While I'm hardly a fan of the UN (outside of WHO, who are tremendous), let's not start blaming everyone for the sins of a few. It might not workoutwell for your arguments in the long run.
(And before the arguments over "librahal traitor" start, I'm ex-military.)
It's not at all uncommon for profs to write things like summer salary into grants. (Technically, they are 9-month employees) Of course, this assumes that you work at a school where people get a lot of high-dollar grants. Not too many people write them at my college: there's a small lunch every year for folks who do so I get a good feel for the percentages. (I usually write one a year or so even though I'm not faculty.) Probably only 20% of the faculty write them, and half of those are for trivial amounts.
Looking through a few names, it seems that the profs on the list are all doctors. I'm not surprised by this at all: doctors make a lot of money. Surgeons make more. Cardio-thoracic surgeons top the pay list, along with neurosurgeons. The top prof on that list, Mark David Iannettoni is the head of cardio-thoracic surgery at a major teaching hospital. The second prof is a neurosurgeon.
Looking up doctor pay scales, the pay for those two was only about 30-40% higher than the average for people in those specialities. Again, a quick scan shows a bunch of the people on that list make less than the average for their speciality- for example, Charles Clark pulls in $350k as a Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery- the average in his field is $381k, and I'll put money that he's far above average in talent.
Paid well? Yep. Overpaid? I'd argue not- don't you want the best possible doctors at teaching hospitals? Cut the pay to some level far below what you'll find in private practice and you'll lose the good people.
However, in any field that involves the discovery of new things/processes (biology, chemistry, physics), income from patents are going to match or exceed income for even the mediocre professors.
Again, not really true in more cases than you would think. I have a PhD in chemistry. My grad school advisor is one of the giants in his field. Brilliant dude, tons of awards, member of the National Academy of Sciences, etc. Full professor at Stanford. He should be making a mint, right?
Well, no. He's a theorist. To the best of my knowledge he doesn't hold a single patent: he certainly never applied for one in the 5 years I worked for him. Many professors tap grants, but theorists don't get big grants for the most part. He's certainly not hurting for cash but he's not exactly buying yachts either.
For folks in marketable fields, yes, you can get some patents. But many university scientists don't really work in areas like that. Most of my friends worked for a guy who did ultrafast laser spectroscopy. Another really really smart dude, but again, no patents that I know of. He didn't do any outside consulting or own a company either.
On the flip side, a few folks I knew worked for Dick Zare. Now Zare is the guy you're talking about. Or others who worked for Barry Trost. (Google the names if you're curious) Trost made a mint consulting for all the big drug companies: my Dad ended up working with him a few times while he was a Merck. Then again, only a few folks are good enough to get these kinds of gigs, and Trost is awesome.
If you really think the majority of professors make $200k, you're nuts. At the school where I work, incoming assistant profs make ~$40k, associate profs with tenure about $55k and the full professors clear about $90k. The president makes about $165k. This is for a liberal arts college, but even research one schools such as where I went to grad school the full profs get $120-130k. Not that many presidents clear a million, and these are folks who could get 10x that in the private sector. The profs at research 1 schools can supplement that with grant funding or consulting (if they are in some decent field like science, engineering or law), but that cash goes primarily to a few big names: most of the folks starting out are almost broke.
Don't even get me started on adjuncts: I'm a summer adjunct for the local community college teaching chemistry. I make $611/credit hour: the 4.5 credit hour chemistry course with lab will net me $2750 before tax, which works out to about $25/hour of my time. I only do it because I like to teach.
I've been playing demos for a bunch of MMORPGs lately for fun (My WoW trial supscription runs out tomorrow) One thing i've noticed is that in all of them rarely are the races really all that differentiated. Yeah, my Undead Warlock can hold his breath a long time, but it's just not that different from any other race. Yeah, your skillset might look different, but overall you basically have the same classes for each race/group. I think back to AvP, where playing an Alien and a Human are so different as to be totally seperate games.
Imagine yours
Ninjas: Totally skill based. No magic equipment- everything depends on reaction time and stealth
Zombies: Magic users. Spells, curses and cannibalism.
Robots: Crafting class. Build yourself
Pirates: Always win, since they can call on the FSM at any time. (Ok, maybe not)
You could have four totally different play experiences. Set up the quests so that some that are trivial for one group are impossible for others since the tactics simply don't transfer between them. Forget the fake "Alliance v. Horde" setup where you make the races fight: ninjas and robots simply can't team up since a stealthy assassin isn't going to be any more effective teamed with something out of an anime nightmare. It would be hell to balance, but could be done.
Frankly, after looking over a bunch of MMORPGs (WoW, CoV, Planetside, AO, EVE, Auto Assault) I'm not impressed. The only truly different one is EVE and I don't have the time to have a second career which seems to be about the only way to really get into that game.
So your camera takes 8 seconds to boot up... that would hardly make it the WORST tech of Q2 2006.
Actually, I would argue it does. 8 seconds is about 7.5 seconds too long. My two year old Minolta 4MP camera boots in well under 2 and it's hardly state of the art today. (Slide the shield open and by the time I can get the camera lined up it will shoot.)
I have two young kids- getting a decent photo really is a matter of seconds. An absurdly long bootup time indicates the people who designed the camera really don't use cameras much, or are simply shaving corners without considering the impact that piss-poor ergonomics makes in the experience of using the camera. Either way it screams bad tech.
Consider the huge number of fanfics, movies and other fan-made stuff for Star Wars. Lucas is completely ok with this-IIRC, he even judges fan film contests. The sticking point is trying to make money with it- you want to release a film for free download on the net, fine, but don't try to sell a DVD. So long as these guys keep it free, I suspect he won't care.
Sony's another story- I'm sure they have legions of lawyers just waiting to piss off more people.
I am trying to write a question that will get the maximum number of snarky replies. Taco didn't post my "Advice for converting a Ruby on Rails application to ASP.NET?" submission, so do you have another suggestion?
We've got the MPEG4 model for a vBrick. Rock solid, easily portable and fairly easy to setup with one huge caveat. There's a web based interface to control almost everything, or you can do it by remote control. You don't even really need that-once the IPs are set and box configured, all you have to do is plug in the cables and turn it on.
The big problem was getting systems on the other side of our firewall to see the stream properly. The best MPEG4 player is Quicktime, and it couldn't find the stream. Real Player could run with the QT plug in and find it, but that was clunky and forced people to actually use Real Player (spit)
The solution was to use Powerstream as a reflector. They are fairly cheap, and if you are broadcasting to a ton of people off site you want to do this anyway to save your bandwidth. All you do is download a config program, click some buttons and you get a URL that works in every browser I can find- IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc. Haven't tested Linux since I only use that on the server side.
If you're looking for a cheaper solution, try StarValley They sell some dirt cheap MPEG2 and 4 encoders and decoders. We have an MPEG2 encoder that's the size of a paperback book- the decoders are even smaller. We use it for a sign system around campus since running cable would have been really expensive. We do get occasional crashes with this (~1/week while running 24/7), but I'm not entirely sure it's Starvalley's fault- the signage system has been a real nightmare. I've got an auto-reboot script to reset it if it dies- a reboot takes about ten seconds, so it's not a big deal.
Well, that depends. Tenure track slots, certainly, you get dozens to hundreds of applicants for every one. But for adjunct positions, especially at lower ranked schools/community colleges, especially in the sciences? Not so much.
I'm teaching general chemistry at the local CC this summer as a second job. They were desperate for someone, anyone to take the class- the pay is low enough and the class schedule brutal enough (6-10PM, four nights a week) that only idiots like me who like teaching would be willing to take it.
What is that? A crumpled piece of paper with an "X" in big black marker? "Well, we told him it was a drummer's license. He tried to eat it at first, but we stopped him."
Just as well: any line of work where you tend to die in bizarre gardening accidents isn't for me. Then again, I play the viola so what do I know? (More viola jokes than drummer jokes probably.)
Slashdot's mod system works well with trolls, but not with factual info. I can't count the number of posts I've seen marked +3 to +5 insightful with simply wrong information in them. I tend to notice these most often in science threads, especially global warming and evolution ones. Often, the worst offenders are folks trying to defend warming or evolution against the (badly informed) naysayers, but they simpy don't understand the topic well enough and thus end up claiming something that either isn't correct in the context or vastly overstates the confidence we have in a conclusion.
This is Wikipedia's biggest problem IMHO, far more so than the vandalization trolls. With the latter, you can fix it, but if an expert writes an article and then has it "corrected" by someone who understands the topic at a much lower level, how does this get fixed? Does the expert have to keep going through and removing "helpful" changes? How long will someone like this want to keep going before they just give up and go back to something more rewarding?
Under a/. type mod system for Wikipedia, dozens of idiot mods could effectively ban experts- the experts in a field are always outnumbered by the less well informed.
Methinks you missed the point of the series. The sole use of normal arrows is to make a "clank" noise that might distract a guard. (And if you're *really* playing, you won't even do that. Guards should never even be alerted- you're a master thief, not some cutpurse.) Kind of like the sole purpose of the sword is to cut tapestries to see what's behind them. Other than that the two serve no purpose.
I live in Goodlatte's district, it's firmly #1. Viginia is so gerrymandered that there is literally no reason for the opposing party to even bother to run in most districts, and they don't. You could run Jesus Christ against Goodlatte and Jesus would lose 80-20. The only choices I have on a ballot are for state-wide offices like governor- all the local offices are held by people who are so safe they don't even bother to campaign.
I'm in one of those non-competitive areas. It took me three years to get something better than dialup- we didn't even get cable *TV* for two years after I moved in. Verizon DSL finally showed up a year ago and I signed up quickly.
Shortly after signup (1.5M down/384K up) I started randomly getting awful transfer rates- it would drop to 64K down occasionally. Every day I'd come home from work, check the speed, and call tech service. I had them opening tickets every day for a week until I demanded to talk to someone who could actually fix the problem. After two escalations from there everything suddenly got better, and a year later I get a pretty stable connection at exactly what they promised.
Remember, every tech support call costs a fortune for them. Flood the company with complaints.
You can also try withholding payment if you think you can get away with it. (perhaps not on a non-SLA account) We're doing that at work right now with a particularly troublesome "turnkey server" which has been anything but. We got it six months ago and we still haven't paid- we've told both the reseller and the company that we are refusing to pay until the problems are resolved. If you are going this route, document *everything*- I've got 10+ pages of details of phone calls, patches applied, unfixed bugs, crash records, etc. I'm more than happy to detail these in public should the company decide to get nasty. (They aren't, and after a recent replacement of one of the pieces we've got almost three weeks up. They'll get their money end of next week if nothing else goes wrong.)
You're missing the point. This isn't an ISP thing, this is a backbone provider thing. (although this post is brought to you by Verizon DSL:^)
It doesn't make a bit of difference what ISP you use if the half-dozen big backbone folks all team up, and they will. You don't have any interaction with them and absolutely no pull- you can switch ISPs all you want and you'll still get metered internet where only the big sites get good service.
Are they counting singly, by decimal? In that case 49. They clearly aren't using octal since we're up to 7950, but if we allow hex you've got 73. Then again, hex might seem to conflict with the letters, so let's stick with decimal.
Assuming that we can have up to three letters after the name (more would be just silly, don't you think?), you'd get 26^3 more possibilities, so you have 17576 possibilities for each number. However, we have to allow for single and double letter combos, so you have an additional 26 + 26^2 or 26+676+17576 = 18278 combinations per number.
That makes it roughly 49*18278= 895622 possible combinations before 8000, assuming decimal numbers and no more than 3 letters. Given the current rate of video card development, I suspect that nVidia can't do more than one new model per hour, which I make out to be roughly 102 years before we get to the GeForce8000.
Personally, I'm waiting for the GeForce 7963 LLQ model. I hear it's really going to be awesome!
How about making a list of known bugs available to your customer prior to purchase?
You can get software that will do this, or at least you could a number of years ago. I used to admin a machine with a copy of the molecular mechanics program Sybil on it. Sybil shipped with full eratta- a list of every known bug in the program, how to trigger it, the effects and the status of fixing it. I think it was three volumes.
Sybil also cost something like $20k/year for our academic version IIRC. I think the commercial version was in the six figures per year per copy.
Slashdot Mirror
While I'm hardly a fan of the UN (outside of WHO, who are tremendous), let's not start blaming everyone for the sins of a few. It might not work out well for your arguments in the long run.
(And before the arguments over "librahal traitor" start, I'm ex-military.)
The advantages seem obvious to me
- Diesel engine runs at an efficient speed when needed
- You lose the transmission/drivetrain complexity
- You get gobs of low end torque
- 4 motors = AWD = you could do funky traction control stuff with four independant motors
- You get regenerative braking built in.
- We've got 50+ years of experience building them for very high demand applications. We know they can handle abuse.
So what gives? It seems so obvious I can't imagine why people haven't built them already unless there's a real catch.It's not at all uncommon for profs to write things like summer salary into grants. (Technically, they are 9-month employees) Of course, this assumes that you work at a school where people get a lot of high-dollar grants. Not too many people write them at my college: there's a small lunch every year for folks who do so I get a good feel for the percentages. (I usually write one a year or so even though I'm not faculty.) Probably only 20% of the faculty write them, and half of those are for trivial amounts.
Looking up doctor pay scales, the pay for those two was only about 30-40% higher than the average for people in those specialities. Again, a quick scan shows a bunch of the people on that list make less than the average for their speciality- for example, Charles Clark pulls in $350k as a Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery- the average in his field is $381k, and I'll put money that he's far above average in talent.
Paid well? Yep. Overpaid? I'd argue not- don't you want the best possible doctors at teaching hospitals? Cut the pay to some level far below what you'll find in private practice and you'll lose the good people.
Again, not really true in more cases than you would think. I have a PhD in chemistry. My grad school advisor is one of the giants in his field. Brilliant dude, tons of awards, member of the National Academy of Sciences, etc. Full professor at Stanford. He should be making a mint, right?
Well, no. He's a theorist. To the best of my knowledge he doesn't hold a single patent: he certainly never applied for one in the 5 years I worked for him. Many professors tap grants, but theorists don't get big grants for the most part. He's certainly not hurting for cash but he's not exactly buying yachts either.
For folks in marketable fields, yes, you can get some patents. But many university scientists don't really work in areas like that. Most of my friends worked for a guy who did ultrafast laser spectroscopy. Another really really smart dude, but again, no patents that I know of. He didn't do any outside consulting or own a company either.
On the flip side, a few folks I knew worked for Dick Zare. Now Zare is the guy you're talking about. Or others who worked for Barry Trost. (Google the names if you're curious) Trost made a mint consulting for all the big drug companies: my Dad ended up working with him a few times while he was a Merck. Then again, only a few folks are good enough to get these kinds of gigs, and Trost is awesome.
Don't even get me started on adjuncts: I'm a summer adjunct for the local community college teaching chemistry. I make $611/credit hour: the 4.5 credit hour chemistry course with lab will net me $2750 before tax, which works out to about $25/hour of my time. I only do it because I like to teach.
*Nobody* goes into academia for the money
Imagine yours
You could have four totally different play experiences. Set up the quests so that some that are trivial for one group are impossible for others since the tactics simply don't transfer between them. Forget the fake "Alliance v. Horde" setup where you make the races fight: ninjas and robots simply can't team up since a stealthy assassin isn't going to be any more effective teamed with something out of an anime nightmare. It would be hell to balance, but could be done.
Frankly, after looking over a bunch of MMORPGs (WoW, CoV, Planetside, AO, EVE, Auto Assault) I'm not impressed. The only truly different one is EVE and I don't have the time to have a second career which seems to be about the only way to really get into that game.
Actually, I would argue it does. 8 seconds is about 7.5 seconds too long. My two year old Minolta 4MP camera boots in well under 2 and it's hardly state of the art today. (Slide the shield open and by the time I can get the camera lined up it will shoot.)
I have two young kids- getting a decent photo really is a matter of seconds. An absurdly long bootup time indicates the people who designed the camera really don't use cameras much, or are simply shaving corners without considering the impact that piss-poor ergonomics makes in the experience of using the camera. Either way it screams bad tech.
Sony's another story- I'm sure they have legions of lawyers just waiting to piss off more people.
Thank you
A. T. Roll
The big problem was getting systems on the other side of our firewall to see the stream properly. The best MPEG4 player is Quicktime, and it couldn't find the stream. Real Player could run with the QT plug in and find it, but that was clunky and forced people to actually use Real Player (spit)
The solution was to use Powerstream as a reflector. They are fairly cheap, and if you are broadcasting to a ton of people off site you want to do this anyway to save your bandwidth. All you do is download a config program, click some buttons and you get a URL that works in every browser I can find- IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc. Haven't tested Linux since I only use that on the server side.
If you're looking for a cheaper solution, try StarValley They sell some dirt cheap MPEG2 and 4 encoders and decoders. We have an MPEG2 encoder that's the size of a paperback book- the decoders are even smaller. We use it for a sign system around campus since running cable would have been really expensive. We do get occasional crashes with this (~1/week while running 24/7), but I'm not entirely sure it's Starvalley's fault- the signage system has been a real nightmare. I've got an auto-reboot script to reset it if it dies- a reboot takes about ten seconds, so it's not a big deal.
I'm teaching general chemistry at the local CC this summer as a second job. They were desperate for someone, anyone to take the class- the pay is low enough and the class schedule brutal enough (6-10PM, four nights a week) that only idiots like me who like teaching would be willing to take it.
My VA letter commented that info on family members might be there too. Great- now you have my wife's info too...
What is that? A crumpled piece of paper with an "X" in big black marker? "Well, we told him it was a drummer's license. He tried to eat it at first, but we stopped him."
Just as well: any line of work where you tend to die in bizarre gardening accidents isn't for me. Then again, I play the viola so what do I know? (More viola jokes than drummer jokes probably.)
Ba bum bump tish
This is Wikipedia's biggest problem IMHO, far more so than the vandalization trolls. With the latter, you can fix it, but if an expert writes an article and then has it "corrected" by someone who understands the topic at a much lower level, how does this get fixed? Does the expert have to keep going through and removing "helpful" changes? How long will someone like this want to keep going before they just give up and go back to something more rewarding?
Under a /. type mod system for Wikipedia, dozens of idiot mods could effectively ban experts- the experts in a field are always outnumbered by the less well informed.
Methinks you missed the point of the series. The sole use of normal arrows is to make a "clank" noise that might distract a guard. (And if you're *really* playing, you won't even do that. Guards should never even be alerted- you're a master thief, not some cutpurse.) Kind of like the sole purpose of the sword is to cut tapestries to see what's behind them. Other than that the two serve no purpose.
no.
I also game.
Then again, I don't listen to podcasts. Hmm, maybe it wasn't such a good idea after all.
I live in Goodlatte's district, it's firmly #1. Viginia is so gerrymandered that there is literally no reason for the opposing party to even bother to run in most districts, and they don't. You could run Jesus Christ against Goodlatte and Jesus would lose 80-20. The only choices I have on a ballot are for state-wide offices like governor- all the local offices are held by people who are so safe they don't even bother to campaign.
Shortly after signup (1.5M down/384K up) I started randomly getting awful transfer rates- it would drop to 64K down occasionally. Every day I'd come home from work, check the speed, and call tech service. I had them opening tickets every day for a week until I demanded to talk to someone who could actually fix the problem. After two escalations from there everything suddenly got better, and a year later I get a pretty stable connection at exactly what they promised.
Remember, every tech support call costs a fortune for them. Flood the company with complaints.
You can also try withholding payment if you think you can get away with it. (perhaps not on a non-SLA account) We're doing that at work right now with a particularly troublesome "turnkey server" which has been anything but. We got it six months ago and we still haven't paid- we've told both the reseller and the company that we are refusing to pay until the problems are resolved. If you are going this route, document *everything*- I've got 10+ pages of details of phone calls, patches applied, unfixed bugs, crash records, etc. I'm more than happy to detail these in public should the company decide to get nasty. (They aren't, and after a recent replacement of one of the pieces we've got almost three weeks up. They'll get their money end of next week if nothing else goes wrong.)
It doesn't make a bit of difference what ISP you use if the half-dozen big backbone folks all team up, and they will. You don't have any interaction with them and absolutely no pull- you can switch ISPs all you want and you'll still get metered internet where only the big sites get good service.
Are they counting singly, by decimal? In that case 49. They clearly aren't using octal since we're up to 7950, but if we allow hex you've got 73. Then again, hex might seem to conflict with the letters, so let's stick with decimal.
Assuming that we can have up to three letters after the name (more would be just silly, don't you think?), you'd get 26^3 more possibilities, so you have 17576 possibilities for each number. However, we have to allow for single and double letter combos, so you have an additional 26 + 26^2 or 26+676+17576 = 18278 combinations per number.
That makes it roughly 49*18278= 895622 possible combinations before 8000, assuming decimal numbers and no more than 3 letters. Given the current rate of video card development, I suspect that nVidia can't do more than one new model per hour, which I make out to be roughly 102 years before we get to the GeForce8000.
Personally, I'm waiting for the GeForce 7963 LLQ model. I hear it's really going to be awesome!
You can get software that will do this, or at least you could a number of years ago. I used to admin a machine with a copy of the molecular mechanics program Sybil on it. Sybil shipped with full eratta- a list of every known bug in the program, how to trigger it, the effects and the status of fixing it. I think it was three volumes.
Sybil also cost something like $20k/year for our academic version IIRC. I think the commercial version was in the six figures per year per copy.