CO2 isn't that bad, it's just a convenient indicator, being the major byproduct of combustion. The idea is to encourage energy generation by clean technologies that don't involve burning things. Measuring carbon dioxide production is just a simple way of sorting that out.
The whole global warming scare is just an oversimplified way of vilifying CO2 directly. Unfortunately the simpletons have called us on the oversimplification.
Yeah, forget CO2 sequestration! Oxygen sequestration is where the action is at! I'm going to suck all of the 02 out of the atmosphere, and charge people to take a hit from MegaMaid's bag! And thanks to you, there's not a dang thing the NWO and GLOBAL GOVERNMENT can do about it! Mwa ha ha!!!
Oh, well I'm being purely facetious. We were joking around about Systems of Systems the other day and imagined it was just a matter of time before the upper management starts talking about filling their ranks with "specialists" working on selling their expertise on Architectures of Architectures and other nebulous self referential recursive functional titles. And lo and behold, we now have Design of Design. Brilliant!
Step 1: Install Wireshark Step 2: Leave Wireshark running and observe what kind of information people are gleaning from you over the network. It's educational! Step 3: There is no step 3.
I don't see why people expect anonymity on the internet any more than they do driving around in their car with the license plate showing. I just pretend there's an FBI agent always watching over my shoulder. His name is Fred. I explain to him everything I'm doing.
Absolutely nothing... there's a reason equipment that hooks into safety critical systems is so damn expensive.
http://www.scantool.net/ has open source drivers to go with their cheap USB / serial auto interfaces. The protocol allows you to distinguish between read-only and read-write commands. I guess it's similar to using SNMP.
Of course, your safety is never guaranteed. I don't think you should take any risks today. Stay at home with the shutters drawn.
There have been mandatory standards for over 10 years, if only to make emissions testing faster by allowing the VEIP to plug directly into the OBD-II / CAN port under your dash to get emissions readings right from your engine instead of having to hook up that chemical analyzer to your exhaust.
It has some pretty good pre-caching tools, and even some rudimentary routing. But no search and nav tools, which made for some pretty neat marginally-pre-planned travel experiences back when I had a Blackberry + Google Maps.
I've had limited success running Google Earth on my eeepc, mostly because their real-time GPS support blows (even back when I was a paying customer for NV Keyhole Plus)
Wake me up when they release a Google Maps Mobile / Navigator client that runs on a netbook / tablet with a decent sized screen. That is all I've really been waiting for.
I got Portal by accident along with "The Orange Box" way back when. Had no idea how awesome it was. But, yeah, I basically lived http://xkcd.com/606/
I could never quite get into TF2, however, even though I really enjoyed similar games such as Tribes II (bought the Linux version, no less; you can get the WInders version for free nowadays) and Tribes III, UT2004 on Linux, and Wolfenstein ET on Linux, Tremulous on Linux, etc. etc.
However, I've been pretty hooked on L4D 1&2 lately, even though I'd never been into zombie mania... Valve did a pretty neat job with the cooperative, cinematic, and asymmetric gameplay. Would love to see those properties come to Linux so I could enjoy it at higher resolutions without having to upgrade my old Windows gaming rig.
My complaint is that it says something somewhat rotten about us as a society if the definition of success for a half-decent STEM grad is to join the ranks of the military-industrial complex and live off of tax dollars divided among the constituency.
As for my personal story, I started off in the civil sector doing something very interesting, but a few years after 9/11 our group was dissolved and absorbed by the defense division. I left that company after it looked like that wasn't going to be temporary, and joined yet another defense firm, but at least it was close to home, a lot more efficient, and a lot less Dilbert-esque than the first job.
But long term plan is to put as much distance between me and the regulation-and-politicking-mired DC area as practical. I mean, I know I can't escape politics and gluttonous administrative overhead, but I don't really have to live on the precipice of the seething pit of it.
Someday once I cut the family loose I'd love to go independent and pursue the technical goals that I think are important. But I've got all the cutthroat business acumen of a jelly donut. Mmmmm, donuts...
I work for the private industry, just on mostly defense stuff. So still funded by taxpayers. I just find it a bit ridiculous what we get paid to do that level of work, compared to if the government employees were actually competent enough to take care of the mildly technical / administrative stuff.
But mostly I had a different view of what engineering would be like coming out of school. And it's not much like how the military-industrial complex does it. (though as a social welfare program for affluent people it works lovely)
Does this mean major cutbacks on corporate welfare and job security clearances for US Persons?
I'd love to get an engineering job outside of the defense/military industrial complex, maybe this will finally make the other jobs on the market relatively more competitive! And maybe I could get to apply some of the mechanical/aerospace skills I learned in college finally?
Corporate welfare through defense spending has been an awfully good way of keeping the educated middle class too busy doing busywork to try to enact any kind of social change. But maybe mass entertainment has finally caught up with keeping those minds preoccupied with inane things.
Same thing with Twitter, which is really just RSS with a cell phone interface and brand name recognition. Even with nearly everything supporting RSS, it never really caught on as fast and by surprise as twitter.
I think the real money to be made is for truly closed alternatives to Facebook and Twitter for use in corporate intranets or for your secret societies.
Also, I'd really like to see Google Buzz and Google Wave catch on as much more technically advanced social networking platforms, but alas, no one I know uses them. Facebook (and to a lesser extent, Twitter) has nearly everyone signed on it, succeeding where Classmates.com failed miserably and spectacularly for a decade+. So Facebook has pretty much become the hub that links to any activity going on in other social sites (flikr, livejournal, etc. where's the Slashdot comment notification?)
Also sounds exactly like a lot of what's going on in education.
Seems like there should be a way to give the professionals who administer systems the tools and resources to ply their trade. But all the money is tied up in political / administrative overhead so they can shuffle the accountability and blame around. Awesome that.
Don't forget the people... Northern Charm combined with Southern Efficiency!
I actually think the parks and weather in DC are actually quite nice; but I grew up in Bangkok so I have a different threshold for hot and humid than most. It's also great to have 4 seasons, where it gets hot enough to kill people, cold enough to kill people, and occasionally windy enough to kill people with the freak tornado. I'd go nuts living in a desert, like arid SoCal.
But back to the people... if I had to pick any place to live, it'd be as far from here as practical; maybe the Pacific Northwest. Even with all the relatively high paying work here and the "job security clearances", I feel like any money spent here goes directly to political / administrative overhead. The fact that this has been the fastest/only-growing sector of the US economy for the past few years speaks pretty poorly of our long term R&D / manufacturing / production capability:/
Ha, didn't recognize half those "leading" brands and didn't care about the ones I did recognize (Gucci / Rolex / blah).. I don't care for Flash either, but I kind of appreciate Flash (and Flashblock) in that it's a great way to help me filter out all the content on the web I don't care about (the stuff made by design-over-function and advertising types).
I don't care for Apple, but I applaud them for not supporting a proprietary web "standard". *golf clap* Then again, I'll probably be sad when more annoying advertising starts showing up in my web browser:-P
I do like some Flash games, so I don't mind having Flash support, though... just like I don't mind installing a JVM for Java games, etc. So locking those kinds of apps out are pretty much an *sshole move. But that's pretty much Apple for you and a large part why I don't care for any of their straightjacket platforms. The NeXTish interface was nice, though... I still like WindowMaker and try to arrange my current WM similarly.
Played with HTML5 on http://youtube.com/testtubethe other day, and it was decent but had no full screen mode. But Flash doesn't have a decent performing fullscreen mode on Linux anyway, so I still tend to just run "vlc/tmp/Flash*" after visiting a flash site with good quality content I'm actually interested in watching.
And yeah, a lot of new tech cars (Prius and Mini Cooper) have electronic locks without a physical key, where you just stick the keyfob in a slot and hit a PC-like power button somewhere. Make it sort of difficult to carry a spare key in your wallet.
As far as consolidating everything into one device, it wouldn't be too bad if it:
* supports 2-factor authentication - so you'd need to enter a PIN number to activate it like most bank goldchip cards or the more secure employee badges.
* supports some kind of key revocation. Then you just have to cancel one thing (rather than try to remember what cards you had in your wallet/purse when it was lost/stolen and make a dozen phone calls). This probably wouldn't be all that practical unless everything you authenticate against was networked so they can get updated to ignore your old auth card and accept your new one, but it doesn't sound like that is all that far off.
Hmm, statistically I've heard that the safest seat in the car is the one just behind the driver, so I've always put the youngest kid there. That way I don't have to walk so far after unlocking the car from the driver's side when carrying an infant seat in my other arm.
Slashdot Mirror
CO2 isn't that bad, it's just a convenient indicator, being the major byproduct of combustion. The idea is to encourage energy generation by clean technologies that don't involve burning things. Measuring carbon dioxide production is just a simple way of sorting that out.
The whole global warming scare is just an oversimplified way of vilifying CO2 directly. Unfortunately the simpletons have called us on the oversimplification.
Yeah, forget CO2 sequestration! Oxygen sequestration is where the action is at! I'm going to suck all of the 02 out of the atmosphere, and charge people to take a hit from MegaMaid's bag! And thanks to you, there's not a dang thing the NWO and GLOBAL GOVERNMENT can do about it! Mwa ha ha!!!
Oh, well I'm being purely facetious. We were joking around about Systems of Systems the other day and imagined it was just a matter of time before the upper management starts talking about filling their ranks with "specialists" working on selling their expertise on Architectures of Architectures and other nebulous self referential recursive functional titles. And lo and behold, we now have Design of Design. Brilliant!
Beat the gold rush while you can! ;-)
Great, SoS was the last big buzzword around corporations who wanted to charge the government a lot for doing LSI (large scale integration).
On the bright side, "DoD" is already taken in the military-industrial complex, so hopefully this won't catch on.
insert "yo dawg" reference here:
Don't let the mass media scare you.
Step 1: Install Wireshark
Step 2: Leave Wireshark running and observe what kind of information people are gleaning from you over the network. It's educational!
Step 3: There is no step 3.
I don't see why people expect anonymity on the internet any more than they do driving around in their car with the license plate showing.
I just pretend there's an FBI agent always watching over my shoulder. His name is Fred. I explain to him everything I'm doing.
Obviously, they're not running: http://sleepbot.com/
(It also drives my wife crazy (in a bad way), which is a nice fringe benefit)
I guess the unimaginative trolls are out in force on a Sunday morning. Here's some inspiration:
http://www.mbworld.org/forums/off-topic/260385-awesome-mr2-carputer.html
http://www.carobd.com/
But yeah, agreed, the future is a dangerous place. Not everyone should dare tread there ;-)
Absolutely nothing... there's a reason equipment that hooks into safety critical systems is so damn expensive.
http://www.scantool.net/ has open source drivers to go with their cheap USB / serial auto interfaces.
The protocol allows you to distinguish between read-only and read-write commands. I guess it's similar to using SNMP.
Of course, your safety is never guaranteed. I don't think you should take any risks today. Stay at home with the shutters drawn.
Who cares about the proprietary chipsets when there are ISO standards for gathering data from them?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-board_diagnostics#Standard_interfaces
There have been mandatory standards for over 10 years, if only to make emissions testing faster by allowing the VEIP to plug directly into the OBD-II / CAN port under your dash to get emissions readings right from your engine instead of having to hook up that chemical analyzer to your exhaust.
The best GPS mapping software I've found so far for my eeepc is TangoGPS:
http://www.tangogps.org/gps/cat/Screenshots
It has some pretty good pre-caching tools, and even some rudimentary routing. But no search and nav tools, which made for some pretty neat marginally-pre-planned travel experiences back when I had a Blackberry + Google Maps.
I've had limited success running Google Earth on my eeepc, mostly because their real-time GPS support blows (even back when I was a paying customer for NV Keyhole Plus)
Wake me up when they release a Google Maps Mobile / Navigator client that runs on a netbook / tablet with a decent sized screen. That is all I've really been waiting for.
I got Portal by accident along with "The Orange Box" way back when. Had no idea how awesome it was. But, yeah, I basically lived http://xkcd.com/606/
I could never quite get into TF2, however, even though I really enjoyed similar games such as Tribes II (bought the Linux version, no less; you can get the WInders version for free nowadays) and Tribes III, UT2004 on Linux, and Wolfenstein ET on Linux, Tremulous on Linux, etc. etc.
However, I've been pretty hooked on L4D 1&2 lately, even though I'd never been into zombie mania... Valve did a pretty neat job with the cooperative, cinematic, and asymmetric gameplay. Would love to see those properties come to Linux so I could enjoy it at higher resolutions without having to upgrade my old Windows gaming rig.
Like Anna and the King of Siam?
But well, yes, actually, my kids are a fun genetic concoction of Russian & Thai.
Hey, we went into a Thai restaurant, and thought that maybe only the waitstaff might just be Russian. But no, it was Russian all the way back.
Misread that as "Russian Chinese [food]".
Had some Russian Thai food near Ocean City, MD, (Russians comprise most of the seasonal labor force there for some reason). Very confused and weak.
My complaint is that it says something somewhat rotten about us as a society if the definition of success for a half-decent STEM grad is to join the ranks of the military-industrial complex and live off of tax dollars divided among the constituency.
As for my personal story, I started off in the civil sector doing something very interesting, but a few years after 9/11 our group was dissolved and absorbed by the defense division. I left that company after it looked like that wasn't going to be temporary, and joined yet another defense firm, but at least it was close to home, a lot more efficient, and a lot less Dilbert-esque than the first job.
But long term plan is to put as much distance between me and the regulation-and-politicking-mired DC area as practical. I mean, I know I can't escape politics and gluttonous administrative overhead, but I don't really have to live on the precipice of the seething pit of it.
Someday once I cut the family loose I'd love to go independent and pursue the technical goals that I think are important. But I've got all the cutthroat business acumen of a jelly donut. Mmmmm, donuts...
I work for the private industry, just on mostly defense stuff. So still funded by taxpayers. I just find it a bit ridiculous what we get paid to do that level of work, compared to if the government employees were actually competent enough to take care of the mildly technical / administrative stuff.
But mostly I had a different view of what engineering would be like coming out of school. And it's not much like how the military-industrial complex does it. (though as a social welfare program for affluent people it works lovely)
Does this mean major cutbacks on corporate welfare and job security clearances for US Persons?
I'd love to get an engineering job outside of the defense/military industrial complex, maybe this will finally make the other jobs on the market relatively more competitive! And maybe I could get to apply some of the mechanical/aerospace skills I learned in college finally?
Corporate welfare through defense spending has been an awfully good way of keeping the educated middle class too busy doing busywork to try to enact any kind of social change. But maybe mass entertainment has finally caught up with keeping those minds preoccupied with inane things.
Not just easy, but Facebook got popular due to brand recognition and I guess maybe media exposure?
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/07/31/106-facebook/ explains it better than I can.
Same thing with Twitter, which is really just RSS with a cell phone interface and brand name recognition. Even with nearly everything supporting RSS, it never really caught on as fast and by surprise as twitter.
I think the real money to be made is for truly closed alternatives to Facebook and Twitter for use in corporate intranets or for your secret societies.
Also, I'd really like to see Google Buzz and Google Wave catch on as much more technically advanced social networking platforms, but alas, no one I know uses them. Facebook (and to a lesser extent, Twitter) has nearly everyone signed on it, succeeding where Classmates.com failed miserably and spectacularly for a decade+. So Facebook has pretty much become the hub that links to any activity going on in other social sites (flikr, livejournal, etc. where's the Slashdot comment notification?)
Sounds like a great way to pass the buck to me :P
Also sounds exactly like a lot of what's going on in education.
Seems like there should be a way to give the professionals who administer systems the tools and resources to ply their trade. But all the money is tied up in political / administrative overhead so they can shuffle the accountability and blame around. Awesome that.
Don't forget the people... Northern Charm combined with Southern Efficiency!
I actually think the parks and weather in DC are actually quite nice; but I grew up in Bangkok so I have a different threshold for hot and humid than most. It's also great to have 4 seasons, where it gets hot enough to kill people, cold enough to kill people, and occasionally windy enough to kill people with the freak tornado. I'd go nuts living in a desert, like arid SoCal.
But back to the people... if I had to pick any place to live, it'd be as far from here as practical; maybe the Pacific Northwest. Even with all the relatively high paying work here and the "job security clearances", I feel like any money spent here goes directly to political / administrative overhead. The fact that this has been the fastest/only-growing sector of the US economy for the past few years speaks pretty poorly of our long term R&D / manufacturing / production capability :/
hey, I cared enough to bother making a post :P
Ha, didn't recognize half those "leading" brands and didn't care about the ones I did recognize (Gucci / Rolex / blah).. I don't care for Flash either, but I kind of appreciate Flash (and Flashblock) in that it's a great way to help me filter out all the content on the web I don't care about (the stuff made by design-over-function and advertising types).
I don't care for Apple, but I applaud them for not supporting a proprietary web "standard". *golf clap* Then again, I'll probably be sad when more annoying advertising starts showing up in my web browser :-P
I do like some Flash games, so I don't mind having Flash support, though... just like I don't mind installing a JVM for Java games, etc. So locking those kinds of apps out are pretty much an *sshole move. But that's pretty much Apple for you and a large part why I don't care for any of their straightjacket platforms. The NeXTish interface was nice, though... I still like WindowMaker and try to arrange my current WM similarly.
Played with HTML5 on http://youtube.com/testtubethe other day, and it was decent but had no full screen mode. But Flash doesn't have a decent performing fullscreen mode on Linux anyway, so I still tend to just run "vlc /tmp/Flash*" after visiting a flash site with good quality content I'm actually interested in watching.
Car is supposed to come with a valet key. <shrug>
And yeah, a lot of new tech cars (Prius and Mini Cooper) have electronic locks without a physical key, where you just stick the keyfob in a slot and hit a PC-like power button somewhere. Make it sort of difficult to carry a spare key in your wallet.
As far as consolidating everything into one device, it wouldn't be too bad if it:
* supports 2-factor authentication - so you'd need to enter a PIN number to activate it like most bank goldchip cards or the more secure employee badges.
* supports some kind of key revocation. Then you just have to cancel one thing (rather than try to remember what cards you had in your wallet/purse when it was lost/stolen and make a dozen phone calls). This probably wouldn't be all that practical unless everything you authenticate against was networked so they can get updated to ignore your old auth card and accept your new one, but it doesn't sound like that is all that far off.
Like the sig, I've heard a lot of that from my Russian friends, usually about skinny dipping or enjoying parties.
Hmm, statistically I've heard that the safest seat in the car is the one just behind the driver, so I've always put the youngest kid there. That way I don't have to walk so far after unlocking the car from the driver's side when carrying an infant seat in my other arm.