. Not even the current situation is causing rents to drop, quite the contrary. An increase in demand has allowed me to increase rents on all of my units significantly above the usual 2-4%. The rents may stay stable for a while, but again, you have to take the long view, any one decade or other is irrelevant, only the 30+ year time-span is important when calculating the value of renting vs owning.
-=Geoskd
Renting is not more expensive than owning property. It's fairly borderline, depending on what you do with the money you save through renting. There are plenty of other ways to build equity.
Renting is absolutely more expensive than owning, by a *very* significant margin. When people figure the cost to own vs. cost to rent, the costs are almost always figured in the present tense, but you need to consider the cost over the lifetime of the occupant. If you are looking at a house that costs $150,000, and you can get 8.0% (not great, but not horrible for someone on the low end of the credit spectrum), then you will pay about $1000 / month in rent, plus about $290 / month in taxes. A fair observation is that the property will also cost you an additional $290 in maintenance and insurance, so your total monthly cost is $1580. Now, say you can rent the same property for $1100 / month today, saving you $480 / month.
Sounds like renting saves a bunch of money doesn't it... Now stop and figure in the rest of the equation. That mortgage will cost you that same $1000 for thirty years, so you paid $360,000 plus about $105,000 in taxes, and $105,000 in maintenance, for a total of $570,000: bottom line, you have $150,000 in equity (assuming no growth in the homes value, which is ridiculous over that kind of time scale) for a total cost of $420,000. Divide that by 360 months, and you have $1166 / month (about the same as you were paying in rent to begin with).
Now, the magic part comes when you remember that you will *not* be paying $1100 per month for the rest of your life, every year, the rent will increase by roughly 3%, so in thirty years, your rent will be $2670 / month. If you calculate the total cost of the rent over 30 years, it then comes to $678,000, which is much higher than the $420,000 you paid to own the same home above. This is the fundamental reason why investors are willing to buy a property even knowing that the rent is 30% or more below what their monthly costs are at the start. Even if the property never gains any value at all, the investment still makes money, and the increase in property value just sweetens the deal. Plus after thirty years, their monthly payments drop by 60%, but the rental income stays the same; making rental property ideal as a nest egg for retirement: It starts paying off big time right about when you're ready to retire. The trick is surviving the first years while the investment is still cash flow negative.
This basic investment strategy, and the lending practices that enabled it, caused our current woes. Most of these investors were affluent people with big paychecks, leveraged to the hilt, so when things turned a little ugly, it took them down whole. Add on top of that, the speculators buying and selling houses based purely on the expectation of rising home prices, and the whole thing looks like what it was: a big bad idea. A bunch of investors who just wanted their money to earn money and didn't feel that they had any responsibility to have to work for their earnings, coupled with a bunch of over ambitious "entrepreneurs", who saw the long term potential of investment property, and over estimated their short term ability to take a loss, and down it goes. I own rental property. I started five years ago, but I took a slightly different approach. I only bought the properties I knew I could get a positive return on investment on right from day one. It doesn't need to be much, in fact, I can live with break even for a long time to come, but i was *very* careful. I turned my nose up at plenty of deals that would have paid of big time in the long run because of the sure knowledge that a turn for the worse would bring me down just like the rest. The funny thing is that most of us in the business saw trouble coming early, and scrambled to make ourselves healthy, which had the perverse affect of adding fuel to the fire. (I myself cleared two of my riskiest buildings right at the height of it, and clearly remember my mortgage agent thi
This makes no sense. Even the deduction makes no sense, in context. TSK TSK those idiots who invented the mouse were engaging in risky behavior?! Let's demonstrate insight by mentioning an economic trend that has nothing to do with technical innovation? Why would radical experiments be conducted by redundant entities? I am scared to download the PDF, for fear it's got more insight that will frustrate and elicit vitriol from me.
Actually, If you had read the document, they do, in fact, spend a little time elaborating on the non-redundancy of current "cloud computing". The entire point of the document was that "cloud computing", as defined these days, solves a problem that has already been solved in a comparable fashion, with all of the critical details being the same except one: Who owns the infrastructure.
Their concept of cloud computing, while compelling, is ultimately unworkable, due to nothing more complicated than market forces. If there is no money to be made in it, no corporate entity will become associated with it.
-=Geoskd
I think we call can agree that current copyright is unreasonable and undemocratic (since it was bought for by the music/movie industry). But Manjoo's reasoning doesn't make a ton of sense either
Actually, I would say the GP has a valid point. The copyright holder should have some control over the distribution and profits involved with their work-product, but they have no right to control what one individual does with their legally purchased copy, so long as it does not involve anything that would deprive the copyright holder of their right to make profits from sales to others.
The basic problem is this. Copyright was meant to protect authors, and give them incentive to release their works to society, thereby benefiting society. The only reason to do this is to increase the overall benefit to society, *not* to improve the profitability of anyone or their assigns. That means that when copyright law is used to prevent society from benefiting from any given set of works, that copyright law is a failure and needs to be amended to correct the problem.
as an example, if someone makes copies of a product and offers it for sale, but gives the same amount of money for each copy sold, to the copyright holders, as they would have made from their own sale, then the copyright holders rights have been upheld in the spirit of the law, if not in the actual fact of the law.
That having been said, it is in societies best interests to have work product offered in whatever format the public wishes to have it in, such that they can use that work product for whatever personal uses they have dreamed up. Anything else is a violation of the original intent of copyright law, and should be treated as such. Come to think of it, the DMCA is in fact a violation of the original intent of copyright law. Most people know intrinsically that the DMCA was a failing of our legal system, but very few people have been able to put that reason into words.
-=Geoskd
what's the point of going through years of education, if not to use it?
The whole point of the exercise was to have as much fun as possible before entering the "real world". I enjoyed college to the utmost and managed to make it last almost 7 years before accidentally graduating. The point of college was not to get an education; I could do that by simply buying $500 in text books and becoming proficient with google. The point was to gain credentials and have as much fun doing it as possible. That is the secret that no one shared with you in advance.
-=Geoskd
Clearly, you jest. You really expect us to believe you are married and you read slashdot?
AND his wife is an engineer?
FRAUD.
No, No, I saw this once before: Back in the eighties when the internets were only available in hardcover.
-=Geoskd
Even in death, their prices are high and their service lousy. Why is their death sad?
Because: Once upon a time, they had decent service, and their prices were significantly better than Best Buy et al. Over the last few years, however, they managed to fail at pretty much everything, jack up their prices, and give up all semblance of their once exceptional service record.
-=Geoskd
Speak for yourself. There's no factual evidence that viewing sexually explicit material is harmful to anyone under any particular age. Calling it "inappropriate" is a matter of opinion, no different from calling political or religious material "inappropriate".
Allowing anyone to view sexually explicit material anytime they wish is quite harmful to the various Catholic denominations, as it undermines their "god-given" authority. They have a vested interest in preventing it, since the bible says so. If they allow it to go unchallenged then they are hypocrites. For that reason, there is a strong religious need to prevent others from doing the things they themselves are prohibited from doing in order to justify their own faith.
People don't have an inability to govern themselves, they have a fundamental inability to refrain from governing others.
-=Geoskd
The lack of a market for doodads away from major cities has nothing to do with the per-capita income, is has to do with the volumetric density of people. There simply are not enough people per square mile for anyone except the census takers to really care a huge amount about. That's why broadband is hard to come by away from the cities. Those that care move closer to a city. Those that don't live without. By and large its a decent system...
-=Geoskd
I think a lot of people here don't quite understand that once you get out of the city, there is no 3G data plans, there is no radio to speak of, and when you can get some reception, the AM/FM dial only has local sports & information on it.
You forgot one important thing that is conspicuously missing away form the cities as well... a market for expensive gadgetry.
-=Geoskd
(assuming im paying lots of money for an iphone (i wouldnt i have a blackberry bold) and i have a 1 gig limit on it per month.)
All nested comments aside, maybe you should consider and iPhone. I am well beyond this mythical 1GB / month limit of which you speak, and I have not had a problem with discontinuation of service... Perhaps you chose the wrong service plan?
i leave the car to go shopping and my wife is in the car still, what will she listen to...no thanks, stupid idea.
I'm assuming that if your wife is staying in the car, that you probably aren't going to spend an hour and a half shopping. I'm going to suggest that unless you need you phone (maybe it has the list of items you wish to get), you could probably live without your phone for the ten minutes you were inside. I would also submit the question: does you wife have a phone? if yes, then is it a smart phone as well? if no, why not? valentines day was yesterday. I got my wife an iPhone, what did you get for your wife?
-=Geoskd
is the internet going to pay the overhead cost of obtaining people such as Howard Stern, Oprah, the NFL, and MLB? I mean
Apperently you haven't seen any of the pay-for-content sites on the internet. I know your experiences as a slashdotter are quite limited, but surely you have come across one of those porn sites you have to give up a credit card number to get into... Same concept applies here. The internet is Free as in freedom, not Free as in beer, and it has always been that way.
-=Geoskd
Satellite radio has its own problems but the iPhone isn't one of them.
I don't think you fully understand the importance of the iPhone. The point isn't that everyone owns an iPhone, and they will simply start using it to get internet radio, the point is that the next generation of "normal people" phones (the generic ones that people with little money get) will be of the iPhone caliber, because no one wants the crappy half jobs anymore. More importantly, these devices are rapidly going to become the main connection method to the internet for most entertainment needs. Who wants to have to lug around a specialized piece of hardware for every single application. What people really want (and apple discovered they will pay a very high price for) are single devices that do it all. If I have to carry a cell phone anyway, it is damn convenient when it is also a music device that I can integrate into whatever stereo I happen to be near. Its also pretty nice when it is a PDA I can use to keep notes and reminders, and oh yeah, I really like the fact that it is also a GPS unit, and I can use it to look up information when i am no where near a "computer". The fact is that the future of stand-alone dedicated hardware is going away, and except for a few niches (dedicated game consoles, and PCs to name a few, although I'm not sure about the latter), all of that functionality will be absorbed by your cell phone. Since I got an iPhone, I use my PC about half as much as I used to, and I haven't listened to any kind of broadcast music at all. I get it all through my phone, and that phenomenon is going to get more common, not less.
-=Geoskd
That was easy.
It's even easier than that. All you really have to do is convince your employees that their suggestion might actually get used, and most of them would be perfectly happy to make suggestions just for the bragging rights of being able to say "that was my idea". any kind of public recognition is a bonus, monetary compensation would be top notch, but is by no means necessary.
The company I work for, by contrast, makes it quite plain that our ideas are not only unwanted but that we should stop trying to waste their time with our ramblings. So be it.
-=Geoskd
Sure, if they needed to make that point though, they could have done it in so many better ways than trying to invent some impossible tech that's so ridiculous that even complete tech morons groaned at it.
Call me odd, but I'm not sure it really was all that ridiculous. Sonar works by sending and receiving high frequency pulses using relatively few transducers. The magic is in the processing power you throw at it to figure out what the sensors "saw". Radar is the same thing only with EM radiation instead of sound. Using cell phones is actually a neat idea. The hardware is all there, all you really need is three additional things: First, you need the local software on each of the phones (Not likely, but if you have a billion dollar R+D budget...), second, you need the coordinating software to compile all of those signals together and figure out the big picture. Last, you need a mainframe back end that can handle that level of computation. All of the parts are technically possible, although probably not to the high resolution they portrayed in the movie. There wasn't anything in this gimmick that was beyond current engineering techniques, as long as you had the budget and the access to the cell phone networks. Response time would be my big concern, but who knows what kind of local processing power is available at the cell tower location. If you had enough compute power at the tower, you could pull off some pretty impressive response times. Especially when you consider that for the high resolution stuff, he would only have needed local signals, not the whole city worth of data.
-=Geoskd
Yea! I agree that they were trying to make a political statement here - which is completely out of context of the movie.
Did you watch the same Batman movie I did? Much of the premise of the last two movies was the idea that Bruce Wayne felt compelled to do "right" by the citizens of Gotham, and as such the cell phone thing, although very contrived and forced, was actually an integral part of the growth of the main character. I have to agree with the GP, they could have done a much better job of implementing this character development without destroying their credibility, but the ethical issues are very much central to the Batman character and thus to the movie as a whole. The question has always been: What is acceptable for Batman to do that Bruce Wayne can't, and what is not acceptable for either of them to do?
-=Geoskd
It all boils down to what an average sitcom/movie viewer wants - and after a hard day at work, asking for him/her to digest a picture of how things really are results in the viewer changing the channel in search of some mind numbing soothing action. We do not want truth, we want fantasy and escapism, which explains why we want to see technology on screen as IP adresses taking half the monitors space, and every action a character takes on the computer give off some cool sound effect. The true picture is true picture, but this is not what people want on average.
I disagree. Simply take "Law and Order". They have survived many seasons by using the same tried and true format. The basic idea is to put out a basic plot and vary the details. They *generally* don't push into any areas that require suspension of disbelief, and the stories are interesting and well thought out. Many of the early episodes were based on actual trials (Hence the disclaimer at the beginning that the stories are *not* based on actual events)
-=Geoskd
I don't really care about tech errors. The Hollywood 'nerd' character annoys me much more.
I can't agree more. Hollywood has little or no clue as to what reality looks like. Most programmers and engineers I know are differentiated from your typical grocery store clerk only by clothing and, possibly, number of teeth remaining.
My first experience in programming was from my neighbor. He taught me C. He was basically a biker and spent his spare time either beating the crap out of bar patrons or being beaten up (although not as frequently). Last I saw him, he was arrested and extradited to NYC where he was arraigned on weapons charges. The point is that Hollywood has no idea how a real "geek" looks or acts, and as long as your typical viewer is willing to overlook plot holes and bad acting, the producers have no incentive to fix the problem. Vote with your money, or give it up.
-=Geoskd
For lighter reading from an author who has a clear grasp of technical reality, I would recommend James P Hogan. Many of his early works are a little short on actual character depth, but his more recent works are quite excellent in all respects. For those hard core Sci-Fi fans, I would strongly recommend the Giants series, and anyone, who likes a good overall read, should try "The Two Faces of Tomorrow".
-=Geoskd
Finally somewhere in your post you mentioned that your current organization is not the best fit for you. Are you sure you want to get a part-time gig? It sounds like you are bored and you'd like a new job. Why not get a new position that pays more? I know that we are in a recession but if you're any good I am sure there will be a job opening.
Have you been living on another planet? The economy didn't just go into a recession, it tanked... The only jobs posted anywhere are the type of posting you see when a company needs to justify the H1B they have on staff. They aren't really looking, but have to post the job to keep their cheap employee... Otherwise, it's basically NULL program right now. If you don't like your job, and want something else, then you are going to take a significant pay cut to do it.
-=Geoskd