Animals fight. Humans fight. It's stupd and sad and I hope we can move long term away from it. In the meantime, I for one am happy we have a strong defense. Do you honestly think Russia and China aren't interested in global hegemony?
That said, I'm not so happy about our offensive game.
Anyway freedom is a double edged sword. Nobody gets to pick and choose who uses FOSS for what purpose. That's sort of the point. You honestly don't think Linux has played a military roll before?
On the other hand they may contribute back to the community, and probably already have done so.
And it's a hell of a lot better than them running Windows. You'd be amazed how many mission critical Windows boxes are on a typical ship, to say nothing of a military vessel.
I used it to wrap some crazy magnetometer processing code written in Fortran into a nice Python program. I ripped out all the I/O from the Fortran code and moved it into the Python layer. It worked great. Fortran is AWESOME at number crunching but SUCKS ASS at IO or well pretty much anything else, hence Python.
Too bad this solar cycle is such a dud and 10m hasn't been opening for long haul comms. I remember back in 2000 talking to South Africa on my 25w mobile. Oh well.
The Juno site doesn't mention who will have coverage at what time. Seems like the closest approach is over central africa and southern asia; not exactly hotbeds of amateur activity, and pointless for most hams to even bother trying at those times. Now as it passes over North America you might actually get something if they bothered to tell you when it would be over North America.
And the odds of any electronics inside the plane interfering with satellite signals is pretty low because the satellite antennas are outside the plane which makes a darned effective faraday cage. HF is different because, unless I'm mistaken, the aircraft body IS the HF antenna.
Today's Oceanographic exercise in stupidity: the government has NOAA scientists on furlough. The... ROV team is heading up to... to sail on a NOAA funded cruise with NOAA scientists. The ROV still isn't operational as of Friday. Yup this sounds like a great idea to sail with broken equipment and scientists who can't work. GO USA!
BTW a typical large research vessel costs several tens of thousands of dollars per day to operate (fuel costs, mostly). Boats are holes in the water you throw money into. Thanks to the shutdown that money is now being lit on fire and then thrown in the hole.
Personally I work mainly on NSF funded contracts, so I am nervous. Thankfully our funding is secure for the short term, so hopefully this all gets resolved before it has any real impact.
Most consumer electronics of the types that people bring on planes do not generate significant RF, with the radios turned off. However they can generate a crapload of RFI in the HF bands, as any ham knows. Guess what band aircraft use on intercontinental flights? HF.
I spent three years sailing on the Scripps Institution of Oceanography research vessels, mostly the Revelle, and the Melville. One of my primary responsibilities was operating the multibeam sonar and other acoustic instruments. Working on ship is interesting, it's sort of like college, where you live in one small floating building housing the dorms, labs, cafeteria, and plant, with 40 people, except you cannot leave the building for 50 days at a stretch. It's like being on a reality show living and working with scientists of all types, and some other colorful characters.
None of the 50 or so marine biologists that I ever sailed with ever had the slightest concern about the multibeam's impact on marine life. And belive me they were very interested in sonar's effects on marine mammals. Anytime we would perform SEISMIC survey ops we were required by law to have a marine mammal observer on watch. If they sighted any whales in the area, we shut down the air guns. In the old days they used sticks of dynamite, now they use 3000psi air guns. Loud.
Bear in mind our ship cost up to $50,000 per DAY to operate. And that's just for the ship, crew, and technicians, not the scientists and who or what ever they bring. Commercial vessels probably cost much more to operate; the greatest cost is diesel; ships burn thousands of gallons per day; we bought ours from the Navy. But the MMO's were professional scientists and took their jobs seriously and we respected them and I would call them my friends. The idea that any of the other acoustic instruments could harm marine mammels was never broached. Another time I sailed with a large group of marine biologists who were basically pinging whales with high powered sonar to see what would happen because they were concerned with high powered sonars effects on whales. They never brought up any of the ships other acoustic instruments.
It's possible that MB has an effect. You could hear our MB all over the ship. We ran a Simrad EM-120 at 12khz, which I can hear pretty well. It sounded like a really loud bird chirping. And sometimes you could even hear the tinkling echos off the seabed. I can see how it MIGHT annoy whales. And I bet the commercial ships run a much higher-power sonar. They drag like 12 airguns when we drag one or two. I think a lot of it also depends on where you're operating. Most of the ocean is surprisingly empty and devoid of higher life forms. Perhaps greater percautions are needed close to whale populations. It's just surprising because as a member of the oceanographic community I for one was not aware that this issue was even on the radar (no pun intended).
MB sonar is generally a "good thing". We can only get very coarse bathymetry via satellite. MB is necessary to map the seabed in any detail and seabed maps are critical to earth science. I just hope this doesn't turn into some sort of sonar hysteria where we are unecessarily restricting good scence based on bad science.
Wow, swap the words "ubuntu" and "debian" from that post and it would reflect the reality that _I_ live in.
I'm a software engineer with a pretty extensive sys admin background. I have the technical skills to dive into the code at any level to fix any problem. What I don't have is the TIME to fsck around with rinky dink BS that doesn't pay my bills or feed my kids. I work on advancing MY part of society (scientific applications) and let the desktop developers advance theirs. Which is exactly the reason I switched to Ubuntu and later Mint. It WORKS. Out of the box. Usually mostly. I can't say I've NEVER had to dink around with it. But a LOT less than any other distro I've ever used, including but not limited to Debian, RH/Centos, Fedora, Gentoo, or any of the various BSDs, or for that matter OpenSolaris. Granted I'm talking about DESKTOP use here. For servers I still usually deploy centos.
When I got a new car I used my ezpass for years before I rememberd to update my acct. The terms say you can't use it in a different car but it's not enforced in my experience.
Vermont's EOC is in a floodplane too and guess what happened when Hurricane Irene came through? All the IT infrastructure was in the (flooded) basement so basically we had no EOC. So after the storm, did the move the EOC? No, they moved the IT stuff up to the second floor. Brilliant!
If you want ALL the attributes to be read-only, you can use collections.namedtuple.
This sort of control over other developers is generally considered un-Pythonic because it violates the "we're all adults here" principle. If the documentation says "Don't assign to X", you know you are taking your chances when you do it. If you feel that you have a good enough reason to do it, bully for you, but don't complain when it breaks.
One feature Python already has which violates this principle is the '__' prefix name mangling. I've had the misfortune of working with a library where I really had a very good reason to change one of the "private" variables in a very safe way, but because the original developer had arbitrarily made ALL his attributes "__*", I had to fork the library and fix it first.
This use of speech recognition seems like a similar situation. It works for a few people, but it will not ever have a large user community. QWERTY keyboards are so dominant that their network effect makes other input modes irrelevant. Even those who adopt it will still be using conventional keyboards away from their custom environment.
I think this point is a red herring. At every job I've ever had I've spent 90% of my time in front of the same workstation. If you can use your preferred input method 90% of the time, how is that purpose defeated by using QWERTY the other 10%?
I've been working from home for two years, the first year as a full time employee at a software consultancy, the second year as a self employed contractor.
At the first job, pay was good, benefits were ok, and work paid for my phone, unlimited data plan, and a high end laptop, with a docking station and a big monitor, and loads of licenced commercial software including a $10,000 GIS platform. We used Skype chat a lot, both video and audio, and email. There was a monthly newsletter and an annual meeting where everybody was on site for a couple of days. Of course because they had an office and offered me an on site job and I chose WFH I didn't get to deduct my home office expenses because it was at my convenience, not my employer's. Economically I think it was sort of a wash. The reasons I left had nothing to do with working from home. All the tradeoffs mentined exist. For me it works.
For the last year or so I've been working as an independant consulting out of my home office. I can deduct more stuff but I also have to buy all my own equipment, my own insurance, etc. Plenty has been said about independant contracting that doesn't bear repeating here.
The biggest issue for me is filtering out the distractions created by my family and overcoming monotony. It's hard to explain to a rambunctious two year old why they can't bang on daddy's office door. Days go by and I don't leave the house. And it's been tough to explain to my wife why I need to be able to talk a walk without taking the kids with me. "But you work from home!" "Yes, until 5pm I am working, even if I go for a walk." Engineers need to go for walks sometimes.
The scientific community is really coalescing around Python. I started working at UCSD-SIO in 2004 and sold my whole team on Python. In that time I've seen Python emerge as the accross the board standard in most research institutions. Although there's still heaps of legacy code written in Perl, C, Fortran, tcl, tcsh, insert language here, and there's always the holdout who will keep writing matlab code until you pry it out of his cold dead hands, so being a multilinguist helps.
You see some programming jobs related to seismics (which is a branch of geology) pop up here from time to time http://www.iris.edu/hq/employment
You'll find some oceaongraphy related programming jobs pop up here from time to time. Note some of them require going to sea. You'll find marine geophysicists do a lot of seismics and geology: http://unols.org/jobs/jobs/index.html
Actually ordering pizza over ham radio phone patch is fine.
The law bans comms in which you have a "pecuniary interest". I.e. you cannot earn money from operating a ham radio. Back in the old days, commercial operators didn't want ham radio ops honing in on their racket. Spending money on a ham radio is fine.
I think I was a ham for about a week before I hear my first on-air cussword. I would advise against dropping the f-bomb but I've never heard of anybody getting in trouble for the occassional mild cuss.
Ham radio is about:
Public service
Radio technology
International goodwill
If you are interested in those things, you will enjoy ham radio, restrictions and all. If you are not interested in those things, see ya.
Slashdot Mirror
Fortran is widely used in science (speaking as a scientific developer here) and perfectly supported on Windows.
http://software.intel.com/en-us/fortran-compilers
I love the "automatically paralellize" checkbox in the intel fortran settings. Take that, C et al.
Animals fight. Humans fight. It's stupd and sad and I hope we can move long term away from it. In the meantime, I for one am happy we have a strong defense. Do you honestly think Russia and China aren't interested in global hegemony?
That said, I'm not so happy about our offensive game.
Anyway freedom is a double edged sword. Nobody gets to pick and choose who uses FOSS for what purpose. That's sort of the point. You honestly don't think Linux has played a military roll before?
On the other hand they may contribute back to the community, and probably already have done so.
And it's a hell of a lot better than them running Windows. You'd be amazed how many mission critical Windows boxes are on a typical ship, to say nothing of a military vessel.
Better yet, Fortran + Python.
http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/user/c-info.python-as-glue.html#f2py
I used it to wrap some crazy magnetometer processing code written in Fortran into a nice Python program. I ripped out all the I/O from the Fortran code and moved it into the Python layer. It worked great. Fortran is AWESOME at number crunching but SUCKS ASS at IO or well pretty much anything else, hence Python.
Too bad this solar cycle is such a dud and 10m hasn't been opening for long haul comms. I remember back in 2000 talking to South Africa on my 25w mobile. Oh well.
The Juno site doesn't mention who will have coverage at what time. Seems like the closest approach is over central africa and southern asia; not exactly hotbeds of amateur activity, and pointless for most hams to even bother trying at those times. Now as it passes over North America you might actually get something if they bothered to tell you when it would be over North America.
And the odds of any electronics inside the plane interfering with satellite signals is pretty low because the satellite antennas are outside the plane which makes a darned effective faraday cage. HF is different because, unless I'm mistaken, the aircraft body IS the HF antenna.
Friend of mine posted this on facebook today
BTW a typical large research vessel costs several tens of thousands of dollars per day to operate (fuel costs, mostly). Boats are holes in the water you throw money into. Thanks to the shutdown that money is now being lit on fire and then thrown in the hole.
Personally I work mainly on NSF funded contracts, so I am nervous. Thankfully our funding is secure for the short term, so hopefully this all gets resolved before it has any real impact.
Most consumer electronics of the types that people bring on planes do not generate significant RF, with the radios turned off. However they can generate a crapload of RFI in the HF bands, as any ham knows. Guess what band aircraft use on intercontinental flights? HF.
I spent three years sailing on the Scripps Institution of Oceanography research vessels, mostly the Revelle, and the Melville. One of my primary responsibilities was operating the multibeam sonar and other acoustic instruments. Working on ship is interesting, it's sort of like college, where you live in one small floating building housing the dorms, labs, cafeteria, and plant, with 40 people, except you cannot leave the building for 50 days at a stretch. It's like being on a reality show living and working with scientists of all types, and some other colorful characters.
None of the 50 or so marine biologists that I ever sailed with ever had the slightest concern about the multibeam's impact on marine life. And belive me they were very interested in sonar's effects on marine mammals. Anytime we would perform SEISMIC survey ops we were required by law to have a marine mammal observer on watch. If they sighted any whales in the area, we shut down the air guns. In the old days they used sticks of dynamite, now they use 3000psi air guns. Loud.
Bear in mind our ship cost up to $50,000 per DAY to operate. And that's just for the ship, crew, and technicians, not the scientists and who or what ever they bring. Commercial vessels probably cost much more to operate; the greatest cost is diesel; ships burn thousands of gallons per day; we bought ours from the Navy. But the MMO's were professional scientists and took their jobs seriously and we respected them and I would call them my friends. The idea that any of the other acoustic instruments could harm marine mammels was never broached. Another time I sailed with a large group of marine biologists who were basically pinging whales with high powered sonar to see what would happen because they were concerned with high powered sonars effects on whales. They never brought up any of the ships other acoustic instruments.
It's possible that MB has an effect. You could hear our MB all over the ship. We ran a Simrad EM-120 at 12khz, which I can hear pretty well. It sounded like a really loud bird chirping. And sometimes you could even hear the tinkling echos off the seabed. I can see how it MIGHT annoy whales. And I bet the commercial ships run a much higher-power sonar. They drag like 12 airguns when we drag one or two. I think a lot of it also depends on where you're operating. Most of the ocean is surprisingly empty and devoid of higher life forms. Perhaps greater percautions are needed close to whale populations. It's just surprising because as a member of the oceanographic community I for one was not aware that this issue was even on the radar (no pun intended).
MB sonar is generally a "good thing". We can only get very coarse bathymetry via satellite. MB is necessary to map the seabed in any detail and seabed maps are critical to earth science. I just hope this doesn't turn into some sort of sonar hysteria where we are unecessarily restricting good scence based on bad science.
Wow, swap the words "ubuntu" and "debian" from that post and it would reflect the reality that _I_ live in. I'm a software engineer with a pretty extensive sys admin background. I have the technical skills to dive into the code at any level to fix any problem. What I don't have is the TIME to fsck around with rinky dink BS that doesn't pay my bills or feed my kids. I work on advancing MY part of society (scientific applications) and let the desktop developers advance theirs. Which is exactly the reason I switched to Ubuntu and later Mint. It WORKS. Out of the box. Usually mostly. I can't say I've NEVER had to dink around with it. But a LOT less than any other distro I've ever used, including but not limited to Debian, RH/Centos, Fedora, Gentoo, or any of the various BSDs, or for that matter OpenSolaris. Granted I'm talking about DESKTOP use here. For servers I still usually deploy centos.
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
When I got a new car I used my ezpass for years before I rememberd to update my acct. The terms say you can't use it in a different car but it's not enforced in my experience.
Vermont's EOC is in a floodplane too and guess what happened when Hurricane Irene came through? All the IT infrastructure was in the (flooded) basement so basically we had no EOC. So after the storm, did the move the EOC? No, they moved the IT stuff up to the second floor. Brilliant!
mod funny
If you want ALL the attributes to be read-only, you can use collections.namedtuple.
This sort of control over other developers is generally considered un-Pythonic because it violates the "we're all adults here" principle. If the documentation says "Don't assign to X", you know you are taking your chances when you do it. If you feel that you have a good enough reason to do it, bully for you, but don't complain when it breaks.
One feature Python already has which violates this principle is the '__' prefix name mangling. I've had the misfortune of working with a library where I really had a very good reason to change one of the "private" variables in a very safe way, but because the original developer had arbitrarily made ALL his attributes "__*", I had to fork the library and fix it first.
If you could go back in time, what, if anything, would you do differently WRT to developing and releasing Python 3?
This use of speech recognition seems like a similar situation. It works for a few people, but it will not ever have a large user community. QWERTY keyboards are so dominant that their network effect makes other input modes irrelevant. Even those who adopt it will still be using conventional keyboards away from their custom environment.
I think this point is a red herring. At every job I've ever had I've spent 90% of my time in front of the same workstation. If you can use your preferred input method 90% of the time, how is that purpose defeated by using QWERTY the other 10%?
At the first job, pay was good, benefits were ok, and work paid for my phone, unlimited data plan, and a high end laptop, with a docking station and a big monitor, and loads of licenced commercial software including a $10,000 GIS platform. We used Skype chat a lot, both video and audio, and email. There was a monthly newsletter and an annual meeting where everybody was on site for a couple of days. Of course because they had an office and offered me an on site job and I chose WFH I didn't get to deduct my home office expenses because it was at my convenience, not my employer's. Economically I think it was sort of a wash. The reasons I left had nothing to do with working from home. All the tradeoffs mentined exist. For me it works.
For the last year or so I've been working as an independant consulting out of my home office. I can deduct more stuff but I also have to buy all my own equipment, my own insurance, etc. Plenty has been said about independant contracting that doesn't bear repeating here.
The biggest issue for me is filtering out the distractions created by my family and overcoming monotony. It's hard to explain to a rambunctious two year old why they can't bang on daddy's office door. Days go by and I don't leave the house. And it's been tough to explain to my wife why I need to be able to talk a walk without taking the kids with me. "But you work from home!" "Yes, until 5pm I am working, even if I go for a walk." Engineers need to go for walks sometimes.
The founding fathers never foresaw global megacorporations with concentrations of wealth and power that exceeds that of some actual countries.
You've obviously never heard of The British East India Company.
Better yet go to a thrift shop. Pop some tags.
The scientific community is really coalescing around Python. I started working at UCSD-SIO in 2004 and sold my whole team on Python. In that time I've seen Python emerge as the accross the board standard in most research institutions. Although there's still heaps of legacy code written in Perl, C, Fortran, tcl, tcsh, insert language here, and there's always the holdout who will keep writing matlab code until you pry it out of his cold dead hands, so being a multilinguist helps.
You see some programming jobs related to seismics (which is a branch of geology) pop up here from time to time http://www.iris.edu/hq/employment
You'll find some oceaongraphy related programming jobs pop up here from time to time. Note some of them require going to sea. You'll find marine geophysicists do a lot of seismics and geology: http://unols.org/jobs/jobs/index.html
From what I can tell, you are a troll.
There's one exception; you can legally arrange a private sale of ham radio equipment over the air.
Actually ordering pizza over ham radio phone patch is fine. The law bans comms in which you have a "pecuniary interest". I.e. you cannot earn money from operating a ham radio. Back in the old days, commercial operators didn't want ham radio ops honing in on their racket. Spending money on a ham radio is fine.
Ham radio is about:
If you are interested in those things, you will enjoy ham radio, restrictions and all. If you are not interested in those things, see ya.