I've often said that organized crime is simply the government for things the main government refuses to deal with. They create rackets (departments) to handle their various operations, and when they don't get their way, they break out the guns.
Agreed. I was on a criminal jury once and most of them were mice looking for a leader and two hang 'em high guys (one of them a minister more interested in talking about Promise Keepers than actually deliberating). While we did find the guy guilty (carjacking), I made them go through all the evidence and I told them "if you try and railroad this guy, I will vote not guilty until the day I die." At least one of the meek ones thanked me afterward. We found the guy guilty in the end, but I *know* he got a fair trial at least. I decided then and there to always waive my right to a jury if I'm ever accused of a crime.
You'll have to pardon me if I take my view on jury nullification from the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court over some random asshole on slashdot.
Actually, that is *my* background. But having had my head stuffed full of perception, human factors, ergonomics, and cognitive psychology has not conferred good graphic design skills to me.
It was 3/5ths, and it was 1787, and given your inadequate knowledge of the basic facts concerning the census count of slaves, you're probably not aware of the way that number was arrived at. There were people who didn't want them to count at all. I'll give you a hint: It *wasn't* the slave holders in the South. Perhaps if you think about the problem for a minute it might dawn on you why that was the case.
The founders knew perfectly well that things would need to change with the times. That is precisely why they created the amendment process in the first place.
That's not really true in the case of loss leaders. Stores sell stuff at a loss all the time, especially grocery stores with perishables, because you can't really stock up on things like milk, eggs or produce. The objective is to get your butt in the door to buy that 1.59 gallon of milk that cost them 1.92 that they usually sell for 2.59. But maybe then you'll buy that 5.99 box of bakery "gourmet" cookies right near the dairy case that cost them 1.64 to make, in addition to all your groceries because you don't want to go to 4 different stores to buy food, do you?
I've learned in my relatively short time in this hobby that it's really all about the antennas. You'll go farther with a cheap low-power rig and a great antenna than brand new top-of-the-line multi-thousand dollar rigs with a crap antenna. Go for broke on the antenna and you can't go far wrong.
We have a linear amp at our club's shack, but I rarely use/need it because we have a multiband beam with a rotor on top of a 60 foot tower at the top of a hill. I almost always get through a pile-up quickly and don't have much trouble talking to Europe and Australia (I'm in Arizona).
Okay, the real reason I don't use the amp much is because it's an old ETA Alpha 374 and If I don't tune it just so it starts to make interesting smells that scare the crap out of me.:-)
Nothing wrong with those cheap Chinese handhelds. Is it a Wouxun? I have one and it's actually a great radio. What's probably killing you is your cheap rubber-duck antenna. Get yourself a handheld multi-element 2m Yagi and point to the ISS and you can probably talk to it yourself. 5 watts isn't much, but the gain of your antenna should be enough for you to be heard at least for a little while.
There are no more Advanced tickets issued. Only Technician, General, and Extra are issued these days. Those who hold advanced tickets are grandfathered. The only privileges you get with an Extra ticket over the General is a little larger allocation on 80 (200 kHz), 40 (50 kHz), 20 (75 kHz), and 15 (75 kHz) meters. The test is also much harder than the General (assuming you're actually learning the material and not just memorizing the question pool). So it may or may not be worth it to you.
I love the older equipment. There's a Drake TR-7 (actually c. 1980, so not that old, really) with the remote VFO I've got an eye on in my club's equipment stash just going unused. I'm probably going to tender an offer for it and see if they bite. We've got some old Collins gear too, which is easy to work on and almost come back around to look trendy and steampunkish.
Plus there's a little magic in talking with someone half the world away without monthly fees, 15 intermediate routers, and billions of dollars of infrastructure between the two. My antenna and transceiver, the other guy's antenna and transceiver, a little bit of know-how, and some electrical power that I can even get from from a battery is all we need.
I've been doing pretty well DXing on 15 and 10 meters during the morning, though. We're definitely not there yet, but the propagation has been improving steadily these last six months or so.
Agreed. Dropping the code requirement helped me get to my extra last year. The irony is now that I have my license, and operating awhile on the HF bands I've learned the value of Morse (talk around the world with a 1 watt transmitter?) and am in the process of learning it.
Some of the finest people I've worked with in software have degrees distantly related to computer science, math, or software engineering. Music, religion, "interdisciplinary studies", and an accounting dropout are included in that mix. They are right to pish-posh it away. Actually, as an art person, you wouldn't happen to live near Phoenix, know Java well, and be interested in working on GIS applications for remote sensing, would you? We have a good product that probably could use a techie with an art background to improve its UI.
I too am running CyanogenMod. It's slow, crashes all the time, and is generally more frustrating with every new release. I have an original Moto Droid, so maybe it's long in the tooth, but if I can't even make it to my 2 year anniversary with a smart phone before obsolescence or malfunction, I'd rather do without. *shrug*
Depends on your definition of "fail". We had a candidate a few weeks ago that couldn't really solve the one I posed, but I still recommended we hire him. I can generally see through the difference between nervousness/stage fright and cluelessness. He asked good questions, and was obviously engaged in trying to solve the problem. I don't ask the questions I ask to see if you get the right answer, I want to see how you think.
If looking up the order of a couple arguments in a reference document is enough to pull you out of "the zone", programming is going to be very hard indeed.
I'm a geek and pretty much hate my Android phone. I bought it because I hated iPhones and BlackBerrys too. I'm fairly convinced my next phone is going to be a nice phone that makes phone calls and sends SMS, and I can do without a so-called smart phone.
I always thought of organized crime as the governments for the things the primary governments simply refuse to govern, apart from banning them outright. And doing things for the good of society is not a necessary function of governments. It could be argued that a government is just the dominant mob in a geographical area.
I would argue that since corporations are legal fictions created by governments, corporations couldn't overpower a government that gives it life in the first place. And even if it could somehow, it would be a de facto government of its own in any case.
Has had an axe to grind with the Mars program for a long time. Nothing new to see here. He's probably also bitter ever since the IAU demoted the planet his baby is headed to a "dwarf planet."
Full disclosure: when he was the science director at NASA, he threatened funding changes that would've put me out of a job, so he's not my favorite person in the world, so take the appropriate amounts of salt with MY comments.
With all that said, I agree with him to an extent. I would *love* to see more attention to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. But the anti-science, cut the budget at all costs people are ascendant right now, and their opposition is pretty luke-warm at best to the space program. The Mars program has momentum and the chances of us getting all the cool stuff funded is virtually nil. I doubt the sample return mission he's talking about will even get funded, especially in light of a recent OMB releases. For missions to Jupiter and Saturn to get any congressional love right now is not likely.
Also it's impossible to detect the use of GPS. It's just a passive receiver like an FM radio.
Not true. A passive receiver still has an oscillator in it that can be detected, though it's only effective at fairly close range. Some Googling has revealed that, in the particular case of GPS receivers, a pseudorandom number generator that runs at 1.023 MHz is used and a regular AM radio might be able to detect that signal (1023 on your AM dial!). I can't personally vouch for that, but I'm intrigued enough by the prospect that I'm going to experiment with it.
I worked on a networked backup and recovery system and in the 1.1 version of our product, we integrated encryption both of the data streams from remote systems, and of the data on the tape itself.
This was 10 years ago. If you bought recovery software from a competent vendor, it's not hard at all.
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I've often said that organized crime is simply the government for things the main government refuses to deal with. They create rackets (departments) to handle their various operations, and when they don't get their way, they break out the guns.
Agreed. I was on a criminal jury once and most of them were mice looking for a leader and two hang 'em high guys (one of them a minister more interested in talking about Promise Keepers than actually deliberating). While we did find the guy guilty (carjacking), I made them go through all the evidence and I told them "if you try and railroad this guy, I will vote not guilty until the day I die." At least one of the meek ones thanked me afterward. We found the guy guilty in the end, but I *know* he got a fair trial at least. I decided then and there to always waive my right to a jury if I'm ever accused of a crime.
You'll have to pardon me if I take my view on jury nullification from the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court over some random asshole on slashdot.
Unix is user-friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
Actually, that is *my* background. But having had my head stuffed full of perception, human factors, ergonomics, and cognitive psychology has not conferred good graphic design skills to me.
It was 3/5ths, and it was 1787, and given your inadequate knowledge of the basic facts concerning the census count of slaves, you're probably not aware of the way that number was arrived at. There were people who didn't want them to count at all. I'll give you a hint: It *wasn't* the slave holders in the South. Perhaps if you think about the problem for a minute it might dawn on you why that was the case.
The founders knew perfectly well that things would need to change with the times. That is precisely why they created the amendment process in the first place.
That's not really true in the case of loss leaders. Stores sell stuff at a loss all the time, especially grocery stores with perishables, because you can't really stock up on things like milk, eggs or produce. The objective is to get your butt in the door to buy that 1.59 gallon of milk that cost them 1.92 that they usually sell for 2.59. But maybe then you'll buy that 5.99 box of bakery "gourmet" cookies right near the dairy case that cost them 1.64 to make, in addition to all your groceries because you don't want to go to 4 different stores to buy food, do you?
I've learned in my relatively short time in this hobby that it's really all about the antennas. You'll go farther with a cheap low-power rig and a great antenna than brand new top-of-the-line multi-thousand dollar rigs with a crap antenna. Go for broke on the antenna and you can't go far wrong.
We have a linear amp at our club's shack, but I rarely use/need it because we have a multiband beam with a rotor on top of a 60 foot tower at the top of a hill. I almost always get through a pile-up quickly and don't have much trouble talking to Europe and Australia (I'm in Arizona).
Okay, the real reason I don't use the amp much is because it's an old ETA Alpha 374 and If I don't tune it just so it starts to make interesting smells that scare the crap out of me. :-)
Nothing wrong with those cheap Chinese handhelds. Is it a Wouxun? I have one and it's actually a great radio. What's probably killing you is your cheap rubber-duck antenna. Get yourself a handheld multi-element 2m Yagi and point to the ISS and you can probably talk to it yourself. 5 watts isn't much, but the gain of your antenna should be enough for you to be heard at least for a little while.
There are no more Advanced tickets issued. Only Technician, General, and Extra are issued these days. Those who hold advanced tickets are grandfathered. The only privileges you get with an Extra ticket over the General is a little larger allocation on 80 (200 kHz), 40 (50 kHz), 20 (75 kHz), and 15 (75 kHz) meters. The test is also much harder than the General (assuming you're actually learning the material and not just memorizing the question pool). So it may or may not be worth it to you.
I love the older equipment. There's a Drake TR-7 (actually c. 1980, so not that old, really) with the remote VFO I've got an eye on in my club's equipment stash just going unused. I'm probably going to tender an offer for it and see if they bite. We've got some old Collins gear too, which is easy to work on and almost come back around to look trendy and steampunkish.
Plus there's a little magic in talking with someone half the world away without monthly fees, 15 intermediate routers, and billions of dollars of infrastructure between the two. My antenna and transceiver, the other guy's antenna and transceiver, a little bit of know-how, and some electrical power that I can even get from from a battery is all we need.
I've been doing pretty well DXing on 15 and 10 meters during the morning, though. We're definitely not there yet, but the propagation has been improving steadily these last six months or so.
Agreed. Dropping the code requirement helped me get to my extra last year. The irony is now that I have my license, and operating awhile on the HF bands I've learned the value of Morse (talk around the world with a 1 watt transmitter?) and am in the process of learning it.
Some of the finest people I've worked with in software have degrees distantly related to computer science, math, or software engineering. Music, religion, "interdisciplinary studies", and an accounting dropout are included in that mix. They are right to pish-posh it away. Actually, as an art person, you wouldn't happen to live near Phoenix, know Java well, and be interested in working on GIS applications for remote sensing, would you? We have a good product that probably could use a techie with an art background to improve its UI.
I too am running CyanogenMod. It's slow, crashes all the time, and is generally more frustrating with every new release. I have an original Moto Droid, so maybe it's long in the tooth, but if I can't even make it to my 2 year anniversary with a smart phone before obsolescence or malfunction, I'd rather do without. *shrug*
Depends on your definition of "fail". We had a candidate a few weeks ago that couldn't really solve the one I posed, but I still recommended we hire him. I can generally see through the difference between nervousness/stage fright and cluelessness. He asked good questions, and was obviously engaged in trying to solve the problem. I don't ask the questions I ask to see if you get the right answer, I want to see how you think.
If looking up the order of a couple arguments in a reference document is enough to pull you out of "the zone", programming is going to be very hard indeed.
I'm a geek and pretty much hate my Android phone. I bought it because I hated iPhones and BlackBerrys too. I'm fairly convinced my next phone is going to be a nice phone that makes phone calls and sends SMS, and I can do without a so-called smart phone.
I always thought of organized crime as the governments for the things the primary governments simply refuse to govern, apart from banning them outright. And doing things for the good of society is not a necessary function of governments. It could be argued that a government is just the dominant mob in a geographical area.
I would argue that since corporations are legal fictions created by governments, corporations couldn't overpower a government that gives it life in the first place. And even if it could somehow, it would be a de facto government of its own in any case.
Has had an axe to grind with the Mars program for a long time. Nothing new to see here. He's probably also bitter ever since the IAU demoted the planet his baby is headed to a "dwarf planet."
Full disclosure: when he was the science director at NASA, he threatened funding changes that would've put me out of a job, so he's not my favorite person in the world, so take the appropriate amounts of salt with MY comments.
With all that said, I agree with him to an extent. I would *love* to see more attention to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. But the anti-science, cut the budget at all costs people are ascendant right now, and their opposition is pretty luke-warm at best to the space program. The Mars program has momentum and the chances of us getting all the cool stuff funded is virtually nil. I doubt the sample return mission he's talking about will even get funded, especially in light of a recent OMB releases. For missions to Jupiter and Saturn to get any congressional love right now is not likely.
Not true. A passive receiver still has an oscillator in it that can be detected, though it's only effective at fairly close range. Some Googling has revealed that, in the particular case of GPS receivers, a pseudorandom number generator that runs at 1.023 MHz is used and a regular AM radio might be able to detect that signal (1023 on your AM dial!). I can't personally vouch for that, but I'm intrigued enough by the prospect that I'm going to experiment with it.
I worked on a networked backup and recovery system and in the 1.1 version of our product, we integrated encryption both of the data streams from remote systems, and of the data on the tape itself.
This was 10 years ago. If you bought recovery software from a competent vendor, it's not hard at all.
I'm not aware of any material that is opaque across the entire EM spectrum.