I think they were getting more and more duplicate essays copied, at least in part, from web sites.
When the essay is limited to 140 characters, identifying the unoriginal essays is by inspection -- there are only so many possible variations. Longer ones have to be actually read to confirm their unoriginality.
The whole craft needs to orient itself to transmit: "The identical Voyager spacecraft are three-axis stabilized systems that use celestial or gyro referenced attitude control to maintain pointing of the high-gain antennas toward Earth."
The amazing thing (well, one of the amazing things) about the Voyager program is the communication link. Voyager's signal, as received on Earth, is almost unbelievably weak.
One can use the Friis Transmission Equation to see just how weak the signal from Voyager 1 is at the moment:
Pr = Pt * Gt * Gr * (lambda/(4 * pi * R))^2, where
Pr is received power, in watts; Pt is transmitted power, in watts; Gt is the gain of the transmitting antenna, relative to an isotropic source (a unit-less value); Gr is the gain of the receiving antenna (one of the 70m DSN antennas), relative to an isotropic source (a unit-less value); lambda is the operating wavelength, in meters, and equal to c/f, or very close to 300/fM, where fM is the operating frequency in MHz; and R is the range (distance) in meters.
Grinding all this out, one is left with a received signal strength -- at the terminals of a 70-meter dish, mind you -- of:
Pr = 18 * 63100 * 25.1*10^6 * (0.0356/(4 * pi * 1.75 * 10^13))^2 = 7.45 * 10^(-19) watts, or 745 -- wait for it -- zeptowatts.
This is equal to -181.3 dBW, or -151.3 dBm. (I don't know how many Libraries of Congress that is.)
In the year 2020, when the probe's power generator is expected to expire, the probe will be about 2 * 10^13 meters away from Earth; using the same calculation the signal will have weakened slightly, to 5.73 * 10^(-19) watts, or 573 zeptowatts, -182.4 dBW, or -152.4 dBm.
(Unless I've made some trivial calculation error, of course.)
. . . document everything. . . [m]ake sure your employer fully understands the situation you and they are in.
This was the first thought that came to me. While there surely are employers that are the personification of Evil (I, too, have met my share), most are simply trying to do the best they can, but are hampered in their ability to help you by a lack of time, a lack of knowledge of IT subjects, or both. Because of this, they can't independently judge the quality of the advice you're giving them -- i.e., they have to trust you. Since (at least in my experience) most conversations with management IT initiates are, in one way or another, a request to spend money, you can see the problem: It's difficult to continue to trust someone whose solution to every problem is to take money from you.
One technique I have used successfully is to never, ever refer to the IT department in particular, but always refer to the company as a whole. Also, as the parent says, document everything -- but do so in terms that will be meaningful to management. "The language of management is money," Juran said, and he was right. The infrastructure must make the company money, or it wouldn't be there -- talk to management in terms of the risks they are running to reduce revenue, increase expenses, or both.
Most business people, like investors in general, dislike surprises, and prefer to know their risks in advance. The trick is to present the situation in non-threatening terms, so that the boss feels like you're trying to make more money for him. Even after doing so, one has to be prepared for the possibility of a negative response, possibly even for a valid reason -- there's no cash available this month; they're planning to move anyway, etc. Or the boss just made a mistake. With any luck, the documentation you have on file will protect you, should blame be directed your way. If not, well, you didn't want to work there, anyway. Did you?
Perhaps the bankers and economists would understand their motivation better than the psychologists and sociologists, then.
. . . but nobody will make any money if they spend $billions to put the satellites in orbit, and the network is a flop; one needs reliable revenue over many years to repay the cost invested in a satellite system (just ask the Iridium guys at Motorola).
The issue at hand is that Lightsquared plans to place strong, satellite-based signals very close in frequency to that of the GPS system -- specifically, signals at 1526-1536 MHz (initially; although Lightsquared has rights to 1525-1559 MHz) that will be 60 dB stronger on the Earth's surface than the GPS L1 signals at 1575.42 MHz.
Since GPS signals are so weak (-130 to -150 dBm at the receive antenna terminals), most GPS receivers have minimal RF filtering, to avoid the insertion loss of the filters and thereby optimize GPS receiver sensitivity. Recognizing that GPS receivers do not have sharp selectivity, for decades it has been national policy (as well as good engineering practice) not to place strong signals near the GPS frequencies. This change in policy is the issue at hand.
Technically, the problem with the Lightsquared proposal is, even if the Lightsquared guys put lots of filtering on their transmitter, so that it is spectrally clean and has substantially no energy at the GPS frequency itself, the millions of existing GPS receivers already in the field will be unable to receive the desired L1 signal in the presence of the strong undesired Lightsquared signal, due to their limited filtering and dynamic range -- and, short of replacing every GPS receiver in the country, there's nothing Lightsquared can do about that.
Why Lightsquared thinks this scheme will work, and they won't be vilified in the press once GPS problems crop up, is something for the psychologists and sociologists to ponder.
By moving from one to nine antennas, you'll get an effective area improvement of at most 9, or 8 dB, but most of the improvement you're seeing is, in fact, the phenomenon you describe -- you're creating a phased array that rejects signals from undesired transmitters in the ISM band, in order to receive the desired signal.
The problem in receiving the Voyager probes, however, is not this problem. The Voyager problem is that one doesn't have enough incoming signal to manipulate at all -- when received by even a 10m dish it's so far buried in the noise that it is undetectable at practical integration times. The solution, as you state, is to "increase the incident signal voltage" into the receiver, and the only way to do this is to increase the effective area of the antenna.
This seems to be a pretty good description of the Voyager telecom system. Based on this, the X-band transmitter provides 18 watts to the high-gain antenna, which has a gain of 48 dB, for an effective radiated power of just over 18 * 10^(48/10) = 1.1 megawatts. (At least at launch; I assume the output power will have fallen somewhat over the intervening decades, as the RTG output falls and RF components age.)
This sounds like a healthy amount of power, and it is, but keep in mind that antenna gain comes easy at X-band (8 GHz), and such ERP levels are common in terrestrial point-to-point microwave links. Also keep in mind that the half-power beamwidth of the high-gain antenna is only 0.5 degrees, so any alien not in that narrow beam would hear substantially nothing.
Also, to answer your direct question, the frequencies and beam shapes are different, and one has to consider the shielding effects of the ionosphere vs. frequency, but just to compare (US regulations, YMMV): AM broadcast stations (~1 MHz) are usually limited to 10 kW with more-or-less 0 dB gain antennas, for an ERP of 10 kW; but UHF TV stations (~500 MHz) may have an ERP of up to 5 MW.
Of course, there are a zillion broadcast stations, all transmitting non-coherently (some would say incoherently), but only two Voyagers, so that would have to be taken into account, too.
You're confusing antenna angular resolution with antenna effective area. The problem with reception of the Voyager probes isn't being able to discern them among other relevant signals. The problem is that the signals are so weak that they need an antenna with large area just to collect enough energy per bit to reliably overcome noise generated in the receiving system. Until you do this, you can't get a signal strong enough for your correlator to work on -- all you'll get out of the correlator is noise, because that's all that's going in to the correlator from your receivers.
Of course, an example of one of the ways language is moving is the word "anticipates" itself. From the Latin meaning "to take before", it originally meant "to foresee and prepare (for) in advance"; it's now been made a synonym for "predicts" or "expects", without the presumption of any action being taken in advance. My theory is that people originally wanted to use the word "expects," but were afraid of confusing this with its near-homonym "aspects," so they avoided both words and found a slight misuse of "anticipates" more comforting.
Of course, this has happened so many times that the original meaning is now a minor usage, and will probably disappear within a generation.
You're presented a patent with a bunch of claims. Here's how to understand what's covered by a particular patent, and what's not:
1. Separate the claims into two sets -- "dependent" and "independent" claims. Dependent claims are the ones that refer to other claims, and usually start with language like, "The gizmo of claim 1, wherein. . . " or "The gizmo of claim 5, further comprising. . .." Note that dependent claims can depend on other dependent claims, i.e., the claim structure is a collection of trees, with an independent claim at the root of each tree. Set aside the set of dependent claims. Identify the first independent claim (which should be claim 1). Go to Step 2.
2. The claim should be of the form [preamble][start of element list delimiter][list of elements]. The preamble is basically a "field of invention" description, and the SOEL delimiter is usually something like the word "comprising," nearly always followed by a colon (:). The preamble and SOEL are irrelevant to the task at hand, so set them aside, leaving the list of elements. Go to Step 3.
3. Examine the list of elements. (It helps to note that the elements are usually separated from each other by a semicolon.) Does your candidate gizmo have each element in the list of elements? Equivalently, does your candidate implementation have all elements listed in the claim? If so, that claim "reads on" your candidate gizmo, and infringement of the patent is possible. Otherwise, it does not read on the gizmo. Go to Step 4.
4. Repeat Steps 2 and 3 for each independent claim in the patent. if your candidate gizmo survives the test in Step 3 for all independent claims, i.e., no independent claims read on your gizmo, congratulations, your gizmo does not infringe on the patent. However, if one or more independent claims reads on your gizmo, congratulations, your gizmo infringes on the patent. (Like a pregnancy test, depending on the circumstances both possible results may be worthy of congratulations.)
For example, in the case of the patent at hand (RE42927),
Step 1: By inspection of the claims list, the independent claims are claim 1, claim 16, and claim 24.
Step 2. Claim 1 reads, "A location information system that displays location specific information, the location information system, comprising: a receiver that receives location identification information from at least one site specific object identifying a location.Iadd., where the at least one site specific object is a beacon.Iaddend.; and a transceiver that transmits the location identification information to a distributed network and that receives the location specific information about the specified location from the distributed network based on the location identification information, wherein the location specific information provides information corresponding to the location."
We parse this claim as follows: [preamble]: "A location information system that displays location specific information, the location information system" [SOEL delimiter]: "comprising:" [element list]: a. "a receiver that receives location identification information from at least one site specific object identifying a location, where the at least one site specific object is a beacon; and" b. "a transceiver that transmits the location identification information to a distributed network and that receives the location specific information about the specified location from the distributed network based on the location identification information, wherein the location specific information provides information corresponding to the location."
[The "Iadd" and "Iaddend" stuff just shows the correcting phrase that was added to the claim during its reissue. Note that this phrase narrows the claim, by requiring that at least one site specific object must be a beacon.]
3. Does your candidate gizmo have both elements a. and b.? If so, claim 1 reads on it; otherwise, it does not.
Well, at least they can keep their nuvistors -- although it would be an interesting (if expensive) technical challenge to redo the project with the last gasp of vacuum tube technology.
As long as software engineering interviews involve writing code on a white board, I won't be moving on to another job.
Okay, but recognize that that is a decision you've made -- one that will make it difficult for you to move around the industry.
Another decision you could have made would have been to practice writing code on a white board, to become better at interviews that use this technique. You don't have to change the way you code at work; just practice the "interview method" for what it is -- an artificial problem to be solved. You didn't complain about written tests with numbered problems in school, did you? They're just as artificial.
When I find my career getting stale, I try to change the venue. If you write enterprise code, try moving to embedded software. If you write code for a commercial enterprise, try writing for an academic or government organization. Or vice versa.
Alternatively, identify a hobby or avocation you have, and write code in that area. Many people have changed avocations to vocations in this way by finding job openings via the hobby grapevine.
I'm more concerned with your apparent short-selling of yourself. Having poor interviewing and resume-writing skills is not a lifetime curse; like all skills, one gets better with practice, and the practice is free. Patrick McKenzie has useful advice in this area.
See this comment. You absolutely cannot call yourself whatever you want in the US. Rules vary by state, but in almost all states the reason you have every right to call yourself an engineer if you work in the engineering department of a company in an Engineering capacity, is because that industry is specifically exempted from such requirements (in Florida, it's the aerospace and military industries, with some other, lesser, exceptions). Calling oneself a "Software Engineer" without also being a Registered Professional Engineer is specifically listed as a prohibited act in the statues.
The "certification organizations" are irrelevant; this is state law.
Note this passage in the Florida statutes (471.031 (1)(b)1.): "A person may not [...] use the name or title “professional engineer” or any other title, designation, words, letters, abbreviations, or device tending to indicate that such person holds an active license as an engineer when the person is not licensed under this chapter, including, but not limited to, the following titles: [...] 'software engineer,' 'computer hardware engineer,' or 'systems engineer.'"
I can tell you from personal experience that the State of Florida will prosecute someone simply for having a business card with the title of "Software Engineer" who is not a Registered Professional Engineer in the state. (No, it wasn't my card.) People thinking that "people with creative job titles [...] are not being prosecuted for calling themselves by their job titles or degrees UNLESS they hang out a shingle and open a contract engineering company or are claiming to own a company that holds an authorization certificate and does not" are living in a dreamworld. A printed card clearly violating a statute is what's known in the legal profession as "physical evidence," and prosecutors wanting an easy conviction love these kinds of cases.
The author, Patrick McKenzie, describes himself as an "awkward twenty-something CEO of a multinational company." As an "awkward fifty-something CTO of a multinational company," I can state that I have never read a more truthful and cogent collection of career advice for this profession.
Yeah, but what you've done is make everyone who imports a laser for a legitimate purpose (astronomy teachers, et al.) but doesn't fill out form B710, and form B709B or B711, and then wait three weeks, a criminal. Whether or not he's prosecuted, receives a caution, or is ignored completely is now up to the whim of the authorities.
In general, this is poor public policy because, as the saying goes, "when everyone is a criminal, the authorities can arrest whoever they please." Making a common act illegal is one of the favorite tools of despots.
Slashdot Mirror
I think they were getting more and more duplicate essays copied, at least in part, from web sites.
When the essay is limited to 140 characters, identifying the unoriginal essays is by inspection -- there are only so many possible variations. Longer ones have to be actually read to confirm their unoriginality.
The whole craft needs to orient itself to transmit: "The identical Voyager spacecraft are three-axis stabilized systems that use celestial or gyro referenced attitude control to maintain pointing of the high-gain antennas toward Earth."
The general DSN site is here; however, for detail on the system hardware, services, and capabilities, see the 810-5 Handbook.
The amazing thing (well, one of the amazing things) about the Voyager program is the communication link. Voyager's signal, as received on Earth, is almost unbelievably weak.
One can use the Friis Transmission Equation to see just how weak the signal from Voyager 1 is at the moment:
Pr = Pt * Gt * Gr * (lambda/(4 * pi * R))^2, where
Pr is received power, in watts;
Pt is transmitted power, in watts;
Gt is the gain of the transmitting antenna, relative to an isotropic source (a unit-less value);
Gr is the gain of the receiving antenna (one of the 70m DSN antennas), relative to an isotropic source (a unit-less value);
lambda is the operating wavelength, in meters, and equal to c/f, or very close to 300/fM, where fM is the operating frequency in MHz;
and R is the range (distance) in meters.
Pt = 18 watts (assuming this hasn't degraded over time and distance);
Gt = 48 dBi, or about 63100;
Gr = 74 dBi, or about 25.1*10^6;
fM = 8420 MHz, so lambda = 300/fM = 0.0356 meters; and
R = 17,545,000,000 km, or 1.75 * 10^13 meters.
Grinding all this out, one is left with a received signal strength -- at the terminals of a 70-meter dish, mind you -- of:
Pr = 18 * 63100 * 25.1*10^6 * (0.0356/(4 * pi * 1.75 * 10^13))^2 = 7.45 * 10^(-19) watts, or 745 -- wait for it -- zeptowatts.
This is equal to -181.3 dBW, or -151.3 dBm. (I don't know how many Libraries of Congress that is.)
In the year 2020, when the probe's power generator is expected to expire, the probe will be about 2 * 10^13 meters away from Earth; using the same calculation the signal will have weakened slightly, to 5.73 * 10^(-19) watts, or 573 zeptowatts, -182.4 dBW, or -152.4 dBm.
(Unless I've made some trivial calculation error, of course.)
. . . document everything. . . [m]ake sure your employer fully understands the situation you and they are in.
This was the first thought that came to me. While there surely are employers that are the personification of Evil (I, too, have met my share), most are simply trying to do the best they can, but are hampered in their ability to help you by a lack of time, a lack of knowledge of IT subjects, or both. Because of this, they can't independently judge the quality of the advice you're giving them -- i.e., they have to trust you. Since (at least in my experience) most conversations with management IT initiates are, in one way or another, a request to spend money, you can see the problem: It's difficult to continue to trust someone whose solution to every problem is to take money from you.
One technique I have used successfully is to never, ever refer to the IT department in particular, but always refer to the company as a whole. Also, as the parent says, document everything -- but do so in terms that will be meaningful to management. "The language of management is money," Juran said, and he was right. The infrastructure must make the company money, or it wouldn't be there -- talk to management in terms of the risks they are running to reduce revenue, increase expenses, or both.
Most business people, like investors in general, dislike surprises, and prefer to know their risks in advance. The trick is to present the situation in non-threatening terms, so that the boss feels like you're trying to make more money for him. Even after doing so, one has to be prepared for the possibility of a negative response, possibly even for a valid reason -- there's no cash available this month; they're planning to move anyway, etc. Or the boss just made a mistake. With any luck, the documentation you have on file will protect you, should blame be directed your way. If not, well, you didn't want to work there, anyway. Did you?
Perhaps the bankers and economists would understand their motivation better than the psychologists and sociologists, then.
. . . but nobody will make any money if they spend $billions to put the satellites in orbit, and the network is a flop; one needs reliable revenue over many years to repay the cost invested in a satellite system (just ask the Iridium guys at Motorola).
The issue at hand is that Lightsquared plans to place strong, satellite-based signals very close in frequency to that of the GPS system -- specifically, signals at 1526-1536 MHz (initially; although Lightsquared has rights to 1525-1559 MHz) that will be 60 dB stronger on the Earth's surface than the GPS L1 signals at 1575.42 MHz.
Since GPS signals are so weak (-130 to -150 dBm at the receive antenna terminals), most GPS receivers have minimal RF filtering, to avoid the insertion loss of the filters and thereby optimize GPS receiver sensitivity. Recognizing that GPS receivers do not have sharp selectivity, for decades it has been national policy (as well as good engineering practice) not to place strong signals near the GPS frequencies. This change in policy is the issue at hand.
Technically, the problem with the Lightsquared proposal is, even if the Lightsquared guys put lots of filtering on their transmitter, so that it is spectrally clean and has substantially no energy at the GPS frequency itself, the millions of existing GPS receivers already in the field will be unable to receive the desired L1 signal in the presence of the strong undesired Lightsquared signal, due to their limited filtering and dynamic range -- and, short of replacing every GPS receiver in the country, there's nothing Lightsquared can do about that.
Why Lightsquared thinks this scheme will work, and they won't be vilified in the press once GPS problems crop up, is something for the psychologists and sociologists to ponder.
The VLA uses aperture synthesis. "Aperture synthesis is possible only if both the amplitude and the phase of the incoming signal is measured by each telescope." The problem is, the amplitude and phase of the Voyager signals can't be measured at each antenna, because they're too weak. Aperture synthesis only works when the signals are detectable (and measurable) by the individual antennas in the array.
(Not to beat it to death, but what the GGP was describing was a simple phased array, not aperture synthesis, anyway.)
Yes, and before you ask, I, too, have been receiving inquiries from museums.
By moving from one to nine antennas, you'll get an effective area improvement of at most 9, or 8 dB, but most of the improvement you're seeing is, in fact, the phenomenon you describe -- you're creating a phased array that rejects signals from undesired transmitters in the ISM band, in order to receive the desired signal.
The problem in receiving the Voyager probes, however, is not this problem. The Voyager problem is that one doesn't have enough incoming signal to manipulate at all -- when received by even a 10m dish it's so far buried in the noise that it is undetectable at practical integration times. The solution, as you state, is to "increase the incident signal voltage" into the receiver, and the only way to do this is to increase the effective area of the antenna.
This seems to be a pretty good description of the Voyager telecom system. Based on this, the X-band transmitter provides 18 watts to the high-gain antenna, which has a gain of 48 dB, for an effective radiated power of just over 18 * 10^(48/10) = 1.1 megawatts. (At least at launch; I assume the output power will have fallen somewhat over the intervening decades, as the RTG output falls and RF components age.)
This sounds like a healthy amount of power, and it is, but keep in mind that antenna gain comes easy at X-band (8 GHz), and such ERP levels are common in terrestrial point-to-point microwave links. Also keep in mind that the half-power beamwidth of the high-gain antenna is only 0.5 degrees, so any alien not in that narrow beam would hear substantially nothing.
Also, to answer your direct question, the frequencies and beam shapes are different, and one has to consider the shielding effects of the ionosphere vs. frequency, but just to compare (US regulations, YMMV): AM broadcast stations (~1 MHz) are usually limited to 10 kW with more-or-less 0 dB gain antennas, for an ERP of 10 kW; but UHF TV stations (~500 MHz) may have an ERP of up to 5 MW.
Of course, there are a zillion broadcast stations, all transmitting non-coherently (some would say incoherently), but only two Voyagers, so that would have to be taken into account, too.
You're confusing antenna angular resolution with antenna effective area. The problem with reception of the Voyager probes isn't being able to discern them among other relevant signals. The problem is that the signals are so weak that they need an antenna with large area just to collect enough energy per bit to reliably overcome noise generated in the receiving system. Until you do this, you can't get a signal strong enough for your correlator to work on -- all you'll get out of the correlator is noise, because that's all that's going in to the correlator from your receivers.
Ergo, the 70m dishes.
I have personally seen 50's Univac and 60's IBM systems running
Yes, but when? I, too, have personally seen 50's Univac and 60's IBM systems running.
However, it was in the 50's and 60's.
Anyone wishing to see a mass toad exodus should just stand outside corporate headquarters at five o'clock on a Friday.
Maybe? Who edits this stuff?
Of course, an example of one of the ways language is moving is the word "anticipates" itself. From the Latin meaning "to take before", it originally meant "to foresee and prepare (for) in advance"; it's now been made a synonym for "predicts" or "expects", without the presumption of any action being taken in advance. My theory is that people originally wanted to use the word "expects," but were afraid of confusing this with its near-homonym "aspects," so they avoided both words and found a slight misuse of "anticipates" more comforting.
Of course, this has happened so many times that the original meaning is now a minor usage, and will probably disappear within a generation.
(n.b.: IANAL.)
You're presented a patent with a bunch of claims. Here's how to understand what's covered by a particular patent, and what's not:
1. Separate the claims into two sets -- "dependent" and "independent" claims. Dependent claims are the ones that refer to other claims, and usually start with language like, "The gizmo of claim 1, wherein. . . " or "The gizmo of claim 5, further comprising. . . ." Note that dependent claims can depend on other dependent claims, i.e., the claim structure is a collection of trees, with an independent claim at the root of each tree. Set aside the set of dependent claims. Identify the first independent claim (which should be claim 1). Go to Step 2.
2. The claim should be of the form [preamble][start of element list delimiter][list of elements]. The preamble is basically a "field of invention" description, and the SOEL delimiter is usually something like the word "comprising," nearly always followed by a colon (:). The preamble and SOEL are irrelevant to the task at hand, so set them aside, leaving the list of elements. Go to Step 3.
3. Examine the list of elements. (It helps to note that the elements are usually separated from each other by a semicolon.) Does your candidate gizmo have each element in the list of elements? Equivalently, does your candidate implementation have all elements listed in the claim? If so, that claim "reads on" your candidate gizmo, and infringement of the patent is possible. Otherwise, it does not read on the gizmo. Go to Step 4.
4. Repeat Steps 2 and 3 for each independent claim in the patent. if your candidate gizmo survives the test in Step 3 for all independent claims, i.e., no independent claims read on your gizmo, congratulations, your gizmo does not infringe on the patent. However, if one or more independent claims reads on your gizmo, congratulations, your gizmo infringes on the patent. (Like a pregnancy test, depending on the circumstances both possible results may be worthy of congratulations.)
For example, in the case of the patent at hand (RE42927),
Step 1: By inspection of the claims list, the independent claims are claim 1, claim 16, and claim 24.
Step 2. Claim 1 reads, "A location information system that displays location specific information, the location information system, comprising: a receiver that receives location identification information from at least one site specific object identifying a location.Iadd., where the at least one site specific object is a beacon.Iaddend.; and a transceiver that transmits the location identification information to a distributed network and that receives the location specific information about the specified location from the distributed network based on the location identification information, wherein the location specific information provides information corresponding to the location."
We parse this claim as follows:
[preamble]: "A location information system that displays location specific information, the location information system"
[SOEL delimiter]: "comprising:"
[element list]: a. "a receiver that receives location identification information from at least one site specific object identifying a location, where the at least one site specific object is a beacon; and"
b. "a transceiver that transmits the location identification information to a distributed network and that receives the location specific information about the specified location from the distributed network based on the location identification information, wherein the location specific information provides information corresponding to the location."
[The "Iadd" and "Iaddend" stuff just shows the correcting phrase that was added to the claim during its reissue. Note that this phrase narrows the claim, by requiring that at least one site specific object must be a beacon.]
3. Does your candidate gizmo have both elements a. and b.? If so, claim 1 reads on it; otherwise, it does not.
4. Repeat steps 2. and 3.
Well, at least they can keep their nuvistors -- although it would be an interesting (if expensive) technical challenge to redo the project with the last gasp of vacuum tube technology.
As long as software engineering interviews involve writing code on a white board, I won't be moving on to another job.
Okay, but recognize that that is a decision you've made -- one that will make it difficult for you to move around the industry.
Another decision you could have made would have been to practice writing code on a white board, to become better at interviews that use this technique. You don't have to change the way you code at work; just practice the "interview method" for what it is -- an artificial problem to be solved. You didn't complain about written tests with numbered problems in school, did you? They're just as artificial.
When I find my career getting stale, I try to change the venue. If you write enterprise code, try moving to embedded software. If you write code for a commercial enterprise, try writing for an academic or government organization. Or vice versa.
Alternatively, identify a hobby or avocation you have, and write code in that area. Many people have changed avocations to vocations in this way by finding job openings via the hobby grapevine.
I'm more concerned with your apparent short-selling of yourself. Having poor interviewing and resume-writing skills is not a lifetime curse; like all skills, one gets better with practice, and the practice is free. Patrick McKenzie has useful advice in this area.
See this comment. You absolutely cannot call yourself whatever you want in the US. Rules vary by state, but in almost all states the reason you have every right to call yourself an engineer if you work in the engineering department of a company in an Engineering capacity, is because that industry is specifically exempted from such requirements (in Florida, it's the aerospace and military industries, with some other, lesser, exceptions). Calling oneself a "Software Engineer" without also being a Registered Professional Engineer is specifically listed as a prohibited act in the statues.
The "certification organizations" are irrelevant; this is state law.
Note this passage in the Florida statutes (471.031 (1)(b)1.): "A person may not [...] use the name or title “professional engineer” or any other title, designation, words, letters, abbreviations, or device tending to indicate that such person holds an active license as an engineer when the person is not licensed under this chapter, including, but not limited to, the following titles: [...] 'software engineer,' 'computer hardware engineer,' or 'systems engineer.'"
I can tell you from personal experience that the State of Florida will prosecute someone simply for having a business card with the title of "Software Engineer" who is not a Registered Professional Engineer in the state. (No, it wasn't my card.) People thinking that "people with creative job titles [...] are not being prosecuted for calling themselves by their job titles or degrees UNLESS they hang out a shingle and open a contract engineering company or are claiming to own a company that holds an authorization certificate and does not" are living in a dreamworld. A printed card clearly violating a statute is what's known in the legal profession as "physical evidence," and prosecutors wanting an easy conviction love these kinds of cases.
The author, Patrick McKenzie, describes himself as an "awkward twenty-something CEO of a multinational company." As an "awkward fifty-something CTO of a multinational company," I can state that I have never read a more truthful and cogent collection of career advice for this profession.
What he says is the way it is.
Yeah, but what you've done is make everyone who imports a laser for a legitimate purpose (astronomy teachers, et al.) but doesn't fill out form B710, and form B709B or B711, and then wait three weeks, a criminal. Whether or not he's prosecuted, receives a caution, or is ignored completely is now up to the whim of the authorities.
In general, this is poor public policy because, as the saying goes, "when everyone is a criminal, the authorities can arrest whoever they please." Making a common act illegal is one of the favorite tools of despots.
*sigh*
Age. It has to be age.