That's completely aside the point though. I know how to do these things, and yes, have done them in the past in order to make some things work that would have been otherwise infeasible. I was also careful about causing harmful interference and stopped as soon as possible.
The thing you mention are different from this situation for two reasons. First, nobody cares. Sure, you can disrupt the frequency band of your choice in some small geographic area, but you're only one person. If you're disruptive enough you'll have a station wagon of greasy ham radio operators sitting in your driveway pretending to be important and calling the FCC. Second, this has a barrier of entry that is much higher than downloading some 'super-power' or 'off-band' patch for your wireless card.
The situation breaks down when every 20th laptop is interfering with your signal. The FCC does a lot of things I don't like, including some of their band allocation and power regulations, but I do appreciate not having to go on a witch hunt every time I break out my laptop at the coffee shop. It's an issue of ease of use, scale, and relevance.
So what's your solution to the FCC's dilemma on hardware restrictions? I don't see any practical way of restricting the hardware to the right frequency bands and power levels without what is in place right now. I don't think it's a practical option to leave it all open to manipulation, even though the regulations against harmful usage are in place they're next to impossible to effectively enforce but are also important to the smooth function of the whole system.
For what it's worth my philosophy isn't to push yourself to the max, but just generally upward and see where it takes you. It landed me at MIT building robots and I'm about as far from miserable as I can get. Taking your chances and shooting high doesn't mean pushing yourself to the max all the time, just sometimes. And if you didn't do it sometimes how could you ever know what you're capable of?
I don't really understand what point you're trying to make. A lot of plumbing and electrical work IS engineering. The engineers know that all their analysis tools are based on physics and it doesn't take a physicist to understand how the support systems work and how to analyze them. The design of the systems is NOT a physics experiment, all the phenomena at work were well pinned down before anyone even thought of making the LHC. This is an engineering problem just like the space shuttle is an engineering problem. Just because the engineers didn't account for a particular failure case doesn't mean that the underlying dynamics aren't known.
Speaking of pages smeared with Cheetos marks, I can't wait until I can get a set of DnD books for the reader. PDFs get the job done on my laptop, but the form factor of the Kindle would be a real win.
May I ask what your line of reasoning is? Seeing that someone has an active social life, which is about all you can infer from that, would make the applicant more appealing to me. What is such a photo incriminating of?
The Student Information Processing Board at MIT really has what you're looking for. All sorts of advanced services for students and lots of education from Haskell to hacking to LaTeX. They do a lot and do a pretty damn good job at it too.
A word of warning though, if you ever needed to fulfill a stereotype about nerds look no further than their ample Linux Beards. These guys mean business.
Does anyone else here think this has more to do with the fact that the US isn't the center of the technological world any more? Earth is a big, big place and the United States is a small part of it, why should we expect to be the Internet's hub in any case? Isn't it a lot more plausible that routes that don't go through the US are preferred because they're better?
My dad had his wedding ring tattooed on and it worked out rather well. Wearing a normal ring is both dangerous and inconvenient for most people who work with their hands. Among all the normal things like getting the ring crushed, the finger swelling, needing to take it off for other hand injuries people often miss such wonderful things as electrical arcing across the ring (I've seen this happen to a titanium watch, melted a few of the links right into the guy's wrist) or it holding nasty chemicals you might be working with close to your skin instead of getting washed off or evaporating quickly.
Not just what we think of as 'tech' jobs on Slashdot either. Tradition engineering, graphic design, writing, research, marketing, even *gasp* business management fall under the same umbrella. I've found that most jobs that require a hard to develop skills are much the same. I could care less if an engineer isn't even 80% productive, if he's the one that suggests the design improvement or catches the error that saves the product then it's worth it to try to get him on the team. I'd much rather have the employee that has reliably solid work and demands to be happy at work than the one that spends the extra 20% of productivity muddling along (which is what my experience with the vast majority of engineers has been). A lot of jobs don't come down to how much you get done in a day, but whether what you did was worthwhile.
Why don't batteries work for VOIP from the cable company? I've got the cable modem, router, and wireless AP all on a UPS in my household. The phones all work when the power goes out and I stay online with my laptop like nothing happened.
What? The last link in THA goes to a fluffy news article on the university website. At the end of the article is a link to the actual study:
"An online copy of the study, 'You cannot be serious! Public Understanding of Technology with special reference to `Hawk-Eye' Public Understanding of Science, 17, 3, 283-308 can be accessed at: http://pus.sagepub.com/cgi/content/short/0963662508093370v1"
For those that didn't care to RTFA, the study is in the journal 'Public Understanding of Science' and (gooly who would have guessed) doesn't have anything to do with the summary written. They argue that uncertainties in measurement that normally don't impact the layman now need to be presented in an understandable way. They worry that people will wrongfully become too trusting of the systems that do have appreciable error in rare circumstances.
To inject my own opinion on the matter, I've had a little bit of experience with Vicon motion capture systems which appear to use similar technology to the Hawkeye system. The main problem with the system (when it works) isn't any problem with accuracy or precision. In fact, it's awesome. The problem is that the output is a little noisy and suffers from occasional jumps and hiccups. With proper filtering these are eliminated and the output is amazing. I can only imagine the problem is much easier when you're tracking a single ball rather than tens of tiny reflective makers such as with the Vicon system.
I've actually needed to use my TI-89 at the supermarket a few times. Good luck trying to figure out the optimal way to buy $100 of hot dogs, buns, and condiments when they carry different prices for different sized packages and have limited numbers of certain types of items. Making chocolate chip cookies? You can make 30 batches of the Toll House recipe for $100, the limiting item is butter.
I think I'll write a MATLAB script to do this next time and bring my laptop, maybe include a way to bias the optimization in favor of certain better ingredients...
Slashdot Mirror
And suddenly the output of my filter stopped ringing! Now we just have to make positive reals into negatives and we'll really be set.
What power does the FCC have over health care?
That's completely aside the point though. I know how to do these things, and yes, have done them in the past in order to make some things work that would have been otherwise infeasible. I was also careful about causing harmful interference and stopped as soon as possible.
The thing you mention are different from this situation for two reasons. First, nobody cares. Sure, you can disrupt the frequency band of your choice in some small geographic area, but you're only one person. If you're disruptive enough you'll have a station wagon of greasy ham radio operators sitting in your driveway pretending to be important and calling the FCC. Second, this has a barrier of entry that is much higher than downloading some 'super-power' or 'off-band' patch for your wireless card.
The situation breaks down when every 20th laptop is interfering with your signal. The FCC does a lot of things I don't like, including some of their band allocation and power regulations, but I do appreciate not having to go on a witch hunt every time I break out my laptop at the coffee shop. It's an issue of ease of use, scale, and relevance.
So what's your solution to the FCC's dilemma on hardware restrictions? I don't see any practical way of restricting the hardware to the right frequency bands and power levels without what is in place right now. I don't think it's a practical option to leave it all open to manipulation, even though the regulations against harmful usage are in place they're next to impossible to effectively enforce but are also important to the smooth function of the whole system.
The Vault-Tec Corporation will be providing them all with Pip-Boy 3000s. We were talking about surviving nuclear war, right?
Then why are they recruiting some of the best mathematicians I know?
For what it's worth my philosophy isn't to push yourself to the max, but just generally upward and see where it takes you. It landed me at MIT building robots and I'm about as far from miserable as I can get. Taking your chances and shooting high doesn't mean pushing yourself to the max all the time, just sometimes. And if you didn't do it sometimes how could you ever know what you're capable of?
I don't really understand what point you're trying to make. A lot of plumbing and electrical work IS engineering. The engineers know that all their analysis tools are based on physics and it doesn't take a physicist to understand how the support systems work and how to analyze them. The design of the systems is NOT a physics experiment, all the phenomena at work were well pinned down before anyone even thought of making the LHC. This is an engineering problem just like the space shuttle is an engineering problem. Just because the engineers didn't account for a particular failure case doesn't mean that the underlying dynamics aren't known.
Well at least now that we've found the Badness Gene we finally have someone to blame for all those underfull hboxes.
Speaking of pages smeared with Cheetos marks, I can't wait until I can get a set of DnD books for the reader. PDFs get the job done on my laptop, but the form factor of the Kindle would be a real win.
And the reporting the The Tech sucks as much as it ever has. Oh how the times have changed (and haven't)
May I ask what your line of reasoning is? Seeing that someone has an active social life, which is about all you can infer from that, would make the applicant more appealing to me. What is such a photo incriminating of?
http://stuff.mit.edu/sipb/
The Student Information Processing Board at MIT really has what you're looking for. All sorts of advanced services for students and lots of education from Haskell to hacking to LaTeX. They do a lot and do a pretty damn good job at it too.
A word of warning though, if you ever needed to fulfill a stereotype about nerds look no further than their ample Linux Beards. These guys mean business.
Does anyone else here think this has more to do with the fact that the US isn't the center of the technological world any more? Earth is a big, big place and the United States is a small part of it, why should we expect to be the Internet's hub in any case? Isn't it a lot more plausible that routes that don't go through the US are preferred because they're better?
My dad had his wedding ring tattooed on and it worked out rather well. Wearing a normal ring is both dangerous and inconvenient for most people who work with their hands. Among all the normal things like getting the ring crushed, the finger swelling, needing to take it off for other hand injuries people often miss such wonderful things as electrical arcing across the ring (I've seen this happen to a titanium watch, melted a few of the links right into the guy's wrist) or it holding nasty chemicals you might be working with close to your skin instead of getting washed off or evaporating quickly.
Citation Needed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Fuel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_speed_record
Don't worry, we've always got ALSA to fall back on!
Not just what we think of as 'tech' jobs on Slashdot either. Tradition engineering, graphic design, writing, research, marketing, even *gasp* business management fall under the same umbrella. I've found that most jobs that require a hard to develop skills are much the same. I could care less if an engineer isn't even 80% productive, if he's the one that suggests the design improvement or catches the error that saves the product then it's worth it to try to get him on the team. I'd much rather have the employee that has reliably solid work and demands to be happy at work than the one that spends the extra 20% of productivity muddling along (which is what my experience with the vast majority of engineers has been). A lot of jobs don't come down to how much you get done in a day, but whether what you did was worthwhile.
Don't forget the space bounty hunters. Venus Sickness can be a real pain in the ass too.
Why don't batteries work for VOIP from the cable company? I've got the cable modem, router, and wireless AP all on a UPS in my household. The phones all work when the power goes out and I stay online with my laptop like nothing happened.
What? The last link in THA goes to a fluffy news article on the university website. At the end of the article is a link to the actual study:
"An online copy of the study, 'You cannot be serious! Public Understanding of Technology with special reference to `Hawk-Eye' Public Understanding of Science, 17, 3, 283-308 can be accessed at:
http://pus.sagepub.com/cgi/content/short/0963662508093370v1"
For those that didn't care to RTFA, the study is in the journal 'Public Understanding of Science' and (gooly who would have guessed) doesn't have anything to do with the summary written. They argue that uncertainties in measurement that normally don't impact the layman now need to be presented in an understandable way. They worry that people will wrongfully become too trusting of the systems that do have appreciable error in rare circumstances.
To inject my own opinion on the matter, I've had a little bit of experience with Vicon motion capture systems which appear to use similar technology to the Hawkeye system. The main problem with the system (when it works) isn't any problem with accuracy or precision. In fact, it's awesome. The problem is that the output is a little noisy and suffers from occasional jumps and hiccups. With proper filtering these are eliminated and the output is amazing. I can only imagine the problem is much easier when you're tracking a single ball rather than tens of tiny reflective makers such as with the Vicon system.
Hey now, the building I live in at MIT has its own Class B and that's the way I likes it!
If you ever see someone from 18.238.*.* make sure to say hello.
Project of mine from a few years ago: http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=89645
:p
I think it's somewhat applicable to the discussion
I've actually needed to use my TI-89 at the supermarket a few times. Good luck trying to figure out the optimal way to buy $100 of hot dogs, buns, and condiments when they carry different prices for different sized packages and have limited numbers of certain types of items. Making chocolate chip cookies? You can make 30 batches of the Toll House recipe for $100, the limiting item is butter.
I think I'll write a MATLAB script to do this next time and bring my laptop, maybe include a way to bias the optimization in favor of certain better ingredients...