If you're worried about food, there's no reason to worry about satellite TV. My point is that $65/mo for all their programming (what, 100 channels?) isn't that bad a deal.
Specifically, it's not worth my time to maintain a cracked reciever, install digital locks, blah blah blah.
And I'm not a damn American. ExpressVu is a Canadian service. I won't make assumptions about -your- nationality.
in me says that bell does the minimum required to make sure the PPV people don't freak out and pull their content. This allows them to gain a monopoly share with a pirated dish. Over the next year or two as they now effectively dominate the market, you will see them crack down on pirating and ultimately release a "new" reciever free to everybody - this upgrade will include callback authentication of services effectively rendering pirating impossible.
The current recievers are a joke to crack, although I question if it's worth the time - $65/mo really isn't that much money.
After we get 24 hour recording with GPS, the next step is... what? Remotely accessible by law enforcement? Perhaps video recording as well?
OBD-III, which will appear in ALL north (american) cars has this functionalty in it. I will never own a car that allows remote monitoring. Anyone who is concerned about this should have a long hard look at what is upcoming under the guise of "emissions" standards. Driving is not a optional anymore - judgements in Canada reflect that, and if I have to go back to a 1950 carbeurated corvette, I will.
not those that have been holding Apple back for the past 15+ years.
No, I think that should be read as business plans that do not make you (You) a customer. Apple has carved out a very profitable niche doing what other people won't. I wasn't part of apple's audience for a long time - didn't have the money for it to be an option. Now that I have the money I don't have the time to deal with linux. I'll gladly fork out (aparently a lot, too) so that my computer just works when I turn it on.
I think this is what Redhat should have done - picked open source for the gems, made it bulletproof, picked out some hardware and ran with it. They didn't - and nobody has. I thought about doing what these guys are doing, and I think they'll get themselves a very successful niche if the whole package is an attractive by.
Don't take me for a zealot - I use openbsd, linux, windows, solaris, and OSX in addition to QNX on a near daily basis. Apple hit themselves a nice little (multi billion $) niche.
That is not a failed business model. If you want to see failed business models, go here. Apple is eating THEIR lunch. Mmm, tasty.
I jerry rigged something "good enough" awhile back with a Xilinx 4000 series FPGA and a microcontroller. I might clean it up and release it if there's any demand, but it's pretty simple to implement a basic one.. you just need a bunch o latches synced to a clock.
Anything more than 10-20mhz you are going to have to buy something though.. although I never did tests to see how fast or reliable my hacked apparatus was.
Google could also change the way the printing industry works overnight with this service - I use the internet for much of my reference needs now, and a few times a year I buy a couple hundred worth of books to add to my reference. The problem is there's a major time investment in locating what new books are actually worth buying - sometimes exceeding the value of the book, almost insignifigant to the effort spent reading and understanding what is in it.
It's not up there any more, but it looked like google was playing around with buying large volumes of IP from publishers then offering it for instant buy in pdf format online. As someone who has a few books in the works and is wondering how to go about trying to make some money from them - a search service and sales avenue managed by google would be amazing.
It's laggy and generally a bad joke compared to a $200 PC.
I'm planning on buying a reasonably slim single board computer with a P3 mobile on it, and putting it into a very thin metal enclosure with an external power supply hookup. The biggest problem is reliable video from it - XP costs money and has horrible registration crap I am avoiding, Win2k which I have a liscence for needs terminal server, and even then I think it won't run on the workstation edition.
VNC is buggy. It's fine for a terminal, but often fonts get munged and graphical artifacts get left all over the place.
I'll probably break down and get XP - that plus a thin single board computer solves all your problems if you have a powerbook, as it has a terminal client from microsoft available.
It would only work well where there is a lot of sun. I've burned pavement with a fresenel lens. Obviously you cannot make all your water this way but you could certainly make enough to drink provided that you run it during hot days.
You can try it yourself if you don't believe me; get a dark bucket or bowl. Put some salt in the water. Get a smaller bowl that you can place inside the first, floating in it. Fill the larger bowl about halfway and leave the smaller bowl in the middle. Cover the larger bowl with the smaller one inside it with some plastic wrap. Put a weight in the middle of the plastic wrap so that it makes a depression over the smaller bowl.
Place this apparatus in a sunny window, warmer the better. Wait an hour or two and you will start to see water evaporate, condense on the plastic, then drain down into the smaller bowl. This water will be salt-free.
Isreal and many other like countries make use of evaporative distilling. I'll do an experiment this summer when it warms up outside.
You can achieve enough to boil water with bright sun, some solar reflectors, and a black pot. In fact , people have melted steel with lenses this way. All that is required after this is to seal the pot, and then run the water vapor through a condensor, or just a coil of pipe to an output. If more purity is required, then run it again or three time.
I do not know why nobody has implemented a system like this. It doesn't have to be large scale, one of the things every person should know how to do is find water. There are many other systems that can purify water, but this is the easiest. More efficient reverse-osmosis systems exist, but they are mich more expensive than a black pot and some shiney steel plates. I'm not even sure you need the mirrors.
You say your not covered by their constitution because your not a citizen, but in Canada, it is a matter of law that our constitution and Charter of Rights applies to anyone on Canadian soil.
That's true, unless you have a security certificate issued against you. If you are a noncitizen you can be held indefinately without charge, lawyer, or right to see the evidenace against you - and you don't have to be shipped to Cuba. There are people working to change this, although I am not sure I disagree with the law.
The next thing may be aiming for zero or negative population and economic growth, or the next thing might be accepting a dramatically lower standard of living. It could be a communist revolution. Nobody knows, but those are some choices nobody wants to hear.
Don't like it? Get organized. Instead of bitching about the machine, it IS a democratic republic in the US. If enough people feel like you do, you could at least in theory get elected and start some serious smackdown. I think people underestimate, or are trained to underestimte, the power of a grassroots politcal movement. It's worked to positive effect (Fall of Communism in Russia; French Revolution), and negative effect (Nazi Germany, China's little incident running over students with Tanks) in the past.
Who knows what one populist leader could accomplish in the USA right now? There are enough people who are working class and don't vote to effectively overthrow the status quo. Except they've been brainwashed their votes don't mater. Here's a hint: The wealthy vote.
(disclaimer: I am Canadian, and am not overly upset with the state of affairs in my country, yet).
There's such a severe shortage of water here that while the wealthy buy theirs commercially and have it delivered to their homes in trucks by the tankful, their servants -- the legions of drivers and cooks and maids and guards -- wait in line for more than an hour each day to receive their own subsidized rations.
Um.. maybe it's illegal or something, I don't know.. but if I myself was in this situation, a pile of copper pipe, some seawater, some pots, some black paint, and some shiney metal for mirrors would soon be producing all the triple-special solar distilled water I could drink.
How about putting it in words they can understand. Here's a dirty little secret about business: learning to write a cost-benefit analysis is easier than programming! Seems most geeks couldn't be bothered though.
You'd be suprised how much money you can make making some calls and having some meetings with companies to see if you can save them money. Do the initial consultation free; you find a way to speed up a machine, track inventory better, anything, and can demonstrate it in business terms - you'll probably get a client.
This is how microsoft operates. Linux advocates should take a page from their book.
Gates has a real problem in that many companies are very happy with Win2000. There are no plans to upgrade from win2k for many people, and this is going to start to cause problems for MS - they're going to get dragged down patching and supporting several versions of the operating system. To say nothing of the complication on the APIs; MSDN is a nightmare, I hadn't done any windows code until very recently - and I was shocked by how much almost-sorta-but-not-quite-duplication is appearing everywhere. There's a LOT of inertia building up daily.
So, get it regulated and set a standard. Now -everybody- has to update their OS. Probably on a regular schedule, as "best practices" change. Of course no CURRENT MS product is going to qualify. You'll have to get all new stuff.
Yeah yeah, tin foil hat time - but this is something people should watch closely. No computer connected to the internet is, or ever will be completely secure. Just like no building is completely secure. If you want a secure building you can get one, but it's going to cost a lot more. I don't see why software is any different.
I don't want to end up paying special taxes for "security" because I own a PC. That's where this is headed.
The flaw is that oil is not our only source of energy! Coal and natural gas can easily make up the energy differences and will last us quite some time still
Dieoff.org covers this in a lot of depth. The problem is that oil is a very, very high quality of energy that is easily transportable and extracted from the earth at a massive energy profit. The issue with coal is that large scale extraction may or may not be possible for an extended period without oil running the machines. Solar and other renewable resources just don't have the energy density or quality to even approach replacing oil. You'd need solar panels the size of earth orbiting the sun.
Largescale hydro and other projects can slow down the problem, but we really need something like fusion power to replace oil. It is a difficult problem that politicians do not want to address right now.
Perhaps a more -realistic- way of looking at it is that in the 1st world, we will not see the full impact of oil scarcity for a long time due to our advanced military capacity. There is no alternative to oil, and we will do what is required to guaranteed access in the short term.
If a cheap replacement for oil is not found (be it energy from the quantum vaccuum; fusion in a bottle; magic beans), we are in very dire straights. Enjoy the oil why it lasts. Before you jump on my post take the time to read some of the references on the Dieoff site - many of them are funded by the petrochemical industry and the US congress.
Maybe we'll have to solve all those human-scale problems (war, enivronmental destruction, poverty, disease, human suffering, etc.) without the benefit of self-replicating autonomous nanotech, real AI, faster-than-light travel, Dyson spheres and all those great science-fictional constructs.
Hahahaha! Oh, my. That's a good one. Humans are exceedingly nasty to one another. We only cooperate when it is in our best interests and as a last resort. Civilizations only work because of monopolies on violence and the rule of law. Not because we're so nice to one another. That'll happen right after people turn to eating tofu and abandoning SUVs and urban sprawl.
People should go to mars for no other reason than it's there. The USA will do it if China lands on the moon, for the same reason they went to the moon. It's a way to one-up the other guy without blowing the planet to smithereens. Sending a robot is NOT the same thing as putting a dust covered boot there.
And hey - if you can stash a few nukes there, maybe you can get the VERY last word in. *sarcasm*
Law School is considered to be an Undergraduate degree in Canada.
For all purposes it is a graduate degree.
Its also somewhat more challenging not due to material difficulty but due to workload, but talk to a med student and see if you think you have it bad.
See above. A PhD in Semiconductor Physics is beyond me. I'm not debating post grad work.
That said I highly doubt you've done any stochastics, measure theoretic probability, advanced PDEs, with Green's Functions, Eigenvalue expansions, method of lines, characteristics or much non-linear stuff, like perturbation theory, though possibly in fluids, etc.
Batting about 50% on the above. Mr. Fourier and his buddy Laplace's work is the vast majority of my skillset, though.
To some degree the math courses in engineering are watered down versions of the courses that Applied MAth students take. Pure math course are a different ballgame. I will disagree with what someone else said about them being harder, they arent, but they are a different way of approaching problems. I've met lots of pure mathematicians who can tell you the nitty gritty details of real analysis and what conditions apply for interchanging differentiation and integration say but couldn't actually solve a PDE. Its a different set of skills.
Every university I've been at, engineering students take the same math courses as math students, given by the math departments. No watering down required.
Nova Scotia.. I work with small companies; there's lots of work out there if you can demonstrate your solution to problem Y costs X, and X cost of problem Y.:)
In the name of fairness, why don't you go take the LSAT, score in the 90th+ percentile (because that's what it takes to get into a tier one law school), then go look at Havard's curriculum for law school (where you will be doing A LOT of pro-bono work and A LOT of case review, and taking quite a few classes...) and then tell me that law school is a cake walk?...just to shut people like you up. I took enough history courses with my engineering degree to get a minor if I so desired. Even ones that weren't required. I would have LOVED to have become a historian - unfortunately, the pay is miserable.
Not all EE's are illiterate, and this one in particular can legalese with with best of them. So don't paint us all with the same brush - and while I have no problem reading and interpreting Canadian law - I had to take a law course to qualify for the engineering association, FWIW, as well.
All engineers in this country are required to take many economics, arts, and english courses - humanities - so they are well rounded. Arts students IMHO do not have the burden of mathematics and science placed upon them that would make THEM as well rounded.
There are exceptions that prove BOTH rules. The other fact is lawyers do not produce new products in a society. They are a result of people being greedy and utterly miserable to one another. The state of the legal profession in Canada is not as bad as the USA - the concept of "nominal" damages still exists.
Who's the one painting who with the big brush? Nowhere did I state my skills were superior. I stated that EE and ME are the most difficult UNDERGRADUATE degrees to take. If you do an informal survey on campus, you will find most students agree with me. Law is a GRADUATE calling.
Secondly, I stated that I believe math is NOT difficult, and that it is mearly taught incorrectly.
Perhaps you (the lawyer) are the one who should learn to read more critically. Or, are you compensating for something?
Slashdot Mirror
Most people are not aware of how limited oil reserves may be.
If you're worried about food, there's no reason to worry about satellite TV. My point is that $65/mo for all their programming (what, 100 channels?) isn't that bad a deal.
Specifically, it's not worth my time to maintain a cracked reciever, install digital locks, blah blah blah.
And I'm not a damn American. ExpressVu is a Canadian service. I won't make assumptions about -your- nationality.
in me says that bell does the minimum required to make sure the PPV people don't freak out and pull their content. This allows them to gain a monopoly share with a pirated dish. Over the next year or two as they now effectively dominate the market, you will see them crack down on pirating and ultimately release a "new" reciever free to everybody - this upgrade will include callback authentication of services effectively rendering pirating impossible.
The current recievers are a joke to crack, although I question if it's worth the time - $65/mo really isn't that much money.
http://www.avrfreaks.org
GNU Open-Source C Compiler Toolchain
$60 US starter kit with prototype board (STK500)
Linux Compatible
Thousands of open-source projects
What else do you need?
After we get 24 hour recording with GPS, the next step is... what? Remotely accessible by law enforcement? Perhaps video recording as well?
OBD-III, which will appear in ALL north (american) cars has this functionalty in it. I will never own a car that allows remote monitoring. Anyone who is concerned about this should have a long hard look at what is upcoming under the guise of "emissions" standards. Driving is not a optional anymore - judgements in Canada reflect that, and if I have to go back to a 1950 carbeurated corvette, I will.
Not that it's going to matter in 25 years anyway.
It could be your turn next.
I think that is the idea.
Where is that customer base going to come from for ION?
They make a fancy slick looking appliance PC, and I'd be tempted to replace my current linux box with one.
not those that have been holding Apple back for the past 15+ years.
No, I think that should be read as business plans that do not make you (You) a customer. Apple has carved out a very profitable niche doing what other people won't. I wasn't part of apple's audience for a long time - didn't have the money for it to be an option. Now that I have the money I don't have the time to deal with linux. I'll gladly fork out (aparently a lot, too) so that my computer just works when I turn it on.
I think this is what Redhat should have done - picked open source for the gems, made it bulletproof, picked out some hardware and ran with it. They didn't - and nobody has. I thought about doing what these guys are doing, and I think they'll get themselves a very successful niche if the whole package is an attractive by.
Don't take me for a zealot - I use openbsd, linux, windows, solaris, and OSX in addition to QNX on a near daily basis. Apple hit themselves a nice little (multi billion $) niche.
That is not a failed business model. If you want to see failed business models, go here. Apple is eating THEIR lunch. Mmm, tasty.
I jerry rigged something "good enough" awhile back with a Xilinx 4000 series FPGA and a microcontroller. I might clean it up and release it if there's any demand, but it's pretty simple to implement a basic one.. you just need a bunch o latches synced to a clock.
Anything more than 10-20mhz you are going to have to buy something though.. although I never did tests to see how fast or reliable my hacked apparatus was.
Go ebay hunting. Lots of deals on there.
Google could also change the way the printing industry works overnight with this service - I use the internet for much of my reference needs now, and a few times a year I buy a couple hundred worth of books to add to my reference. The problem is there's a major time investment in locating what new books are actually worth buying - sometimes exceeding the value of the book, almost insignifigant to the effort spent reading and understanding what is in it.
It's not up there any more, but it looked like google was playing around with buying large volumes of IP from publishers then offering it for instant buy in pdf format online. As someone who has a few books in the works and is wondering how to go about trying to make some money from them - a search service and sales avenue managed by google would be amazing.
"Sold!"
The moon orbits the earth at 2300 MPH (1 km/s), but orbits the earth at 67,000 MPH (30 km/s).
I know what you're getting at, but.. Eh?
It's laggy and generally a bad joke compared to a $200 PC.
I'm planning on buying a reasonably slim single board computer with a P3 mobile on it, and putting it into a very thin metal enclosure with an external power supply hookup. The biggest problem is reliable video from it - XP costs money and has horrible registration crap I am avoiding, Win2k which I have a liscence for needs terminal server, and even then I think it won't run on the workstation edition.
VNC is buggy. It's fine for a terminal, but often fonts get munged and graphical artifacts get left all over the place.
I'll probably break down and get XP - that plus a thin single board computer solves all your problems if you have a powerbook, as it has a terminal client from microsoft available.
It would only work well where there is a lot of sun. I've burned pavement with a fresenel lens. Obviously you cannot make all your water this way but you could certainly make enough to drink provided that you run it during hot days.
You can try it yourself if you don't believe me; get a dark bucket or bowl. Put some salt in the water. Get a smaller bowl that you can place inside the first, floating in it. Fill the larger bowl about halfway and leave the smaller bowl in the middle. Cover the larger bowl with the smaller one inside it with some plastic wrap. Put a weight in the middle of the plastic wrap so that it makes a depression over the smaller bowl.
Place this apparatus in a sunny window, warmer the better. Wait an hour or two and you will start to see water evaporate, condense on the plastic, then drain down into the smaller bowl. This water will be salt-free.
Isreal and many other like countries make use of evaporative distilling. I'll do an experiment this summer when it warms up outside.
You can achieve enough to boil water with bright sun, some solar reflectors, and a black pot. In fact , people have melted steel with lenses this way. All that is required after this is to seal the pot, and then run the water vapor through a condensor, or just a coil of pipe to an output. If more purity is required, then run it again or three time.
I do not know why nobody has implemented a system like this. It doesn't have to be large scale, one of the things every person should know how to do is find water. There are many other systems that can purify water, but this is the easiest. More efficient reverse-osmosis systems exist, but they are mich more expensive than a black pot and some shiney steel plates. I'm not even sure you need the mirrors.
You say your not covered by their constitution because your not a citizen, but in Canada, it is a matter of law that our constitution and Charter of Rights applies to anyone on Canadian soil.
That's true, unless you have a security certificate issued against you. If you are a noncitizen you can be held indefinately without charge, lawyer, or right to see the evidenace against you - and you don't have to be shipped to Cuba. There are people working to change this, although I am not sure I disagree with the law.
Answer: what's the next thing?
The next thing may be aiming for zero or negative population and economic growth, or the next thing might be accepting a dramatically lower standard of living. It could be a communist revolution. Nobody knows, but those are some choices nobody wants to hear.
Don't like it? Get organized. Instead of bitching about the machine, it IS a democratic republic in the US. If enough people feel like you do, you could at least in theory get elected and start some serious smackdown. I think people underestimate, or are trained to underestimte, the power of a grassroots politcal movement. It's worked to positive effect (Fall of Communism in Russia; French Revolution), and negative effect (Nazi Germany, China's little incident running over students with Tanks) in the past.
Who knows what one populist leader could accomplish in the USA right now? There are enough people who are working class and don't vote to effectively overthrow the status quo. Except they've been brainwashed their votes don't mater. Here's a hint: The wealthy vote.
(disclaimer: I am Canadian, and am not overly upset with the state of affairs in my country, yet).
There's such a severe shortage of water here that while the wealthy buy theirs commercially and have it delivered to their homes in trucks by the tankful, their servants -- the legions of drivers and cooks and maids and guards -- wait in line for more than an hour each day to receive their own subsidized rations.
Um.. maybe it's illegal or something, I don't know.. but if I myself was in this situation, a pile of copper pipe, some seawater, some pots, some black paint, and some shiney metal for mirrors would soon be producing all the triple-special solar distilled water I could drink.
How about putting it in words they can understand. Here's a dirty little secret about business: learning to write a cost-benefit analysis is easier than programming! Seems most geeks couldn't be bothered though.
You'd be suprised how much money you can make making some calls and having some meetings with companies to see if you can save them money. Do the initial consultation free; you find a way to speed up a machine, track inventory better, anything, and can demonstrate it in business terms - you'll probably get a client.
This is how microsoft operates. Linux advocates should take a page from their book.
Gates has a real problem in that many companies are very happy with Win2000. There are no plans to upgrade from win2k for many people, and this is going to start to cause problems for MS - they're going to get dragged down patching and supporting several versions of the operating system. To say nothing of the complication on the APIs; MSDN is a nightmare, I hadn't done any windows code until very recently - and I was shocked by how much almost-sorta-but-not-quite-duplication is appearing everywhere. There's a LOT of inertia building up daily.
So, get it regulated and set a standard. Now -everybody- has to update their OS. Probably on a regular schedule, as "best practices" change. Of course no CURRENT MS product is going to qualify. You'll have to get all new stuff.
Yeah yeah, tin foil hat time - but this is something people should watch closely. No computer connected to the internet is, or ever will be completely secure. Just like no building is completely secure. If you want a secure building you can get one, but it's going to cost a lot more. I don't see why software is any different.
I don't want to end up paying special taxes for "security" because I own a PC. That's where this is headed.
The flaw is that oil is not our only source of energy! Coal and natural gas can easily make up the energy differences and will last us quite some time still
Dieoff.org covers this in a lot of depth. The problem is that oil is a very, very high quality of energy that is easily transportable and extracted from the earth at a massive energy profit. The issue with coal is that large scale extraction may or may not be possible for an extended period without oil running the machines. Solar and other renewable resources just don't have the energy density or quality to even approach replacing oil. You'd need solar panels the size of earth orbiting the sun.
Largescale hydro and other projects can slow down the problem, but we really need something like fusion power to replace oil. It is a difficult problem that politicians do not want to address right now.
Perhaps a more -realistic- way of looking at it is that in the 1st world, we will not see the full impact of oil scarcity for a long time due to our advanced military capacity. There is no alternative to oil, and we will do what is required to guaranteed access in the short term.
If a cheap replacement for oil is not found (be it energy from the quantum vaccuum; fusion in a bottle; magic beans), we are in very dire straights. Enjoy the oil why it lasts. Before you jump on my post take the time to read some of the references on the Dieoff site - many of them are funded by the petrochemical industry and the US congress.
Maybe we'll have to solve all those human-scale problems (war, enivronmental destruction, poverty, disease, human suffering, etc.) without the benefit of self-replicating autonomous nanotech, real AI, faster-than-light travel, Dyson spheres and all those great science-fictional constructs.
Hahahaha! Oh, my. That's a good one. Humans are exceedingly nasty to one another. We only cooperate when it is in our best interests and as a last resort. Civilizations only work because of monopolies on violence and the rule of law. Not because we're so nice to one another. That'll happen right after people turn to eating tofu and abandoning SUVs and urban sprawl.
People should go to mars for no other reason than it's there. The USA will do it if China lands on the moon, for the same reason they went to the moon. It's a way to one-up the other guy without blowing the planet to smithereens. Sending a robot is NOT the same thing as putting a dust covered boot there.
And hey - if you can stash a few nukes there, maybe you can get the VERY last word in. *sarcasm*
Law School is considered to be an Undergraduate degree in Canada.
For all purposes it is a graduate degree.
Its also somewhat more challenging not due to material difficulty but due to workload, but talk to a med student and see if you think you have it bad.
See above. A PhD in Semiconductor Physics is beyond me. I'm not debating post grad work.
That said I highly doubt you've done any stochastics, measure theoretic probability, advanced PDEs, with Green's Functions, Eigenvalue expansions, method of lines, characteristics or much non-linear stuff, like perturbation theory, though possibly in fluids, etc.
Batting about 50% on the above. Mr. Fourier and his buddy Laplace's work is the vast majority of my skillset, though.
To some degree the math courses in engineering are watered down versions of the courses that Applied MAth students take. Pure math course are a different ballgame. I will disagree with what someone else said about them being harder, they arent, but they are a different way of approaching problems. I've met lots of pure mathematicians who can tell you the nitty gritty details of real analysis and what conditions apply for interchanging differentiation and integration say but couldn't actually solve a PDE. Its a different set of skills.
Every university I've been at, engineering students take the same math courses as math students, given by the math departments. No watering down required.
Basic arthmetic is the bare minimum. Do we aspire to lead the world, or is the lowest common denominator what we all strive for?
Nova Scotia.. I work with small companies; there's lots of work out there if you can demonstrate your solution to problem Y costs X, and X cost of problem Y. :)
In the name of fairness, why don't you go take the LSAT, score in the 90th+ percentile (because that's what it takes to get into a tier one law school), then go look at Havard's curriculum for law school (where you will be doing A LOT of pro-bono work and A LOT of case review, and taking quite a few classes...) and then tell me that law school is a cake walk? ...just to shut people like you up. I took enough history courses with my engineering degree to get a minor if I so desired. Even ones that weren't required. I would have LOVED to have become a historian - unfortunately, the pay is miserable.
Not all EE's are illiterate, and this one in particular can legalese with with best of them. So don't paint us all with the same brush - and while I have no problem reading and interpreting Canadian law - I had to take a law course to qualify for the engineering association, FWIW, as well.
All engineers in this country are required to take many economics, arts, and english courses - humanities - so they are well rounded. Arts students IMHO do not have the burden of mathematics and science placed upon them that would make THEM as well rounded.
There are exceptions that prove BOTH rules. The other fact is lawyers do not produce new products in a society. They are a result of people being greedy and utterly miserable to one another. The state of the legal profession in Canada is not as bad as the USA - the concept of "nominal" damages still exists.
Who's the one painting who with the big brush? Nowhere did I state my skills were superior. I stated that EE and ME are the most difficult UNDERGRADUATE degrees to take. If you do an informal survey on campus, you will find most students agree with me. Law is a GRADUATE calling.
Secondly, I stated that I believe math is NOT difficult, and that it is mearly taught incorrectly.
Perhaps you (the lawyer) are the one who should learn to read more critically. Or, are you compensating for something?