The more you try to clean things up... the louder the people will get. If you tell an idiot in chat to hush up, does he? No. Instead he doubles his attacks and focuses them at you. You cannot change this, sorry, it cannot be done.
From my experience administrating a CS:Source server, about 3/4 of the people will stop their annoying behavior if you just ask them nicely. For the people who don't follow the rules though, my experience is that the best thing to do is ban them. Our server has a strict no racism policy and the admins are fairly intolerant of people being general jackasses, too. The end point I get at is that I agree with you that people will never stop acting stupidly on the internet, but there's at least one good way to handle it: good administrators.
You can configure GMail to do that from the web interface.
Settings->Forwarding and POP->POP Download->2) When messages are accessed by POP: [keep Gmail's copy in the Inbox|Archive GMail's copy|delete Gmail's copy]
That's exactly like what makes consultants like me (mostly Tivoli, some OpenView) happy. If IBM and HP made their products easy to use, I'd have to get a real job!
This is more insightful than funny; I wish I had mod points.
IBM already makes cross-platform IT management products (or rather frequently, it buys them and incorporates them into their own high-priced products). The overall term for the many products in this family is IBM Tivoli. Interestingly, much of it runs on Java. It's a very mature line of products used by lots of high-profile companies worldwide, and it makes IBM many millions of dollars.
The first multiplayer game I ever really got addicted to was Descent II over a serial link (this predated the time when computers typically had built-in NICs). My dad and I would sometimes fight each other and sometimes play co-op. I remember dialing in and using Kali to emulate a local IPX network so I could play Descent II with people from who-knows-where.
I never got tired of people's responses when they found out that I wasn't using anything but a keyboard while keeping up with the top players in each game B-)
Because my family never really got into computers until I did ("Hey Dad, after using the high-speed internet at college I'm never going back to dial-up!"), and because of the equipment available to me ("no son, you certainly may NOT delete all the files we have and put on an OS that none of us have ever used"), I never even had a chance to play with Linux until college, and I didn't seize the opportunity until my junior year, 3 years ago.
I dual majored so I didn't have tons of free time to go learn non-class material on my own, but one of my majors was Computer Science, so I learned how to use an already-configured *nix machine, just not how to administer one. But I would periodically try to do it anyways, trying to install about 4 different flavors of Linux on a number of computers in my last year-and-a-half of college. Every single time I had the same problem: a piece of hardware didn't work right. Also every time, I tried finding a solution online or with Linux guru friends, did what they said to do, and found that my computer would refuse to boot after I made the changes. So I would start over, break it again, and repeat a few times before getting frustrated and installing Windows on it, which seemed to Just Plain Work.
I've had two exceptions to this, where I can boot them and use them for regular tasks without getting any ugly errors. I just wish I knew how to lock them down properly. One success story boots into Solaris 10/W2k Server and runs a web server if I want it to, and the other (the one that I'm using to typing this post) dual boots into Fedora 5 and XP. The only problem with the laptop is that I can't find a way to get my wireless card working under Linux, so I almost exclusively use XP. It's a driver issue, but I've long since given up finding a good once since it's an old 802.11B card and even the Windows driver sucks. Linux works great when I actually plug my laptop with good ol' cat-5, but that doesn't happen very often.
I won't rehash _all_ the issues that need to be addressed before Linux Is Ready For The Desktop, but I'll mention one: ease-of-configuration. Installation and use of a well-configured machine is really brainless. Hell, I got Slackware installed and running once, I just never made it past that. When your average CS undergrad (or teenager, or businessman, or mother-of-two-who-OhMyGodTimmyPutThatDown) can configure a Linux computer without needing to heavily consult friends/the internet, it'll be much closer to reality.
PS: Without having read TFA, maybe the title shouldn't be "Why the World is Not Ready For Linux," but "Why Linux is Not Ready For the World."
When I say physical limit I don't mean the number of blades, I mean the dimensions of the blades themselves, especially their cutting edge. You probably don't know this, but the cutting edges to Schick's blades have three facets to them, made in 3 steps (schick.com, select your country, shaving history, miles of steel... to read about it yourself) and the technology for doing that hasn't changed much in a long time (ie: many years). From an engineering perspective, the three facets give a nice sharp edge while still maintaining strength. The blades can be made sharper than they are now, but they wouldn't last very long because the blades would be so fragile: THAT's the physical limit that I was referring to.
Now to take your funny response seriously.
As for putting thousands of blades on a single razor, it's been thought of, but the problem (other than the blade strength) is with where the debris would go. Quantum shaving would be a good idea, but as it doesn't exist yet, it's a barrier that has yet to be overcome.
I'm posting anonymously because I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to talk about this, but when I interned at a razor company, much of the research was for new materials, and none of the ones that I tried while I was there lasted through the equivalent of even 1 shave. The technology is nearing the physical limits of the materials. My take on the situation would be that since there are 2 big razor manufacturers in the US, they'll take any advantage they can get to gain a larger market share, no matter how small.
A lot of the 'shaving comfort' is anecdotal, too. I remember one test that I ran while I was there and I found that a certain coating significantly reduced the force required to cut a hair, so we produced a bunch of razors with that coating for a test. The testers are just people off the street, and in the double-blind trial of the new coating vs the traditional one, the testers overwhelmingly preferred the old coating. My point is basically that the best technical ideas don't necessarily produce the most consumer satisfaction, and maybe 6 or 10 blades will draw a larger market share.
Technology frequently affects us in ways that we don't originally intend, and DVRs are no exception. IMHO (and at the risk of being flamed as a consumer whore), the advertising companies should just make better commercials, maybe in the same way that beer companies have been doing for a long time. When I hear a "real men of genius" commercial on the radio, I listen because they're funny. My roommate and I also rewind to watch the "man law" commercials on TV, and lots of other people watch the commercials during the Superbowl.
I don't want to see some crazy guy screaming about how low his prices are for cars or furniture. I don't want to see commercials hyping a drug by its name without saying what it's for. I certainly don't need to see 2 people pretending to have a normal conversation that sounds painfully unnatural.
Agreed. One of my NH-based cousins told me about a time she was talking with a bunch of people from new england and one person from the midwest somewhere. She was talking about dirt bike riding and how someone "took a wicked digger" (translation: crashed hard). Everyone there got it except the person from the midwest... Even I understood when she told me the story.
I picked up their top of the line copperhead because it's a "small" mouse designed for finger gamers.
What I got however was an extremely long yet thin mouse which is very difficult to control without jamming it into your palm all night long, the rubber decorative edging was sharp and uncomfortable, the LED distracting etc.
Personally, I like my Copperhead more than my dad's Logitech MX518. Each has 7 buttons and fast response time, the major difference between them is ergonomics. I used to use a MS Intellimouse, 2 actually, but they kept breaking on me; they just would stop responding after 2 years or so. My dad also had one, and his last one died in January. He picked up the aforementioned MX518 as a replacement. When my beloved Intellimouse broke in early April, I tried his out for a week or so... I couldn't stand how tall it is. I got so used to resting my wrist on the desk while using the MS mouse that I had to bend my wrist uncomfortably to use his. I looked at a bunch of reviews and decided to blow some money on the Copperhead. At first I had the same complaints as you about it, but by the end of the first week, I had changed my mind.
The fact that it's thin means that I can move it while resting my wrist on my desk. The fact that it's short means that I can keep my wrist very nearly straight. The LED is covered by my hand so I don't see it... you must have unusually transparent hands. The edging took me the longest to get used to, but now I rest my thumb and ring figer on top of it instead of gripping the sides, and I use those fingers to move it around more than I use my palm to do so. It's more grippy in my hand than either the Intellimouse or the MX518 and the pads are smoother, and the sensitivity-adjustment buttons are easier to reach than on the MX518. It has nice detents on the scroll wheel, and the buttons click VERY nicely (as you ponted out).
I guess it's really a subjective matter on whether or not Razer makes good products. The real test in my mind is if it lasts longer than the 2-year average lifespan I've seen for the Intellimouse.
The major complaint about the Razer Copperhead that I hear is that the four side buttons are too easy to push. You would think a mouse marketed for First Person Shooters'ers would feature less buttons on the mouse, since fewer are required during intense gun battles (just aim, and click).
I have had my Copperhead for about 2 months and I'm an FPS-er. The side buttons are easy to push, but not overly so. The buttons on the thumb side are much easier to reach than the opposite ones, but they're not in the way once you get used to the mouse. Yes, once you get used to it: if you're going to use a different mouse, you can't expect it to work like your old mouse right away, you may as well buy another of what you're used to. I gave it some time, and I'm glad I did.
An RTSer would benefit from the Copperhead's extra buttons because they could bind specific game events (select Group 1, Group 2, Attack, and Defend) to each button.
I would contend that more buttons are only a drawback for someone who's completely new to computers and would just get confused. For everyone else, you can just unbind the side buttons if you keep hitting them accidentally. I use all 7 buttons when I play BF2 and FarCry and 5 when I play CS:S and HL2, and if I did RTSs or RPGs I'm sure I'd find uses for all 7, too. Even when browsing the internet I love using the side buttons to scroll forward and backwards in my history, and when I'm playing around with photo editing I like being able to change the sensitivity on the fly for detail work.
The Krait is just a regular 2-button-with-scroll-wheel mouse with better hardware to handle faster movements while the Copperhead just has more buttons and a faster sensor (1600dpi @ 40ips vs 2000dpi @ 45ips, where ips = inches/second), hence the price difference. I can't imagine how the Krait could be better suited for one type of game because it has less features; this branding that Razer is doing is just a gimmick.
With the current generation's "pre-installed" computer knowledge, we need more people to get into the traditional engineering disciplines. It's hard and you might not be in an office every day, but this is going to be a booming area soon.
I graduated from RPI last year with a dual BS in Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science. As such, I looked into the job market for both of these areas. A number of things drove me towards IT rather than engineering, but the two biggest were money and time. Let me explain.
Money: I was very lucky because my uncle is a consultant who does IBM Tivoli installs & maintenance. He was willing to teach me Tivoli so that I could do the same. In return, he would bring me along on his contracts whlie I was learning and have me help him with them while taking a cut of my pay for teaching me. His eventual goal was for me to take the certification exams and start getting my own contracts within a year (his timeframe was off by a bit, but things are still progessing).
Now that you know the backstory... So long as you keep current with Tivoli it's not hard to find jobs that pay >$100/hr. Comparing that to starting Mechanical Engineering salaries, and considering that I don't have a strong preference for either job, it's not a hard choice. I'll admit that I didn't take your shortage of Engineers into account, but the projected salaries for that field just didn't compare for even 5 years down the road and then other factors influenced my decision.
Time: There's a lot of travelling involved, but I think it's a perk to go see new people and places all over the country (and in other countries if I ever feel like it). After the travelling, it's typically remote work from my home computer on my own timeframe until the contract ends. A 9-5 in a cubicle with a commute and 2 weeks vacation just doesn't compare to that. I can travel, and as long as there's internet access I can work an hour or two each day and get ahead on my work. I can go to the bank and the DMV when it's open without taking time off work, and I can schedule my errands for when there's no traffic. The hardest part is disciplining myself to work, but it's not an insurmountable problem.
In a few years if I get tired of consulting and there's a huge demand for Engineers as you say, I'll pick up my textbooks to brush up on what I've gotten rusty with and go get an entry-level 9-to-5 with a steady paycheck. In the meanwhile I'll go see the country on the client's dime.
Re:On any UNIX box vi is always there for you
on
Vim 7 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm a fresh college grad breaking into the consulting business and the guys I work for insist that I learn vi for that exact reason. The example they gave me was: when you're sitting at a client's terminal with them breathing down your neck to make some simple changes, vi (or ed, but I won't go there) is simply the fastest way to do it, and when you do it fast enough it looks like magic to an inexperienced bystander. My preference is for the windowed editors like Crimson Editor or even Notepad, but I'm learning how important these "low level" tools can be.
UAVs are here today and the elimination of the human pilot is many years off; we DO need to worry about the time in between now and then.
I wish the article said what kind of UAV is going to be used, because they can get pretty big: the RQ-1 Predator is comperable in length, height, and weight to a Cessna 152, and in wingspan it's 15 feet longer. The wrong paint scheme could render predator-sized UAV practically invisible, and a smaller UAV could easily be missed by a pilot. Given the damage that birds can do, a collision with all but the smallest ones could cause catastrophic damage to a small plane like a 152. I suspect that predator-sized UAVs will be out of budget for most applications, which means that pilots will have to start watching out for smaller and smaller traffic. The last thing pilots need, especially recreational pilots who don't fly daily, is another distraction to watch for. There are all sorts of restrictive rules for planes and pilots: I don't see why any of them should be relaxed for UAVs. Indeed, they should be subject to closer scrutiny simply because they have no brain.
If UAVs remain doing the jobs they're currently doing: monitoring borders and ports, I don't forsee many problems. If these things start making their way into more populated areas, big issues arise. The biggest issue that I can think of is one of th e first things I learned in flight school: the final responsibility for avoiding other air traffic always falls with the pilot. When the pilot is a computer, does it have any responsibility? This rule works best when there are real pilots in each plane; when one of the planes is a drone, the other pilots have double responsibility.
I vividly remember one graph from my textbook while I was taking flying lessons: there was a chart with 2 lines: NECESSARY pilot skill to operate the plane, and AVAILABLE pilot skill. During preflight and taxi, there was plenty of room between the two lines. During takeoff, the lines were closer but there was still a good margin. During cruise and nazvigation, there was once again a large safety margin. Landing was the interesting part: the available skill and necessary skill lines were really damn close. Plenty of pilots have more than enough skill to land safely all the time. It only takes one pilot who doesn't to make the news. Naturally, these UAVs would be in closest contact with other planes when around airports: the times when the pilot has the least amount of extra attention to spare for a UAV in the traffic pattern.
Do UAVs check above and below themselves before ascending or descending like human pilots do? Do they check for planes that don't have transponders or radios like human pilots? Do they take into account the fact that other planes might have malfunctioning equipment like human pilots? Did a pilot write the code that flies the UAV or was it a programmer working overtime to make a deadline? Personally, I would like these issues and more brought up to the aviation community and satisfactorily addressed before UAVs become a common sight in the sky.
Slashdot Mirror
The more you try to clean things up ... the louder the people will get. If you tell an idiot in chat to hush up, does he? No. Instead he doubles his attacks and focuses them at you. You cannot change this, sorry, it cannot be done.
From my experience administrating a CS:Source server, about 3/4 of the people will stop their annoying behavior if you just ask them nicely. For the people who don't follow the rules though, my experience is that the best thing to do is ban them. Our server has a strict no racism policy and the admins are fairly intolerant of people being general jackasses, too. The end point I get at is that I agree with you that people will never stop acting stupidly on the internet, but there's at least one good way to handle it: good administrators.
You can configure GMail to do that from the web interface. Settings->Forwarding and POP->POP Download->2) When messages are accessed by POP: [keep Gmail's copy in the Inbox|Archive GMail's copy|delete Gmail's copy]
Good timing for this one :/
That's exactly like what makes consultants like me (mostly Tivoli, some OpenView) happy. If IBM and HP made their products easy to use, I'd have to get a real job!
They're planning on calling it "Java"
This is more insightful than funny; I wish I had mod points.
IBM already makes cross-platform IT management products (or rather frequently, it buys them and incorporates them into their own high-priced products). The overall term for the many products in this family is IBM Tivoli. Interestingly, much of it runs on Java. It's a very mature line of products used by lots of high-profile companies worldwide, and it makes IBM many millions of dollars.
... Slashdot's finest?
I haven't played in a few years... Maybe I'll dust it off and get back into it soon.
/ Wanders off to find a copy of Kali...
2-player Nibbles was always a blast, especially if you'd seen Tron :-D
/ Double post... oops
The first multiplayer game I ever really got addicted to was Descent II over a serial link (this predated the time when computers typically had built-in NICs). My dad and I would sometimes fight each other and sometimes play co-op. I remember dialing in and using Kali to emulate a local IPX network so I could play Descent II with people from who-knows-where.
I never got tired of people's responses when they found out that I wasn't using anything but a keyboard while keeping up with the top players in each game B-)
So is 4.2.2.1; I've been using it for a few months.
I don't get it.
Because my family never really got into computers until I did ("Hey Dad, after using the high-speed internet at college I'm never going back to dial-up!"), and because of the equipment available to me ("no son, you certainly may NOT delete all the files we have and put on an OS that none of us have ever used"), I never even had a chance to play with Linux until college, and I didn't seize the opportunity until my junior year, 3 years ago.
I dual majored so I didn't have tons of free time to go learn non-class material on my own, but one of my majors was Computer Science, so I learned how to use an already-configured *nix machine, just not how to administer one. But I would periodically try to do it anyways, trying to install about 4 different flavors of Linux on a number of computers in my last year-and-a-half of college. Every single time I had the same problem: a piece of hardware didn't work right. Also every time, I tried finding a solution online or with Linux guru friends, did what they said to do, and found that my computer would refuse to boot after I made the changes. So I would start over, break it again, and repeat a few times before getting frustrated and installing Windows on it, which seemed to Just Plain Work.
I've had two exceptions to this, where I can boot them and use them for regular tasks without getting any ugly errors. I just wish I knew how to lock them down properly. One success story boots into Solaris 10/W2k Server and runs a web server if I want it to, and the other (the one that I'm using to typing this post) dual boots into Fedora 5 and XP. The only problem with the laptop is that I can't find a way to get my wireless card working under Linux, so I almost exclusively use XP. It's a driver issue, but I've long since given up finding a good once since it's an old 802.11B card and even the Windows driver sucks. Linux works great when I actually plug my laptop with good ol' cat-5, but that doesn't happen very often.
I won't rehash _all_ the issues that need to be addressed before Linux Is Ready For The Desktop, but I'll mention one: ease-of-configuration. Installation and use of a well-configured machine is really brainless. Hell, I got Slackware installed and running once, I just never made it past that. When your average CS undergrad (or teenager, or businessman, or mother-of-two-who-OhMyGodTimmyPutThatDown) can configure a Linux computer without needing to heavily consult friends/the internet, it'll be much closer to reality.
PS: Without having read TFA, maybe the title shouldn't be "Why the World is Not Ready For Linux," but "Why Linux is Not Ready For the World."
When I say physical limit I don't mean the number of blades, I mean the dimensions of the blades themselves, especially their cutting edge. You probably don't know this, but the cutting edges to Schick's blades have three facets to them, made in 3 steps (schick.com, select your country, shaving history, miles of steel... to read about it yourself) and the technology for doing that hasn't changed much in a long time (ie: many years). From an engineering perspective, the three facets give a nice sharp edge while still maintaining strength. The blades can be made sharper than they are now, but they wouldn't last very long because the blades would be so fragile: THAT's the physical limit that I was referring to.
Now to take your funny response seriously.
As for putting thousands of blades on a single razor, it's been thought of, but the problem (other than the blade strength) is with where the debris would go. Quantum shaving would be a good idea, but as it doesn't exist yet, it's a barrier that has yet to be overcome.
Or maybe I forgot to check the 'post anonymously' button..... oops.
I'm posting anonymously because I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to talk about this, but when I interned at a razor company, much of the research was for new materials, and none of the ones that I tried while I was there lasted through the equivalent of even 1 shave. The technology is nearing the physical limits of the materials. My take on the situation would be that since there are 2 big razor manufacturers in the US, they'll take any advantage they can get to gain a larger market share, no matter how small.
A lot of the 'shaving comfort' is anecdotal, too. I remember one test that I ran while I was there and I found that a certain coating significantly reduced the force required to cut a hair, so we produced a bunch of razors with that coating for a test. The testers are just people off the street, and in the double-blind trial of the new coating vs the traditional one, the testers overwhelmingly preferred the old coating. My point is basically that the best technical ideas don't necessarily produce the most consumer satisfaction, and maybe 6 or 10 blades will draw a larger market share.
Technology frequently affects us in ways that we don't originally intend, and DVRs are no exception. IMHO (and at the risk of being flamed as a consumer whore), the advertising companies should just make better commercials, maybe in the same way that beer companies have been doing for a long time. When I hear a "real men of genius" commercial on the radio, I listen because they're funny. My roommate and I also rewind to watch the "man law" commercials on TV, and lots of other people watch the commercials during the Superbowl.
I don't want to see some crazy guy screaming about how low his prices are for cars or furniture. I don't want to see commercials hyping a drug by its name without saying what it's for. I certainly don't need to see 2 people pretending to have a normal conversation that sounds painfully unnatural.
Adapt or die.
We still have a long way to go before we even make the top 10 list.
No, I didn't miss the joke.
Agreed. One of my NH-based cousins told me about a time she was talking with a bunch of people from new england and one person from the midwest somewhere. She was talking about dirt bike riding and how someone "took a wicked digger" (translation: crashed hard). Everyone there got it except the person from the midwest... Even I understood when she told me the story.
Just sayin.
I picked up their top of the line copperhead because it's a "small" mouse designed for finger gamers. What I got however was an extremely long yet thin mouse which is very difficult to control without jamming it into your palm all night long, the rubber decorative edging was sharp and uncomfortable, the LED distracting etc.
Personally, I like my Copperhead more than my dad's Logitech MX518. Each has 7 buttons and fast response time, the major difference between them is ergonomics. I used to use a MS Intellimouse, 2 actually, but they kept breaking on me; they just would stop responding after 2 years or so. My dad also had one, and his last one died in January. He picked up the aforementioned MX518 as a replacement. When my beloved Intellimouse broke in early April, I tried his out for a week or so... I couldn't stand how tall it is. I got so used to resting my wrist on the desk while using the MS mouse that I had to bend my wrist uncomfortably to use his. I looked at a bunch of reviews and decided to blow some money on the Copperhead. At first I had the same complaints as you about it, but by the end of the first week, I had changed my mind.
The fact that it's thin means that I can move it while resting my wrist on my desk. The fact that it's short means that I can keep my wrist very nearly straight. The LED is covered by my hand so I don't see it... you must have unusually transparent hands. The edging took me the longest to get used to, but now I rest my thumb and ring figer on top of it instead of gripping the sides, and I use those fingers to move it around more than I use my palm to do so. It's more grippy in my hand than either the Intellimouse or the MX518 and the pads are smoother, and the sensitivity-adjustment buttons are easier to reach than on the MX518. It has nice detents on the scroll wheel, and the buttons click VERY nicely (as you ponted out).
I guess it's really a subjective matter on whether or not Razer makes good products. The real test in my mind is if it lasts longer than the 2-year average lifespan I've seen for the Intellimouse.
The major complaint about the Razer Copperhead that I hear is that the four side buttons are too easy to push. You would think a mouse marketed for First Person Shooters'ers would feature less buttons on the mouse, since fewer are required during intense gun battles (just aim, and click).
I have had my Copperhead for about 2 months and I'm an FPS-er. The side buttons are easy to push, but not overly so. The buttons on the thumb side are much easier to reach than the opposite ones, but they're not in the way once you get used to the mouse. Yes, once you get used to it: if you're going to use a different mouse, you can't expect it to work like your old mouse right away, you may as well buy another of what you're used to. I gave it some time, and I'm glad I did.
An RTSer would benefit from the Copperhead's extra buttons because they could bind specific game events (select Group 1, Group 2, Attack, and Defend) to each button.
I would contend that more buttons are only a drawback for someone who's completely new to computers and would just get confused. For everyone else, you can just unbind the side buttons if you keep hitting them accidentally. I use all 7 buttons when I play BF2 and FarCry and 5 when I play CS:S and HL2, and if I did RTSs or RPGs I'm sure I'd find uses for all 7, too. Even when browsing the internet I love using the side buttons to scroll forward and backwards in my history, and when I'm playing around with photo editing I like being able to change the sensitivity on the fly for detail work.
The Krait is just a regular 2-button-with-scroll-wheel mouse with better hardware to handle faster movements while the Copperhead just has more buttons and a faster sensor (1600dpi @ 40ips vs 2000dpi @ 45ips, where ips = inches/second), hence the price difference. I can't imagine how the Krait could be better suited for one type of game because it has less features; this branding that Razer is doing is just a gimmick.
Maybe you mean all 4 pages of it.
Zing!
With the current generation's "pre-installed" computer knowledge, we need more people to get into the traditional engineering disciplines. It's hard and you might not be in an office every day, but this is going to be a booming area soon.
I graduated from RPI last year with a dual BS in Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science. As such, I looked into the job market for both of these areas. A number of things drove me towards IT rather than engineering, but the two biggest were money and time. Let me explain.
Money: I was very lucky because my uncle is a consultant who does IBM Tivoli installs & maintenance. He was willing to teach me Tivoli so that I could do the same. In return, he would bring me along on his contracts whlie I was learning and have me help him with them while taking a cut of my pay for teaching me. His eventual goal was for me to take the certification exams and start getting my own contracts within a year (his timeframe was off by a bit, but things are still progessing).
Now that you know the backstory... So long as you keep current with Tivoli it's not hard to find jobs that pay >$100/hr. Comparing that to starting Mechanical Engineering salaries, and considering that I don't have a strong preference for either job, it's not a hard choice. I'll admit that I didn't take your shortage of Engineers into account, but the projected salaries for that field just didn't compare for even 5 years down the road and then other factors influenced my decision.
Time: There's a lot of travelling involved, but I think it's a perk to go see new people and places all over the country (and in other countries if I ever feel like it). After the travelling, it's typically remote work from my home computer on my own timeframe until the contract ends. A 9-5 in a cubicle with a commute and 2 weeks vacation just doesn't compare to that. I can travel, and as long as there's internet access I can work an hour or two each day and get ahead on my work. I can go to the bank and the DMV when it's open without taking time off work, and I can schedule my errands for when there's no traffic. The hardest part is disciplining myself to work, but it's not an insurmountable problem.
In a few years if I get tired of consulting and there's a huge demand for Engineers as you say, I'll pick up my textbooks to brush up on what I've gotten rusty with and go get an entry-level 9-to-5 with a steady paycheck. In the meanwhile I'll go see the country on the client's dime.
I'm a fresh college grad breaking into the consulting business and the guys I work for insist that I learn vi for that exact reason. The example they gave me was: when you're sitting at a client's terminal with them breathing down your neck to make some simple changes, vi (or ed, but I won't go there) is simply the fastest way to do it, and when you do it fast enough it looks like magic to an inexperienced bystander. My preference is for the windowed editors like Crimson Editor or even Notepad, but I'm learning how important these "low level" tools can be.
MechE / CS graduate here, too. Hi.
UAVs are here today and the elimination of the human pilot is many years off; we DO need to worry about the time in between now and then.
I wish the article said what kind of UAV is going to be used, because they can get pretty big: the RQ-1 Predator is comperable in length, height, and weight to a Cessna 152, and in wingspan it's 15 feet longer. The wrong paint scheme could render predator-sized UAV practically invisible, and a smaller UAV could easily be missed by a pilot. Given the damage that birds can do, a collision with all but the smallest ones could cause catastrophic damage to a small plane like a 152. I suspect that predator-sized UAVs will be out of budget for most applications, which means that pilots will have to start watching out for smaller and smaller traffic. The last thing pilots need, especially recreational pilots who don't fly daily, is another distraction to watch for. There are all sorts of restrictive rules for planes and pilots: I don't see why any of them should be relaxed for UAVs. Indeed, they should be subject to closer scrutiny simply because they have no brain.
If UAVs remain doing the jobs they're currently doing: monitoring borders and ports, I don't forsee many problems. If these things start making their way into more populated areas, big issues arise. The biggest issue that I can think of is one of th e first things I learned in flight school: the final responsibility for avoiding other air traffic always falls with the pilot. When the pilot is a computer, does it have any responsibility? This rule works best when there are real pilots in each plane; when one of the planes is a drone, the other pilots have double responsibility.
I vividly remember one graph from my textbook while I was taking flying lessons: there was a chart with 2 lines: NECESSARY pilot skill to operate the plane, and AVAILABLE pilot skill. During preflight and taxi, there was plenty of room between the two lines. During takeoff, the lines were closer but there was still a good margin. During cruise and nazvigation, there was once again a large safety margin. Landing was the interesting part: the available skill and necessary skill lines were really damn close. Plenty of pilots have more than enough skill to land safely all the time. It only takes one pilot who doesn't to make the news. Naturally, these UAVs would be in closest contact with other planes when around airports: the times when the pilot has the least amount of extra attention to spare for a UAV in the traffic pattern.
Do UAVs check above and below themselves before ascending or descending like human pilots do? Do they check for planes that don't have transponders or radios like human pilots? Do they take into account the fact that other planes might have malfunctioning equipment like human pilots? Did a pilot write the code that flies the UAV or was it a programmer working overtime to make a deadline? Personally, I would like these issues and more brought up to the aviation community and satisfactorily addressed before UAVs become a common sight in the sky.