The degree in engineering is only one component of being an engineer. Just like getting a law degree does not license you to practice law in a state. You must also pass the bar exam and go through a background check, and take an oath, before you are allowed to act like a lawyer.
Advertising yourself (not just job title, or saying you have a certain degree) as an engineer without a PE certificate is illegal.
In most states, to call yourself an "engineer," or to advertise your services as "engineering," you must be registered as a Professional Engineer (PE). That usually requires passing a couple exams, along with several years of work under the supervision of a PE.
This is rather difficult in electrical engineering, because there are relatively few PEs working in the field, and the exams are biased toward structural, civil, and other "public works" type engineering.
Some effort is being made to recognize the difference between traditional PE disciplines and electronics, to create a PE process more suited to those disciplines, but in most cases, it is still difficult to get PE certification working as an electrical (non)engineer.
As a software person, forget it.
Just because someone calls it "software engineering" doesn't make you an engineer.
(Of course, you can have whatever job title you want. "Sanitation Engineer," etc. But you still shouldn't advertise yourself as an engineer. Try "Software Designer," "Programmer," etc.)
Re: "dark side of the moon"
on
Lunar Power
·
· Score: 2
50% of the moon is in shadow from the sun at any given time. That 50% is not the same 50% all the time.
During a new moon, the dark side is, as even you point out, the side facing us! It doesn't get sunlight, which is why we see black when we look at the new moon.
I guess the great slashdot blackout has only further reduced the signal-to-noise ratio in these posts.
Foghorn Leghorn - Large, white windbag of a rooster seen in a number of Warner Brother cartoons over the years. Foghorn Leghorn (inspired by Kenny Delmar's Senator Beauregard Claghorn from Bighorn character, a Deep South politician from THE FRED ALLEN SHOW on radio) premiered in the Warner's animated feature Walky Talky Hawky (1946). His popular catchphrases are "I say, I say there!", "Pay attention, boy!" and "Now listen here!" In his book That's Not all Folks (Warner Books, 1988) Mel Blanc, the voice of this boisterous loudmouth southern rooster, relayed a confusion that arose about the initial inspiration for the voice of Foghorn Leghorn. "Delmar claimed he based the voice not on my (Mel Blanc) character's, but on that of a Texas rancher he'd once hitched a ride from. Bob McKimson claimed Foghorn's voice was derived not from Senator Claghorn's but from someone on another old-time radio program, BLUE MONDAY JAMBOREE. And I claim I first heard the accent at a 1928 vaudeville show at San Francisco's Pantages Theater when I was twenty. As I recall it, in one of the skits an actor played a clownish hard-of-hearing southern sheriff."
That is, Foghorn Leghorn's voice was based on some vaudeville act, and his name seems to have been derived from a *fictional* senator, the character of which appeared on the Fred Allen Show, whose accent may have been similar.
Man, what a troll. But I cannot let your technical lies pass.
Mac OS X cannot in any way be said to run on top of OS 9. It is running on a completely new kernel implementation, separately available from Apple as an open-source product called "Darwin."
OS 9, on the other hand, can run (complete with 68k emulation) on top of OS X in what is called the "Classic" environment.
If it weren't a single revolution of the Earth, then why didn't God explain it more clearly (in Hebrew, of course) in the first place?
The only reason to spend a second thinking up your "outside the box" solution is because you need an excuse to stay in your own box, i.e., you need some way to keep the seemingly-explicit language in Genesis consistent with your understanding of history.
How about thinking outside your own box: Genesis was written by several Hebrew writers, who were addressing an audience that needed religious instruction, but didn't care too much about how old the universe really was.
1) Makes perfect sense 2) Doesn't require any stretching of the Hebrew text to make it work.
Re:Influences, agendas shouldn't matter with facts
on
Rare Earth
·
· Score: 2
A creationist has more of an agenda because he rejects scientific inquiry as a method for establishing "truth," whereas an evolutionist likely has scientific criteria for discussing whether something is true or not.
A creationist's view of evolution is that it isn't true. An evolutionist's view of creationism is that there is no reason to believe it is true, other than the belief itself. The creationist is more radical.
The idea must be that more people are willing to pay a premium for the durability and aesthetic appeal of hardcover than are willing to pay a premium for reduction of weight. (Although if you think the weight is dramatically different, I believe you are talking about smaller-format paperbacks, which are cheaper to produce. I was discussing larger library-size paperbacks, which are about the same size and weight.)
If you could simply wait for the discounted hardback, fewer people would pay the full price, which was the publisher's goal.
The issue of "seconds" or "remainders" is a different issue than the profit margin. Remainders happen when a publisher has written off the remaining stock of a title at a LOSS. [The motivation for this is changes in tax laws that have the effect of discouraging the publisher from keeping the books in the warehouse.] They are not defective, but the publisher is also not making a profit at that price.
Retail markup is yet a third issue. That would appear in the operating results of book retailers. Barnes & Noble have results showing operating profits which are 5.5% of revenues for their retail business.
Retail is not a good business environment in general. Books are no exception.
But don't worry about facts. Just wait for the next Slashdot discussion, and we can kvetch about how much money there is in music publishing.
A library gives you a loan of a book only for a limited time, and doesn't guarantee that you'll find that book on the shelves when you want to look at it.
No, what the Guild is complaining about is that Amazon is advertising the used book price right next to the full retail price.
The authors don't demand royalties on the used book sale, but rather that the used book prices and ordering process not be so aggressively presented to potential new-book customers, especially for books that are still hot off the presses.
You could read it yourself, but I guess you don't want to have to page through that and digest it.
Based on my five minutes' reading, the highest paid executive director apparently got UKP525,000 in base salary, other stuff including pension contributions raises the total compensation to UKP1.13 million. It's harder for me to decode the stock holdings and options, but it looks like the highest compensated executive director got about 167,000 stock options in the year, with a strike price of 1421 UKpence, and 30,000 or so restricted shares, which I gather have vesting based on reaching performance goals.
Quality paperback and hardbacks cost about the same to produce. What you see in lower paperback prices is what is called by economists "price discrimination," that is, an attempt to cherry pick those willing to pay a higher price (hardback buyers) and still include those who only are willing to pay a lower price (those willing to wait for the paperback version.)
The only way to get paperbacks for $5 is to print them on crappy paper, with the cheapest binding, or go the Dover route and forbid bookstore returns.
And as for profit margins, 99% is laughable. Funny, on this marvelous invention called the Internet it is possible to look up profit margins on publishing companies and find out, for instance, that Penguin books, for instance, had a 12.9% operating margin in 2001. This with what they call a "record year" on the bestseller lists.
I didn't say that WWII was the war to end all wars. That would be silly. But US military doctrine doesn't depend on mass conscription anymore. It depends on very high levels of training of a volunteer force and high levels of technology (e.g. *fewer* bombs to eliminate targets). There isn't any reliance on calling up civilians for military service, and no reliance on a massive switch of the civilian economy to a military standing.
The point was in response to a previous poster who claimed targeting civilians and the industrial infrastructure (with nukes) was going to be a strategy in future conflicts. It wouldn't work against the US.
The "world vs. Islam" is not going to look like WWII either. Hopefully it won't get nuclear either; the West can easily handle any conventional threat, and nothing can "defend" against some unconventional threats, but it isn't clear the West could be "defeated" by unconventional means either. What does it mean for Islam to win? Convert us all to fundamentalist Islam? Sink the West into a dark age? Get US troops out of Saudi Arabia? Destroy Israel? Eliminate secular governments in the Muslim world?
Mass mobilization of the US population doesn't help fight Osama bin Laden or his cohorts, or prevent him from "winning" in a number of those situations. How would millions of civilians putting on a uniform and picking up a rifle, or staffing new bomb factories help the West?
Oh, come on. Except for some Russia vs. US and/or Europe conflict, no war involving nuclear weapons is going to be a long, drawn-out strategic contest involving lots of soldiers and factories. It would most likely be some small country striking to preserve itself under what it perceives to be overwhelming odds (Israel's Samson option), and if a large nuclear power is the aggressor, an obliteration of some hardened targets to allow a conventional force to overwhelm a smaller country (e.g., US against Iraq with a nuclear capability).
I don't see any realistic way that a society would regroup to "man the factories" to change the outcome of the fighting after a nuclear exchange. If a small country got hit, the fight is over--there's nothing to regroup. If a large country got hit, it might shrug it off. Only Russia/US have enough weapons to make a real dent in a large country's productive capacity.
Any country that depends on manpower reserves to win its wars is not going to hold up very well against a technologically sophisticated opponent. Iraq had a huge army mobilized, and a smaller coalition force was able to mop the floor with it. Civilians and factories did not come into play in any major way. Even if Iraq had been able to throw a few nukes into the US, killing US civilians would only have made the result worse for Iraq.
The kind of mobilization seen in WWII is not going to happen in future conflicts. Modern forces do not fight with mass-produced, overwhelming quantities of cheap weaponry. They use small quantities of specialized high-tech weaponry, which they have already, and then try very hard not to lose it.
Actually, not to make nuclear weapons sound nicer than they are, but the major (theoretical) use for nuclear weapons is against another country's nuclear missile arsenal, or against other hardened military or command targets. Blowing up cities to kill civilians serves no real purpose. What enemy that you have to use nuclear weapons against cares about their civilian population?
Improvements in ICBM targeting technology allow smaller and smaller yields to achieve the same damage to hardened targets. That reduces even more the need for very high-yield weapons, and reduces the fallout and civilian casualties that would be associated with a strike against military targets.
Renormalization is only a problem if you want to apply quantum field theory to black holes in a reasonable way. That is an admirable goal, but it might reveal more about the limitations of QFT than the limitations of general relativity. The string theory folks seem to believe they have a mathematical approach that will solve these problems and more.
I don't think anyone doubts that quantum phenomena are going to be involved in what really happens in a star that can't be supported by nuclear forces against gravity. But that doesn't mean that any wacky theory with the word "quantum" in it is automatically better than general relativity.
Not so great. Heat pipes work BETTER than copper of similar volume, by a substantial factor. That's why they are used instead of copper for the kinds of applications you are talking about.
Conduction through a heat conductor can be represented with the thermal equivalent of Ohm's law. Warmth of a soft drink above room temperature is equivalent to a charged capacitor, where you can consider the room to be ground.
In your drink experiment, a drink warmer than room temperature will equilibrate to room temperature eventually. The speed with which it will equilibrate with a time constant
tau = RC
where R is the thermal resistance, C the heat capacity of the soft drink.
Lower R (better thermal conductivity) means the time is faster. However, when all is said and done, the drink and the room are all the same temperature, and that temperature does NOT depend on the thermal conductivity. It depends on the relative heat capacities. Given that the room is much bigger than the drink, its heat capacity is much larger, so the change in room temperature is negligible. (The amount of heat in a warm drink is the amount of heat in an infinitesimally warmer room.)
The only thing that could get signficantly hotter is a cold drink in a warm room.
I think you need to study a bit harder, Mr. PhysicsGenius.
I believe you mean Myth's pure "tactical" approach, not strategy. Strategy is a broader concept, including logistics and political considerations. Tactics are the actions taken by fighting units in battle to gain advantage.
The problem is that basically any vendor other than Dell is not going to have Dell's economies of scale, which means, for example, that they can't provide the corporation-wide service agreements that Dell can while beating Dell on price.
The margin they have to work with is only the cost of Windows to Dell, which probably ain't much, and is probably made up for by the ruthless inventory efficiency that Dell is famous for.
So, (1) any moderately large Linux-based competitor that tries to offer the kind of support Dell offers to corporate IT types will LOSE on price, not win, despite avoiding the Windows tax.
(2) in order to become moderately large, in an attempt to capture economies of scale, these vendors will need a customer base bigger than Linux; hence, they will have to support Windows anyway, making it worse.
What the hell are you talking about? Copyright *is* guaranteed to the authors under current law. They can publish in a vanity press all they want, without fear of theft.
Most authors in the real world, however, like to get paid, rather than pay, to get a book in print. For real-world publishers to agree, the author has to offer something in exchange, namely the copyright.
Without copyright, authors have nothing to offer that publishers can't steal. How difficult is this for people to understand?
Slashdot Mirror
The degree in engineering is only one component of being an engineer. Just like getting a law degree does not license you to practice law in a state. You must also pass the bar exam and go through a background check, and take an oath, before you are allowed to act like a lawyer.
Advertising yourself (not just job title, or saying you have a certain degree) as an engineer without a PE certificate is illegal.
In most states, to call yourself an "engineer," or to advertise your services as "engineering," you must be registered as a Professional Engineer (PE). That usually requires passing a couple exams, along with several years of work under the supervision of a PE.
This is rather difficult in electrical engineering, because there are relatively few PEs working in the field, and the exams are biased toward structural, civil, and other "public works" type engineering.
Some effort is being made to recognize the difference between traditional PE disciplines and electronics, to create a PE process more suited to those disciplines, but in most cases, it is still difficult to get PE certification working as an electrical (non)engineer.
As a software person, forget it.
Just because someone calls it "software engineering" doesn't make you an engineer.
(Of course, you can have whatever job title you want. "Sanitation Engineer," etc. But you still shouldn't advertise yourself as an engineer. Try "Software Designer," "Programmer," etc.)
50% of the moon is in shadow from the sun at any given time. That 50% is not the same 50% all the time.
During a new moon, the dark side is, as even you point out, the side facing us! It doesn't get sunlight, which is why we see black when we look at the new moon.
I guess the great slashdot blackout has only further reduced the signal-to-noise ratio in these posts.
Just to clarify: I don't think the voice of Foghorn Leghorn was intended to parody a particular living or dead politician.
From some random website I found through Google
Foghorn Leghorn - Large, white windbag of a rooster seen in a number of Warner Brother cartoons over the years. Foghorn Leghorn (inspired by Kenny Delmar's Senator Beauregard Claghorn from Bighorn character, a Deep South politician from THE FRED ALLEN SHOW on radio) premiered in the Warner's animated feature Walky Talky Hawky (1946). His popular catchphrases are "I say, I say there!", "Pay attention, boy!" and "Now listen here!" In his book That's Not all Folks (Warner Books, 1988) Mel Blanc, the voice of this boisterous loudmouth southern rooster, relayed a confusion that arose about the initial inspiration for the voice of Foghorn Leghorn. "Delmar claimed he based the voice not on my (Mel Blanc) character's, but on that of a Texas rancher he'd once hitched a ride from. Bob McKimson claimed Foghorn's voice was derived not from Senator Claghorn's but from someone on another old-time radio program, BLUE MONDAY JAMBOREE. And I claim I first heard the accent at a 1928 vaudeville show at San Francisco's Pantages Theater when I was twenty. As I recall it, in one of the skits an actor played a clownish hard-of-hearing southern sheriff."
That is, Foghorn Leghorn's voice was based on some vaudeville act, and his name seems to have been derived from a *fictional* senator, the character of which appeared on the Fred Allen Show, whose accent may have been similar.
Man, what a troll. But I cannot let your technical lies pass.
Mac OS X cannot in any way be said to run on top of OS 9. It is running on a completely new kernel implementation, separately available from Apple as an open-source product called "Darwin."
OS 9, on the other hand, can run (complete with 68k emulation) on top of OS X in what is called the "Classic" environment.
If it weren't a single revolution of the Earth, then why didn't God explain it more clearly (in Hebrew, of course) in the first place?
The only reason to spend a second thinking up your "outside the box" solution is because you need an excuse to stay in your own box, i.e., you need some way to keep the seemingly-explicit language in Genesis consistent with your understanding of history.
How about thinking outside your own box: Genesis was written by several Hebrew writers, who were addressing an audience that needed religious instruction, but didn't care too much about how old the universe really was.
1) Makes perfect sense
2) Doesn't require any stretching of the Hebrew text to make it work.
A creationist has more of an agenda because he rejects scientific inquiry as a method for establishing "truth," whereas an evolutionist likely has scientific criteria for discussing whether something is true or not.
A creationist's view of evolution is that it isn't true. An evolutionist's view of creationism is that there is no reason to believe it is true, other than the belief itself. The creationist is more radical.
The idea must be that more people are willing to pay a premium for the durability and aesthetic appeal of hardcover than are willing to pay a premium for reduction of weight. (Although if you think the weight is dramatically different, I believe you are talking about smaller-format paperbacks, which are cheaper to produce. I was discussing larger library-size paperbacks, which are about the same size and weight.)
If you could simply wait for the discounted hardback, fewer people would pay the full price, which was the publisher's goal.
The issue of "seconds" or "remainders" is a different issue than the profit margin. Remainders happen when a publisher has written off the remaining stock of a title at a LOSS. [The motivation for this is changes in tax laws that have the effect of discouraging the publisher from keeping the books in the warehouse.] They are not defective, but the publisher is also not making a profit at that price.
Retail markup is yet a third issue. That would appear in the operating results of book retailers.
Barnes & Noble have results showing operating profits which are 5.5% of revenues for their retail business.
Retail is not a good business environment in general. Books are no exception.
But don't worry about facts. Just wait for the next Slashdot discussion, and we can kvetch about how much money there is in music publishing.
A library gives you a loan of a book only for a limited time, and doesn't guarantee that you'll find that book on the shelves when you want to look at it.
A used book has neither limitation.
No, what the Guild is complaining about is that Amazon is advertising the used book price right next to the full retail price.
The authors don't demand royalties on the used book sale, but rather that the used book prices and ordering process not be so aggressively presented to potential new-book customers, especially for books that are still hot off the presses.
Funny, the annual report lists that as well.
You could read it yourself, but I guess you don't want to have to page through that and digest it.
Based on my five minutes' reading, the highest paid executive director apparently got UKP525,000 in base salary, other stuff including pension contributions raises the total compensation to UKP1.13 million. It's harder for me to decode the stock holdings and options, but it looks like the highest compensated executive director got about 167,000 stock options in the year, with a strike price of 1421 UKpence, and 30,000 or so restricted shares, which I gather have vesting based on reaching performance goals.
Again, through the miracle of the Internet, one can discover that Microsoft's figures indicates an operating profit that is 46% of revenues.
Quality paperback and hardbacks cost about the same to produce. What you see in lower paperback prices is what is called by economists "price discrimination," that is, an attempt to cherry pick those willing to pay a higher price (hardback buyers) and still include those who only are willing to pay a lower price (those willing to wait for the paperback version.)
The only way to get paperbacks for $5 is to print them on crappy paper, with the cheapest binding, or go the Dover route and forbid bookstore returns.
And as for profit margins, 99% is laughable. Funny, on this marvelous invention called the Internet it is possible to look up profit margins on publishing companies and find out, for instance, that Penguin books, for instance, had a 12.9% operating margin in 2001. This with what they call a "record year" on the bestseller lists.
I didn't say that WWII was the war to end all wars. That would be silly. But US military doctrine doesn't depend on mass conscription anymore. It depends on very high levels of training of a volunteer force and high levels of technology (e.g. *fewer* bombs to eliminate targets). There isn't any reliance on calling up civilians for military service, and no reliance on a massive switch of the civilian economy to a military standing.
The point was in response to a previous poster who claimed targeting civilians and the industrial infrastructure (with nukes) was going to be a strategy in future conflicts. It wouldn't work against the US.
The "world vs. Islam" is not going to look like WWII either. Hopefully it won't get nuclear either; the West can easily handle any conventional threat, and nothing can "defend" against some unconventional threats, but it isn't clear the West could be "defeated" by unconventional means either. What does it mean for Islam to win? Convert us all to fundamentalist Islam? Sink the West into a dark age? Get US troops out of Saudi Arabia? Destroy Israel? Eliminate secular governments in the Muslim world?
Mass mobilization of the US population doesn't help fight Osama bin Laden or his cohorts, or prevent him from "winning" in a number of those situations. How would millions of civilians putting on a uniform and picking up a rifle, or staffing new bomb factories help the West?
Oh, come on. Except for some Russia vs. US and/or Europe conflict, no war involving nuclear weapons is going to be a long, drawn-out strategic contest involving lots of soldiers and factories. It would most likely be some small country striking to preserve itself under what it perceives to be overwhelming odds (Israel's Samson option), and if a large nuclear power is the aggressor, an obliteration of some hardened targets to allow a conventional force to overwhelm a smaller country (e.g., US against Iraq with a nuclear capability).
I don't see any realistic way that a society would regroup to "man the factories" to change the outcome of the fighting after a nuclear exchange. If a small country got hit, the fight is over--there's nothing to regroup. If a large country got hit, it might shrug it off. Only Russia/US have enough weapons to make a real dent in a large country's productive capacity.
Any country that depends on manpower reserves to win its wars is not going to hold up very well against a technologically sophisticated opponent. Iraq had a huge army mobilized, and a smaller coalition force was able to mop the floor with it. Civilians and factories did not come into play in any major way. Even if Iraq had been able to throw a few nukes into the US, killing US civilians would only have made the result worse for Iraq.
The kind of mobilization seen in WWII is not going to happen in future conflicts. Modern forces do not fight with mass-produced, overwhelming quantities of cheap weaponry. They use small quantities of specialized high-tech weaponry, which they have already, and then try very hard not to lose it.
Actually, not to make nuclear weapons sound nicer than they are, but the major (theoretical) use for nuclear weapons is against another country's nuclear missile arsenal, or against other hardened military or command targets. Blowing up cities to kill civilians serves no real purpose. What enemy that you have to use nuclear weapons against cares about their civilian population?
Improvements in ICBM targeting technology allow smaller and smaller yields to achieve the same damage to hardened targets. That reduces even more the need for very high-yield weapons, and reduces the fallout and civilian casualties that would be associated with a strike against military targets.
Not just on-topic, but accurate!
Renormalization is only a problem if you want to apply quantum field theory to black holes in a reasonable way. That is an admirable goal, but it might reveal more about the limitations of QFT than the limitations of general relativity. The string theory folks seem to believe they have a mathematical approach that will solve these problems and more.
I don't think anyone doubts that quantum phenomena are going to be involved in what really happens in a star that can't be supported by nuclear forces against gravity. But that doesn't mean that any wacky theory with the word "quantum" in it is automatically better than general relativity.
Not so great. Heat pipes work BETTER than copper of similar volume, by a substantial factor. That's why they are used instead of copper for the kinds of applications you are talking about.
Weird but true.
More info here and here.
Sorry, try again.
Conduction through a heat conductor can be represented with the thermal equivalent of Ohm's law. Warmth of a soft drink above room temperature is equivalent to a charged capacitor, where you can consider the room to be ground.
In your drink experiment, a drink warmer than room temperature will equilibrate to room temperature eventually. The speed with which it will equilibrate with a time constant
tau = RC
where R is the thermal resistance, C the heat capacity of the soft drink.
Lower R (better thermal conductivity) means the time is faster. However, when all is said and done, the drink and the room are all the same temperature, and that temperature does NOT depend on the thermal conductivity. It depends on the relative heat capacities. Given that the room is much bigger than the drink, its heat capacity is much larger, so the change in room temperature is negligible. (The amount of heat in a warm drink is the amount of heat in an infinitesimally warmer room.)
The only thing that could get signficantly hotter is a cold drink in a warm room.
I think you need to study a bit harder, Mr. PhysicsGenius.
I believe you mean Myth's pure "tactical" approach, not strategy. Strategy is a broader concept, including logistics and political considerations. Tactics are the actions taken by fighting units in battle to gain advantage.
The problem is that basically any vendor other than Dell is not going to have Dell's economies of scale, which means, for example, that they can't provide the corporation-wide service agreements that Dell can while beating Dell on price.
The margin they have to work with is only the cost of Windows to Dell, which probably ain't much, and is probably made up for by the ruthless inventory efficiency that Dell is famous for.
So, (1) any moderately large Linux-based competitor that tries to offer the kind of support Dell offers to corporate IT types will LOSE on price, not win, despite avoiding the Windows tax.
(2) in order to become moderately large, in an attempt to capture economies of scale, these vendors will need a customer base bigger than Linux; hence, they will have to support Windows anyway, making it worse.
Competing against Dell is a losing proposition.
Is Katz getting paid by Slashdot for these lousy articles?
Point being: are Slashdot subscribers subsidizing this waste of electrons?
What the hell are you talking about? Copyright *is* guaranteed to the authors under current law. They can publish in a vanity press all they want, without fear of theft.
Most authors in the real world, however, like to get paid, rather than pay, to get a book in print. For real-world publishers to agree, the author has to offer something in exchange, namely the copyright.
Without copyright, authors have nothing to offer that publishers can't steal. How difficult is this for people to understand?