IIRC (this is mid-90s) that technology was patented by Hagenuk.
The only US patent I could find assigned to Hagenuk that discusses antennas was 5886668, which doesn't mention radiation absorbed by the body at all. Can you supply a reference?
This is incorrect. 802.11 is both -- it specifies both the MAC and a number of physical (PHY) layers, better known as the "radio" part. The standards can be downloaded here -- for free -- if you'd like to see for yourself.
The funny part is, those corporate researchers that I've met -- and it would be dozens over the years -- all use cell phones, and buy them for their spouses and children. What cold-hearted bastards! Or ignorant fools! Or both!
And the corporate cell phone designers that I've met -- and it would be hundreds over the years -- all use cell phones and, despite their decades of work on improving the size, weight, battery life, and range of their devices, never once realized that it would be to their competitive advantage to minimize any radiation absorbed by the body, since that represents wasted energy that could have been used to reach the cell tower instead. Idiots!
But the managerial genius of the corporations! They can stay in the business for twenty years or more, and each hire hundreds of EM researchers and tens of thousands of engineers, without one of them cracking and letting the Great Corporate Secret -- those Top Secret studies that show how dangerous cell phones are -- out to the public. The maintained secrecy would impress the NSA and NRO, while the control of their people would impress Kim Jong-un. Masterful!
the operator at the control center has a little bit of unfocused goofiness.
You mean Joe Kittenger, the man who holds the existing record, the man Felix trusts implicitly, and possesses the only voice that Felix wants to hear in his capsule?
When you are old enough to need bifocals, you'll appreciate the difference between "unfocused goofiness" and just trying to see.
. . . it reminds us all to embrace the challenges of exploration and to never stop discovering.
Placed just above the submission, "Astronomy Portfolio Review Recommends Defunding US's Biggest Telescope," the combination tells you all you need to know.
The application was not "filed in June." The application was published in June. From TFPA (after all, the link is to a patent application, not an article):
PRIORITY CLAIM
[0001] This application claims priority to and the benefit of U.S. Provisional Patent Application Ser. No. 61/422,895, filed Dec. 14, 2010, entitled "Method of Monitoring or Tracking Customer Demographics and Volume in a Venue or Similar Facility", the entire contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference and relied upon.
The provisional patent application was made on 14 December 2010. The full utility patent application was made on 13 December 2011 (also from TFPA). The reason the application was published in June 2012 is that the utility application claims the priority date of the provisional application, and June was eighteen months after that date.
In your view, what about the "end product" has to change in order for the improvement to be patentable? Manufacturing cost? Ease of assembly? Size? Features? Power consumption?
Nearly all patentable improvements I've seen result in a change in a product -- otherwise, no one would make the improvement in the first place -- but what's the "end product"? Is it the chip the new circuit goes into, sold by the semiconductor manufacturer? The radio using the chip, sold by the radio company? The car using the radio, sold by the car company? Not every invention patented is put into a consumer product by an OEM.
I hear this a lot, and I'm not against it at all, but I'd like to understand more about how you'd like that to work.
Suppose, for example, we take something like the FM demodulator in a radio. When Edwin Armstrong invented it, back in the stone age of the 1930s, I think we can all agree that (a) it was an "actual physical device," and (b) that it met all the other criteria (novelty, non-obviousness, etc.) needed for a patent. It was implemented with the technology available at the time -- stone knives, bear skins, and vacuum tubes (valves).
Skipping over details like the invention of ratio detectors, etc., the next change in implementation of FM detectors came when the tubes were replaced with discrete transistors. This required some change in bias methods, impedance levels, etc., but no major redesign. It did save cost, size, and power, though.
The next change was integration. At first, the transformer was still needed for the demodulator, and so it was pinned out of the ICs, which were still analog. This saved cost, size, and power still further.
Later, schemes were found to integrate the function of the transformer, fully integrating the (still analog) demodulator. This saved cost and size still further.
Still later, improvements in integration processes enabled the function of the FM demodulator to be performed digitally, using an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and a bunch of hard-wired logic gates, emulating the mathematical function performed by the analog demodulator. This saved cost, size, and power still further.
After that, demodulator designs were moved into hardware register-transfer languages, like Verilog, providing portability from chip to chip, and enabling one to program the hardware in a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) to become, when preceded by the ADC, an FM demodulator. This saved cost.
Demodulator designs were next ported into programmable hardware dedicated to signal-processing applications (digital signal processors); this required the ADC, plus the Verilog algorithm to be converted to the DSP's assembly language. This saved cost and size.
Finally, technology improved to the point that the FM demodulator could be made by an ADC followed by a microcomputer, programmed with software in a high-level language as part of a much larger system. This saved cost.
At what point in this development do we draw the line and say, "Below this, it's not patentable?"
You may find Richard Rhodes' Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb interesting. It discusses a lot of detail in various hydrogen bomb designs, and why things are as they (possibly) are. (The technical points all seem to be internally consistent but, other than that, I have no way of verifying the accuracy of the book. Still, it's a great geek read.) Even the Wikipedia entry is enlightening.
One point is that it's tough to get deuterium hot enough to fuse, without having the energy radiate away as just a bright X-ray source, cooling things back off. (Turning a liability into an asset -- using pressure from the radiation of the fission first stage to compress and ignite the fusion second stage -- is supposed to be one of the key ideas of the Bomb.)
Nuclear weapons do not "rely on mushing things together quickly enough to generate fission." Nuclear weapons take material that is already fissioning at a very low rate -- or on the edge of doing so, and can be made to do so by the addition of the appropriate neutron source -- and "mushes it together" fast enough and dense enough that the resulting chain reaction occurs very rapidly, creating an explosion instead of just a general warming of the material.
The "mushing" is what creates the explosion, not what creates the fission. The fission is a property of the material itself, which is why the international control of fissionable material -- primarily plutonium and enriched uranium -- is sufficient to control the spread of nuclear weapons (in theory). Nuclear arms control is not done by controlling "things that mush."
(a) explain how an impact can make something radioactive; (b) cite a source for your belief that these diamonds are radioactive; or (c) stop going on and on about it?
Don't get so hung up on the UPS Service Guarantee (section 47, pdf page 32, paper page 29):
In the event UPS fails to attempt delivery within the time published on the UPS website, or as provided when 1-800-PICK-UPS® is called, UPS, at its option, will either credit or refund the transportation charges for each such package to the payer only, upon request, provided the conditions set forth in the UPS Service Guarantee are met. Transportation charges do not include other fees or charges that may be assessed by UPS including, but not limited to, fuel surcharges. This is the sole remedy available under the UPS Service Guarantee.
UPS shall not be liable for any damages whatsoever for delayed delivery, except as specifically provided for shipments made under the UPS Service Guarantee. Under no circumstances shall UPS be liable for any special, incidental, or consequential damages including, but not limited to, damages arising from delayed delivery or failure to attempt on-schedule delivery.
UPS may cancel or suspend the UPS Service Guarantee for any service(s), and for any period of time, as determined by UPS in its sole discretion, and without prior notice.[Emphasis added.]
What follows (in Section 47.1) is seven bullets of conditions, followed (in Section 47.2) by eleven bullets of exclusions.
I don't have a problem with UPS -- they've always treated me, and my packages, well -- but I'm not under any illusions that I could actually get a court judgement from them based on their terms of service, should they decide not to refund their shipping charges on a lost parcel, and I decided to sue. Any service guarantee that may be canceled by the service provider, at its sole discretion and without prior notice, isn't very reassuring.
Resending a packet due to a missed ACK takes up air time, just like it did sending it the first time, and the carriers have no control on where the user will be. If they make their systems robust enough to move their present average packet reception rate from an already-good 93-95% to, say, 99%, this will only enable their users to move down another floor in their sub-basements, or another few city blocks, or another cubicle row deeper into the building, before the average goes back down again -- after all, wireless systems have limited range. The cost of the new infrastructure would be roughly twice that of the previous one ("increasing coverage is increasingly expensive"), and you're going to pay for the cost of the infrastructure either way in your air-time charges.
Look at it this way: Even if the company only charged for packets successfully received, it would just increase their rates by (1/0.95) - 1 = 5.3% to (1/0.93) - 1 = 7.5% to maintain the same cash flow. Plus it would have to start keeping track of the success or failure of each packet transmitted, and put that into its billing scheme. That's a database PITA I don't want, thank you very much.
In the new company, software is not what this company does primarily.
I've always tried to be in companies in which what I did was directly tied to the company's main business. There is an analogy to a river: You want to be in the main stream, not in some backwater, so that when things get tight and money dries up, you're not left high and dry -- as in, a department or division that can be conveniently closed as a "cost reduction," with little (immediate) effect on their main business.
A corollary to this applies to physical locations, too: Remote sites will be closed before corporate headquarters will be, so pay attention to your job's location.
Besides, if you're not in the company's main business, you could develop a fabulous thing, and nobody at your company will appreciate it. (Think Xerox PARC. There are many examples at smaller scales.)
This leads to something that has always puzzled me about American political parties -- their legal status. Are they non-profit corporations, or something? Other than the brownshirts, what keeps me from opening up a storefront down the street from the local Republican Party headquarters, and call my place the local Republican Party headquarters, instead -- complete with candidates that I support, fundraisers, etc.?
The Bureau of Industry and Security, US Department of Commerce, is the place to go to see the appropriate regulations. See, especially, the Export Administration Regulations, the Commerce Control List (especially), and the Lists to Check list. (Yes, there are so many lists that the lists themselves have a list.)
There are lots of reasons for weather delays of rocket launches, but one of them is wind. I've been told (by actual rocket scientists, with only a few Green Martians* in them at the time) that there are two critical factors related to wind -- the wind speed itself and its variability, i.e., gusts -- and that the reasons both trace back to the limitations of the directional-control system of the engines (i.e., the gimbals) and the guidance system of the rocket.
The limitation on maximum wind speed is related to the range of control of the engines (i.e., how many degrees off the axis of the rocket the engines can point), since that eventually works back to how large a wind-compensating vector is available to the guidance system. The gust limitation is related to the response speed (slew rate) of the engine gimbals, since that eventually works back to how fast the guidance system can respond to changes in wind speed and/or direction. ________ *Equal parts vodka, Midori, sour mix, ginger ale, 7-Up, and soda, in case you're curious. Once a favorite of that crowd, back in the day.
To put it bluntly, professors don't care about undergraduate students with this attitude, or any other.
FTFY.
And I would say that that goes double for professors teaching undergraduate required classes (chemistry, biology, physics, etc.) at universities that have medical schools. At the U.S. university I attended (a large state school with more than 30,000 students at the time), people interested in learning chemistry need not apply, because the goal was to avoid teaching freshmen at all costs -- too many students might pass, and then how would they fund the sophomore organic chemistry classes? Besides, they could save money on teaching assistants and labs because a sufficiently small fraction of the pre-med students would still pass, without instruction. Since these students did, in fact, pass, they used the fact of their passing as a justification of these policies -- after all, everyone knows chemistry is difficult, right? Nobody asked how many undergraduate chemistry majors went into chemistry as a profession, or became chemistry grad students (all of them were from other schools, mostly overseas).
When my brother went through the program a few years later, he found out that, despite the department's best efforts, too many freshmen were still passing chemistry. Since the 200-student class was down to a single, massively-overworked graduate teaching assistant, the minimum allowed by regulation, they had thought of something else: They contacted the math department, and coordinated the mid-term exams for the freshman chemistry and freshman calculus classes, so that they occurred on the same night: chemistry 6-8 PM, calculus 8-10 PM. That bit of synergism did the trick -- both classes' passing rate dropped to "acceptable" levels.
Oh, and not to worry -- this isn't a case of sour grapes. I passed very well, thank you, and got three graduate degrees to boot, so I'm none the worse for wear. However, as a result of this and a litany of similar experiences, I don't suffer undergraduate teaching apologists gladly.
The professors I know say that "technology" has had a bigger effect on their students than it has on themselves -- specifically, their lack of concern with plagiarism. Having grown up with Google and the Internet, when asked to write a paper discussing, say, the contributions to Twentieth-Century culture of recently-deceased Lithuanian tennis champions, the students' normal way of research is to Google the topic, find a relevant web site, copy the material, and present it.
They're often shocked when the plagiarism is noted and the fail the assignment because, after all, the paper is on-topic and factually true (let's suppose); what's the issue? The concept that one needs to come up with his own ideas and opinions is often a foreign one to someone who has grown up using the web as an immediate source of all the world's knowledge. I suspect, but of course cannot prove, that developing one's own opinions was an easier and more natural thing when one had to search multiple libraries for bits and pieces of the subject matter here and there; often your opinion developed over time, based on the facts you were able to find, and the order in which you found them.
Students (and professors) have been plagiarizing since the second piece of paper was made, of course; the new issue is that many students today do not see a problem with it. Because of this, the highest level of technology some professors use is their plagiarism-detect software.
Yeah, I know, having done the same myself, but I was trying to think of the reason it felt much more exclusive to be flying in the 1960s than it does to be flying international First Class today, and I guess I didn't hit it. Maybe it was that in the 1960s there were no class upgrades, so the people in First Class paid for their tickets? Or that fewer people flew, so that First class was a small fraction of a smaller fraction of the population (the rest of which could be seen down below, traveling on the ground)? Or that you were in such luxury, even though you were only flying from Cleveland to Chicago?
Flying with Qatar it's even possible to make the whole journey without seeing an economy class passenger.
That was one of the amusing things about flying the Concorde out of Heathrow: Concorde-only ticketing, Concorde-only security station, Concorde-only gate area -- you made the whole journey without seeing so much as a BA First Class passenger on any other flight. It was like you had your own private airport (which, I suppose, was the intent).
Formal dress was de rigueur because, at the time, it wasn't a "simple transportation event." You were flying, something that only the upper class did, so you dressed as if you were a member of the upper class (or as close as you could get). Once jets came in in the 1950s, you were not only flying, you were part of the "Jet Set"!
Besides, you were being seen by the public, and who wouldn't want to make a good first impression on someone you just met? After all, this was an era when people wore suits and ties to baseball and football games.
If you think today's US domestic First Class is the same as flying in the 1960s, you need to go back to the 1960s and have another look. Stewardesses called you by your name -- "Mr. Smith, Mrs. Jones." It was a different era -- and not only because one had "stewardesses" instead of "flight attendants."
The last time I had service similar to 1960s US domestic First Class was on the Concorde, and we all know how that turned out. The closest thing now is international First Class on some of the Asian airlines, like Singapore Air and Malaysia Air.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC (this is mid-90s) that technology was patented by Hagenuk.
The only US patent I could find assigned to Hagenuk that discusses antennas was 5886668, which doesn't mention radiation absorbed by the body at all. Can you supply a reference?
802.11 is a MAC standard, not a radio standard.
This is incorrect. 802.11 is both -- it specifies both the MAC and a number of physical (PHY) layers, better known as the "radio" part. The standards can be downloaded here -- for free -- if you'd like to see for yourself.
The funny part is, those corporate researchers that I've met -- and it would be dozens over the years -- all use cell phones, and buy them for their spouses and children. What cold-hearted bastards! Or ignorant fools! Or both!
And the corporate cell phone designers that I've met -- and it would be hundreds over the years -- all use cell phones and, despite their decades of work on improving the size, weight, battery life, and range of their devices, never once realized that it would be to their competitive advantage to minimize any radiation absorbed by the body, since that represents wasted energy that could have been used to reach the cell tower instead. Idiots!
But the managerial genius of the corporations! They can stay in the business for twenty years or more, and each hire hundreds of EM researchers and tens of thousands of engineers, without one of them cracking and letting the Great Corporate Secret -- those Top Secret studies that show how dangerous cell phones are -- out to the public. The maintained secrecy would impress the NSA and NRO, while the control of their people would impress Kim Jong-un. Masterful!
the operator at the control center has a little bit of unfocused goofiness.
You mean Joe Kittenger, the man who holds the existing record, the man Felix trusts implicitly, and possesses the only voice that Felix wants to hear in his capsule?
When you are old enough to need bifocals, you'll appreciate the difference between "unfocused goofiness" and just trying to see.
I assume no one there was making a server?
. . . it reminds us all to embrace the challenges of exploration and to never stop discovering.
Placed just above the submission, "Astronomy Portfolio Review Recommends Defunding US's Biggest Telescope," the combination tells you all you need to know.
The application was not "filed in June." The application was published in June. From TFPA (after all, the link is to a patent application, not an article):
PRIORITY CLAIM
[0001] This application claims priority to and the benefit of U.S. Provisional Patent Application Ser. No. 61/422,895, filed Dec. 14, 2010, entitled "Method of Monitoring or Tracking Customer Demographics and Volume in a Venue or Similar Facility", the entire contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference and relied upon.
The provisional patent application was made on 14 December 2010. The full utility patent application was made on 13 December 2011 (also from TFPA). The reason the application was published in June 2012 is that the utility application claims the priority date of the provisional application, and June was eighteen months after that date.
In your view, what about the "end product" has to change in order for the improvement to be patentable? Manufacturing cost? Ease of assembly? Size? Features? Power consumption?
Nearly all patentable improvements I've seen result in a change in a product -- otherwise, no one would make the improvement in the first place -- but what's the "end product"? Is it the chip the new circuit goes into, sold by the semiconductor manufacturer? The radio using the chip, sold by the radio company? The car using the radio, sold by the car company? Not every invention patented is put into a consumer product by an OEM.
Okay, but that doesn't answer the question asked: At what point in this development do we draw the line and say, "Below this, it's not patentable?"
Patents should be for actual physical devices.
I hear this a lot, and I'm not against it at all, but I'd like to understand more about how you'd like that to work.
Suppose, for example, we take something like the FM demodulator in a radio. When Edwin Armstrong invented it, back in the stone age of the 1930s, I think we can all agree that (a) it was an "actual physical device," and (b) that it met all the other criteria (novelty, non-obviousness, etc.) needed for a patent. It was implemented with the technology available at the time -- stone knives, bear skins, and vacuum tubes (valves).
Skipping over details like the invention of ratio detectors, etc., the next change in implementation of FM detectors came when the tubes were replaced with discrete transistors. This required some change in bias methods, impedance levels, etc., but no major redesign. It did save cost, size, and power, though.
The next change was integration. At first, the transformer was still needed for the demodulator, and so it was pinned out of the ICs, which were still analog. This saved cost, size, and power still further.
Later, schemes were found to integrate the function of the transformer, fully integrating the (still analog) demodulator. This saved cost and size still further.
Still later, improvements in integration processes enabled the function of the FM demodulator to be performed digitally, using an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and a bunch of hard-wired logic gates, emulating the mathematical function performed by the analog demodulator. This saved cost, size, and power still further.
After that, demodulator designs were moved into hardware register-transfer languages, like Verilog, providing portability from chip to chip, and enabling one to program the hardware in a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) to become, when preceded by the ADC, an FM demodulator. This saved cost.
Demodulator designs were next ported into programmable hardware dedicated to signal-processing applications (digital signal processors); this required the ADC, plus the Verilog algorithm to be converted to the DSP's assembly language. This saved cost and size.
Finally, technology improved to the point that the FM demodulator could be made by an ADC followed by a microcomputer, programmed with software in a high-level language as part of a much larger system. This saved cost.
At what point in this development do we draw the line and say, "Below this, it's not patentable?"
You may find Richard Rhodes' Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb interesting. It discusses a lot of detail in various hydrogen bomb designs, and why things are as they (possibly) are. (The technical points all seem to be internally consistent but, other than that, I have no way of verifying the accuracy of the book. Still, it's a great geek read.) Even the Wikipedia entry is enlightening.
One point is that it's tough to get deuterium hot enough to fuse, without having the energy radiate away as just a bright X-ray source, cooling things back off. (Turning a liability into an asset -- using pressure from the radiation of the fission first stage to compress and ignite the fusion second stage -- is supposed to be one of the key ideas of the Bomb.)
Nuclear weapons do not "rely on mushing things together quickly enough to generate fission." Nuclear weapons take material that is already fissioning at a very low rate -- or on the edge of doing so, and can be made to do so by the addition of the appropriate neutron source -- and "mushes it together" fast enough and dense enough that the resulting chain reaction occurs very rapidly, creating an explosion instead of just a general warming of the material.
The "mushing" is what creates the explosion, not what creates the fission. The fission is a property of the material itself, which is why the international control of fissionable material -- primarily plutonium and enriched uranium -- is sufficient to control the spread of nuclear weapons (in theory). Nuclear arms control is not done by controlling "things that mush."
Can you either:
(a) explain how an impact can make something radioactive;
(b) cite a source for your belief that these diamonds are radioactive; or
(c) stop going on and on about it?
Thank you.
Don't get so hung up on the UPS Service Guarantee (section 47, pdf page 32, paper page 29):
In the event UPS fails to attempt delivery within the time published on the UPS website, or as provided when 1-800-PICK-UPS® is called, UPS, at its option, will either credit or refund the transportation charges for each such package to the payer only, upon request, provided the conditions set forth in the UPS Service Guarantee are met. Transportation charges do not include other fees or charges that may be assessed by UPS including, but not limited to, fuel surcharges. This is the sole remedy available under the UPS Service Guarantee.
UPS shall not be liable for any damages whatsoever for delayed delivery, except as specifically provided for shipments made under the UPS Service Guarantee. Under no circumstances shall UPS be liable for any special, incidental, or consequential damages including, but not limited to, damages arising from delayed delivery or failure to attempt on-schedule delivery.
UPS may cancel or suspend the UPS Service Guarantee for any service(s), and for any period of time, as determined by UPS in its sole discretion, and without prior notice.[Emphasis added.]
What follows (in Section 47.1) is seven bullets of conditions, followed (in Section 47.2) by eleven bullets of exclusions.
I don't have a problem with UPS -- they've always treated me, and my packages, well -- but I'm not under any illusions that I could actually get a court judgement from them based on their terms of service, should they decide not to refund their shipping charges on a lost parcel, and I decided to sue. Any service guarantee that may be canceled by the service provider, at its sole discretion and without prior notice, isn't very reassuring.
Resending a packet due to a missed ACK takes up air time, just like it did sending it the first time, and the carriers have no control on where the user will be. If they make their systems robust enough to move their present average packet reception rate from an already-good 93-95% to, say, 99%, this will only enable their users to move down another floor in their sub-basements, or another few city blocks, or another cubicle row deeper into the building, before the average goes back down again -- after all, wireless systems have limited range. The cost of the new infrastructure would be roughly twice that of the previous one ("increasing coverage is increasingly expensive"), and you're going to pay for the cost of the infrastructure either way in your air-time charges.
Look at it this way: Even if the company only charged for packets successfully received, it would just increase their rates by (1/0.95) - 1 = 5.3% to (1/0.93) - 1 = 7.5% to maintain the same cash flow. Plus it would have to start keeping track of the success or failure of each packet transmitted, and put that into its billing scheme. That's a database PITA I don't want, thank you very much.
The red flag for me was,
In the new company, software is not what this company does primarily.
I've always tried to be in companies in which what I did was directly tied to the company's main business. There is an analogy to a river: You want to be in the main stream, not in some backwater, so that when things get tight and money dries up, you're not left high and dry -- as in, a department or division that can be conveniently closed as a "cost reduction," with little (immediate) effect on their main business.
A corollary to this applies to physical locations, too: Remote sites will be closed before corporate headquarters will be, so pay attention to your job's location.
Besides, if you're not in the company's main business, you could develop a fabulous thing, and nobody at your company will appreciate it. (Think Xerox PARC. There are many examples at smaller scales.)
This leads to something that has always puzzled me about American political parties -- their legal status. Are they non-profit corporations, or something? Other than the brownshirts, what keeps me from opening up a storefront down the street from the local Republican Party headquarters, and call my place the local Republican Party headquarters, instead -- complete with candidates that I support, fundraisers, etc.?
20120037751, filed 26 April 2010. Not yet issued. . . .
The Bureau of Industry and Security, US Department of Commerce, is the place to go to see the appropriate regulations. See, especially, the Export Administration Regulations, the Commerce Control List (especially), and the Lists to Check list. (Yes, there are so many lists that the lists themselves have a list.)
There are lots of reasons for weather delays of rocket launches, but one of them is wind. I've been told (by actual rocket scientists, with only a few Green Martians* in them at the time) that there are two critical factors related to wind -- the wind speed itself and its variability, i.e., gusts -- and that the reasons both trace back to the limitations of the directional-control system of the engines (i.e., the gimbals) and the guidance system of the rocket.
The limitation on maximum wind speed is related to the range of control of the engines (i.e., how many degrees off the axis of the rocket the engines can point), since that eventually works back to how large a wind-compensating vector is available to the guidance system. The gust limitation is related to the response speed (slew rate) of the engine gimbals, since that eventually works back to how fast the guidance system can respond to changes in wind speed and/or direction.
________
*Equal parts vodka, Midori, sour mix, ginger ale, 7-Up, and soda, in case you're curious. Once a favorite of that crowd, back in the day.
To put it bluntly, professors don't care about undergraduate students with this attitude, or any other.
FTFY.
And I would say that that goes double for professors teaching undergraduate required classes (chemistry, biology, physics, etc.) at universities that have medical schools. At the U.S. university I attended (a large state school with more than 30,000 students at the time), people interested in learning chemistry need not apply, because the goal was to avoid teaching freshmen at all costs -- too many students might pass, and then how would they fund the sophomore organic chemistry classes? Besides, they could save money on teaching assistants and labs because a sufficiently small fraction of the pre-med students would still pass, without instruction. Since these students did, in fact, pass, they used the fact of their passing as a justification of these policies -- after all, everyone knows chemistry is difficult, right? Nobody asked how many undergraduate chemistry majors went into chemistry as a profession, or became chemistry grad students (all of them were from other schools, mostly overseas).
When my brother went through the program a few years later, he found out that, despite the department's best efforts, too many freshmen were still passing chemistry. Since the 200-student class was down to a single, massively-overworked graduate teaching assistant, the minimum allowed by regulation, they had thought of something else: They contacted the math department, and coordinated the mid-term exams for the freshman chemistry and freshman calculus classes, so that they occurred on the same night: chemistry 6-8 PM, calculus 8-10 PM. That bit of synergism did the trick -- both classes' passing rate dropped to "acceptable" levels.
Oh, and not to worry -- this isn't a case of sour grapes. I passed very well, thank you, and got three graduate degrees to boot, so I'm none the worse for wear. However, as a result of this and a litany of similar experiences, I don't suffer undergraduate teaching apologists gladly.
The professors I know say that "technology" has had a bigger effect on their students than it has on themselves -- specifically, their lack of concern with plagiarism. Having grown up with Google and the Internet, when asked to write a paper discussing, say, the contributions to Twentieth-Century culture of recently-deceased Lithuanian tennis champions, the students' normal way of research is to Google the topic, find a relevant web site, copy the material, and present it.
They're often shocked when the plagiarism is noted and the fail the assignment because, after all, the paper is on-topic and factually true (let's suppose); what's the issue? The concept that one needs to come up with his own ideas and opinions is often a foreign one to someone who has grown up using the web as an immediate source of all the world's knowledge. I suspect, but of course cannot prove, that developing one's own opinions was an easier and more natural thing when one had to search multiple libraries for bits and pieces of the subject matter here and there; often your opinion developed over time, based on the facts you were able to find, and the order in which you found them.
Students (and professors) have been plagiarizing since the second piece of paper was made, of course; the new issue is that many students today do not see a problem with it. Because of this, the highest level of technology some professors use is their plagiarism-detect software.
Yeah, I know, having done the same myself, but I was trying to think of the reason it felt much more exclusive to be flying in the 1960s than it does to be flying international First Class today, and I guess I didn't hit it. Maybe it was that in the 1960s there were no class upgrades, so the people in First Class paid for their tickets? Or that fewer people flew, so that First class was a small fraction of a smaller fraction of the population (the rest of which could be seen down below, traveling on the ground)? Or that you were in such luxury, even though you were only flying from Cleveland to Chicago?
Flying with Qatar it's even possible to make the whole journey without seeing an economy class passenger.
That was one of the amusing things about flying the Concorde out of Heathrow: Concorde-only ticketing, Concorde-only security station, Concorde-only gate area -- you made the whole journey without seeing so much as a BA First Class passenger on any other flight. It was like you had your own private airport (which, I suppose, was the intent).
Formal dress was de rigueur because, at the time, it wasn't a "simple transportation event." You were flying, something that only the upper class did, so you dressed as if you were a member of the upper class (or as close as you could get). Once jets came in in the 1950s, you were not only flying, you were part of the "Jet Set"!
Besides, you were being seen by the public, and who wouldn't want to make a good first impression on someone you just met? After all, this was an era when people wore suits and ties to baseball and football games.
If you think today's US domestic First Class is the same as flying in the 1960s, you need to go back to the 1960s and have another look. Stewardesses called you by your name -- "Mr. Smith, Mrs. Jones." It was a different era -- and not only because one had "stewardesses" instead of "flight attendants."
The last time I had service similar to 1960s US domestic First Class was on the Concorde, and we all know how that turned out. The closest thing now is international First Class on some of the Asian airlines, like Singapore Air and Malaysia Air.