Simply really. The purchase decision for airline tickets is not solely made by the company; a significant portion is determined by the flyer/employee. Employees are not simple "resources" the company can direct like pencil inventories but rather independent actors in the economic equation. Thus a company needs to allow FFM for motivation and morale. The savings from trying to collect them *really* isn't the much compared to other costs (especially salary). If nothing else consider the overhead the company needs to incur to track it (that could be an entire additional "head" or two).
FFMs encourage additional trips (airline revenue) by providing a nudge toward flying when the need might be on-the-fence or justifying "impulse" flying. This has an immense benefit for airlines, of course. The benefit to the company is that employees don't revolt against necessary travel.
I can tell you from personal experience that flying day-in and day-out (in my case daily, up-and-down the US west coast for several years) loses its romance very quickly and becomes little more exciting that a daily car commute.
At some point I might have tried to find excuses for skipping a trip if I wasn't getting FFM (I wasn't on commision). If it helps think of FFM as like a fee paid by airlines and company to the employee for enduring the hardship of frequent flying.
There are other benefits: for example, allowing a spouse or SO to come-along on a business trip because of FFM is a major productivity and morale boon that benefits the company. Even from an accounting perspective, the business trip cost for the employee are a sunk cost and the spouse's cost is largely covered by FFM thus it is largely cost neutral to the company. If the trip is for vacation, vacation time is already a sunk cost for the company, and in fact, the vacation time is on the company books as an unrealized accrued expense which has negative tax implications until it can be realized. There is a benefit to the company to having the employee take the time off, and if FFM are the lubricant that does that, so much the better.
As a side note: I've been wondering how much economic impact does the added airport security have due to preventing marginal or impulse flying? I haven't run the numbers but it would not surprise me if 20-30% of the current economic downturn could be explained by it. I used to routinely hop on a plane with only hours notice and zip up to Seattle or down to San Diego. A certain percentage of the time (1:4 or 1:5) a deal in 6-7 figures would close as result. That kind travel is completely impossible now.
In general, most of the security added is probably marginal in terms of effectiveness but certainly "throughput" of most processes that depend on travel are significantly slowed. Most of the economic growth of the last two decades is due to productivity improvements related to JIT manufacturing (which has been seriously crippled by travel security) and due to increases in "turns" (sales, inventory, etc.) of all types (which are reduced by slowing things down).
And that sure turned out to be a real thriving, online healthy community!
I think his solution is workable for small groups but without social norming things get out of hand pretty quick. Modding is just a form of social norming.
The BSA is so fond of applying legal sticks, well, it's time for "back at ya' punk"! The BSA uses their legal muscle as a terrorist weapon. They should either be treated like terrorist or have their own methods used against them. I'd start with:
Keep track of all expenses involved in replying to this foolishness including cost of lawyers, IT staff, etc. and send the BSA a bill. Sue them for the expenses incurred by their false accusation.
Demand an audit on BSA (at their expense, of course) assuring that a) no derogatory records (that could amount to libel) exists in their records, b) processes are in place to assure that similar mistakes with OpenOffice or any other non-BSA software application won't occur again. , c) others have not been similarly mistreated - require such "proof" be made as legal deposition what would allow future disclosures to the contrary to be treated as perjury by the BSA.
If they don't comply with the audit sue for the additional costs incurred to accused organization to protect itself from future false accusations (extra, unnecessary due-diligence required to deal with the BSA's reckless behavior).
File for libel anyway. Be sure that individual officers of BSA and representatives of member companies are named in the suit so that either they or their lawyers get their rears dragged into court at least once or twice even if the suit is refocused back on the BSA by a judge. Let them personally feel the fear-of-God that comes with being a legal defendent.
Hopefully this can become a $1M mistake for the BSA which might begin to moderate their behavior.
Not only that, resumes really need to target specific jobs (yes, a different resume for each job is best if you want to maximize you chances - no two resumes the same). Call it optimization or call it marketing spin or kissing up - the only outcome that matters is whether you get the job you want or not.
Once you get enough experience under belt you want to rearrange your resume to make it a "perfect match" for any arbitrary job.
And if you are over 40 you definitely want to "dial-out" experience to fly-in under the rampant age discrimination in the industry today
Example: my current agency made me shave off 15 years. They said I shouldn't even bother otherwise. Never mind that the job and the management expectations of the job I'm working now on more closely match my original resume. Hey, the short resume got me in the door and was able to talk up the rest, so, whatever!:-p
Related to this, has anyone seen any tools that allow you to break your resume up into reuseable components (ideally XML) and reassemble them quickly into multiple customized versions? Possible OSS project? Any takers.
Ditto. This is a story I heard from the a guy in the HP Fullerton service center a dozen-odd years ago. Back in the early 80's the B-2 bomber project was still a dark black project at Northrup in Pico Rivera (suburb in east LA).
They called HP about a failed disk drive (a 7936 "disk washer" for those who know it). A service tech came out, diagnosed a terminal failure and ordered a replacement under the service contract. When it came time to retrieve the old drive (so that it could be refurbished and resold) the security folks said "no way". There was talk about using multiple overwrites as specified in some military standards for disk disposal. Northrup said "no, this project is different - it's not good enough. It's not leaving. We'll take care of disposal.".
Finally an HP service center manager started making a fuss about how the service contract clearly specified the customer obligation to return the drive (it enabled HP to recover profit from returns). Northrup finally said "Fine, we'll obey the contract. You'll receive your disk by the end of the week."
Sure enough the disk drive arrived as promised.... as a dozen baggies of 1/8" chips of metal and plastic. Northrup later explained that nothing in the contract said anything about the final form of the return, so "...the only way the drive would leave the project premises is through our industrial chipper. If you don't like it we don't have accept you bids for computers in the future." HP realized the situation was probably "misjudged" and the drive was marked in the inventory database as "received, not salvagable.
This kind of hacking has been going on for >30 years by NASA and the military to save satellites. Certainly saving expensive spacecraft is one of the clearly positive aspects of hacking and hacking talents.
I don't this is the funniest, but it is a nerd joke. If you don't get this joke, relax, you're not an Electrical Engineer. This has long been a joke punchline without a decent lead-up. So here it is:
On day a charter airline took off from Riga with a tour group of
eastern europeans from the Baltics, Poland and Russia. While
boarding the plane, one tourist Stanislaus spotted a cute
Lithuanian girl. She smiled at him and he knew he had to talk
to her. To his delight he discovered her seat was just across the
aisle on the right side of the plane.
While waiting for take off they chatted and discovered they had
much in common. Her name was Katya and they worked in the same
industry. They like the same music and both loved Golabki with
caraway.
Once airborne the pilot announced that everyone was free to
get up and move about the cabin. Stanislaus asked Katya if
he could sit in the empty seat next to her. She eagerly agreed
and Stanislaus got up and sat down next to the cute Lithuanian girl.
Within seconds the plane started bouncing about from turbulence.
Stanislaus' gripped the seat handle, his eyes grew wide and the veins
bulged in his forehead. Katya became more than little concerned
and asked him to go back to his seat, which he did.
Quickly the plane was out of turbulence and Stanislaus was
profusely appologizing to Katya. "It was just the turbulence;
I'm just afraid of flying. Please forgive me."
Katya was touched and told him he could sit on her side of the
aisle again if he could control his fear. He promised he would
and he again sat down next to Katya.
Unfortunately, again, as he sat down the plane began to shudder
and Stanislaus began to act crazy, frightening Katya. She pushed
the stewardess call button frantically and the stewardess ran up
and pulled Stanislaus back to his seat on the left side of the aisle.
The turbulence ended and after a few seconds Stanislaus calmed
down.
The stewardess demanded to know what led up to the altercation
and Katya explained
"We were talking and he asked if he could sit next to me to talk."
"And that was when he began acting up?"
"Yes"
"I see" said the stewardess, the gear turning in her head.
"And sir may I ask where you are from?"
He replied "Krakow, but my family is from Posnan".
The stewardess sighed and looked at Katya sternly and said:
"You foolish girl, you should know better than that!
Everyone know that poles in the right-hand-side of the
plane are unstable!"
Option 1: Switch to MacOS X/Darwin BSD - neither Motorola, IBM or Apple have announced DRM support for the PowerPC (yet). I'm already a Macolyte, as well as a Penguin-Hugger and Devil-Hugger, and dabble with the powers-of-darkness by economic necessity.
Option 2: DIY, open-source microprocessors and motherboard projects. To wit:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/11/016223 &mode=thread&tid=137
http://www.circuitcellar.com/library/print/0502/2. asp
et al.
Talk to any biologist (my sister and brother-in-law are PhDs in molecular biology) and they'll tell you that there is no universal or specific definition of what species actually is - being a species is often little more than a mix of peer-reviewed acceptance, overwhelmed indifference to minutiae, sectarian groupie-ism, phenotypic endearment/chauvanism and chutzpah.
Add to that the fact that biological ecosystems are dynamic systems where "species" appear and disappear, usually without human intervention, mind you, as part of its natural existence and process. This makes the idea of creating a encyclopedic master reference of species even more dubious because it is an already vague and definitely moving target.
It would be nice to track species if a definition could actually be defined in terms of something repeatably measureable (probably in terms of genotypic distances or something) to understand the dynamic systems they are part of, but such a project will probably be used for more cynical purposes.
So the argument is Nissan Motors deserves the domain due to utilitarian arguments. Well then, please analyze the situation properly.
In reality, the smaller company is likely to have more to gain: small companies that grow do so at a larger % increase rate than large companies. If I'm a start-up and go from nothing to $1000 income in a fiscal year, it's infinite growth. The next fiscal year I make $100,000; that's 10,000% growth rate. The next fiscal year $1,000,000; that's 1000% growth rate.
Such growth is not unreasonable for a successful and growing small company. As you get bigger, it's harder to grow. This is the rationale behind merger and acquisition - it is often the only way to keep the books moving up-and-to-the-right.
Go to Nissan Motors' SEC finanicals and you'll see that they haven't had growth approaching small company rates since the 1960s. Guess Nissan Motors is less deserving on utilitarian grounds too; in addition to the basis of virtue, fairness and just about every other ethical standard.
This whole episode is nothing more that unbridled, unrestrained and unethical exercise of power by Nissan Motors. May the Nissan marketers and lawyers enjoy their roast in hell or their agony of bad karma in this life or the next (depending on one's theistic views) - there is absolutely no doubt of either outcome for them.
It goes without saying: boycott Nissan products and propagate the anti-Nissan meme with every person you know that may be considering their products. Use the power of scale-free networks to destroy the Beast.
Rad Hardening is required for deep space or in LEO or MEO under certain circumstances.
Yes, the satellites you refer to are LEO and are thus still within and protected from solar radiation by the Earth's magnetic fields. Also the expected lifetime for LEO satellites is short because there is enough atmospheric drag at LEO to assure reentry in just a few years (the central cost flaw with Teledesic, BTW). NASA's push to use off-the-shelf parts is based on the assumption that most satellite projects can and will exist at LEO and will be cheap enough to be disposable with shorter lifespans. Remove these assumptions and you will have trouble using commerical parts.
Anything in a higher orbit, with longer life or unusual mission will be exposed to direct solar or other radiation. Over time through the sun spot cycle (12 years), solar flares will raise total dose levels typically 1-2 orders of magnitude over sunspot minimums.
Most commercial ICs are laughably soft. When I was in the business of testing such we tried commercial Intel uP's in our radiation chambers; they'd die in a matter of minutes while the space-grade equivalents lasted much longer (I could tell you how long but I'd have to kill you:-) ). Pioneer's lifespan using space-grade parts gives a clue though.
The amount of radiation isn't always so small. My impression of medical radiology changed about 15 years ago when I was involved in a similar incident. It lead me to believe the radiologist are pretty damn cavalier about the radiation they expose people to.
About 15 years ago I did radiation/weapons effects testing for military electronics. We worked with all the interesting stuff, but especially cobalt-60 which is a gamma source. Our back of the envelope dose-rate estimates were that if our Co-60 source ever "broke open" we could trivially deliver enough radiation to be instantly lethal to 10 people every single second. Yeah, a little intense.
Not surprisingly our labs were outfitted with ambient radiation alarms and rad badges were required for everyone. We had drills. You came to know the sound of The Alarm. You knew that if you heard it when it wasn't a drill, people you knew were either already dead, or dying, or you were already dead or dying. Remember the scene from the movie Fatman and Littleboy when they have the fatal "accident" tickling the tail of the dragon? Yeah, that's the feeling.
One day I was coming back from lunch. We were running a big test sequence and everyone else decided to work through lunchtime and break later to collect some key data. As I was walking in from the parking lot, I heard The Alarm. I instantly get the sick, sinking "Oh Sh*t" feeling. All the doors in are automatically locked down, just in case, when the alarm goes. I wait outside wondering "what went wrong?", "what about everyone else who stayed?" and "am I now a department of one?"
Within a few minutes, radiation safety arrives in suits and masks with geigers on poles and gingerly peels back the locked doors finally reaching the lab door. Everyone inside is white-as-a-sheet, but alive. The radiation is measureable but not super high; no Co-60 breach after all. They let me and others in to help check on our formerly doomed comrades.
The first order of business is to find the source that triggered the alarms. They walk into the lab with the geigers, seeking out the source like bloodhounds. On the scent they push past the hapless and frightened labbies. After a few steps they stop, looking perplexed, as the counts trail off. "It's gone. Must have walk past it!" They turn around and find the scent again. Everyone scatters in the narrow lab. They walk purposely forward again, pushing past Lee, our senior labby. The count ticks away to background. "What? Where'd it go again?" They turn; Lee gets out of the way as they head toward him. The geiger count drops off as they walk past him. "No way! It can't be!" They point the geiger at Lee. It goes crazy. It's Lee! He's hot. Very hot. Hot enough to violate our radioisotope license ambient limits.
Lee finally realizes it was the doctors appointment he had that morning at a local hospital. It was a diagnostic of some sort. The doctor said it was necesary but painless. He signed a release like you always have to. Lee remembers "They told me afterwards to stay away from children for the day. It didn't make a lot of sense, but I don't have kids so I didn't think much about it." Well, it was a radiotracer. The doctor decided he "didn't need to get all nervous about it" and so neglected to tell him he'd be radioactive for while. The only problem was that it was pretty hot. Iodine, Technetium, who know, they never told Lee. The half-life was was only hours so within a day or too he was cold again and was allowed back to work.
It turns out that his dose rate (as a radiation source) was nearly a rem/hour at one point. Our lab alarms were triggered at 20 millirem per hour and our exposure badges were deemed to be "indicating an exposure problem" at 5-10 millirem per month.
We were playing with very serious stuff and we were far more careful with it than these radiologists. My opinion of the medical community's knowledge and safety has been monotonically declined ever since.
As someone who has been a marketing droid, tradeshows are not an effective use of marketing money when you brand is well established - it doesn't tend to generate new leads or customers because most of the people that go are already existing (in Apple's case, also loyal) customers. A marketing investment *should* translate into sales, immediate or repeat (this is the post.com era, right?).
There can be post-sales value in a "user group" sense but there are often better ways to sustain customer loyalty, particularly for commodity products, which PCs including Macs have become.
JGski
The number is more like 80%. Most jobs are "created" for candidates that impress to fit the organization rather than the other way around. You never hear about it, by definition. Another statistic: 80% of all hires result from contacts with people you know *only casually or less well*.
I've never gotten a job by sending out resumes. I keep a box of reject letters from college during the '82 recession to remind me of how useless a method it is. On top is the letter from Intel I received 2 weeks after I started at Intel as a result of a "non-traditional" contact and phone interview.:-)
Spatial resolution is catching up and will surpass film, but one spec that still miles behind is dynamic range, i.e. the magnitude ratio between brightest and darkest resolving light levels. Film still kicks digital on this, with digital using either using only a few decades or using autoranging. Film still has a large non-auto-ranged dynamic range. Being in the IC business I don't see this changing any time soon.
...market leader Intel adopts SiGe *heterojunction* technology. For literally decades GaAs folks have crowed about how GaAs will be the technology of the future that would wipe out Si. GaAs has been the traditional bastion of HBTs. The adoption of SiGe now potentially turns that claim on its head, certainly keeping GaAs marginalized as always. Conventional Si technology and economics are still completely available to such HBT designs, which GaAs has lacked - key being having a native insulating oxide.
What's significant about SiGe and heterojunctions is that current Si technology is homojunction with a fixed, indirect bandgap (the latter being why there are no Si electro-optic devices like LEDs. Heterojunctions allow you to tune the bandgap and even create direct gap devices (which LED/Laser consistuents GaAs, GaInP, GaP, AlGaAs, et al., are) out of indirect gap elements. This throws in an additional set of parameters into the circuit design mix that allows traditional limits on carrier mobility, intrinsic carrier concentrations and other basic device parameters to be thrown out the window. This completely changes both the upper bounds of performance and potentially even basic device operating modes. Many of the "tricks" from the GaAs world become available to "mere mortals of the commercial Si world" such as HBTs, HEMTs, LEDs, EOs, et al.
Now one of the largest Si manufacturers has seen the economics as workable for general purpose uses. That is profound because for >30 years, GaAs has never gotten there beyond its very small niches, largely due to economics.
As mentioned, mixed signal devices have been around for some time (every cellphone has a mixed signal IC). Combining digital computing with analog circuitry has often required trading performance on one or the other - often what makes good digital gates MOS devices and processing isn't optimal for analog circuits which is best done in bipolar. HBTs are a special high-performance bipolar technology - an analog designer's dream, yet all the VLSI digital can be on-chip without compromise!
The TI OMAP comparison is completely out in left field as others have mentioned. Irrelevant.
The null spot is due to ground wave vs. sky wave differences and skywave propagation characteristics. Sky waves are completely propagated by refraction off of the ionosphere. Ground waves propagate along the ground in a fashion similar to propagation along a transmission line such as a wire or waveguide. The sky wave is received back on earth only because of Snell's Law of Refraction - remember "critical angles" from physics. Think of reflection in water that only happen at certain angles.
There are two factors in the case of the Boulder Null.
The first due to the fact that WWV transmitters and antennas are in Ft Collins while you are in Boulder with mountains in between. If you had a clear path to Ft. Collins (e.g. in nearby Denver) you could get a ground wave.
The second is due to antenna design. WWV is intended for world-wide time service so the antenna is designed to maximize sky wave and also minimize ground wave. The sky wave is optimized to have the lowest "wave angle" to maximize the propagation distance (to the other side of the earth, ideally).
However this also minimizes the local reception. You can't get a sky wave in Boulder because you are still too close to the transmitter to catch the first bounce off the ionosphere. At WWV's frequencies and likely antenna design, you'll usually catch the first sky wave reflection at distances not less than 250-500 miles from the antenna.
These combined help to create the null in Boulder.
The cover of this ARRL book "Your Guide to Propagation" has a diagram of exactly what's happening above: the antenna in the middle is Boulder; the antenna on the left is Ft. Collins WWV. The little arrow just to the right of Ft. Collins is the ground wave path. The arrows heading up into the sky are the sky wave paths. Then imagine a mountain between the left and middle antennas.
1. The broadcast transmitters for WWV are in Ft. Collins, not Boulder. Front-end overload isn't a problem or cause.
2. Modulation doesn't affect propagation, per se - it doesn't matter if you use AM, FM or 64 QAM. Well, you could argue that sideband distortion is a propagation issue, but that's more of a 2nd order effect. You can subsume that as S/N ratio or Bit-Error-Rate (BER)spec. Only S/N ratio or BER is affected by modulation choice.
3. Atmospheric water doesn't have any effect on radio propagation until you get into VHF (30 MHz < f < 300MHz) and becomes a major component only at UHF and above (f > 300 MHz).
So FM radio (88-108 MHz) can be affected by the weather, but WWV (2.5, 5, 10, 15, 20 MHz) and broadcast AM (0.68 - 1.7 MHz) are not. The latter are affected by solar or geomagnetic weather i.e. sun spots and solar flares.
If you want to learn more pick up copies of the ARRL Antenna Book and the ARRL Propagation Handbook.
In many cases it's whether 1) you are reasonably honest and trustworth (politics has little to do with this), 2) you can work well with others, i.e. you have a social network to reinforce proper behavior, 3) you don't advocate sedition or treachery - i.e. you largely have the best interests of the country at heart, and 4) you are not vulnerable to blackmail or coercion that could force you to disclose secrets.
From what I've seen, most supposed "sins" are forgiven for clearances if all four are true. The fourth is normally validated by full disclosure of ones "sins" (perhaps surprisingly to some). For example cheating on your wife is more of a security risk than having an "open" marriage arrangement! If she knows and accepts, it can't be used to coerce you to disclose classified data; in contrast, an affair can.
No doubt a similar argument could be made for an ex-Socialist hippie peacenik vegetarian programmers depending on how you answer the clearance officer's questions.:-)
This is basically a marketing problem, in the ideal sense of the word marketing
If you site is dying it is time to re-evaluate your initial assumptions about the visitor market segment that your site is suppose to appeal to.
Perhaps the vistor segment is too narrow to support normal visitor turn-over. You have to have at least some aggregation of interest to justify creating a site. "Market segment of one" really doesn't work for any tangible products, and are only marginally workable for virtual products.
Perhaps your site didn't provide what that segment really needed. For example, though I love RSS, the actual value of everyone republishing Slashdot, Freshmeat, et al. is dubious at best if there is no original value/content added somewhere along the line. Too many sites don't really add anything extra to justify using anything but the original sites or personally controllable "segment of one" tools like Radio Userland.
Perhaps what the visitor segment needed from your site was economically elastic, or in other words, when other (economic) resource priorities come up, your site ended up last on the pareto order list and gets cut out of visitor's time. This is one of many dot-com's big business model flaws - selection of elastic markets/products.
Assuming a leak couldn't occur from the CDC stock does seem reasonable. Assuming a leak couldn't occur from the former Soviet lab is not reasonable.
Re: We can deal with it
Not now we can't. There are 20M smallpox vaccine doses in the US now, all of which are of uncertain quality (could easily be as few as 5M still good). It's been estimated by CDC that it might be possible to use diluted vaccine to get 2x-3x but dilution has never been tried. The CDC/HHS estimate that we could have 70M doses in 3-4 months. There are 280M people in the US.
The lethality of smallpox historically is ~30% (which puts an upper bound of 84M US people if everyone is infected) in population with some natural genetic immunity. There are forms of small pox and populations without natural genetic immunity (native American peoples 200-400 years ago) which can have 90+% lethality. Since vaccination ceased in the US prior to 1978, most of the population doesn't artificial immunity so best case the 30% number applied but it could be higher. The main factor controlling the actual number is the nature of the propagation: traditional epidemics are diffusive while terrorist can make them non-diffusive.
Putting the 84M in perspective compare this to US war deaths:
Revolutionary War: 4,435
Civil War (North & South): 498,332
WWI: 116,708
Total (all nations) WWI deaths from combat: ~10M
Total deaths from Spanish Flu in 1918-1919: 21M (600,000 civilian+military US deaths, military US ~200,000 deaths - yes, more US soldiers died in WWI from flu than bullets! And 2x died from bullets in WWI than in Vietnam!)
WWII: 407,316
Vietnam: 58,168
Re: We can only hope...
So maybe we'll have enough vaccine within a year, BUT, the death rate due to lethal vaccine side effects (source: CDC) is about 1:1,000,000, or 280 deaths from vaccination, and 1:10,000 rate of moderate to severe side effects or 28,000 (bad enough to require hospitalization).
First, it isn't related to Quantum Computing. It's just a regular old nonvolatile memory.
The technology works real nice. I did technology development project management for the Air Force in the late 80s on this and other wild-ass NVM technologies. MRM is very sound, just too pricey for commercial use yet.
The problem is that the manufacturing economics combined with market perceived risk keeps it from prime time. Flash (the next nearest alternative) is more mature, more familiar and comfortable (derived from EPROM and E^2PROM technologies which are 25-plus years old) dispite its speed and endurance shortcomings.
Slashdot Mirror
FFMs encourage additional trips (airline revenue) by providing a nudge toward flying when the need might be on-the-fence or justifying "impulse" flying. This has an immense benefit for airlines, of course. The benefit to the company is that employees don't revolt against necessary travel. I can tell you from personal experience that flying day-in and day-out (in my case daily, up-and-down the US west coast for several years) loses its romance very quickly and becomes little more exciting that a daily car commute. At some point I might have tried to find excuses for skipping a trip if I wasn't getting FFM (I wasn't on commision). If it helps think of FFM as like a fee paid by airlines and company to the employee for enduring the hardship of frequent flying.
There are other benefits: for example, allowing a spouse or SO to come-along on a business trip because of FFM is a major productivity and morale boon that benefits the company. Even from an accounting perspective, the business trip cost for the employee are a sunk cost and the spouse's cost is largely covered by FFM thus it is largely cost neutral to the company. If the trip is for vacation, vacation time is already a sunk cost for the company, and in fact, the vacation time is on the company books as an unrealized accrued expense which has negative tax implications until it can be realized. There is a benefit to the company to having the employee take the time off, and if FFM are the lubricant that does that, so much the better.
As a side note: I've been wondering how much economic impact does the added airport security have due to preventing marginal or impulse flying? I haven't run the numbers but it would not surprise me if 20-30% of the current economic downturn could be explained by it. I used to routinely hop on a plane with only hours notice and zip up to Seattle or down to San Diego. A certain percentage of the time (1:4 or 1:5) a deal in 6-7 figures would close as result. That kind travel is completely impossible now.
In general, most of the security added is probably marginal in terms of effectiveness but certainly "throughput" of most processes that depend on travel are significantly slowed. Most of the economic growth of the last two decades is due to productivity improvements related to JIT manufacturing (which has been seriously crippled by travel security) and due to increases in "turns" (sales, inventory, etc.) of all types (which are reduced by slowing things down).
I think his solution is workable for small groups but without social norming things get out of hand pretty quick. Modding is just a form of social norming.
If they don't comply with the audit sue for the additional costs incurred to accused organization to protect itself from future false accusations (extra, unnecessary due-diligence required to deal with the BSA's reckless behavior).
Hopefully this can become a $1M mistake for the BSA which might begin to moderate their behavior.
Once you get enough experience under belt you want to rearrange your resume to make it a "perfect match" for any arbitrary job.
And if you are over 40 you definitely want to "dial-out" experience to fly-in under the rampant age discrimination in the industry today
Example: my current agency made me shave off 15 years. They said I shouldn't even bother otherwise. Never mind that the job and the management expectations of the job I'm working now on more closely match my original resume. Hey, the short resume got me in the door and was able to talk up the rest, so, whatever! :-p
Related to this, has anyone seen any tools that allow you to break your resume up into reuseable components (ideally XML) and reassemble them quickly into multiple customized versions? Possible OSS project? Any takers.
They called HP about a failed disk drive (a 7936 "disk washer" for those who know it). A service tech came out, diagnosed a terminal failure and ordered a replacement under the service contract. When it came time to retrieve the old drive (so that it could be refurbished and resold) the security folks said "no way". There was talk about using multiple overwrites as specified in some military standards for disk disposal. Northrup said "no, this project is different - it's not good enough. It's not leaving. We'll take care of disposal.".
Finally an HP service center manager started making a fuss about how the service contract clearly specified the customer obligation to return the drive (it enabled HP to recover profit from returns). Northrup finally said "Fine, we'll obey the contract. You'll receive your disk by the end of the week."
Sure enough the disk drive arrived as promised.... as a dozen baggies of 1/8" chips of metal and plastic. Northrup later explained that nothing in the contract said anything about the final form of the return, so "...the only way the drive would leave the project premises is through our industrial chipper. If you don't like it we don't have accept you bids for computers in the future." HP realized the situation was probably "misjudged" and the drive was marked in the inventory database as "received, not salvagable.
JGski
Perhaps it's nostalgia. As the quality of RIAA products goes monotonically down and to the right of over time... :-)
This kind of hacking has been going on for >30 years by NASA and the military to save satellites. Certainly saving expensive spacecraft is one of the clearly positive aspects of hacking and hacking talents.
The popularity of Simon & Garfunkel, and later by himself, Paul Simon, in the late 1960s perhaps?
On day a charter airline took off from Riga with a tour group of eastern europeans from the Baltics, Poland and Russia. While boarding the plane, one tourist Stanislaus spotted a cute Lithuanian girl. She smiled at him and he knew he had to talk to her. To his delight he discovered her seat was just across the aisle on the right side of the plane.
While waiting for take off they chatted and discovered they had much in common. Her name was Katya and they worked in the same industry. They like the same music and both loved Golabki with caraway.
Once airborne the pilot announced that everyone was free to get up and move about the cabin. Stanislaus asked Katya if he could sit in the empty seat next to her. She eagerly agreed and Stanislaus got up and sat down next to the cute Lithuanian girl.
Within seconds the plane started bouncing about from turbulence. Stanislaus' gripped the seat handle, his eyes grew wide and the veins bulged in his forehead. Katya became more than little concerned and asked him to go back to his seat, which he did.
Quickly the plane was out of turbulence and Stanislaus was profusely appologizing to Katya. "It was just the turbulence; I'm just afraid of flying. Please forgive me."
Katya was touched and told him he could sit on her side of the aisle again if he could control his fear. He promised he would and he again sat down next to Katya.
Unfortunately, again, as he sat down the plane began to shudder and Stanislaus began to act crazy, frightening Katya. She pushed the stewardess call button frantically and the stewardess ran up and pulled Stanislaus back to his seat on the left side of the aisle. The turbulence ended and after a few seconds Stanislaus calmed down.
The stewardess demanded to know what led up to the altercation and Katya explained
"We were talking and he asked if he could sit next to me to talk."
"And that was when he began acting up?"
"Yes"
"I see" said the stewardess, the gear turning in her head.
"And sir may I ask where you are from?"
He replied "Krakow, but my family is from Posnan".
The stewardess sighed and looked at Katya sternly and said:
"You foolish girl, you should know better than that! Everyone know that poles in the right-hand-side of the plane are unstable!"
Creating an insider lingo is an inherent feature of social groups both for efficiency and for exclusion.
It's probably most effective just to be amused by it. My favorite is "Buzzword Bingo". Great for meetings!
Option 2: DIY, open-source microprocessors and motherboard projects. To wit:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/11/016223 &mode=thread&tid=137. asp
http://www.circuitcellar.com/library/print/0502/2
et al.
JGski
Add to that the fact that biological ecosystems are dynamic systems where "species" appear and disappear, usually without human intervention, mind you, as part of its natural existence and process. This makes the idea of creating a encyclopedic master reference of species even more dubious because it is an already vague and definitely moving target.
It would be nice to track species if a definition could actually be defined in terms of something repeatably measureable (probably in terms of genotypic distances or something) to understand the dynamic systems they are part of, but such a project will probably be used for more cynical purposes.
JGski
In reality, the smaller company is likely to have more to gain: small companies that grow do so at a larger % increase rate than large companies. If I'm a start-up and go from nothing to $1000 income in a fiscal year, it's infinite growth. The next fiscal year I make $100,000; that's 10,000% growth rate. The next fiscal year $1,000,000; that's 1000% growth rate.
Such growth is not unreasonable for a successful and growing small company. As you get bigger, it's harder to grow. This is the rationale behind merger and acquisition - it is often the only way to keep the books moving up-and-to-the-right.
Go to Nissan Motors' SEC finanicals and you'll see that they haven't had growth approaching small company rates since the 1960s. Guess Nissan Motors is less deserving on utilitarian grounds too; in addition to the basis of virtue, fairness and just about every other ethical standard.
This whole episode is nothing more that unbridled, unrestrained and unethical exercise of power by Nissan Motors. May the Nissan marketers and lawyers enjoy their roast in hell or their agony of bad karma in this life or the next (depending on one's theistic views) - there is absolutely no doubt of either outcome for them.
It goes without saying: boycott Nissan products and propagate the anti-Nissan meme with every person you know that may be considering their products. Use the power of scale-free networks to destroy the Beast.
Yes, the satellites you refer to are LEO and are thus still within and protected from solar radiation by the Earth's magnetic fields. Also the expected lifetime for LEO satellites is short because there is enough atmospheric drag at LEO to assure reentry in just a few years (the central cost flaw with Teledesic, BTW). NASA's push to use off-the-shelf parts is based on the assumption that most satellite projects can and will exist at LEO and will be cheap enough to be disposable with shorter lifespans. Remove these assumptions and you will have trouble using commerical parts.
Anything in a higher orbit, with longer life or unusual mission will be exposed to direct solar or other radiation. Over time through the sun spot cycle (12 years), solar flares will raise total dose levels typically 1-2 orders of magnitude over sunspot minimums.
Most commercial ICs are laughably soft. When I was in the business of testing such we tried commercial Intel uP's in our radiation chambers; they'd die in a matter of minutes while the space-grade equivalents lasted much longer (I could tell you how long but I'd have to kill you :-) ). Pioneer's lifespan using space-grade parts gives a clue though.
JGSki
About 15 years ago I did radiation/weapons effects testing for military electronics. We worked with all the interesting stuff, but especially cobalt-60 which is a gamma source. Our back of the envelope dose-rate estimates were that if our Co-60 source ever "broke open" we could trivially deliver enough radiation to be instantly lethal to 10 people every single second . Yeah, a little intense.
Not surprisingly our labs were outfitted with ambient radiation alarms and rad badges were required for everyone. We had drills. You came to know the sound of The Alarm. You knew that if you heard it when it wasn't a drill, people you knew were either already dead, or dying, or you were already dead or dying. Remember the scene from the movie Fatman and Littleboy when they have the fatal "accident" tickling the tail of the dragon? Yeah, that's the feeling.
One day I was coming back from lunch. We were running a big test sequence and everyone else decided to work through lunchtime and break later to collect some key data. As I was walking in from the parking lot, I heard The Alarm. I instantly get the sick, sinking "Oh Sh*t" feeling. All the doors in are automatically locked down, just in case, when the alarm goes. I wait outside wondering "what went wrong?", "what about everyone else who stayed?" and "am I now a department of one?"
Within a few minutes, radiation safety arrives in suits and masks with geigers on poles and gingerly peels back the locked doors finally reaching the lab door. Everyone inside is white-as-a-sheet, but alive. The radiation is measureable but not super high; no Co-60 breach after all. They let me and others in to help check on our formerly doomed comrades.
The first order of business is to find the source that triggered the alarms. They walk into the lab with the geigers, seeking out the source like bloodhounds. On the scent they push past the hapless and frightened labbies. After a few steps they stop, looking perplexed, as the counts trail off. "It's gone. Must have walk past it!" They turn around and find the scent again. Everyone scatters in the narrow lab. They walk purposely forward again, pushing past Lee, our senior labby. The count ticks away to background. "What? Where'd it go again?" They turn; Lee gets out of the way as they head toward him. The geiger count drops off as they walk past him. "No way! It can't be!" They point the geiger at Lee. It goes crazy. It's Lee! He's hot. Very hot. Hot enough to violate our radioisotope license ambient limits.
Lee finally realizes it was the doctors appointment he had that morning at a local hospital. It was a diagnostic of some sort. The doctor said it was necesary but painless. He signed a release like you always have to. Lee remembers "They told me afterwards to stay away from children for the day. It didn't make a lot of sense, but I don't have kids so I didn't think much about it." Well, it was a radiotracer. The doctor decided he "didn't need to get all nervous about it" and so neglected to tell him he'd be radioactive for while. The only problem was that it was pretty hot. Iodine, Technetium, who know, they never told Lee. The half-life was was only hours so within a day or too he was cold again and was allowed back to work.
It turns out that his dose rate (as a radiation source) was nearly a rem/hour at one point. Our lab alarms were triggered at 20 millirem per hour and our exposure badges were deemed to be "indicating an exposure problem" at 5-10 millirem per month.
We were playing with very serious stuff and we were far more careful with it than these radiologists. My opinion of the medical community's knowledge and safety has been monotonically declined ever since.
As someone who has been a marketing droid, tradeshows are not an effective use of marketing money when you brand is well established - it doesn't tend to generate new leads or customers because most of the people that go are already existing (in Apple's case, also loyal) customers. A marketing investment *should* translate into sales, immediate or repeat (this is the post .com era, right?).
There can be post-sales value in a "user group" sense but there are often better ways to sustain customer loyalty, particularly for commodity products, which PCs including Macs have become.
JGski
The number is more like 80%. Most jobs are "created" for candidates that impress to fit the organization rather than the other way around. You never hear about it, by definition. Another statistic: 80% of all hires result from contacts with people you know *only casually or less well*. I've never gotten a job by sending out resumes. I keep a box of reject letters from college during the '82 recession to remind me of how useless a method it is. On top is the letter from Intel I received 2 weeks after I started at Intel as a result of a "non-traditional" contact and phone interview. :-)
Spatial resolution is catching up and will surpass film, but one spec that still miles behind is dynamic range, i.e. the magnitude ratio between brightest and darkest resolving light levels. Film still kicks digital on this, with digital using either using only a few decades or using autoranging. Film still has a large non-auto-ranged dynamic range. Being in the IC business I don't see this changing any time soon.
UC Berkeley KIC (an IC Layout App) used gestures also - probably a knock-off of the Applicon app.
What's significant about SiGe and heterojunctions is that current Si technology is homojunction with a fixed, indirect bandgap (the latter being why there are no Si electro-optic devices like LEDs. Heterojunctions allow you to tune the bandgap and even create direct gap devices (which LED/Laser consistuents GaAs, GaInP, GaP, AlGaAs, et al., are) out of indirect gap elements. This throws in an additional set of parameters into the circuit design mix that allows traditional limits on carrier mobility, intrinsic carrier concentrations and other basic device parameters to be thrown out the window. This completely changes both the upper bounds of performance and potentially even basic device operating modes. Many of the "tricks" from the GaAs world become available to "mere mortals of the commercial Si world" such as HBTs, HEMTs, LEDs, EOs, et al.
Now one of the largest Si manufacturers has seen the economics as workable for general purpose uses. That is profound because for >30 years, GaAs has never gotten there beyond its very small niches, largely due to economics.
As mentioned, mixed signal devices have been around for some time (every cellphone has a mixed signal IC). Combining digital computing with analog circuitry has often required trading performance on one or the other - often what makes good digital gates MOS devices and processing isn't optimal for analog circuits which is best done in bipolar. HBTs are a special high-performance bipolar technology - an analog designer's dream, yet all the VLSI digital can be on-chip without compromise!
The TI OMAP comparison is completely out in left field as others have mentioned. Irrelevant.
JSki
The null spot is due to ground wave vs. sky wave differences and skywave propagation characteristics. Sky waves are completely propagated by refraction off of the ionosphere. Ground waves propagate along the ground in a fashion similar to propagation along a transmission line such as a wire or waveguide. The sky wave is received back on earth only because of Snell's Law of Refraction - remember "critical angles" from physics. Think of reflection in water that only happen at certain angles.
There are two factors in the case of the Boulder Null.
The first due to the fact that WWV transmitters and antennas are in Ft Collins while you are in Boulder with mountains in between. If you had a clear path to Ft. Collins (e.g. in nearby Denver) you could get a ground wave.
The second is due to antenna design. WWV is intended for world-wide time service so the antenna is designed to maximize sky wave and also minimize ground wave. The sky wave is optimized to have the lowest "wave angle" to maximize the propagation distance (to the other side of the earth, ideally).
However this also minimizes the local reception. You can't get a sky wave in Boulder because you are still too close to the transmitter to catch the first bounce off the ionosphere. At WWV's frequencies and likely antenna design, you'll usually catch the first sky wave reflection at distances not less than 250-500 miles from the antenna.
These combined help to create the null in Boulder.
The cover of this ARRL book "Your Guide to Propagation" has a diagram of exactly what's happening above: the antenna in the middle is Boulder; the antenna on the left is Ft. Collins WWV. The little arrow just to the right of Ft. Collins is the ground wave path. The arrows heading up into the sky are the sky wave paths. Then imagine a mountain between the left and middle antennas.
[Cover Image]
Some other clarifications for other comments:
1. The broadcast transmitters for WWV are in Ft. Collins, not Boulder. Front-end overload isn't a problem or cause.
2. Modulation doesn't affect propagation, per se - it doesn't matter if you use AM, FM or 64 QAM. Well, you could argue that sideband distortion is a propagation issue, but that's more of a 2nd order effect. You can subsume that as S/N ratio or Bit-Error-Rate (BER)spec. Only S/N ratio or BER is affected by modulation choice.
3. Atmospheric water doesn't have any effect on radio propagation until you get into VHF (30 MHz < f < 300MHz) and becomes a major component only at UHF and above (f > 300 MHz).
So FM radio (88-108 MHz) can be affected by the weather, but WWV (2.5, 5, 10, 15, 20 MHz) and broadcast AM (0.68 - 1.7 MHz) are not. The latter are affected by solar or geomagnetic weather i.e. sun spots and solar flares.
If you want to learn more pick up copies of the ARRL Antenna Book and the ARRL Propagation Handbook.
ARRL Books on Antennas & Propagation
JG
From what I've seen, most supposed "sins" are forgiven for clearances if all four are true. The fourth is normally validated by full disclosure of ones "sins" (perhaps surprisingly to some). For example cheating on your wife is more of a security risk than having an "open" marriage arrangement! If she knows and accepts, it can't be used to coerce you to disclose classified data; in contrast, an affair can.
No doubt a similar argument could be made for an ex-Socialist hippie peacenik vegetarian programmers depending on how you answer the clearance officer's questions. :-)
If you site is dying it is time to re-evaluate your initial assumptions about the visitor market segment that your site is suppose to appeal to.
Assuming a leak couldn't occur from the CDC stock does seem reasonable. Assuming a leak couldn't occur from the former Soviet lab is not reasonable.
Re: We can deal with it
Not now we can't. There are 20M smallpox vaccine doses in the US now, all of which are of uncertain quality (could easily be as few as 5M still good). It's been estimated by CDC that it might be possible to use diluted vaccine to get 2x-3x but dilution has never been tried. The CDC/HHS estimate that we could have 70M doses in 3-4 months. There are 280M people in the US.
The lethality of smallpox historically is ~30% (which puts an upper bound of 84M US people if everyone is infected) in population with some natural genetic immunity. There are forms of small pox and populations without natural genetic immunity (native American peoples 200-400 years ago) which can have 90+% lethality. Since vaccination ceased in the US prior to 1978, most of the population doesn't artificial immunity so best case the 30% number applied but it could be higher. The main factor controlling the actual number is the nature of the propagation: traditional epidemics are diffusive while terrorist can make them non-diffusive.
Putting the 84M in perspective compare this to US war deaths:
Revolutionary War: 4,435
Civil War (North & South): 498,332
WWI: 116,708
Total (all nations) WWI deaths from combat: ~10M
Total deaths from Spanish Flu in 1918-1919: 21M (600,000 civilian+military US deaths, military US ~200,000 deaths - yes, more US soldiers died in WWI from flu than bullets! And 2x died from bullets in WWI than in Vietnam!)
WWII: 407,316
Vietnam: 58,168
Re: We can only hope...
So maybe we'll have enough vaccine within a year, BUT, the death rate due to lethal vaccine side effects (source: CDC) is about 1:1,000,000, or 280 deaths from vaccination, and 1:10,000 rate of moderate to severe side effects or 28,000 (bad enough to require hospitalization).
The technology works real nice. I did technology development project management for the Air Force in the late 80s on this and other wild-ass NVM technologies. MRM is very sound, just too pricey for commercial use yet. The problem is that the manufacturing economics combined with market perceived risk keeps it from prime time. Flash (the next nearest alternative) is more mature, more familiar and comfortable (derived from EPROM and E^2PROM technologies which are 25-plus years old) dispite its speed and endurance shortcomings.