Aside from the radioactive material, a lot of his extra curricular activities mirrored my own when I was a teenager in the mid 80's. I leaned how to make gun powder and zinc oxide mesh concoctions at 14. My 8th grade science teacher was less than pleased when I learned how to make nitrigen triiodide, pulled out his desk drawer before class and painted the back of it with the stuff, leaving the drawer open a few inches so he would be certain to shut it upon arriving to class. The drawer shot clean out of his desk and without missing a beat, he yelled my name and told me to get down to the office.
I don't know how old the boy scout was when he was making moonshine. I was about 15 years old when I put one together from "appropriated" lab equipment.
I think he would be about 24 or 25 by now. That was about the time I finally decided to be a liitle more serious about the future. Sadly it took the death of friend to convince me that I wasn't going to be in my 20's forever and that (gasp!) both I and the little group I hung out with really were not immortal after all. I wonder how this guy turned out.
Keep tech workers happy?! Not in this job market!
on
Managing Einsteins
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· Score: 1
This might have been a worthy topic two years ago, but not now. In my particular field of engineering, upper management could care less what we want. This attitude started to grow as the job market in this field was tanking. Once the unemployment rate got above 5 or 6%, we were slapped with a new interpretation of the dress code. Now casual Fridays mean we will be allowed to wear Dockers. Jeans are forbidden on any day. The last perk that we have, free coffee, will be gone next month. The top level of management (VP and above) know that there is really nowhere else for us to go right now, so it's time to put the screws to everyone.
I have many fond memories of the golden age of video games from the late 70's into the early 80's. The graphics were lacking, the sound was no where near what it is now, and the premiss of most games was simple. For all that those old games lacked, they had one thing that almost all of the games today don't have....a soul. Back then gameplay was the main focus for game developers. Too many of the new games go all out for the "eye-candy" factor and gameplay seems to be a distant concern. This goes for the arcade coin-op games as well as the home games. That's not to say that there weren't some serious turds floating in the video game swimming pool back then. Anything with a movie tie-in was almost certainly a waste of time, and I'm sure that some of us old-timers, now in our 30's, remember how much of a big dissapointment the 2600 version of Pac-Man was.
Things are going to change...very soon
on
Stopping Light
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· Score: 2, Insightful
There are a handful new (or at least vastly improved) technologies that will be developed and put into use in the near future that will rival the changes ushered in by the developement of the microchip. This could happen much sooner than most people think, maybe as soon as 4 or 5 years. Quantum computing will be one. It will be crude and a lot of people will look upon it the same the that the Altair or the GUI developed by Werox PARC, but advances will happen fast once things get moving. Nanotechnology will be another. Tiny machines that can clean out clogged arteries will be "neat" but this will really be useful in materials developement. Once we can custom build materials at the atomic level, things will get interesting in a hurry.
Being able to stop light is something that sounds pretty obscure, but then so was a little hunk of silicon Bell Labs touted 50 some years ago. I've talked to some people who were working in the electronics industry when the transistor was first talked about. A lot of them at the time thought "Well, that's neat, but that thing will never be able to handle any serious current. Intel made a real gamble in the 70's with their little "calculator-on-a-chip", the microprocessor, that they made in the hopes of selling it to a Japanese calculator manufacturer. It will be interesting to see what comes down the road from what these people did with stopping light.
It is clear that we will never do anything useful on the moon or mars if the only way to get there is the Saturn V.
I don't think the Saturn V is a realistic option any longer. Don't get me wrong. That beast is an absolute wonder of engineering, but we would have an excruciatingly hard time building any more of them. There are over 1,000,000 moving parts in a Saturn V. The last I heard, no one has any hard copies of the complete blue prints, many of the old computer tapes with those files have been lost, damaged, or have degraded beyond recovery. The majority of the parts manufactures no longer exist and almost all of the original engineers and scientists who designed it have died over the past 30 years. The only way to build another one would be to reverse engineer one of the surviving Saturn V's that were built but never used after the Apollo project was cancelled. One is on display in Florida, another one is also on display in Texas. I believe there is also a third that is in pieces in a couple of different storage facillities. I do wish they still built and launched these monsters. I'd love to see one launch in person.
Temp sig: "I just send the rockets up. I don't care where they come down, that's not my department." says Werner Von Braun.
okay, I'm a day late on the reply but here it is anyway:
Again, an American right-winger insults in both backhanded and forehanded ways two of the most prominent European natinons, the Germans and the French.
I stand by the forehanded swat at the French (or more accurately, their government). The US (well, at least I don't) doesn't expect any of our allies to bow down and kiss anyone's ring, but it would be nice if every once in a while we could count on France to do more than carp about how the US is being such a bully when it's time to go old-school on some terrorists for killing over 3000 of us on a Tuesday morning. I hope you didn't think any of those people in New York deserved that. As for the Germans, I don't have any issues with them. The "backhanded" swipe was at the Nazis. Yes, the right-wing yanks know the difference between the two.
No doubt you are one of the Swiss-haters as well.
Nah, the Swiss are just fine. If they want to stay out of a fight, they know how to express that desire without being snobbish about it.
You hate the far east because you think everyone there is a Chinese maoist and you can't get along with them
It's not the maoist part that I have a problem with, it's the repeated threats to vaporize Los Angeles if we don't mind our business and let their army crush Taiwan. If you think the US is a bully, wait until China gets some of it's newly aquired Russian hardware incorperated into its military.
you hate the middle east because you think they're all Muslim terrorists
Most Muslims are good people but the ones hijacking our planes and crashing them into 110 story buildings are a problem. We didn't have any issues with the Muslims when we helped liberate one Muslim nation and defended another 12 years ago. Sure, part of our motivation was over oil. How much do you think a barrel of crude would cost on the market today if Iraq had control over the Saudi and Kuwaiti oil fields? It's generally good policy for 1/3 of the worlds proven oil reserves are not controlled by the likes of Saddam.
the American right wing should itself be thankful that the rest of the world (including the other half of the American population) hasn't already chased it into the ocean once and for all!
And I'm the one who's full of hate?!
And yes, good call on my spelling. A lot of us Americans have a problem with that...the left wing is in charge of the public schools here.
You are correct about the vulnerability due to telecom's dependance on the GPS system. If the GPS network over the US were to go down, it would cause a lot of problems, but it would not crash the entire phone system nationwide. Many central offices, at least the larger ones, have a cesium clock for timing purposes(I'm an engineer at one of the big 4 telecoms and I'm very familiar with our BITS standards). These can go weeks without a slip but eventually they will start to lose sync. Sites that have only stratum 3 back ups are few and far between. Almost all sites that rely on GPS timing have at least a stratum 1 backup. From what I know of my company's and the others SOP's, the industry operates on the belief that if the GPS network goes, we expect it to be back up before the cesium clocks would begin to slip. Stratum 1 can go for a few days, so it would be my estimate that we would encounter problems with the phone networks, major disruptions would be avoided if GPS can be restored within a week. I believe that this theory follows the line of thaught that if the GPS network is down for longet than that, something nearly catostrophic would have to have happened...something so bad that having the phones screwd up would be the least of the country's problems. If something were to happen that takes out GPS sats, it would almost certainly take out a lot of other satellites. Now THAT would really screw us. If you remember what happened in the summer of 1998 what just one communication satellite went down, then you know what I mean. Almost all ATM and credit card transactions, as well as a lot of pagers (mine included) came to a screatching halt. Take out GPS and a dozen other satellites and things get really scary.
I suppose I should have expected some stupid american to give me intelligent comments like this. I suppose you deny any US involvement in what has taken place and think the Israelis have some sort of god given right to terrorise the Middle-East. If the US are not careful they will alienate the whole world with their blatant threats and stupid politiocal decisions. I suppose you think its fine for the US to break the Kyoto protocols and reintroduce tarriffs on steel and supply weapons to Israeli terrorists! FOOL!
I suppose I should have expected some stupid AC coward to spout this flavor of tripe. What are you, French? Not that it matters. I guess you would be happier if we turned our backs to our allies and ran from every fight that was brought to our front door. Point being, if it wasn't for the U.S., you, along with all of Europe would be singing "Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alis" every morning.
So I could see her siding with the DMCA since "secure" content transmission is part of her former employer's business.
I used to deliver pizza for Domino's, but that doesn't mean I'm gonna do jack for them at ANY point in the future. Hell, if I were a Senator I'd probably put that company's survival "in question":)
Ye Gods! This is aimed more at the comments below than the parent of this post. Here we have one of the 24 hour news networks actually getting this story right, and what do we get? A bunch of pissing and moaning! "Ewwww! Fox News is right-wing! Republicans are BAD! They like John Ashcroft! We don't need THEM!" Pardon my fucking french, but get the fuck over yourselves and quit pissing on the only goddamn network that actually gets this issue! For fuck's sake! Who else IS going to be on our side on this??? CNN? I think not. ABC? not very likely! There are so many fools who would rather sit in the corner and boo-hoo and bitch about how the big media types are trying, once again, to give all of us the sausage aenema and there is no shortage of bed-wetters who would rather hold their breath till they pass out then even consider that the republicans can be useful to stop this. Psst, here's a hint, THE DEMOCRATS ARE BOUGHT AND PAID FOR BY THE OTHER SIDE! Who is going to be able to counter them, Ralph Nader?! Put down the bong and go buy a clue. This is how things are done in the system. You make your alliances where you have to. If stopping this gives the republicans a political club to beat Hollings and Disney with, then we should be helping them drive the rusty nails into business end of that club! Yes, the system is corrupt. Yes, the people you ally yourself with today might be on the other side of another issue tomorrow. Yes, they are all paid professional liars. But this is one issue where you may just have to hold your noses and play the game. The good does not have to be the enemy of the perfect. A little pragmatism can go a long way. [/soapbox-ranting]
This might be fusion, then again it might not, but it doesn't mean that this isn't worth serious study. This is a very big universe and we we don't even understand 1/10th of 1% of it. History is repleat with people who were scoffed, mocked and ridiculed because they stepped away from what was accepted to look at things from a different angle. There was no shortage of people who laughed at Galileo, Capernicus, Keplar and a long list of others. Has anyone bothered to think that maybe, just maybe there is some part of nuclear physics that we don't even know exists, let alone understand? Let them do the research and see where it leads. Some of the greatest discoveries in science have happend by accident while looking for something completely different.
for Lojack type applications. Stuff one inside the dash or in a fender and connect to be powered by cars electrical system in case the battery runs down. If your car gets stolen you can track it down. In Lojack systems, only the police have access to this info and will deal with it "when they get around to it." Also makes it easy to tail a spouse susspected of cheating or making sure that if they kids borrow the car, they really are just going to the library.
as well as prove those copyrights were not used to monopolize and stifle the distribution of digital music.
What the judge has ordered will be exluded in the appeal that the record industry will ceratinky pursue. It's a burdon of proof situation. Napster is innocent until the court can prove that they are guilty. You can't prove a negative.
...before the propeller heads collect enough of this stuff to transmute their lab into a very large, smoldering crater when they lose their magnetic confinement. Okay, maybe that would be way more antihydrogen than they could ever realistically hope to produce. I just don't want to live anywhere near the facillity that ever does.
Granted, there are going to be people that will have serious issues with the idea of cloning pets. But once the process is perfected for dogs and cats, pet cloning will be one of the biggest industries in the country.
Think about this. How many people out there would pay serious money to have a chance to "hit the reset button" if something happens to a cherished pet. I've had a dog that died, like all dogs do. Nothing could replace her because she was unique and there are some things that even cloning can't copy. But I would have moved heaven and earth to have a chance to start over again with a puppy that would have at least grown up to look like her. Dare I say that my parents would have even taken out a 2nd mortgage on the house for the money if cloning was an option.
This is more than just the "gee-whiz" factor of having the fastest PC or a TIVO with 2 Terabyte RAID storage. This is dealing with people's emotions and people with money will spend it like drunken sailors if they know that a few thousand dollars can get them an exact living, breathing, physical copy of their pet after they die.
Job market will recover, but will do it slowly
on
The Laid-off Techie
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· Score: 1
When I got out of school in '97 (DeVry, don't laugh too hard:) ) I had offers from all over the country. One was from Intel as a wafer tech. I didn't consider that because I didn't want to move across the country but mostly because those positions were filled to the rafters with layed-off aero-space engineers from the defense industry. There was little chance of moving up the ladder, possible for years, because I would literally be competing with rocket scientists for almost any promotion. Sure, I probably could have worked my way up, it would have taken a lot longer. I fear that the recovery in the entire tech sector will be similar to that situation.
Things will improve but it's going to take a lot longer than we are all hoping it will. It will most likely mean career advancement will be much slower than in recent years. It's depressing when you're experienced in a well paying field and good at what you do and then end up working in the proverbial "McJob" where there seems to be no end of the downturn in sight. Lets just hope that we don't have to wait too much longer. I'm lucky to still be working in my field and I just hope things turn around soon.
You and I seem to be on the same line of thought on this one. Many people don't have a problem with this and similar proposals because they trust the current administration. I trust the current administration, insofar as not abusing the power that they have expanded. My over-riding concern is what a future administration will do with the expanded power and authority, post 9/11. Hitler didn't enact gun registration in Germany, it was in place before he come into power and used it to confiscate any weapons owned by jews in Germany, eliminating any chance of an armed resistance.
I know a lot of people get knocked for just getting a technical degree, but it's a very good way to start for some people. I got started a little late on the higher education track. When I was 25 I got sick of drifting from one no-future job to another. I didn't want to end up delivering pizza for the rest of my life so I decided to get my ass in gear and go to school to study electronics, something I had always been interested in. I went to Devry and completed the associates degree program for electronic technicians because it was took a little less than two years. My plan was to get my foot in the door at a good company that would pay for part of the cost for me to continue on to Devry's BSEET. A few months before I graduated I got a job with one of the telecoms (one that survived the.com crash) as an equipment installer. Since I was well versed in electronics in general I was able to become familiar with a lot of the hardware, I moved from a field installer to coordinating equipment purchasing and logistics of storing and shipping the stuff to the field because the people that were doing that didn't always know what to send and when to send it. After more than a year of doing that, a head-hunter offered me a program manager job at another company. When I tried to turn in my notice at my company, they wanted to know what it would take to keep me. I told them that I wanted to get into engineering, thinking that they might offer to pay for me to go back to school. Instead they promoted me to an entry level engineering position and trained me on the job. This has worked out pretty well so far. I'm now 32 and if I do go back to school it will be to learn how to write code since the money seems to be in software. The telecom job market is scary right now. If I get laid off this year (very likely) at least I'll be able to fix TV's or something like that. Now I'm a little nervous about getting into another field at 32 when most of the entry level jobs for programmers are filled by people in their early 20's. God I'm too young to feel this old!
AFIK my cable provider (Time-Warner, Columbus Ohio) isn't doing this yet. If they do I'll be quickly dropping the internet access along with their cable TV service (currently about $83/month) and will sign up for Ameritech/SBC DSL and will probably get a dish unless SBC is running a deal for cable TV. VOTE WITH YOUR WALLETS! If Comcast people have another option they should go with it.
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Aside from the radioactive material, a lot of his extra curricular activities mirrored my own when I was a teenager in the mid 80's. I leaned how to make gun powder and zinc oxide mesh concoctions at 14. My 8th grade science teacher was less than pleased when I learned how to make nitrigen triiodide, pulled out his desk drawer before class and painted the back of it with the stuff, leaving the drawer open a few inches so he would be certain to shut it upon arriving to class. The drawer shot clean out of his desk and without missing a beat, he yelled my name and told me to get down to the office. I don't know how old the boy scout was when he was making moonshine. I was about 15 years old when I put one together from "appropriated" lab equipment. I think he would be about 24 or 25 by now. That was about the time I finally decided to be a liitle more serious about the future. Sadly it took the death of friend to convince me that I wasn't going to be in my 20's forever and that (gasp!) both I and the little group I hung out with really were not immortal after all. I wonder how this guy turned out.
This might have been a worthy topic two years ago, but not now. In my particular field of engineering, upper management could care less what we want. This attitude started to grow as the job market in this field was tanking. Once the unemployment rate got above 5 or 6%, we were slapped with a new interpretation of the dress code. Now casual Fridays mean we will be allowed to wear Dockers. Jeans are forbidden on any day. The last perk that we have, free coffee, will be gone next month. The top level of management (VP and above) know that there is really nowhere else for us to go right now, so it's time to put the screws to everyone.
...of what I've been saying about some of the more "talent-challenged" in the top 40 music industry..."You can clean up anything in the studio."
I have many fond memories of the golden age of video games from the late 70's into the early 80's. The graphics were lacking, the sound was no where near what it is now, and the premiss of most games was simple. For all that those old games lacked, they had one thing that almost all of the games today don't have....a soul. Back then gameplay was the main focus for game developers. Too many of the new games go all out for the "eye-candy" factor and gameplay seems to be a distant concern. This goes for the arcade coin-op games as well as the home games. That's not to say that there weren't some serious turds floating in the video game swimming pool back then. Anything with a movie tie-in was almost certainly a waste of time, and I'm sure that some of us old-timers, now in our 30's, remember how much of a big dissapointment the 2600 version of Pac-Man was.
There are a handful new (or at least vastly improved) technologies that will be developed and put into use in the near future that will rival the changes ushered in by the developement of the microchip. This could happen much sooner than most people think, maybe as soon as 4 or 5 years. Quantum computing will be one. It will be crude and a lot of people will look upon it the same the that the Altair or the GUI developed by Werox PARC, but advances will happen fast once things get moving. Nanotechnology will be another. Tiny machines that can clean out clogged arteries will be "neat" but this will really be useful in materials developement. Once we can custom build materials at the atomic level, things will get interesting in a hurry. Being able to stop light is something that sounds pretty obscure, but then so was a little hunk of silicon Bell Labs touted 50 some years ago. I've talked to some people who were working in the electronics industry when the transistor was first talked about. A lot of them at the time thought "Well, that's neat, but that thing will never be able to handle any serious current. Intel made a real gamble in the 70's with their little "calculator-on-a-chip", the microprocessor, that they made in the hopes of selling it to a Japanese calculator manufacturer. It will be interesting to see what comes down the road from what these people did with stopping light.
I don't think the Saturn V is a realistic option any longer. Don't get me wrong. That beast is an absolute wonder of engineering, but we would have an excruciatingly hard time building any more of them. There are over 1,000,000 moving parts in a Saturn V. The last I heard, no one has any hard copies of the complete blue prints, many of the old computer tapes with those files have been lost, damaged, or have degraded beyond recovery. The majority of the parts manufactures no longer exist and almost all of the original engineers and scientists who designed it have died over the past 30 years. The only way to build another one would be to reverse engineer one of the surviving Saturn V's that were built but never used after the Apollo project was cancelled. One is on display in Florida, another one is also on display in Texas. I believe there is also a third that is in pieces in a couple of different storage facillities. I do wish they still built and launched these monsters. I'd love to see one launch in person.
Temp sig: "I just send the rockets up. I don't care where they come down, that's not my department." says Werner Von Braun.
Again, an American right-winger insults in both backhanded and forehanded ways two of the most prominent European natinons, the Germans and the French.
I stand by the forehanded swat at the French (or more accurately, their government). The US (well, at least I don't) doesn't expect any of our allies to bow down and kiss anyone's ring, but it would be nice if every once in a while we could count on France to do more than carp about how the US is being such a bully when it's time to go old-school on some terrorists for killing over 3000 of us on a Tuesday morning. I hope you didn't think any of those people in New York deserved that. As for the Germans, I don't have any issues with them. The "backhanded" swipe was at the Nazis. Yes, the right-wing yanks know the difference between the two.
No doubt you are one of the Swiss-haters as well.
Nah, the Swiss are just fine. If they want to stay out of a fight, they know how to express that desire without being snobbish about it.
You hate the far east because you think everyone there is a Chinese maoist and you can't get along with them
It's not the maoist part that I have a problem with, it's the repeated threats to vaporize Los Angeles if we don't mind our business and let their army crush Taiwan. If you think the US is a bully, wait until China gets some of it's newly aquired Russian hardware incorperated into its military.
you hate the middle east because you think they're all Muslim terrorists
Most Muslims are good people but the ones hijacking our planes and crashing them into 110 story buildings are a problem. We didn't have any issues with the Muslims when we helped liberate one Muslim nation and defended another 12 years ago. Sure, part of our motivation was over oil. How much do you think a barrel of crude would cost on the market today if Iraq had control over the Saudi and Kuwaiti oil fields? It's generally good policy for 1/3 of the worlds proven oil reserves are not controlled by the likes of Saddam.
the American right wing should itself be thankful that the rest of the world (including the other half of the American population) hasn't already chased it into the ocean once and for all!
And I'm the one who's full of hate?!
And yes, good call on my spelling. A lot of us Americans have a problem with that...the left wing is in charge of the public schools here.
That would be the Sex Pistols version, right?
You are correct about the vulnerability due to telecom's dependance on the GPS system. If the GPS network over the US were to go down, it would cause a lot of problems, but it would not crash the entire phone system nationwide. Many central offices, at least the larger ones, have a cesium clock for timing purposes(I'm an engineer at one of the big 4 telecoms and I'm very familiar with our BITS standards). These can go weeks without a slip but eventually they will start to lose sync. Sites that have only stratum 3 back ups are few and far between. Almost all sites that rely on GPS timing have at least a stratum 1 backup. From what I know of my company's and the others SOP's, the industry operates on the belief that if the GPS network goes, we expect it to be back up before the cesium clocks would begin to slip. Stratum 1 can go for a few days, so it would be my estimate that we would encounter problems with the phone networks, major disruptions would be avoided if GPS can be restored within a week. I believe that this theory follows the line of thaught that if the GPS network is down for longet than that, something nearly catostrophic would have to have happened...something so bad that having the phones screwd up would be the least of the country's problems. If something were to happen that takes out GPS sats, it would almost certainly take out a lot of other satellites. Now THAT would really screw us. If you remember what happened in the summer of 1998 what just one communication satellite went down, then you know what I mean. Almost all ATM and credit card transactions, as well as a lot of pagers (mine included) came to a screatching halt. Take out GPS and a dozen other satellites and things get really scary.
Not to nit-pick, but the soldiers in Nazi Germany had to swear an oath to Hitler, personally, not to Germany as a nation.
I suppose I should have expected some stupid AC coward to spout this flavor of tripe. What are you, French? Not that it matters. I guess you would be happier if we turned our backs to our allies and ran from every fight that was brought to our front door. Point being, if it wasn't for the U.S., you, along with all of Europe would be singing "Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alis" every morning.
I used to deliver pizza for Domino's, but that doesn't mean I'm gonna do jack for them at ANY point in the future. Hell, if I were a Senator I'd probably put that company's survival "in question" :)
Ye Gods! This is aimed more at the comments below than the parent of this post. Here we have one of the 24 hour news networks actually getting this story right, and what do we get? A bunch of pissing and moaning! "Ewwww! Fox News is right-wing! Republicans are BAD! They like John Ashcroft! We don't need THEM!" Pardon my fucking french, but get the fuck over yourselves and quit pissing on the only goddamn network that actually gets this issue! For fuck's sake! Who else IS going to be on our side on this??? CNN? I think not. ABC? not very likely! There are so many fools who would rather sit in the corner and boo-hoo and bitch about how the big media types are trying, once again, to give all of us the sausage aenema and there is no shortage of bed-wetters who would rather hold their breath till they pass out then even consider that the republicans can be useful to stop this. Psst, here's a hint, THE DEMOCRATS ARE BOUGHT AND PAID FOR BY THE OTHER SIDE! Who is going to be able to counter them, Ralph Nader?! Put down the bong and go buy a clue. This is how things are done in the system. You make your alliances where you have to. If stopping this gives the republicans a political club to beat Hollings and Disney with, then we should be helping them drive the rusty nails into business end of that club! Yes, the system is corrupt. Yes, the people you ally yourself with today might be on the other side of another issue tomorrow. Yes, they are all paid professional liars. But this is one issue where you may just have to hold your noses and play the game. The good does not have to be the enemy of the perfect. A little pragmatism can go a long way. [/soapbox-ranting]
This might be fusion, then again it might not, but it doesn't mean that this isn't worth serious study. This is a very big universe and we we don't even understand 1/10th of 1% of it. History is repleat with people who were scoffed, mocked and ridiculed because they stepped away from what was accepted to look at things from a different angle. There was no shortage of people who laughed at Galileo, Capernicus, Keplar and a long list of others. Has anyone bothered to think that maybe, just maybe there is some part of nuclear physics that we don't even know exists, let alone understand? Let them do the research and see where it leads. Some of the greatest discoveries in science have happend by accident while looking for something completely different.
for Lojack type applications. Stuff one inside the dash or in a fender and connect to be powered by cars electrical system in case the battery runs down. If your car gets stolen you can track it down. In Lojack systems, only the police have access to this info and will deal with it "when they get around to it." Also makes it easy to tail a spouse susspected of cheating or making sure that if they kids borrow the car, they really are just going to the library.
What the judge has ordered will be exluded in the appeal that the record industry will ceratinky pursue. It's a burdon of proof situation. Napster is innocent until the court can prove that they are guilty. You can't prove a negative.
...before the propeller heads collect enough of this stuff to transmute their lab into a very large, smoldering crater when they lose their magnetic confinement. Okay, maybe that would be way more antihydrogen than they could ever realistically hope to produce. I just don't want to live anywhere near the facillity that ever does.
Think about this. How many people out there would pay serious money to have a chance to "hit the reset button" if something happens to a cherished pet. I've had a dog that died, like all dogs do. Nothing could replace her because she was unique and there are some things that even cloning can't copy. But I would have moved heaven and earth to have a chance to start over again with a puppy that would have at least grown up to look like her. Dare I say that my parents would have even taken out a 2nd mortgage on the house for the money if cloning was an option.
This is more than just the "gee-whiz" factor of having the fastest PC or a TIVO with 2 Terabyte RAID storage. This is dealing with people's emotions and people with money will spend it like drunken sailors if they know that a few thousand dollars can get them an exact living, breathing, physical copy of their pet after they die.
Things will improve but it's going to take a lot longer than we are all hoping it will. It will most likely mean career advancement will be much slower than in recent years. It's depressing when you're experienced in a well paying field and good at what you do and then end up working in the proverbial "McJob" where there seems to be no end of the downturn in sight. Lets just hope that we don't have to wait too much longer. I'm lucky to still be working in my field and I just hope things turn around soon.
You and I seem to be on the same line of thought on this one. Many people don't have a problem with this and similar proposals because they trust the current administration. I trust the current administration, insofar as not abusing the power that they have expanded. My over-riding concern is what a future administration will do with the expanded power and authority, post 9/11. Hitler didn't enact gun registration in Germany, it was in place before he come into power and used it to confiscate any weapons owned by jews in Germany, eliminating any chance of an armed resistance.
I hope this isn't the start of what could turn into an internal visa that will apply to all forms of mass transit.
I know a lot of people get knocked for just getting a technical degree, but it's a very good way to start for some people. I got started a little late on the higher education track. When I was 25 I got sick of drifting from one no-future job to another. I didn't want to end up delivering pizza for the rest of my life so I decided to get my ass in gear and go to school to study electronics, something I had always been interested in. I went to Devry and completed the associates degree program for electronic technicians because it was took a little less than two years. My plan was to get my foot in the door at a good company that would pay for part of the cost for me to continue on to Devry's BSEET. A few months before I graduated I got a job with one of the telecoms (one that survived the .com crash) as an equipment installer. Since I was well versed in electronics in general I was able to become familiar with a lot of the hardware, I moved from a field installer to coordinating equipment purchasing and logistics of storing and shipping the stuff to the field because the people that were doing that didn't always know what to send and when to send it. After more than a year of doing that, a head-hunter offered me a program manager job at another company. When I tried to turn in my notice at my company, they wanted to know what it would take to keep me. I told them that I wanted to get into engineering, thinking that they might offer to pay for me to go back to school. Instead they promoted me to an entry level engineering position and trained me on the job. This has worked out pretty well so far. I'm now 32 and if I do go back to school it will be to learn how to write code since the money seems to be in software. The telecom job market is scary right now. If I get laid off this year (very likely) at least I'll be able to fix TV's or something like that. Now I'm a little nervous about getting into another field at 32 when most of the entry level jobs for programmers are filled by people in their early 20's. God I'm too young to feel this old!
Damn! Got any details on that?
Hey, mod this one up if we get case number!
AFIK my cable provider (Time-Warner, Columbus Ohio) isn't doing this yet. If they do I'll be quickly dropping the internet access along with their cable TV service (currently about $83/month) and will sign up for Ameritech/SBC DSL and will probably get a dish unless SBC is running a deal for cable TV. VOTE WITH YOUR WALLETS! If Comcast people have another option they should go with it.
It would appear that the moderators don't share our love for sterling wittiness.