Or at least the Allen Telescope Array. Which was divested from UC Berkeley in April.
What they did was spend that money on equipment *now*, rather than investing part of it as an endowed fund in a trust to provide ongoing funding for the operation of the equipment, and, on an as overage available basis, additional equipment.
Maybe they can get him to kick in the funding again, to avoid it being renamed the AT&T Telescope Array or the Oracle Telescope Array, and this time set it up as an endowed trust so that they will have funding in perpetuity.
There is generally FEMA funding available for burying wires.
Every time a hurricane hits St. Croix (U.S. Virgin Islands - an unincorporated U.S. Territory), they allocate funding for burying the wires. 80% of it finds its way into various pockets, and the 20% left over goes to balancing the wires back up on poles for the next hurricane.
Quite the little income generator, for the people with the pockets.
Aren't smart meters more about differential rates?
It seems to me that the power companies are deathly afraid of losing their stranglehold on energy, so with all the government subsidized solar coming on line in California, and the forced-buy by the power company, the point of smart meters seems intended to be poised to implement an arbitrage system in order to game the power rates.
With an ordinary meter, if you provide power to the grid, the meter runs backwards: they pay you the same rate as you pay them, at least for power you "borrowed" during the night. But what if they could pay you less for the power you provide them than they charge for the power they provide you? Smart meters enable this business model and protect their monopolies.
Personally, I think the grid should be government owned and tax supported, and that power companies should have to pay to lease it. For the case of municipal power companies, to avoid establishing vertical monopolies and integration, they'd have to divest their generating capacity, but that's a small minority situation with power generation in the U.S..
Richard Branson - Virgin Records, Virgin Atlantic Airways, Virgin Mobile, Virgin Galactic, plus all of http://www.virgin.com/company David Geffen - Dreamworks Ted Murphy - izea.com Tom Anderson - myspace.com David Karp - Tumblr.com Y.C. Wang - fpusa.com Rob Kalin - etsy.com Theodore Waitt - gateway.com Shawn Fanning - napster.com Steve Wozniak - apple.com Kevin Rose - digg.com Dustin Moskovitz - Cofounder, Facebook Jerry Yang - yahoo.com Amadeo Peter Giannini - Bank of America, perhaps you've heard of it Craig McCaw - McCaw Cellular Ashley Qualls - whateverlife.com Pete Cashmore - mashable.com Jeffrey Kalmikoff - Threadless.com Ben Kaufman - kluster.com Red McComb - Clear Channel Bram Cohen - BitTorrent Gurbaksh Chahal - Blue Lithium, Click Again
Given the fundamentals here there is no reason to be concerned about the safety of terahertz radiation. It is certainly far safer than the alternatives which have large known risks.
United States Patent 5,356,635: "wherein the carbohydrate comprises sucrose, lactose, maltose or cellobiose"
So it should be relatively biologically inter, not triger IgE reactions due to allergies, and will most likely be dissolved out prior to implantation, in any case, unless there's a pressing time requirement that necessitates it going in before the scaffolding is totally gone.
Good developer tools make all the difference. They get the hell out of the way of doing work.
(1) The biggest thing you can do to make people happy is fast builds. That generally means rolling your own, since tools like emerge/ebuilds and so on all have horrendous overhead. A null build of a product containing 500 modules (for example, an embedded Linux device) should take no more than 10 seconds. If it takes more than 10 seconds to do nothing, then you are doing it wrong.
(2) The next biggest thing you can do is proper build. Building is half the battle; the big thing that stops work is integration failure. Say you have 500 packages in a product, and you make a change to one of the packages; what should get rebuilt? The answer should be (A) the package itself, and (B) whatever depends on APIs exported by the package. Yes, this means properly expressing dependencies. This is hard. Boo hoo: you are getting paid because you do hard things that you ordinarily wouldn't do, except if you were getting paid. Get the hell over it. Doing things this way is incredibly important in order to resolve #1: If I can use binary build products for all the packages I'm not working on, obtained from a previous build, then all I have to concentrate on building is the things I'm currently working on. A 30 minute build goes down to a few seconds.
(3) This is necessary to resolving the build: Have strong inter-module contracts. A package that exports an ABI used by one or more other packages should damn well export a linkable library and header files. If the library version doesn't change, and the header files haven't changed, you don't need to rebuild the damn thing. But this can only be properly known if you have partitioned your packages such that they export ABIs. The ABIs should be documented, and these documents are contracts, where you agree not to break the contract from either end of things. A dependent package needs a new API? That's a negotiation. A Package wants to deprecate an API it exports? That's a negotiation, too.
(4) After build works, you need integration. Integration boils down to using branch tags in your source code control system. This is necessary when someone attempts to submit a change that breaks things: instead of being dead in the water until the change is fixed or reverted within the package, and waiting hours, the B&I team reverts the package version to the previous version, and you are good to go: Things take minutes, not hours, days, or weeks to resolve. The B&I team is God, but their deliverable is binary packages. This is important in support of #1.
(5) React appropriately when things go wrong. For example, if someone commits a test that's broken, but the test isn't exercised, and three weeks later the code path gets activated by a change and breaks things, do the right thing. The right thing is to back the hell out the change that activated the code path. The wrong thing is to try to fix the test at that point, while everything stays broken on the theory "Ah, this is a smiple fix, I'll just fix the test instead". You may look like a hero for fixing the test after a couple days or a week, but you aren't, you're the bottleneck who killed the productivity of the rest of the team while you were trying to fix the test. Bottom line: back out the proximal cause of the problem, and fix the root/distal problem out of band. Everyone gets to get more work done.
(6) Test appropriately. This is almost never done; most testing is reactive. What I mean by this is that people tend to write tests to verify that things are fixed, and then integrate those tests into their waterfall; that's a reactive test. This is almost never useful, since it doesn't verify correct behaviour, it only protects against regressions on a bug that was noteworthy enough that it's unlikely to repeat. Instead, testing should test desired product functionality. One aspect of agile programming that is a good idea is writing the functional tests before writing the code.
It's useless to spoof the GPS signal unless you know, apriori, where the drone is going. Lying to it about where it is is only useful if you lie to it relative to its destination, unless you are trying to lie it into a target very near the jamming signal source.
The Iranian spoof worked because the self destruct wasn't armed, and when jammed, the drone was known to be programmed to return to its launch site, which was a known location, and THAT location could be spoofed.
I imagine that there were a number of experiments in jamming to see what the behaviour of the drone would be when its communications were jammed, and the first several probably had armed self destructs and just blew themselves up. Given that these things are somewhat expensive, they probably stopped arming the destruct, which prevented the jamming from being used as a remote "blow the drone up" trigger. And then after a couple of them returned to base, and it became SOP to not arm the self destruct, the spoofing started, resulting in the drone capture.
The Air Force had a similar weapon in 1978, albeit using what was effectively ball lightning in the plasma channel rather than full arc charges like the Army weapon -- I don't think the arc charges terrifically useful any more than people die in the Farraday cage at Arc Attack concerts at Maker Faires (hint: they don't).
The air force work was based on work by Pyotr Kapitsa, the Russian Nobel winning physicist. The idea was to create a plasma channel with a laser, drop a ball of lighning into it, and let the closing channel push it into the target. I'm pretty sure the project was scrapped for the same reason the army project isn't going to go anywhere (unless they deploy it against combat troops, rather than vehicles.
HERF guns would probably be more fruitful, if the intent wasn't fried humans; at least HERF guns actually work against avionics/vehicle electronics.
Benefiting the citizenry is not the same thing as benefiting society, and the point of services provided by society needs to be to benefit the society, not the individual. If it benefits the citizenry as well, that's a nice side effect, but it should not be the primary underlying goal.
Setting the price point at or lower than the necessary price point to achieve the societal benefit is all that's necessary. In the case of higher education, this is achievable at a non-zero price point. And yes, this means that some people will be economically disadvantaged by that decision.
I would argue that it's possible to be a member of an economic underclass and get a scholarship for your higher education. I know many existence proofs. So the corollary to that is that setting a non-zero price point only economically disadvantage those who are already intellectually disadvantaged to the point of not being able to obtain said scholarship.
Again, we get a net benefit to society: the people who can afford the economic admission get it, and the people who can't afford that admission, but who can instead afford the intellectual admission instead, both get their higher education.
While it could be argued that the net benefit to society would be higher if it were a pure intellectual meritocracy as to who received the education, until you hit the net benefit cut-off point, the ability of institutions to float scholarships on the backs of less intellectually gifted people with money to spare is very similar to achieving the same ends through taxation. This method, however, avoids the negative reaction you would get by taxing the parents of less capable economically advantaged students, and then not letting them into the club while using that money to pay for the economically disadvantaged geniuses.
Chevron: We really don't care about the price of a barrel of oil one way or the other, except for those of us who have commodities futures in our portfolios. We've just successfully lobbied California to get the gas reformulated again so out of state gas can't compete in our private sandbox. Oh yeah, we'll be taking two of our refineries offline for preventive maintenance to celebrate this achievement.
You're an idiot for comparing "Feasible" with "Free", he's saying- It's a birth right, you're saying if you work yourself to death doing odd work during the years of your life you're supposed to spend studying to become more intelligent and an eventual net gain to your family and country you might just get one.
Studying doesn't make you more intelligent, it makes you more educated. This is fundamental attribution error often seen in highly educated people who like to believe themselves more intelligent for it.
You tell me which one's better- yes yours works, but it doesn't even compare. So don't compare them. People always bring up your point when the free things other countries provide are mentioned, and it's just stupid.
I agree that education up to a certain level should be considered a birthright, but you quickly hit a point of diminishing returns when you attempt to educate everyone to the same level. Some people are in fact not educable -- this is the major legitimate complaint about the "No Child Left Behind" policies of recent decades. Not everyone is capable of having differential calculus crammed between their ears.
You also hit that point when you start educating people in fields which were self-selected based on their expectation of income. Does the U.S. seriously need more lawyers per capita than all other countries (25% higher than Brazil, the next most lawyer-heavy country)? Probably not. Does it need deeply unhappy brain surgeons who are only in it because of the money? That's probably counter-productive as well.
Frankly, we don't need the number of people we have in order to maintain society at the current level, and we will likely need to come to terms with finding some way of giving them money not to steal our stuff at the point we realize cable television is no longer cutting it.
I'd suggest sticking to your field and getting a job with a big U.S. player with offices in Hong Kong, Both Google and IBM have offices there, although IBM has many more openings posted at the moment.
The point is that if you join the National Guard, it's not a safe haven, you're getting deployed as if you had intentionally joined the full time military. There's no practical difference these days between the two. If George Bush had pulled his stint with the Texas National guard in this climate, his ass would have been in Vietnam. Even the Coast Guard is getting deployed overseas.
Add to this that when your contract is up, if you are able-bodied, then you are getting stop-lossed and you're not getting a discharge at the end of your contract period, unless, like my nephew, you are injured enough that you're no longer useful. And then after 6 months, they will then say you are fully recovered, even if you demonstrably aren't, and wash their hands of you to avoid paying ongoing medical.
H.264 patent: The last expiration is US 7826532 on 29 nov 2027 MPEG-2 patent: The last expiration is US 7334248 in 2026 (but if 6181712 is held to be prior art, move that up to 2018)
Otherwise there are per unit royalties without a Microsoft to pre-pay them for you so the OS itself pays no royalties for the driver (or you pay for the driver, or you drive the chip cost up relative to Intel, for whom Microsoft also pays the royalty).
So he wanted to be trained and paid and give nothing in return? There's a group for people like that. It's called everyone, and we meet at the bar after work to discuss how life didn't work out like we wanted.
He was already a trained helicopter pilot; he wanted to make himself available to fill in for things like Hurricane Katrina while the full time military was off playing whack-a-mole with Al Qaeda. He was offering them a lot more than what he expected in exchange.
Make no mistake, this was a bait-and-switch based on the MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) he was contracted for when he signed up.
Pick something as far from programming as possible, and do that.
I was convinced from a very early age that I wanted to be a nuclear physicist (this was back before it was politically corrected into "high energy physics"). I learned everything I could about it, learned all the math, derived neutron numbers from information gleaned from "The Curve of Binding Energy", and basically absorbed information like a sponge.
Then I went to my first year of college (entering as a sophomore due to my AP credits), did well in the first couple of quarters of physic classes (started in at the junior level, since I was pretty advanced in physics already), and things were going great. Then I was visiting a lab, and saw my first microcomputer with a graphics card (a Terak 8510, as it turned out).
Now I'm a software engineer for Google, having worked previously for Apple and IBM.
I tripled in physics, math, and CS, and physics taught me an incredible amount about how to think about problem solving that I couldn't have achieved without studying an actual hard science, but I'm not working in the field by building bombs for TRW to balance on top of pencils of fire.
The point of this little autobiographical journey is that, even if you know what you want, you might not know what you want/more/, until you encounter it.
So set yourself up in a situation where you'll encounter something outside your comfort zone, and which is far away from your experience to date. You might find you hate it; you might find you love it, but either way, in doing that, you'll find out more about yourself and the world. And if you find something you hate, remember that you can do something you hate while looking for something else; a summer is long enough to sample up to half a dozen things you find that you hate.
If I had my summer between high school and college to do over, I'd probably try for the news room at a newspaper, an art studio co-op, a cruise ship, a CPA firm, a law firm, an airline, or randomly opening the yellow pages.
The parent poster suggests you join the National Guard.
I have a friend with a masters in CS, was a highly respected engineer at Apple. He was a recreational helicopter pilot who always wanted to be a rescue pilot working for LifeFlight or a similar air ambulance organization. So he joined the National Guard to get flight hours and get rescue training for domestic disasters, which he felt was an OK trade for boot camp plus one weekend a month and two weeks a year.
Slashdot Mirror
And it turned out that it was made of what we long suspected the mising mass of the universe wa composed of: AOL discs.
The question was "tech exec", not "any exec", or I would have been including a lot more people in the list. Plastics is tech.
Or at least the Allen Telescope Array. Which was divested from UC Berkeley in April.
What they did was spend that money on equipment *now*, rather than investing part of it as an endowed fund in a trust to provide ongoing funding for the operation of the equipment, and, on an as overage available basis, additional equipment.
Maybe they can get him to kick in the funding again, to avoid it being renamed the AT&T Telescope Array or the Oracle Telescope Array, and this time set it up as an endowed trust so that they will have funding in perpetuity.
There is generally FEMA funding available for burying wires.
Every time a hurricane hits St. Croix (U.S. Virgin Islands - an unincorporated U.S. Territory), they allocate funding for burying the wires. 80% of it finds its way into various pockets, and the 20% left over goes to balancing the wires back up on poles for the next hurricane.
Quite the little income generator, for the people with the pockets.
Hey Philosophy Major, is my latte ready yet?
Yes, English major. See you at lunch? Yes, I would like fries with that.
Aren't smart meters more about differential rates?
It seems to me that the power companies are deathly afraid of losing their stranglehold on energy, so with all the government subsidized solar coming on line in California, and the forced-buy by the power company, the point of smart meters seems intended to be poised to implement an arbitrage system in order to game the power rates.
With an ordinary meter, if you provide power to the grid, the meter runs backwards: they pay you the same rate as you pay them, at least for power you "borrowed" during the night. But what if they could pay you less for the power you provide them than they charge for the power they provide you? Smart meters enable this business model and protect their monopolies.
Personally, I think the grid should be government owned and tax supported, and that power companies should have to pay to lease it. For the case of municipal power companies, to avoid establishing vertical monopolies and integration, they'd have to divest their generating capacity, but that's a small minority situation with power generation in the U.S..
OK, BofA is stretching "high tech" a little...
Richard Branson - Virgin Records, Virgin Atlantic Airways, Virgin Mobile, Virgin Galactic, plus all of http://www.virgin.com/company
David Geffen - Dreamworks
Ted Murphy - izea.com
Tom Anderson - myspace.com
David Karp - Tumblr.com
Y.C. Wang - fpusa.com
Rob Kalin - etsy.com
Theodore Waitt - gateway.com
Shawn Fanning - napster.com
Steve Wozniak - apple.com
Kevin Rose - digg.com
Dustin Moskovitz - Cofounder, Facebook
Jerry Yang - yahoo.com
Amadeo Peter Giannini - Bank of America, perhaps you've heard of it
Craig McCaw - McCaw Cellular
Ashley Qualls - whateverlife.com
Pete Cashmore - mashable.com
Jeffrey Kalmikoff - Threadless.com
Ben Kaufman - kluster.com
Red McComb - Clear Channel
Bram Cohen - BitTorrent
Gurbaksh Chahal - Blue Lithium, Click Again
Given the fundamentals here there is no reason to be concerned about the safety of terahertz radiation. It is certainly far safer than the alternatives which have large known risks.
Unless you have an insulin pump.
http://www.inquisitr.com/233195/tsa-breaks-teens-insulin-pump-during-forced-full-body-scanner-examination/
Then it's pretty damn dangerous, particularly if it happens to be on when the scanner kills the control circuitry for the pump.
United States Patent 5,356,635: "wherein the carbohydrate comprises sucrose, lactose, maltose or cellobiose"
So it should be relatively biologically inter, not triger IgE reactions due to allergies, and will most likely be dissolved out prior to implantation, in any case, unless there's a pressing time requirement that necessitates it going in before the scaffolding is totally gone.
Good developer tools make all the difference. They get the hell out of the way of doing work.
(1) The biggest thing you can do to make people happy is fast builds. That generally means rolling your own, since tools like emerge/ebuilds and so on all have horrendous overhead. A null build of a product containing 500 modules (for example, an embedded Linux device) should take no more than 10 seconds. If it takes more than 10 seconds to do nothing, then you are doing it wrong.
(2) The next biggest thing you can do is proper build. Building is half the battle; the big thing that stops work is integration failure. Say you have 500 packages in a product, and you make a change to one of the packages; what should get rebuilt? The answer should be (A) the package itself, and (B) whatever depends on APIs exported by the package. Yes, this means properly expressing dependencies. This is hard. Boo hoo: you are getting paid because you do hard things that you ordinarily wouldn't do, except if you were getting paid. Get the hell over it. Doing things this way is incredibly important in order to resolve #1: If I can use binary build products for all the packages I'm not working on, obtained from a previous build, then all I have to concentrate on building is the things I'm currently working on. A 30 minute build goes down to a few seconds.
(3) This is necessary to resolving the build: Have strong inter-module contracts. A package that exports an ABI used by one or more other packages should damn well export a linkable library and header files. If the library version doesn't change, and the header files haven't changed, you don't need to rebuild the damn thing. But this can only be properly known if you have partitioned your packages such that they export ABIs. The ABIs should be documented, and these documents are contracts, where you agree not to break the contract from either end of things. A dependent package needs a new API? That's a negotiation. A Package wants to deprecate an API it exports? That's a negotiation, too.
(4) After build works, you need integration. Integration boils down to using branch tags in your source code control system. This is necessary when someone attempts to submit a change that breaks things: instead of being dead in the water until the change is fixed or reverted within the package, and waiting hours, the B&I team reverts the package version to the previous version, and you are good to go: Things take minutes, not hours, days, or weeks to resolve. The B&I team is God, but their deliverable is binary packages. This is important in support of #1.
(5) React appropriately when things go wrong. For example, if someone commits a test that's broken, but the test isn't exercised, and three weeks later the code path gets activated by a change and breaks things, do the right thing. The right thing is to back the hell out the change that activated the code path. The wrong thing is to try to fix the test at that point, while everything stays broken on the theory "Ah, this is a smiple fix, I'll just fix the test instead". You may look like a hero for fixing the test after a couple days or a week, but you aren't, you're the bottleneck who killed the productivity of the rest of the team while you were trying to fix the test. Bottom line: back out the proximal cause of the problem, and fix the root/distal problem out of band. Everyone gets to get more work done.
(6) Test appropriately. This is almost never done; most testing is reactive. What I mean by this is that people tend to write tests to verify that things are fixed, and then integrate those tests into their waterfall; that's a reactive test. This is almost never useful, since it doesn't verify correct behaviour, it only protects against regressions on a bug that was noteworthy enough that it's unlikely to repeat. Instead, testing should test desired product functionality. One aspect of agile programming that is a good idea is writing the functional tests before writing the code.
It's useless to spoof the GPS signal unless you know, apriori, where the drone is going. Lying to it about where it is is only useful if you lie to it relative to its destination, unless you are trying to lie it into a target very near the jamming signal source.
The Iranian spoof worked because the self destruct wasn't armed, and when jammed, the drone was known to be programmed to return to its launch site, which was a known location, and THAT location could be spoofed.
I imagine that there were a number of experiments in jamming to see what the behaviour of the drone would be when its communications were jammed, and the first several probably had armed self destructs and just blew themselves up. Given that these things are somewhat expensive, they probably stopped arming the destruct, which prevented the jamming from being used as a remote "blow the drone up" trigger. And then after a couple of them returned to base, and it became SOP to not arm the self destruct, the spoofing started, resulting in the drone capture.
The Air Force had a similar weapon in 1978, albeit using what was effectively ball lightning in the plasma channel rather than full arc charges like the Army weapon -- I don't think the arc charges terrifically useful any more than people die in the Farraday cage at Arc Attack concerts at Maker Faires (hint: they don't).
The air force work was based on work by Pyotr Kapitsa, the Russian Nobel winning physicist. The idea was to create a plasma channel with a laser, drop a ball of lighning into it, and let the closing channel push it into the target. I'm pretty sure the project was scrapped for the same reason the army project isn't going to go anywhere (unless they deploy it against combat troops, rather than vehicles.
HERF guns would probably be more fruitful, if the intent wasn't fried humans; at least HERF guns actually work against avionics/vehicle electronics.
What was the exact question?
Was it "Is Obama better suited to handle an alien invasion, or serve another term as president?"
Because I'd say Romney is better suited for the alien invasion thing too.
Benefiting the citizenry is not the same thing as benefiting society, and the point of services provided by society needs to be to benefit the society, not the individual. If it benefits the citizenry as well, that's a nice side effect, but it should not be the primary underlying goal.
Setting the price point at or lower than the necessary price point to achieve the societal benefit is all that's necessary. In the case of higher education, this is achievable at a non-zero price point. And yes, this means that some people will be economically disadvantaged by that decision.
I would argue that it's possible to be a member of an economic underclass and get a scholarship for your higher education. I know many existence proofs. So the corollary to that is that setting a non-zero price point only economically disadvantage those who are already intellectually disadvantaged to the point of not being able to obtain said scholarship.
Again, we get a net benefit to society: the people who can afford the economic admission get it, and the people who can't afford that admission, but who can instead afford the intellectual admission instead, both get their higher education.
While it could be argued that the net benefit to society would be higher if it were a pure intellectual meritocracy as to who received the education, until you hit the net benefit cut-off point, the ability of institutions to float scholarships on the backs of less intellectually gifted people with money to spare is very similar to achieving the same ends through taxation. This method, however, avoids the negative reaction you would get by taxing the parents of less capable economically advantaged students, and then not letting them into the club while using that money to pay for the economically disadvantaged geniuses.
Chevron: We really don't care about the price of a barrel of oil one way or the other, except for those of us who have commodities futures in our portfolios. We've just successfully lobbied California to get the gas reformulated again so out of state gas can't compete in our private sandbox. Oh yeah, we'll be taking two of our refineries offline for preventive maintenance to celebrate this achievement.
You're an idiot for comparing "Feasible" with "Free", he's saying- It's a birth right, you're saying if you work yourself to death doing odd work during the years of your life you're supposed to spend studying to become more intelligent and an eventual net gain to your family and country you might just get one.
Studying doesn't make you more intelligent, it makes you more educated. This is fundamental attribution error often seen in highly educated people who like to believe themselves more intelligent for it.
You tell me which one's better- yes yours works, but it doesn't even compare. So don't compare them. People always bring up your point when the free things other countries provide are mentioned, and it's just stupid.
I agree that education up to a certain level should be considered a birthright, but you quickly hit a point of diminishing returns when you attempt to educate everyone to the same level. Some people are in fact not educable -- this is the major legitimate complaint about the "No Child Left Behind" policies of recent decades. Not everyone is capable of having differential calculus crammed between their ears.
You also hit that point when you start educating people in fields which were self-selected based on their expectation of income. Does the U.S. seriously need more lawyers per capita than all other countries (25% higher than Brazil, the next most lawyer-heavy country)? Probably not. Does it need deeply unhappy brain surgeons who are only in it because of the money? That's probably counter-productive as well.
Frankly, we don't need the number of people we have in order to maintain society at the current level, and we will likely need to come to terms with finding some way of giving them money not to steal our stuff at the point we realize cable television is no longer cutting it.
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/12/05/29/176252/ask-slashdot-find-a-job-in-china-for-non-native-speaker
I'd suggest sticking to your field and getting a job with a big U.S. player with offices in Hong Kong, Both Google and IBM have offices there, although IBM has many more openings posted at the moment.
Problem solved.
Actually, this is why you can't have source code to the binary blobs.
-- Terry
At the time I took it, if you worked at SLAC, you were a nuclear physicist.
-- Terry
You are, I think, missing the point.
The point is that if you join the National Guard, it's not a safe haven, you're getting deployed as if you had intentionally joined the full time military. There's no practical difference these days between the two. If George Bush had pulled his stint with the Texas National guard in this climate, his ass would have been in Vietnam. Even the Coast Guard is getting deployed overseas.
Add to this that when your contract is up, if you are able-bodied, then you are getting stop-lossed and you're not getting a discharge at the end of your contract period, unless, like my nephew, you are injured enough that you're no longer useful. And then after 6 months, they will then say you are fully recovered, even if you demonstrably aren't, and wash their hands of you to avoid paying ongoing medical.
-- Terry
H.264 patent: The last expiration is US 7826532 on 29 nov 2027
MPEG-2 patent: The last expiration is US 7334248 in 2026 (but if 6181712 is held to be prior art, move that up to 2018)
Otherwise there are per unit royalties without a Microsoft to pre-pay them for you so the OS itself pays no royalties for the driver (or you pay for the driver, or you drive the chip cost up relative to Intel, for whom Microsoft also pays the royalty).
-- Terry
So he wanted to be trained and paid and give nothing in return? There's a group for people like that. It's called everyone, and we meet at the bar after work to discuss how life didn't work out like we wanted.
He was already a trained helicopter pilot; he wanted to make himself available to fill in for things like Hurricane Katrina while the full time military was off playing whack-a-mole with Al Qaeda. He was offering them a lot more than what he expected in exchange.
Make no mistake, this was a bait-and-switch based on the MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) he was contracted for when he signed up.
-- Terry
Pick something as far from programming as possible, and do that.
I was convinced from a very early age that I wanted to be a nuclear physicist (this was back before it was politically corrected into "high energy physics"). I learned everything I could about it, learned all the math, derived neutron numbers from information gleaned from "The Curve of Binding Energy", and basically absorbed information like a sponge.
Then I went to my first year of college (entering as a sophomore due to my AP credits), did well in the first couple of quarters of physic classes (started in at the junior level, since I was pretty advanced in physics already), and things were going great. Then I was visiting a lab, and saw my first microcomputer with a graphics card (a Terak 8510, as it turned out).
Now I'm a software engineer for Google, having worked previously for Apple and IBM.
I tripled in physics, math, and CS, and physics taught me an incredible amount about how to think about problem solving that I couldn't have achieved without studying an actual hard science, but I'm not working in the field by building bombs for TRW to balance on top of pencils of fire.
The point of this little autobiographical journey is that, even if you know what you want, you might not know what you want /more/, until you encounter it.
So set yourself up in a situation where you'll encounter something outside your comfort zone, and which is far away from your experience to date. You might find you hate it; you might find you love it, but either way, in doing that, you'll find out more about yourself and the world. And if you find something you hate, remember that you can do something you hate while looking for something else; a summer is long enough to sample up to half a dozen things you find that you hate.
If I had my summer between high school and college to do over, I'd probably try for the news room at a newspaper, an art studio co-op, a cruise ship, a CPA firm, a law firm, an airline, or randomly opening the yellow pages.
-- Terry
The parent poster suggests you join the National Guard.
I have a friend with a masters in CS, was a highly respected engineer at Apple. He was a recreational helicopter pilot who always wanted to be a rescue pilot working for LifeFlight or a similar air ambulance organization. So he joined the National Guard to get flight hours and get rescue training for domestic disasters, which he felt was an OK trade for boot camp plus one weekend a month and two weeks a year.
He's in Afghanistan now.
-- Terry