These are not necessarily easy to find at consumer electronics stores. What they carry are el-cheapo trackballs, which may have the word "ergonomic" on them and some funky curved design, but they're awful to use.
The ones we have are made by Mouse-Trak and look as ugly as hell, cost $150 each, but are
a joy to use. They are used 24x7 and are in place on 8-CRT consoles, so they get heavily used and abused, and we send a few dozen back in each year to get repaired. Usually the problem is that the
track-ball itself (which weighs probably 10 times what you'd find in a el-cheapo trackball, think
back to the old "Missile Command" and "Centipede" games) has worn down, or the shafts it rides on.
Ronnie Ray-gun. Beam weapons = a waste of money
on
Weapons in Space
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Most of the money goes to beam weapons of one
kind of another. Still (and probably forever)
Flash Gordon technology.
Kinetic energy weapons are probably useful,
but testing and re-use are extremely difficult
things in the harsh space environment.
If you have a manned presence in space, the
most effective weapon to take out an enemy
satellite is probably a shotgun.
An online gaming/hardware 'zine vs a company that
doesn't have any products.
I do appreciate that there are issues regarding
journalism which must be defended, and it's great
that HardOCP is standing up for its rights. But
this isn't exactly the Pentagon Papers or 9/11 at stake here. When all is said and done, the only
people to have gained anything will be the lawyers.
Especially as you say that you cannot have a firewall, you have to assume that anything on the networked machine will eventually be hacked and your data stolen.
Viruses aren't the issue: the Microsoft software that came with your machine has all the vulnerabilities the hackers need.
Of course, you haven't told us what's so valuable about your data. Will your business immediately fold if it leaks out? Are you worried about having your customer list stolen? Do you have customer credit card numbers on your machine? Medical data? Bank records of your customers?
In most cases dealing with bank/medical customer data there are already federal standard you have to meet.
In summary, I would say that scientists and engineers already have a reasonably good handle on atoms and that the real R&D opportunities are in getting
better with bits.
Maybe the trend is right, but I know of several
really top-notch bit-coding and mathematics types
(*not* hardware-oriented) who got laid off from Bell Labs
in the big purge a few years back. These are guys who had no problems at all finding jobs at other
tech companies and MIT, despite the fact that those job markets are not particularly good right now. But Bell Labs no longer
needed them.
This will work, while the "create-your-own-CD-in-the-record-store" ideas have all failed. Why? Because coffee stores don't sell stamped music CD's. Music stores do sell stamped music CD's. Every burnt CD a music store sold was probably a loss of three stamped CD's they might have otherwise sold.
As I understand your question, you already have
the TN-1. So you don't really need an immigration
lawyer (until it comes time to renew and/or you
decide to get a different kind of visa, or until
you decide to bring family along to live in the US. You're in
for a rude surprise when it comes to how they're
treated when you have a TN-1.).
The questions you have seem to be more along the
lines of "what sort of paperwork do I have to do" and ordinary living questions. Usually much of the necessary tax paperwork is handled by your
employer, but how much hand-holding they give you
varies a lot. I assume from your questions that
they are giving you very little. The processes
in the US (with the notable exception of health
insurance) of taxes/banking/etc. really aren't
all that different than in Canada, so I'm
guessing that you're a recent college graduate
and this is your first job ever anywhere.
In which case the issues aren't awfully related
to you being from out of the country.
Most of the paperwork questions, you'll find
decent answers for on the web. Both Canada
and the US have really good websites for federal
tax forms and instructions. Disentangling all
the details isn't that easy, but there are
newsgroups (like misc.immigration.usa and
misc.immigration.canada) where common cases
seem to be fairly well treated. State and local
taxes aren't necessarily quite so easy but
generally your employer knows how to sort things
out there (although if you're the only Canadian
employee they may not get things right, so double
check on them!)
I once thought Altavista ruled the universe
on
Search Beyond Google
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
At one point I thought Altavista was the end-all
and be-all of search engines. Since then it's
become an also-ran (last time I tried it, it
really wasn't working at all) and Google has taken its place.
I see no reason why the cycle cannot repeat. In
fact, the cycle may be much like the semiconductor
memory business, which has seen boom-bust cycles every few years since the early 70's. Sometimes
a name will ride out for many cycles, but usually
the company (and as necessary the technology) behind the name changes radically.
Gees, if only 1 percent of the readings are false
positives, there will be tens of thousands of
disabled cars a day in that single (small
population) state. Resulting traffic congestion
and accidents would probably kill more people
than saved.
Others get worried by all these government
contractors who are making big bucks by
selling privacy-invading tools to Uncle Sam.
But I don't. Why? Because 95% of all government
software projects end up either being outright
failures or not useful. (You'd be surprised
how many contractors know that they're meeting
the requirement specification but know that
the result won't be useful to anyone.)
Now, I do not like the fact that my government
is wasting money on software that doesn't
help make me any safer. We have to do something
about that, this is the real lossage.
There is no classified information at Fermilab.
Phsycial security has been stepped up since
9/11 but there's no bombs built there, just some
mildly radioactive metal in the beamline and lots of little radioactive sources for testing/calibration.
That's not to say that massive damage/downtime
can't be done by breaking into the right machines.
Realistically, many of the machines at Fermilab are admin'ed by physics postdocs and grad students. Their first priority is science, of course, and few have had any "official" training in setting up secure machines.
The national labs have done a good job at firewalling off the non-professionaly administered machines where feasible, but the academics really don't like anything that slows down collaboration. Thus there are lots of open machines, ftp and telnet still abound and give lots of opportunities to swipe usernames/passwords in the clear even though ssh and scp are available, etc.
Most (but not all) machines running the accelerator and the detectors are on their own mostly-private subnets.
After _Lion King_, everyone expected every Disney animated feature to rake in cash at the box office. If you look at the reviews from the past few years, all the animation fans dissed Disney each time they came up with a solid film that didn't go straight to #1. It took Disney a while for them to get back on track making good consistent stuff. (In the past couple years, I put _Lilo and Stitch_ and _Brother Bear_ as really good stuff. _Treasure Planet_ was good too even though it didn't get nearly as much attention as it should have.)
With _Nemo_, the bar got raised too high for Disney again (although you could argue that Disney didn't do much in the way of making it.) Now that Disney isn't hooked up with Pixar, I hope that the bar is set appropriately for future Disney animation.
Not that I didn't like _Nemo_, I thought it was great, wonderful, funny, my kids loved it and I loved it too. But that's a once-in-a-generation thing; it's great it happened, but we shouldn't let _Nemo_'s success stop us from appreciating good work. If Disney had stuck with Pixar, they'd be afraid to release anything that wasn't going to gross more than _Nemo_; now that they've broken up I hope we can look forward to seeing three or four good animated features a year, with some of them being really original.
Back in the good old days, if you had a recent copy of hosts.txt all this was irrelevant:-).
But it's been most of a decade since just anyone could download it.
Any idiot could've told Lego that they've been pissing their main business down the tubes for years. I just went to several local toy stores looking for plain old Lego Bricks for my kids (ages 3 and 5). Most of the toy stores had an entire aisle of Harry Potter and Star Wars Lego sets (literally dozens of different sets all with commercial tie-ins) and zero generic building block Lego sets. Eventually I found one store that had a single tub of "plain" Legos left; I bought it and they now have zero.
Slashdot Mirror
These are not necessarily easy to find at consumer electronics stores. What they carry are el-cheapo trackballs, which may have the word "ergonomic" on them and some funky curved design, but they're awful to use.
The ones we have are made by Mouse-Trak and look as ugly as hell, cost $150 each, but are a joy to use. They are used 24x7 and are in place on 8-CRT consoles, so they get heavily used and abused, and we send a few dozen back in each year to get repaired. Usually the problem is that the track-ball itself (which weighs probably 10 times what you'd find in a el-cheapo trackball, think back to the old "Missile Command" and "Centipede" games) has worn down, or the shafts it rides on.
Kinetic energy weapons are probably useful, but testing and re-use are extremely difficult things in the harsh space environment.
If you have a manned presence in space, the most effective weapon to take out an enemy satellite is probably a shotgun.
Last time I checked, those same model drives were listing for $5 on E-bay but not selling... it'd cost way more to ship them.
I do appreciate that there are issues regarding journalism which must be defended, and it's great that HardOCP is standing up for its rights. But this isn't exactly the Pentagon Papers or 9/11 at stake here. When all is said and done, the only people to have gained anything will be the lawyers.
Viruses aren't the issue: the Microsoft software that came with your machine has all the vulnerabilities the hackers need.
Of course, you haven't told us what's so valuable about your data. Will your business immediately fold if it leaks out? Are you worried about having your customer list stolen? Do you have customer credit card numbers on your machine? Medical data? Bank records of your customers? In most cases dealing with bank/medical customer data there are already federal standard you have to meet.
Maybe the trend is right, but I know of several really top-notch bit-coding and mathematics types (*not* hardware-oriented) who got laid off from Bell Labs in the big purge a few years back. These are guys who had no problems at all finding jobs at other tech companies and MIT, despite the fact that those job markets are not particularly good right now. But Bell Labs no longer needed them.
Who loses in the end? The music stores, anyway.
This open solution
The questions you have seem to be more along the lines of "what sort of paperwork do I have to do" and ordinary living questions. Usually much of the necessary tax paperwork is handled by your employer, but how much hand-holding they give you varies a lot. I assume from your questions that they are giving you very little. The processes in the US (with the notable exception of health insurance) of taxes/banking/etc. really aren't all that different than in Canada, so I'm guessing that you're a recent college graduate and this is your first job ever anywhere. In which case the issues aren't awfully related to you being from out of the country.
Most of the paperwork questions, you'll find decent answers for on the web. Both Canada and the US have really good websites for federal tax forms and instructions. Disentangling all the details isn't that easy, but there are newsgroups (like misc.immigration.usa and misc.immigration.canada) where common cases seem to be fairly well treated. State and local taxes aren't necessarily quite so easy but generally your employer knows how to sort things out there (although if you're the only Canadian employee they may not get things right, so double check on them!)
I see no reason why the cycle cannot repeat. In fact, the cycle may be much like the semiconductor memory business, which has seen boom-bust cycles every few years since the early 70's. Sometimes a name will ride out for many cycles, but usually the company (and as necessary the technology) behind the name changes radically.
Speaking of the original dubious certification, a 8-year old just got certified as an MCSE.
It's not Crystal Reports, by any means. It comes without all that baggage :-)
We need a DARPA-sponsored program to keep kernel developers active and efficient for 5 days without food. And without do_mremap bugs, too...
Gees, if only 1 percent of the readings are false positives, there will be tens of thousands of disabled cars a day in that single (small population) state. Resulting traffic congestion and accidents would probably kill more people than saved.
:-). My experiment at Fermilab was the magnetic moment of the Sigma+ meson.
But I don't. Why? Because 95% of all government software projects end up either being outright failures or not useful. (You'd be surprised how many contractors know that they're meeting the requirement specification but know that the result won't be useful to anyone.)
Now, I do not like the fact that my government is wasting money on software that doesn't help make me any safer. We have to do something about that, this is the real lossage.
Yeahbut that's all after the machine has been compromised, and the machine possibly used to sniff for username/passwords etc on the LAN.
You do have a good point that they do a pretty good job at having so many machines "open" yet keeping an eye on them.
That's not to say that massive damage/downtime can't be done by breaking into the right machines.
The national labs have done a good job at firewalling off the non-professionaly administered machines where feasible, but the academics really don't like anything that slows down collaboration. Thus there are lots of open machines, ftp and telnet still abound and give lots of opportunities to swipe usernames/passwords in the clear even though ssh and scp are available, etc.
Most (but not all) machines running the accelerator and the detectors are on their own mostly-private subnets.
Actually, I didn't much care for Lion King or Aladdin. The last thing Disney needs is to continually remake or sequelize those dogs.
The merchandising on those movies were way overdone, too, and I regard that as very unfortunate because it financially rewards Disney for the junk.
OTOH I really enjoyed The Emperors's New Groove, Lilo and Stitch, Treasure Planet, etc, films that have an "adult" as well as a "kid" level.
With _Nemo_, the bar got raised too high for Disney again (although you could argue that Disney didn't do much in the way of making it.) Now that Disney isn't hooked up with Pixar, I hope that the bar is set appropriately for future Disney animation.
Not that I didn't like _Nemo_, I thought it was great, wonderful, funny, my kids loved it and I loved it too. But that's a once-in-a-generation thing; it's great it happened, but we shouldn't let _Nemo_'s success stop us from appreciating good work. If Disney had stuck with Pixar, they'd be afraid to release anything that wasn't going to gross more than _Nemo_; now that they've broken up I hope we can look forward to seeing three or four good animated features a year, with some of them being really original.
Back in the good old days, if you had a recent copy of hosts.txt all this was irrelevant :-).
But it's been most of a decade since just anyone could download it.
Any idiot could've told Lego that they've been pissing their main business down the tubes for years. I just went to several local toy stores looking for plain old Lego Bricks for my kids (ages 3 and 5). Most of the toy stores had an entire aisle of Harry Potter and Star Wars Lego sets (literally dozens of different sets all with commercial tie-ins) and zero generic building block Lego sets. Eventually I found one store that had a single tub of "plain" Legos left; I bought it and they now have zero.