This bill requires a level of administrative overhead that is infeasible, both technically and financially. Therefore, if you pass this bill, Google will be forced to shut down access to YouTube for all connections originating within the United States and its territories.
This may be exactly what our government wants!
People are not happy. The "occupy wall street" movement is alive. Traditional (i.e. controllable) news sources are now competing with citizen's cellphone reports. People are demanding accountability from their politicians... and NOT getting it.
If Congress can pass legislation to shut down social networking sites and communications kiosks while they still have the power to do so, it will be just that much harder to organize to keep this a government "of the people, by the people, for the people".
Since this ie an "accountability" bill, we really need a rider that holds EVERYONE accountable, That means Congressmen should be held personally acountable for the budget deficit, with their retirement plans, healthcare, and whatever cancelled to help pay for amounts due that they signed for. This is no more draconian than that which their meanderings has placed millions of American citizens in.
Forcing Congress to eat what they dish out would guarantee that bill would never pass.
I hate to counterpost a fellow slashdotter. I have been as much leery of HP and Compaq as anyone,
HP got on my bad side when I was in University in the early 70's. I had bought a HP-45 calculator.. was right at $400, a helluva lot of money for a college student. I made that investment considering the time it would free. No sooner than I got it, a segment driver failed, making all "8"'s appear as a "0". Being in the EE curriculum, I took the calculator to the engineering lab and discovered the problem was nothing more than an open inductor. Try and plead as I would, HP would NOT send me another inductor. The rest of my career, I was very leery of HP, not because of the failed inductor, but my perception of HP as not caring one whit about their customer.
I was irritated with Compaq because they used so many custom parts that I could find very few uses for a broken machine, as I could not patch it back together with parts I could get from other scrap machines.
But, at the beginning of this year, I broke down and bought a HP-Compaq laptop (CQ-56) at Wal-Mart. It had everything I was looking for at a real good price.
This machine had been really good to me. I am quite impressed with it, and recommend it to my friends. That's something I did not think I would ever do, giving the first impression I had of both companies was quite a bit less than stellar.
My take on it is HP/Compaq has their act together, and it would be a shame to discontinue their machines.
I can't tell you how many times I have had to throw away something because some little plastic part broke.
If this thing can print out decently strong parts, I'll want one too.
Hopefully, I can make more of that little nylon clutch that broke in every one of my Gardner-Denver wirewrap guns. I threw all the broken guns in a drawer hoping one day I would be able to bring them back to life. They were damm handy little tools, and I haven't seen anyone else make them that had the right feel to 'em.
We have so many "weasel words" in the language of law that interpretation is up to the judge and jury. Its not like engineering at all. Its more like the language of statistics.
Every time I try to read a business contract, its like reading some newbies code where its full of undefined variables.
The big four to me was Star Trek, Father Knows Best, Hazel, and Dennis the Menace.
Little Home on the Prairie. I can't remember the name of one but it was Walter Brennan looking for his son. Gunsmoke and Bonanza. Most of the other stuff was too cheezy for me. Damn near everything today is too cheezy.
The only series I see coming out that I would try to follow is Fox's "Terra Nova". Their premiere was excellent. I hope they don't louse it up with soap-opera crap and bad science.
As far as Nimoy "retiring", I hope he remembers the first acting he did for Star Trek. The show where he takes his old captain, Christopher Pike, to the forbidden planet Talos. Pike was old, decrepit, and in a wheelchair, yet Spock, despite lacking human emotions, cared enough for him to bring him to peace. You know, there are a lot of fans who remember you for the dreams you inspired that you will always be "Spock" to us, no matter what.
Leonard, your work on Star Trek meant a lot to a lot of us and changed our lives forever. Please reconsider your appearances at Star Trek conventions. You are one of the very few people we have left that were worth remembering. .
The soft-drink people have helped our conversion to thinking-in-metric more than anyone else, I suppose.
I figure if we started selling beer and whiskey by the liter ( something you SEE on the shelf ), people will come around faster to have a "gut feel" of how much substance a liter represents.
Back to NASA, I am extremely impressed by the accuracy and reliability of their craft. With as much as America funds sports, rock stars, and teen idols, it is so saddening to me just how little respect NASA is getting for their work.
I can see the argument of how "useful" it is to see geysers on saturn, but this argument can be applied to sports, most of that stuff labeled "music", and gussying up for the camera.
NASA has given us a helluva lot of spinoff stuff that we use for other things ( like cellphones, laptops, superstrong materials, etc. ).
I have yet to see anything useful spun off from the other stuff.... uh, well, moonshining spun off some drastic improvements in automobiles (NASCAR).
This is what we get with an out-of-control poorly-administered patenting system.
Can we patent football plays? That would get their attention.
Its time for our government to try like the dickens to encourage people doing things, not beat the hell out of anyone caught trying to do something.
When it comes to productive economic activity, our government seems to look at us like moonshiners.
I wait with baited breath for our government to realize one day that we can't print prosperity, or get it by taking it away from someone else. We have to build it. Once we realize that, we will have unlimited prosperity.
"Let's all go to the DMV,ï where it's okay that we're number four hundred and three, we'll find ourselves a comfy seat.... and watch some shows and stuff!"
"Let's follow that lady with the.... laptop..... and watch day-time dramas at the.... bus stop..."
Wasn't this AT&T's ad? For their
..."High-Speed Internet - On the Go! Wooo!"
Now, they nail you for doing just that?
I just watched an old "Dennis the Menace" episode OTA on "Antenna TV". He was selling "All you can drink root beer for a penny". Once surrendering your penny, he would pour out about 1/4 inch of root beer in a glass. Upon questioning, he would reply that was all the root beer you could drink for a penny..
Yes... the TEACHER, not so much the stuff, made all the difference.
My teachers taught me well, to make do with what I had.
To improvise that which I did not have.
That was the way to prosper in the early days. Both of my Grandpas, both who were farmers, taught me the same.
My interest in electronics was kindled with old radios the neighbors threw away. Right out of the trash can. Once I found out how they worked, and could reassemble them into other things, well, that's where some really nifty science teachers changed my life forever.
I don't see my neighbor's kids showing up all excited when their science teacher found some old VOM in the school's donation bin and gives it to him.
Today, its all sent to the trash heap and we think we have to spend big bucks for something. The kid would be disciplined for severely if he did to it what I did to the things my science teachers gave me.
When I was in Junior High School in the early 60's, I was allowed to maintain the school's public address/intercom system. All vacuum tubes. Lethal voltages.
I knew that. Just as I knew about the power saw in shop class. I knew what guns were too. And explosives. I knew what they were and treated them with due respect.
I don't think anyone gave the situation a second thought.
Its called living in the real world. Common sense. Who of us were not aware of the kinetic energy of a moving car? Even dogs and cats knew of these things.
My school made available to me stuff of a very expensive nature, and let me open it up and see how it worked. I am very grateful to Glenn Peterson, the principal of the Junior High School I attended for the trust he placed in me. I kept that machine working the whole time I attended the school, and that prepared me for my summer job of fixing things at my neighborhood radio repair shop.
I am also aware of just how fortunate I was to be schooled in that time frame. There is no way I could ever get *that* kind of education today. I would have never seen the power of "nature in the raw" that my teachers were able to show me.
Yes, it was dangerous. I could have killed myself touching the wrong thing in that chassis. I could have cut my hand off with the power saw. I could have blinded myself with the drill press. But I didn't.
The worst damage I did to myself during school, all the science labs, all the shop classes, all the experience with guns - the worst was I snapped my ankle during a wrestling match, and to this day still walk with a limp.
I don't think an $800 thingie way beyond my comprehension would have helped much. It was my teachers, and my relationship with them, that made the difference in my life, and that is what I remember.
You are right, in the sense I did not stick specifically to throttling services.
I am in interested in high speed internet. I am still on dialup. I go to McDonalds with my laptop to use their high speed internet. Its hosted by AT&T and speedtest.net will consistently rate them a F- in connection speed. "AT&T delivers" is kinda a joke. But its better than what I have at home. If I enable JavaScript, the page likely won't load at all on dialup, as I will encounter TCP timeouts before the sluggish connections muster the data rate needed to keep the TCP sockets alive.
I read all their advertising crap and its so full of "up-to"s and disclaimers and all I find guaranteed is the price and the 12 to 24 months commit I must agree to, regardless of their performance.
I used to work in aerospace in Southern California. I do thermodynamics and microcontroller design. Thermal energy transfer. Refrigeration. Very unconventional systems - mostly based on Propane (R290). The microcontroller stuff is mostly to eliminate the need for control panels as I much prefer letting a switch DHCP me and let me display what I want via HTML and bitmaps using TCP/IP.
I have been playing around with desalination, using lorentz and hall-effect forces to separate saline from fresh water... but I really don't have the financial resources to implement such a thing on a larger scale,
I know if I built it for sale, I would just receive a letter telling me I can't do this, and a larger company would just take my work and be done with it. Bigger fish eat small, and the big fish work with Washington to make sure it stays that way.
I wanted to start my own company. Damn near lost my shirt. No way could I compete in the legal environment where everything I did violated someone's IP.
Its like being a writer where someone else "owns" every word I want to use.
I have my government telling me whatever I try to do is illegal, but if I will just admit to being mentally ill with asperger's syndrome, they will put me on welfare.
I am 60 years old. And with a Scots-Irish/Seminole temperament to boot. You know the white man was never able to "domesticate" the American Indian into slavery to work his cotton field.
In order to get a job with a "big company" , I have to interview someone who is more interested in what "certs" I have, and there is no way he's going to discuss either thermodynamics or internet protocols with me. I am just about ready to take the Government up on their offer and move to Maggie Valley.
I only have five more years to go till social security kicks in anyway. The conservative side of me yells to "conserve my resources", not do anything, and wait it out. The government demands inactivity and they are gonna really take a hit out of anyone who does otherwise.
To me, "asperger's syndrome" is just another word for "work ethic". I am INTP. I guess that means I derive far more enjoyment from crafting an elegant thermodynamic system than from watching endless sports programming.
Dammit, I want to do what I trained to do. Engineering. But I do realize America is no longer a manufacturing economy. We make money selling insurance and land to each other. As I noted in my post, the school bully owns the rights to the merry-go-round and he's got the mob of US Legislators to protect his "right" to keep me form building another one.
I do not have the ass-kissing skill to "work with" legislators to "allow" me to do anything.
All that math and science I studied was moot. Why did I waste my youth on such useless frivolity? Yet, I realize given my "disability", I was never cut out to have a career telling others what they would be allowed to do, I was cut out to DO things.
So, I sit in frustration, like watching some ignoramus who has no idea how to put a nut on a bolt try to change a tire, while uniformed police officers tell me not to say a word. I know the
If I sign up for 10Mb service, I feel I should get it. If I agreed to 29.99 a month, I should pay it. I feel terribly shortchanged when I do not get the service advertised, regardless of the "businesstalk" fine print in their contract.
I live in a country (USA) whose lawmakers find me in terrible breach of law if I as much as download a song. Yet a "health insurance" company can accept premium after premium for years, only to rescind the insurance when the insured comes to need it. None of our "honorable" suits-and-ties of Congress even see fit to require the insurance company to even as much as refund every premium ever sent them. Geez, that's like asking a shoplifter just to pay for what he stole.
Here we are, in a "jobs" crisis, yet we behave like first graders turned out to the play-yard. The first big kid takes control of the merry-go-round and wants a buck to ride. The "engineer" kid gets fed up and starts building his own. The "entrepreneur" who snared control of the first merry-go-round sees it and sends his thugs (lawyers) over to smash it.
Now, our governments are all in a tizzy cause the only way they can keep any cash in the economy is to run the printing presses fullbore.
This whole mess has originated in Congress. It will take a leap of Congressional insight to fix it.
Hint: Enforce the payments law only to the extent one pays for what one GETS. If the ISP screws up the credit rating of one who withheld payment because of throttled bandwidth, then whoever submitted the credit rating ding will be liable for damages, no different than the one who is liable for damages for downloading a song.
There is nothing like responsibility for insuring honesty.
Its something sorely lacking in today's authority laden political and business hierarchies.
I used the 6J6 a lot in preamps.... especially on differential front ends. It was a quite useful little tube.
A 12AX7 could be used too, but it needed a 9-pin socket... if I remember right, a 6J6 only needed a 7-pin socket.
I used to be amazed how long I could run mike cables when I used a 6J6 differential input preamp I had designed. It used a pair of 6J6. The first ran with its grids at zero volts and the cathode at about +10. The second ran with its grids coupled to the first 6J6's plates, with the cathode running with about 47K to ground. That was followed by a 12AX7 connected as a cathode follower not only to provide strong drive to the pair of 6L6 that followed it, but the pair of 12AX7 cathodes ended up summing their current at the first 6J6's cathodes, thereby stabilizing the DC bias for the whole thing.
At that time the XLR connectors were first coming into use. Before that, it was some single-contact eyelet-in-the-center screw-together connector about 1/2 inch diameter that Amphenol put out. Primitive by today's standards, but it was rugged and easy to fix when the mike wires broke - as they always seemed to do at least once in every performance.
I do miss those old vacuum tube days, but I would hardly recommend we return to them. They sure took a lot of wiring before you got anything to work.
I would imagine the "light gun" was a photocell held against the face of the display CRT which would respond when the area "shot" by the gun was illuminated.
Due to the nature of a CRT, only the phosphor area addressed by the current in its deflection coils will be illuminated, thereby giving the computer a pulse when it directs the beam to the area the gun operator is "shooting".
We used to build these things for our old IMSAI's and Altairs, as we didn't have mice yet, trackballs were terribly expensive, and 2N5777 phototransistors could be had for less than a buck.
They are just trying to automate what professional interrogators have known for years. Even in the 1950's, Sergeant Dan Matthews of "Highway Patrol" was shown using a Metrigraph psychogalvanometer to measure skin resistance of a subject. ( Not to be outdone, a whole religion was started by a science-fiction writer that centered on the use of this device, renamed to "E-Meter")
Lie detection is an art. Very subjective. How does one differentiate the stress caused by being under test and knowing the machine is determining your future from the stress of fibbing?
Its the same thing that causes blood pressure to rise when your physician measures it, or causes perfectly good students to fail tests. (Especially math tests). I have seen it. And experienced it. Too many times.
I'll betcha the arresting patrolman's gut feeling will outdo any testing any day. Not to say he's always right, but I would bet probability is in his favor.
I was wondering if anyone out there in Slashdot land was aware of such ancient technology and still lived to tell about it. (No insult intended... just respect)
What it models is the rate a resource can be extracted is proportional to how much of the resource you have consumed times how much you have left. As the amount you consume grows higher, your capacity to extricate the remaining resource grows, but only to a point - beyond that, there is an ever dwindling resource left.
It looks exponential at first, then surprise, it bends over and decays.
This equation has been found to model many phenomena in nature which are depletional in nature, such as oil well production, or growth of yeast in a petri dish.
I would be very wary of predicting future growth in a finite system based on the ascending part of what is likely a logistic (sigmoid) curve...
Even the idea one could even implement a vacuum-tube machine capable of performing at 286-levels to me is a miracle in itself. 6502 maybe, but, to me, even the lowly 286 represents a level of sophistication I could not even imagine being implemented with vacuum-tube technology.
I've never seen a SAGE, but it must have been quite a machine. In my imagination, it must have been about the size of a Wal-Mart. With the physical size of the thing, it would amaze me that they would be able to clock the thing anything more than 100 KHz or so.
Yes, I do know what a 6SN7 is. And a 12AT7, which I suspect the machine was full of ( or its JAN equivalent).
Do the designations 12SA7, 12SK7, 12SQ7, 50L6, 35Z5 still ring a bell with anyone?
From what I have seen, the American situation is very similar to my neighbor's situation.
He lost his job. High income earner. She never had a job, she raised kids. 3 of 'em.
Their spending habits changed little. They still bought new cars, plasma TV's, vacations, restaurants, Disneyland. New strollers.
HELOCs paid it all.
Then, two months ago, the bank wouldn't accept any more charges. Payments were due, and they wanted something of substance, not promises.
The house now sits vacant. A bank's foreclosure sign waves on the front yard. I have no idea where the family is, or who would take them in. From what I hear, the bank is not happy. They bought the house for around 800K and Zillow lists it at 399K.
I am waiting for the same thing to happen to America when we dig ourselves in so deep into debt that we have to surrender any claim we have on our own natural resources in order to pay our debt. I see the day hungry people will see grain on Maersk ships, headed for China. I see the day I see cold people in barely warm houses mining coal to be sent overseas.
Competing for jobs with machines.
While rich people and the politicians who wrote law for them watch over closed circuit monitors with all the sympathy of a healthcare employee rescinding insurance to someone who had the ill luck to get sick.
I have already seen us become a nation which passes law to financially ruin a family for illegally downloading a song, yet find corporations harmless for accepting one's health insurance premium for years, then denying treatment.
Or internet service providers who deliver nowhere near the advertised performance, yet demand payment in full.
If our government is going to hold phrases like "the terms and conditions of this agreement can be changed at any time" and stuff like "advertised performance is not guaranteed", is valid businesstalk, then let me state "release to the public via public airwaves or internet constitutes permission to whomever receives it privileges to do whatever he/she wants to do with it."
There, I've said it. Written in Businesstalk just like a real contract.
Slashdot Mirror
This may be exactly what our government wants!
People are not happy. The "occupy wall street" movement is alive. Traditional (i.e. controllable) news sources are now competing with citizen's cellphone reports. People are demanding accountability from their politicians... and NOT getting it.
If Congress can pass legislation to shut down social networking sites and communications kiosks while they still have the power to do so, it will be just that much harder to organize to keep this a government "of the people, by the people, for the people".
Since this ie an "accountability" bill, we really need a rider that holds EVERYONE accountable, That means Congressmen should be held personally acountable for the budget deficit, with their retirement plans, healthcare, and whatever cancelled to help pay for amounts due that they signed for. This is no more draconian than that which their meanderings has placed millions of American citizens in.
Forcing Congress to eat what they dish out would guarantee that bill would never pass.
If there is one thing I learned from Government aerospace contractors, its WHO, not WHAT you know that counts.
If you are not good at doing technical stuff, but have good people skills with those above you, they will put you in charge of engineers,
I found dealing with people who have management skills but limited awareness of the laws of physics the most frustrating experience I ever had.
I hate to counterpost a fellow slashdotter. I have been as much leery of HP and Compaq as anyone,
HP got on my bad side when I was in University in the early 70's. I had bought a HP-45 calculator.. was right at $400, a helluva lot of money for a college student. I made that investment considering the time it would free. No sooner than I got it, a segment driver failed, making all "8"'s appear as a "0". Being in the EE curriculum, I took the calculator to the engineering lab and discovered the problem was nothing more than an open inductor. Try and plead as I would, HP would NOT send me another inductor. The rest of my career, I was very leery of HP, not because of the failed inductor, but my perception of HP as not caring one whit about their customer.
I was irritated with Compaq because they used so many custom parts that I could find very few uses for a broken machine, as I could not patch it back together with parts I could get from other scrap machines.
But, at the beginning of this year, I broke down and bought a HP-Compaq laptop (CQ-56) at Wal-Mart. It had everything I was looking for at a real good price.
This machine had been really good to me. I am quite impressed with it, and recommend it to my friends. That's something I did not think I would ever do, giving the first impression I had of both companies was quite a bit less than stellar.
My take on it is HP/Compaq has their act together, and it would be a shame to discontinue their machines.
I can't tell you how many times I have had to throw away something because some little plastic part broke.
If this thing can print out decently strong parts, I'll want one too.
Hopefully, I can make more of that little nylon clutch that broke in every one of my Gardner-Denver wirewrap guns. I threw all the broken guns in a drawer hoping one day I would be able to bring them back to life. They were damm handy little tools, and I haven't seen anyone else make them that had the right feel to 'em.
That's a headline we may see if we lose control of those things.
Exactly.
We have so many "weasel words" in the language of law that interpretation is up to the judge and jury. Its not like engineering at all. Its more like the language of statistics.
Every time I try to read a business contract, its like reading some newbies code where its full of undefined variables.
Drives me nuts.
I had the utmost respect for Steve.
He knew what was important and what was fluff. And stood up to doing it right.
The big four to me was Star Trek, Father Knows Best, Hazel, and Dennis the Menace.
Little Home on the Prairie. I can't remember the name of one but it was Walter Brennan looking for his son. Gunsmoke and Bonanza. Most of the other stuff was too cheezy for me. Damn near everything today is too cheezy.
The only series I see coming out that I would try to follow is Fox's "Terra Nova". Their premiere was excellent. I hope they don't louse it up with soap-opera crap and bad science.
As far as Nimoy "retiring", I hope he remembers the first acting he did for Star Trek. The show where he takes his old captain, Christopher Pike, to the forbidden planet Talos. Pike was old, decrepit, and in a wheelchair, yet Spock, despite lacking human emotions, cared enough for him to bring him to peace. You know, there are a lot of fans who remember you for the dreams you inspired that you will always be "Spock" to us, no matter what.
Leonard, your work on Star Trek meant a lot to a lot of us and changed our lives forever. Please reconsider your appearances at Star Trek conventions. You are one of the very few people we have left that were worth remembering.
.
Thanks, all!
;)
I remembered (err partially ) that tag line and thought it most insightful.
You guys always seem to come through
The soft-drink people have helped our conversion to thinking-in-metric more than anyone else, I suppose.
I figure if we started selling beer and whiskey by the liter ( something you SEE on the shelf ), people will come around faster to have a "gut feel" of how much substance a liter represents.
Back to NASA, I am extremely impressed by the accuracy and reliability of their craft. With as much as America funds sports, rock stars, and teen idols, it is so saddening to me just how little respect NASA is getting for their work.
I can see the argument of how "useful" it is to see geysers on saturn, but this argument can be applied to sports, most of that stuff labeled "music", and gussying up for the camera.
NASA has given us a helluva lot of spinoff stuff that we use for other things ( like cellphones, laptops, superstrong materials, etc. ).
I have yet to see anything useful spun off from the other stuff.... uh, well, moonshining spun off some drastic improvements in automobiles (NASCAR).
This is what we get with an out-of-control poorly-administered patenting system.
Can we patent football plays? That would get their attention.
Its time for our government to try like the dickens to encourage people doing things, not beat the hell out of anyone caught trying to do something.
When it comes to productive economic activity, our government seems to look at us like moonshiners.
I wait with baited breath for our government to realize one day that we can't print prosperity, or get it by taking it away from someone else. We have to build it. Once we realize that, we will have unlimited prosperity.
The French Revolution.
The governed will put up with so much, but when the government gets too out of hand, it will be replaced.
Someone here has a tag line down the order of the boxes of government: soap, ballot,ammo. Use in that order.
Looks like the soap box for now.
( hoping the owner of the clever tag line throws in a comment )...
Wasn't this AT&T's ad? For their
..."High-Speed Internet - On the Go! Wooo!"
Now, they nail you for doing just that?
I just watched an old "Dennis the Menace" episode OTA on "Antenna TV". He was selling "All you can drink root beer for a penny". Once surrendering your penny, he would pour out about 1/4 inch of root beer in a glass. Upon questioning, he would reply that was all the root beer you could drink for a penny..
I figured AT&T must have seen the same episode.
Yes... the TEACHER, not so much the stuff, made all the difference.
My teachers taught me well, to make do with what I had.
To improvise that which I did not have.
That was the way to prosper in the early days. Both of my Grandpas, both who were farmers, taught me the same.
My interest in electronics was kindled with old radios the neighbors threw away. Right out of the trash can. Once I found out how they worked, and could reassemble them into other things, well, that's where some really nifty science teachers changed my life forever.
I don't see my neighbor's kids showing up all excited when their science teacher found some old VOM in the school's donation bin and gives it to him.
Today, its all sent to the trash heap and we think we have to spend big bucks for something. The kid would be disciplined for severely if he did to it what I did to the things my science teachers gave me.
When I was in Junior High School in the early 60's, I was allowed to maintain the school's public address/intercom system. All vacuum tubes. Lethal voltages.
I knew that. Just as I knew about the power saw in shop class. I knew what guns were too. And explosives. I knew what they were and treated them with due respect.
I don't think anyone gave the situation a second thought.
Its called living in the real world. Common sense. Who of us were not aware of the kinetic energy of a moving car? Even dogs and cats knew of these things.
My school made available to me stuff of a very expensive nature, and let me open it up and see how it worked. I am very grateful to Glenn Peterson, the principal of the Junior High School I attended for the trust he placed in me. I kept that machine working the whole time I attended the school, and that prepared me for my summer job of fixing things at my neighborhood radio repair shop.
I am also aware of just how fortunate I was to be schooled in that time frame. There is no way I could ever get *that* kind of education today. I would have never seen the power of "nature in the raw" that my teachers were able to show me.
Yes, it was dangerous. I could have killed myself touching the wrong thing in that chassis. I could have cut my hand off with the power saw. I could have blinded myself with the drill press. But I didn't.
The worst damage I did to myself during school, all the science labs, all the shop classes, all the experience with guns - the worst was I snapped my ankle during a wrestling match, and to this day still walk with a limp.
I don't think an $800 thingie way beyond my comprehension would have helped much. It was my teachers, and my relationship with them, that made the difference in my life, and that is what I remember.
Your advice is noted.
You are right, in the sense I did not stick specifically to throttling services.
I am in interested in high speed internet. I am still on dialup. I go to McDonalds with my laptop to use their high speed internet. Its hosted by AT&T and speedtest.net will consistently rate them a F- in connection speed. "AT&T delivers" is kinda a joke. But its better than what I have at home. If I enable JavaScript, the page likely won't load at all on dialup, as I will encounter TCP timeouts before the sluggish connections muster the data rate needed to keep the TCP sockets alive.
I read all their advertising crap and its so full of "up-to"s and disclaimers and all I find guaranteed is the price and the 12 to 24 months commit I must agree to, regardless of their performance.
I used to work in aerospace in Southern California. I do thermodynamics and microcontroller design. Thermal energy transfer. Refrigeration. Very unconventional systems - mostly based on Propane (R290). The microcontroller stuff is mostly to eliminate the need for control panels as I much prefer letting a switch DHCP me and let me display what I want via HTML and bitmaps using TCP/IP.
I have been playing around with desalination, using lorentz and hall-effect forces to separate saline from fresh water... but I really don't have the financial resources to implement such a thing on a larger scale,
I know if I built it for sale, I would just receive a letter telling me I can't do this, and a larger company would just take my work and be done with it. Bigger fish eat small, and the big fish work with Washington to make sure it stays that way.
I wanted to start my own company. Damn near lost my shirt. No way could I compete in the legal environment where everything I did violated someone's IP.
Its like being a writer where someone else "owns" every word I want to use.
I have my government telling me whatever I try to do is illegal, but if I will just admit to being mentally ill with asperger's syndrome, they will put me on welfare.
I am 60 years old. And with a Scots-Irish/Seminole temperament to boot. You know the white man was never able to "domesticate" the American Indian into slavery to work his cotton field.
In order to get a job with a "big company" , I have to interview someone who is more interested in what "certs" I have, and there is no way he's going to discuss either thermodynamics or internet protocols with me. I am just about ready to take the Government up on their offer and move to Maggie Valley. I only have five more years to go till social security kicks in anyway. The conservative side of me yells to "conserve my resources", not do anything, and wait it out. The government demands inactivity and they are gonna really take a hit out of anyone who does otherwise.
To me, "asperger's syndrome" is just another word for "work ethic". I am INTP. I guess that means I derive far more enjoyment from crafting an elegant thermodynamic system than from watching endless sports programming.
Dammit, I want to do what I trained to do. Engineering. But I do realize America is no longer a manufacturing economy. We make money selling insurance and land to each other. As I noted in my post, the school bully owns the rights to the merry-go-round and he's got the mob of US Legislators to protect his "right" to keep me form building another one.
I do not have the ass-kissing skill to "work with" legislators to "allow" me to do anything.
All that math and science I studied was moot. Why did I waste my youth on such useless frivolity? Yet, I realize given my "disability", I was never cut out to have a career telling others what they would be allowed to do, I was cut out to DO things.
So, I sit in frustration, like watching some ignoramus who has no idea how to put a nut on a bolt try to change a tire, while uniformed police officers tell me not to say a word. I know the
I am getting fed up with this idea.
If I sign up for 10Mb service, I feel I should get it. If I agreed to 29.99 a month, I should pay it. I feel terribly shortchanged when I do not get the service advertised, regardless of the "businesstalk" fine print in their contract.
I live in a country (USA) whose lawmakers find me in terrible breach of law if I as much as download a song. Yet a "health insurance" company can accept premium after premium for years, only to rescind the insurance when the insured comes to need it. None of our "honorable" suits-and-ties of Congress even see fit to require the insurance company to even as much as refund every premium ever sent them. Geez, that's like asking a shoplifter just to pay for what he stole.
Here we are, in a "jobs" crisis, yet we behave like first graders turned out to the play-yard. The first big kid takes control of the merry-go-round and wants a buck to ride. The "engineer" kid gets fed up and starts building his own. The "entrepreneur" who snared control of the first merry-go-round sees it and sends his thugs (lawyers) over to smash it.
Now, our governments are all in a tizzy cause the only way they can keep any cash in the economy is to run the printing presses fullbore.
This whole mess has originated in Congress. It will take a leap of Congressional insight to fix it.
Hint: Enforce the payments law only to the extent one pays for what one GETS. If the ISP screws up the credit rating of one who withheld payment because of throttled bandwidth, then whoever submitted the credit rating ding will be liable for damages, no different than the one who is liable for damages for downloading a song.
There is nothing like responsibility for insuring honesty.
Its something sorely lacking in today's authority laden political and business hierarchies.
Interesting... Thanks!
I used the 6J6 a lot in preamps.... especially on differential front ends. It was a quite useful little tube.
A 12AX7 could be used too, but it needed a 9-pin socket... if I remember right, a 6J6 only needed a 7-pin socket.
I used to be amazed how long I could run mike cables when I used a 6J6 differential input preamp I had designed. It used a pair of 6J6. The first ran with its grids at zero volts and the cathode at about +10. The second ran with its grids coupled to the first 6J6's plates, with the cathode running with about 47K to ground. That was followed by a 12AX7 connected as a cathode follower not only to provide strong drive to the pair of 6L6 that followed it, but the pair of 12AX7 cathodes ended up summing their current at the first 6J6's cathodes, thereby stabilizing the DC bias for the whole thing.
At that time the XLR connectors were first coming into use. Before that, it was some single-contact eyelet-in-the-center screw-together connector about 1/2 inch diameter that Amphenol put out. Primitive by today's standards, but it was rugged and easy to fix when the mike wires broke - as they always seemed to do at least once in every performance.
I do miss those old vacuum tube days, but I would hardly recommend we return to them. They sure took a lot of wiring before you got anything to work.
I would imagine the "light gun" was a photocell held against the face of the display CRT which would respond when the area "shot" by the gun was illuminated.
Due to the nature of a CRT, only the phosphor area addressed by the current in its deflection coils will be illuminated, thereby giving the computer a pulse when it directs the beam to the area the gun operator is "shooting".
We used to build these things for our old IMSAI's and Altairs, as we didn't have mice yet, trackballs were terribly expensive, and 2N5777 phototransistors could be had for less than a buck.
Yes, it looks like prior art to me too.
They are just trying to automate what professional interrogators have known for years. Even in the 1950's, Sergeant Dan Matthews of "Highway Patrol" was shown using a Metrigraph psychogalvanometer to measure skin resistance of a subject. ( Not to be outdone, a whole religion was started by a science-fiction writer that centered on the use of this device, renamed to "E-Meter")
Lie detection is an art. Very subjective. How does one differentiate the stress caused by being under test and knowing the machine is determining your future from the stress of fibbing?
Its the same thing that causes blood pressure to rise when your physician measures it, or causes perfectly good students to fail tests. (Especially math tests). I have seen it. And experienced it. Too many times.
I'll betcha the arresting patrolman's gut feeling will outdo any testing any day. Not to say he's always right, but I would bet probability is in his favor.
Bingo!
I was wondering if anyone out there in Slashdot land was aware of such ancient technology and still lived to tell about it. (No insult intended... just respect)
Consider the logistic equation : dQ(t)/dt=(Q(t))*(1-Q(t)).
What it models is the rate a resource can be extracted is proportional to how much of the resource you have consumed times how much you have left. As the amount you consume grows higher, your capacity to extricate the remaining resource grows, but only to a point - beyond that, there is an ever dwindling resource left.
It looks exponential at first, then surprise, it bends over and decays.
This equation has been found to model many phenomena in nature which are depletional in nature, such as oil well production, or growth of yeast in a petri dish.
I would be very wary of predicting future growth in a finite system based on the ascending part of what is likely a logistic (sigmoid) curve...
What amazes me is the computation done in biological systems.
When I consider the amount of correlation and replication done by RNA/DNA systems, I am left in the dust, wondering just what happened.
Even the idea one could even implement a vacuum-tube machine capable of performing at 286-levels to me is a miracle in itself. 6502 maybe, but, to me, even the lowly 286 represents a level of sophistication I could not even imagine being implemented with vacuum-tube technology.
I've never seen a SAGE, but it must have been quite a machine. In my imagination, it must have been about the size of a Wal-Mart. With the physical size of the thing, it would amaze me that they would be able to clock the thing anything more than 100 KHz or so.
Yes, I do know what a 6SN7 is. And a 12AT7, which I suspect the machine was full of ( or its JAN equivalent).
Do the designations 12SA7, 12SK7, 12SQ7, 50L6, 35Z5 still ring a bell with anyone?
From what I have seen, the American situation is very similar to my neighbor's situation.
He lost his job. High income earner. She never had a job, she raised kids. 3 of 'em.
Their spending habits changed little. They still bought new cars, plasma TV's, vacations, restaurants, Disneyland. New strollers.
HELOCs paid it all.
Then, two months ago, the bank wouldn't accept any more charges. Payments were due, and they wanted something of substance, not promises.
The house now sits vacant. A bank's foreclosure sign waves on the front yard. I have no idea where the family is, or who would take them in. From what I hear, the bank is not happy. They bought the house for around 800K and Zillow lists it at 399K.
I am waiting for the same thing to happen to America when we dig ourselves in so deep into debt that we have to surrender any claim we have on our own natural resources in order to pay our debt. I see the day hungry people will see grain on Maersk ships, headed for China. I see the day I see cold people in barely warm houses mining coal to be sent overseas.
Competing for jobs with machines.
While rich people and the politicians who wrote law for them watch over closed circuit monitors with all the sympathy of a healthcare employee rescinding insurance to someone who had the ill luck to get sick.
I have already seen us become a nation which passes law to financially ruin a family for illegally downloading a song, yet find corporations harmless for accepting one's health insurance premium for years, then denying treatment.
Or internet service providers who deliver nowhere near the advertised performance, yet demand payment in full.
If our government is going to hold phrases like "the terms and conditions of this agreement can be changed at any time" and stuff like "advertised performance is not guaranteed", is valid businesstalk, then let me state "release to the public via public airwaves or internet constitutes permission to whomever receives it privileges to do whatever he/she wants to do with it."
There, I've said it. Written in Businesstalk just like a real contract.