While cool, this thing has a LOONNNGGGG way to go before it has many useful applications. Presently it can do a single on-off and is a huge head gear application. If it can montior different areas if the brain for Activity or no Activity, then you have maybe a half dozen on-off bits to make it do different things. Half a dozen bits is useful for some things, and in combination can make numbers, but if you have to do math to turn on bit one, and then think of a pretty scense to turn on bit two, and think about this to turn on bit 3, etc. it won't be good other then for a few simple On/Off logic gates to be tied to something.
Article said it at the bottom, it is cool to move a train by thinking, but to do much else, even a remote control to the tv with this thing will be limited. On a remote, you could have Power, Channel up, Channel down, volume up, volume down and that would be about it. And all that by putting on your huge magic hat.
Will be cool eventually, but I for one am not yet fearing my Device Controlling using Brain Wave Hat overlords yet.
They were also sued over not allowing girls in about 10 years ago. Some girl wanted to go camping with the boy scouts, there was no girl scout troop in the area so she wanted in Boy Scouts. She was told no, she sued, was going to win the case and the boy scouts bowed to pressure from major investors who said if you discriminate against female we will stop donating and the BSA said, ok, girls can join the boy scouts, suit was dropped.
They do not advertise the decision and it didn't recieve a ton of press, but it is on the books that girls can join boy scouts. I have not heard of any girls joining other than the one girl that brough the whole thing up, but there are probably more than just the one.
I just think, what parent of a teen age girls is going to want to send thier daughter out into the woods with a bunch of Boy Scouts! For all the good things you learn in BSA, they are ultimately a bunch of young hormone crazed teenage boys and throwing girls into the mix, is not a pretty picture!
I remember one campout where there was a school group at the next site over that was a co-ed group. What do you think the troop did? Spent all the spare time of the campout trying to hit on the chicks at the next campsite over!!!
You can kick people out of private events basically at whim, as long as it's not on the grounds of race, religion, sex, etc.
Actually, private event, you can exclude people from a private event for any reason you want, it is private. If you want to have a party and exclude all females and a female shows up, you can throw her out. If you want to exclude someone of a certain race from coming to a party at your house, feel free, they have absolutely no recourse.
Wether it is smart to do and what the public backlash would be for a stadium, NCAA, college, etc is a totally different story. Remember the Boy Scouts being sued for not admitting girls? They are a private organization that recieves no government money and they can do that if they want to. In the end they allowed girls because many large corporate sponsors said if they didn't allow girls, they would pull money, but they can.
Think of the KKK, they have tons of restrictions, they can restrict all they want to and as long as they don't go torching places hanging people, they are protected by law.
Now, by citing these examples I am not saying I agree with the KKK or any of the example above, just pointing out, private entities are held by very few, if any, laws about discrimination. If the NCAA said, no Asians at all games, they could. Of course all the colleges that can't discriminate and companies etc would have to stop participating, but the NCAA could do it.
p!ssa and some others that posted here have it right. Look into something like Allen Bradley os GE or something. If it is important enough to put a monitor on it, spend a little extra money and do it right. I am a Controls Engineer and have spec'd out stuff like this all of the time. There are cheaper solution, but failure rates of homebrewed methods have too high a chance of failure.
Like p!ssa said, call a vendor that sells the stuff, or if you don't have the know how to spec it, call a system integrator (i.e. process controls engineers for hire, that is what I do for a living) and have them assit you in specing it out.
There are way to many potential problems to homebrew controls equipment and the results of failure can be disaterous, espically if it is monitoring used to make controls decisions.
Most forms of speech are protected, but threats, slander, liable, those types of speach are not a right. Threaten to shoot someone, yeah, that is illegal. Make unfounded statements that damage somoene's reputation, yeah, that is illegal too. Express an opinion, pretty much protected. So while it isn't all speech is protected, most forms of speech are protected.
Don't know what this kids wrote, but did see someone posted a small excerpt fo the paper and he wrote some crazy disturbing stuff, but that little excerpt, I can't see how that would qualify as not protected. IANAL
Dragonwriter is correct on this one, and I wanted to weigh in. The big thing to check is one or two party consent in the state you are in/they are in. In many states, one party consent is all that is required by a citizen to legalley record a call. If you are one of the parties on the call, you consent and record it, that is one party consent. Never even have to tell teh other party because you do not need thier consent
In two party consent, the second party has to be informed they are being recorded. If they do not object to being recorded, that is implied consent and will hold up in court most of the time. Think about when you call a company service rep. Most of them have an automatic blub, this call may be recorded...etc before you are connected to a live person. You didn't hang up the phone or tell them when a person answers that you object to being recorded so the fact you did neither of these means you just consented and they can use the call. They cover themselves for two party consent with the blurb instead of worrying which state you are calling from.
Required to give 3 months notice? How do they enforce that? As mentioned previously, terms of employeement, unless there is a contract, are at will from either side. They can't require you to do anything. If you do something they do not like (as long as it is legal), they can "discipline" you with your record, make you do things, blah blah, but if you refuse to comply, the only thing they can really do is fire you.
If you don't give three months notice, what will they do, fire you? The only real option they have is fire you or hold a carrot under your nose for the 3 months notice. At my last company, you acrued vacation for the year as of Jan. 1 of that year, so if you got 4 weeks vacation in that year, you could take January off and quit on Feb 1. They "required" you to give two weeks notice to get your vacation pay. I quit there and my last day was Jan. 20. I had acruued my 4 weeks of vacation. I gave proper 2 weeks notice and they gave me a check on the way out the door for 4 weeks of accrued vacation. If I had not given proper notice, they would have withheld that money. They can't make you give any notice or do anything that is legal (and quiting is legal unless you are breaching a contract, then it is breach of contract law) without saying, give 3 months notice or we won't give you X and you forfiet that. I am curious, how did they enforce the 3 months notice thing because unless it was like my old company where it was give 2 weeks notice or forfiet vacation pay that is due you or have you sign a contract saying you will give 3 months notice, they can't make you do anything, give 3 months, they treat you liek that, walk out and don't come back. If they made you sign a contract stating you will give 3 months notice, well, that is bad and if I wasn't extremely desperate for a job, I would not go work for a company that required me ot sign a contract like that.
What your friend said was a half truth. Microwaves are designed to heat water, but they do not only have affects on water. The way microwaves work is they emit microwaves with the wave length that will exicte the nuclea bonds present in a water molecule. Imagine a molecule of water, H2O and think about the motion it can have. There is a vibration that acts like a spring between the atoms, there is the rotation of the water molecule (spinning like a top) and then there is linear motion where the water molecules are moving fast and bouncing off things (this is temperature. You want to heat the water molecule, or get it bouncing around. That is harder to do then the vibrational. Like 2 pitchforks with similar tuning, if you strike one, the other resonates. The mircowaves hit the water molecule and excite the rotational motion (I am pretty sure it is the rotational, it might be the vibrational, but am pretty sure it is the rotational frequency). Once the molecuel is excited, it hits another molecule nearby (water or non) and transfer the rotational excited energy into motion of what it just hit. The water molecule looses rotational energy, the other gains linear velocity, i.e. heat and the microwave re-excites teh water molecue.
So while the microwaves are spewing forth the right frequency waves to excite water molecules, they can excite other things as well even if no water is present. Other things than water responds to the same frequencies, and some things react violently to microwaves via reflection (like metal) or other ways.
Yes, I am a geek. Chem Eng. by profession, spent time working in a physics lab. http://home.howstuffworks.com/microwave.htm hints at this, but doens't get into the same level of detail, just says water and fats absorbs the energy transfering ti directly into heat.
Wow, hold on a second there...you are talking about doing something intelligently and analyzing a problem to come up with the solution that will give you the best bang for the buck. We can't be talking about logically solving a problem because these policies come from government bodies and logic and intelligence and legislation rarely go hand in hand!;)
I perfectly agree with you, going after this 4% is probably not the best use of time and resources, need to go after larger items and when those are solved, get down to the small items that are the 4%..of course, that is unless the 4% is one fo the biggest items, but I doubt that is the case.
Let me know how you accomplish this...I have been trying to convince my wife to let "my 6 year old" have a set of Mindstorm or something and she still isn't buying it. She says we need to focus on things like reading...come on already, reading isn't useful or anything, robotics is the wave of the future. Who needs reading when he can do robotics!
You need to talk to my wife, she will blow you away at getting deals on ebay over time. She bids early, depending on the item and it's level of interest. She also figures out how how she is willing to go before making the first bid and then if it gets to that point or past, she walks away. She has patience with the bidding.
She looses a ton of auctions because they go over her price limit, but watching when auctions end and if anyone is bidding, she has placed and early bid or two, gotten above whoever else she was early bidding with and then no other bids came through because it ended at an odd time, or competitors were to busy to check, had internent go down, etc... who knows. She has managed to get thing at 25-30% of what they normally sell for with the early bid that for some reason no one bids on except her, or everyone else gave up. Granted, most auctions come down to the last minute sniping, but if you are patient and wait, the item will come up again and again and again and eventually you will get it for a fraction of the price that it sold for yesterday or will sell for tomorrow.
This takes a ton of patience and time to do, but my wife loves doing it this way and she has gotten a ton of good deals. So, there is some value to early bids, but most come down to the last minute snipping. If you just like getting the item for a ton less, you can get stuff for cheap, but it takes more time than most will spend looking form something.
Yes, very true, fully agree. I recently broke the MMORPG addiction, for the 3rd time, and haven't bought many new games since. I am enjoying talking with people and going out of doors (although the sun did hurt for the first few weeks of trying to go out in it).
You could have done all kinds of things ahead of time just as easily as after putting in the two weeks. Let us not all forget that any such acts, before or after are criminal and if caught, there can be repecussion, i.e. civil lawsuits for damamged! If you do malicious things and they can find evidence of it, you are liable!
My HR director worked at a facility where they fired the facility manager. He was a bit of a quack, which is part of the reason he was being fired, but a nice enough guy. They allowed him to go around the facility with HR escort to say goodbye to a few people after they fired him. As he walked by the production machine, he walked over to a control console and hit the main e-stop button and then whith his escort left the building never to return. It didn't take but a couple of days for the corporate lawyers to have the suit drawn up and file for damamges.
The company cutting off access is just covering themselves against possible wacko's. Don't let it bug you, take the pay, have a party, take your gf out to a fancy dinner and have a good time....hold on a sec, posting to/....I meant... take the pay, go home buy a new computer and have fun playing games and streaming porn for 2 weeks! GF for a/. user...what was I thinking!!;)
I had a buddy that I played DAOC with and he named his character BigWorm. He was fine for months with that name, unitl he hatched his master plan. In DAOC, after level 10 you can choose a surname to add to your name. His name became BigWorm InDaPants! He didn't last long and had to change his name!
That friend had a good friend who's character's name was Baconstriplicker!! No joke and he never had any problems! It is so hit or miss.
On a more personal note, I have names that violate policies and I would be crushed if they were revoked. Fortunately, very few people recognize them. I have other characters I play too and when I am playing them, I am constantly reintroducing myself by my main characters name so they realize who I am.
Last thing before I post, when DAOC started, the first guild I joined there was Fellowship of the Ring. Yes, blatantly in violoation as that is copyrighted, but we lasted a while. When the GM told us he would have to change it, luckily we got a nice one who told us to take a few days and figure out what we wanted the new name to be and that he would change it. We became the Tourtued Souls and the guild rallied around the fact that we had to change and were being violated, but it still was not the same feel to the guild. I joined the guild initally because of the name!! The one thing we always asked afterwards is why our name was changed and there are 18 thousand mis-spelling of Legolas and none of them are forced to change thier names! Oh well, what are you going to do when playing at thier house with thier toys!
Not as much a reply to this post as it was pretty funny, but to the rest of the posts that follow arguing about using.NET or other platforms for nuclear reactor controls.
Controls technology and IT technology are intertwined at the operator interface level/data mining for storage purposes and that is about the extenet of it. I am a Control Engineer and I have "controls servers" running Windows Server 2003 and my operator interfaces are dependant on this server. The Operator interfaces are on Industrial Computers running windows, I forget which version, but windows, XP I think. The operators are minorly screwed if the servers go down as they can't access the controls system and make changes. The actual controls systems continue to run, the operators just can't make changes, i.e. change set points, put things in manual/automatic etc. I don't work in Nuclear Power and if our stuff crashed it costs some money in downtime but won't kill people/blow things up and we don't rely on windows based stuff. We loose interfaces/windows server and we loose some historical data tracking, but that is it and the interfaces can be worked around in a matter of minutes..NET and microsoft and windows are not ever put in a critical controls applications for something you use for controls, the actual controls are run by Distributed Cotnrols Systems (DCS) Programmable Logix Controllers (PLC) and other equipment that is 100% reliable, is designed to runs for years without interruption/downtime and does. I would bet this company was doing data mining/display interfaces/historical graphs/data analysis tools, not actual controls stuff. the stuff alot of the following posts talk about trying to run controls stuff on a box running this or that doens't happen. Controls Technology is extremely robust and doens't fail often, rarely as a matter of fact and to even get approval for Nuc Power and others, they have all kinds of proprietary hardened system that are designed to run for years and years, i.e. not Windows OS or the like.
Just as a point of interest (and off topic to main post, but relavent to the previous post), in case you wanted to know, if you didn't know already. The difference between black and white clouds is black clouds are alsmot always by products of burning something, i.e. coal, and are pollutants. White clouds are just that, clouds. They are nothing more than water vapor the condenses and shoots out thier exhausts. I work at a plant that gives out alot of "white clouds" (condensing water vapor) and every so often I have people say you polute things so bad, look at all that terrible smoke you let out! I tell them it is not smoke, it is water!
Bound to be very unpopular stating on slashdot, and late enough bound not to be read, but here goes anyway.
As this posted put it, "the airlines have a security interest in knowing the identity of their customers", and if they want to mandate ids to fly, they can do that. I agree that if the government put this into affect, they need to put the law/reasoning available to see. If the airlines decide at some point to require id, there is nothing we can do about it. The airline is privately owned and when you step foot on a privately owned property, you all but give up all your rights except the right to life according to the owner of the properties dictates. Airlines can say, we will not allow you to fly without id, and they can do that and whil it may infringe on some privacy issues, they own the airline, they do not have to allow anyone not willing to follow their rules on their property. An airline could impose a ban on talking and if you fly our airline you agree to give up your right to communicate period. NO one would fly, but as they own the airline, they can set the terms of the contract and you would have to abide, or not fly them.
Now, that being said, the government and the airlines stating this are two different things and like I said, the governemtn should put the laws and information out there available, they are held to a higher standard. Finally, even if this case wins and the government doens't require ids anymore, the airlines are already cehckign them and will undoubtedly not want to retrain thier people or stop verifying ids, so they would then leave it in as a policy and we would have no choice but to abide by their rules or not fly their arilines. So, fight the good fight, but in the end we will still need valid ids to fly, if not government imposed, privately owned airline imposed.
Variable speed is unecessary. Not sure if you were saying that is the way and how it works when you replied, but you don't need to vary the speed at all. The speed of the pump is set to have the ability to deliver the maximum required flow and pressure (pump sizing exercise) and then the amount of flow is varied by the muslces that contract on the artieries. In other words, the body continues ot regulate the flow/need of the blood and the pump just supplies it. THat is the way a centrifigual pump works, the impeller goes the same speed all the time and has the potential to deliver the maximum flow, but does not deliver the maximum flow until the discharge valve (in this case the muscles the constrict the arteries) are open 100%. Simply put in the pump so that the blood flow capacity is there and then the bodies natural mechanisms that already directy the flow of blood would do the rest. Variable speed is near impossible (probably completely impossible) due to the control/decisions of speed/input needs etc that we don't know how to read from the human body.
I coudl be wrong on this, not being a biologist or a doctor, but I do remember studies on this from a few years back in some bio classes. The viens have the back prevention valves, but the arteries do not. The pressure is highest closest to the heart, and drops the further you get (basic fluid flow) The arteries don't have the back flow prevention valves because the pressure is high enough even between beats that the blood keeps moving forward. The viens, the pressure has dropped anough to get a slow down/slight back flow of the blood, espically in the legs pumping against gravity, between beats. Organs/tissue already have a steady flow going to them and and unsteady flow going away from them. Correct me if I am wrong.
This is something I know about, I am an engineer and work with centrifugal pumps (engineering classification of these impeller/turbine pumps. You can make them variable speed and use the speed of the impeller to control the flow of the medium being pumped. There are many advantages to this, but it is not the common flow control scheme. Most of the time, the speed of the impeller is held constant and a control valve on the discharge side of the pump is opened and closed. As the discharge vale is open, flow goes up, as the valve is closed, the flow goes down. I woudl venture to guess, that the muscles that apply pressure to arteries to direct the blood flow (an everyday normal activity in all human beigns) acts as the flow control and the pump just sits at normal speed. If you have a variable speed pump, they would have to tap into the nervous system to determine the blood needs of various organs/tissues and use that as speed control, not going to happen, or give you a rheostat on your side that you coudl turn up and down the spped of the impeller based on what you were doing (sarcasm).
Summary, constant speed centrifigal pump with the flow control being down by the discharge valve (this case muscles on the arteries that are already there) and the pump impeller speed never changes.
I think most of the people below missed the point of making the reports not available to the public. The article and the DHS are saying these reports contains a failure analysis of why the network went down, not just when it was down. All the posts I read talked about why would terrorists care when the network is down. What the Terrorists would care about, and the DHS is trying to keep away from them is HOW the network went down. If you had a whole list of problem A casued Area A to loose communication, problem B caused area B etc, it would be simple to pick the area you wanted a communication black out, go cut the line or whatever to reproduce that outage and then make an attack while communications is down.
Communications is the key to emergency response to any situation and if the terrorists can interrupt communications and then attack, they will be more effective. The DHS is worried these reports will give them the ability to do just that, create specific communications outages at will because the reports will point out network weak points.
And for the record, before I get flamed on this, I am not saying I am for or against what the FCC or DHS say on this, just pointing out that we missed the point of the article. If you flame/downgrade me for something, make it for what I said, not assuming I am for or against the FCC or DHS on this one.
Armed sysadmins tracking down spammers, breaking down the doors? I can't imagine my sysadmin doing more than picking up his cup of coffee or typing on his keyboard or taking his calculator out of his pocket protector, let alone being able to break down a door!
Sysadmin 1: Break down the door!
Group of sysadmins start hitting door repeatedly to try and break it down.
30 minutes later, police arrive.
Police Officer: You are all under arrest for disturbing the peace, we had a call from the person living here about the excessive noise!
Another failed attempt for the sysadmin bounty hunters to arrest a spammer!!;)
The second part of finding out if they have power you may want to use is the service they offer. Many parks run power to shelters for group gatherings etc., but the power is alot lower wattage than you might expect/need. We have a company picnic every year out at a park that we have catered and what food selection is limited due to the power. The caterers need thier equipment and can only run so much off what the park has run there before blowing fuses. If the park has power, make sure you check that or you may arrive, plug everything in, and blow a fuse.
Not to jump on the conspiracy bandwagon, but there is a huge difference. The long term view is to have a unique code on every item. UPC codes tell you, this is a box of corn flakes. If it has an RFID tag, it tells you this is Box of Cornflakes serial number 123DFE545DFD, which is unique from the box of cornflakes sittign next to it. Tie cornflakes box 123DFE545DFD to you because you used a credit card and as long as you have the box, they know who you are. That is what they are all freaky about and the differenc between UPC and RFID.
I agree though, I can't wait until, "the day when I pull my shopping cart up to the register and it gives me my total."
I agree with the other person that responded to you. You will ever be lauded as my personal hero when I play this game on my PALM and laptop when at work. You may not be well liked by my employer, but I will always remember you!!
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While cool, this thing has a LOONNNGGGG way to go before it has many useful applications. Presently it can do a single on-off and is a huge head gear application. If it can montior different areas if the brain for Activity or no Activity, then you have maybe a half dozen on-off bits to make it do different things. Half a dozen bits is useful for some things, and in combination can make numbers, but if you have to do math to turn on bit one, and then think of a pretty scense to turn on bit two, and think about this to turn on bit 3, etc. it won't be good other then for a few simple On/Off logic gates to be tied to something. Article said it at the bottom, it is cool to move a train by thinking, but to do much else, even a remote control to the tv with this thing will be limited. On a remote, you could have Power, Channel up, Channel down, volume up, volume down and that would be about it. And all that by putting on your huge magic hat. Will be cool eventually, but I for one am not yet fearing my Device Controlling using Brain Wave Hat overlords yet.
They were also sued over not allowing girls in about 10 years ago. Some girl wanted to go camping with the boy scouts, there was no girl scout troop in the area so she wanted in Boy Scouts. She was told no, she sued, was going to win the case and the boy scouts bowed to pressure from major investors who said if you discriminate against female we will stop donating and the BSA said, ok, girls can join the boy scouts, suit was dropped.
They do not advertise the decision and it didn't recieve a ton of press, but it is on the books that girls can join boy scouts. I have not heard of any girls joining other than the one girl that brough the whole thing up, but there are probably more than just the one.
I just think, what parent of a teen age girls is going to want to send thier daughter out into the woods with a bunch of Boy Scouts! For all the good things you learn in BSA, they are ultimately a bunch of young hormone crazed teenage boys and throwing girls into the mix, is not a pretty picture!
I remember one campout where there was a school group at the next site over that was a co-ed group. What do you think the troop did? Spent all the spare time of the campout trying to hit on the chicks at the next campsite over!!!
You can kick people out of private events basically at whim, as long as it's not on the grounds of race, religion, sex, etc.
Actually, private event, you can exclude people from a private event for any reason you want, it is private. If you want to have a party and exclude all females and a female shows up, you can throw her out. If you want to exclude someone of a certain race from coming to a party at your house, feel free, they have absolutely no recourse.
Wether it is smart to do and what the public backlash would be for a stadium, NCAA, college, etc is a totally different story. Remember the Boy Scouts being sued for not admitting girls? They are a private organization that recieves no government money and they can do that if they want to. In the end they allowed girls because many large corporate sponsors said if they didn't allow girls, they would pull money, but they can.
Think of the KKK, they have tons of restrictions, they can restrict all they want to and as long as they don't go torching places hanging people, they are protected by law.
Now, by citing these examples I am not saying I agree with the KKK or any of the example above, just pointing out, private entities are held by very few, if any, laws about discrimination. If the NCAA said, no Asians at all games, they could. Of course all the colleges that can't discriminate and companies etc would have to stop participating, but the NCAA could do it.
p!ssa and some others that posted here have it right. Look into something like Allen Bradley os GE or something. If it is important enough to put a monitor on it, spend a little extra money and do it right. I am a Controls Engineer and have spec'd out stuff like this all of the time. There are cheaper solution, but failure rates of homebrewed methods have too high a chance of failure. Like p!ssa said, call a vendor that sells the stuff, or if you don't have the know how to spec it, call a system integrator (i.e. process controls engineers for hire, that is what I do for a living) and have them assit you in specing it out. There are way to many potential problems to homebrew controls equipment and the results of failure can be disaterous, espically if it is monitoring used to make controls decisions.
Most forms of speech are protected, but threats, slander, liable, those types of speach are not a right. Threaten to shoot someone, yeah, that is illegal. Make unfounded statements that damage somoene's reputation, yeah, that is illegal too. Express an opinion, pretty much protected. So while it isn't all speech is protected, most forms of speech are protected.
Don't know what this kids wrote, but did see someone posted a small excerpt fo the paper and he wrote some crazy disturbing stuff, but that little excerpt, I can't see how that would qualify as not protected. IANAL
Dragonwriter is correct on this one, and I wanted to weigh in. The big thing to check is one or two party consent in the state you are in/they are in. In many states, one party consent is all that is required by a citizen to legalley record a call. If you are one of the parties on the call, you consent and record it, that is one party consent. Never even have to tell teh other party because you do not need thier consent
In two party consent, the second party has to be informed they are being recorded. If they do not object to being recorded, that is implied consent and will hold up in court most of the time. Think about when you call a company service rep. Most of them have an automatic blub, this call may be recorded...etc before you are connected to a live person. You didn't hang up the phone or tell them when a person answers that you object to being recorded so the fact you did neither of these means you just consented and they can use the call. They cover themselves for two party consent with the blurb instead of worrying which state you are calling from.
Required to give 3 months notice? How do they enforce that? As mentioned previously, terms of employeement, unless there is a contract, are at will from either side. They can't require you to do anything. If you do something they do not like (as long as it is legal), they can "discipline" you with your record, make you do things, blah blah, but if you refuse to comply, the only thing they can really do is fire you. If you don't give three months notice, what will they do, fire you? The only real option they have is fire you or hold a carrot under your nose for the 3 months notice. At my last company, you acrued vacation for the year as of Jan. 1 of that year, so if you got 4 weeks vacation in that year, you could take January off and quit on Feb 1. They "required" you to give two weeks notice to get your vacation pay. I quit there and my last day was Jan. 20. I had acruued my 4 weeks of vacation. I gave proper 2 weeks notice and they gave me a check on the way out the door for 4 weeks of accrued vacation. If I had not given proper notice, they would have withheld that money. They can't make you give any notice or do anything that is legal (and quiting is legal unless you are breaching a contract, then it is breach of contract law) without saying, give 3 months notice or we won't give you X and you forfiet that. I am curious, how did they enforce the 3 months notice thing because unless it was like my old company where it was give 2 weeks notice or forfiet vacation pay that is due you or have you sign a contract saying you will give 3 months notice, they can't make you do anything, give 3 months, they treat you liek that, walk out and don't come back. If they made you sign a contract stating you will give 3 months notice, well, that is bad and if I wasn't extremely desperate for a job, I would not go work for a company that required me ot sign a contract like that.
What your friend said was a half truth. Microwaves are designed to heat water, but they do not only have affects on water. The way microwaves work is they emit microwaves with the wave length that will exicte the nuclea bonds present in a water molecule. Imagine a molecule of water, H2O and think about the motion it can have. There is a vibration that acts like a spring between the atoms, there is the rotation of the water molecule (spinning like a top) and then there is linear motion where the water molecules are moving fast and bouncing off things (this is temperature. You want to heat the water molecule, or get it bouncing around. That is harder to do then the vibrational. Like 2 pitchforks with similar tuning, if you strike one, the other resonates. The mircowaves hit the water molecule and excite the rotational motion (I am pretty sure it is the rotational, it might be the vibrational, but am pretty sure it is the rotational frequency). Once the molecuel is excited, it hits another molecule nearby (water or non) and transfer the rotational excited energy into motion of what it just hit. The water molecule looses rotational energy, the other gains linear velocity, i.e. heat and the microwave re-excites teh water molecue.
So while the microwaves are spewing forth the right frequency waves to excite water molecules, they can excite other things as well even if no water is present. Other things than water responds to the same frequencies, and some things react violently to microwaves via reflection (like metal) or other ways.
Yes, I am a geek. Chem Eng. by profession, spent time working in a physics lab. http://home.howstuffworks.com/microwave.htm hints at this, but doens't get into the same level of detail, just says water and fats absorbs the energy transfering ti directly into heat.
Wow, hold on a second there...you are talking about doing something intelligently and analyzing a problem to come up with the solution that will give you the best bang for the buck. We can't be talking about logically solving a problem because these policies come from government bodies and logic and intelligence and legislation rarely go hand in hand! ;)
I perfectly agree with you, going after this 4% is probably not the best use of time and resources, need to go after larger items and when those are solved, get down to the small items that are the 4%..of course, that is unless the 4% is one fo the biggest items, but I doubt that is the case.
Let me know how you accomplish this...I have been trying to convince my wife to let "my 6 year old" have a set of Mindstorm or something and she still isn't buying it. She says we need to focus on things like reading...come on already, reading isn't useful or anything, robotics is the wave of the future. Who needs reading when he can do robotics!
You need to talk to my wife, she will blow you away at getting deals on ebay over time. She bids early, depending on the item and it's level of interest. She also figures out how how she is willing to go before making the first bid and then if it gets to that point or past, she walks away. She has patience with the bidding. She looses a ton of auctions because they go over her price limit, but watching when auctions end and if anyone is bidding, she has placed and early bid or two, gotten above whoever else she was early bidding with and then no other bids came through because it ended at an odd time, or competitors were to busy to check, had internent go down, etc... who knows. She has managed to get thing at 25-30% of what they normally sell for with the early bid that for some reason no one bids on except her, or everyone else gave up. Granted, most auctions come down to the last minute sniping, but if you are patient and wait, the item will come up again and again and again and eventually you will get it for a fraction of the price that it sold for yesterday or will sell for tomorrow. This takes a ton of patience and time to do, but my wife loves doing it this way and she has gotten a ton of good deals. So, there is some value to early bids, but most come down to the last minute snipping. If you just like getting the item for a ton less, you can get stuff for cheap, but it takes more time than most will spend looking form something.
Yes, very true, fully agree. I recently broke the MMORPG addiction, for the 3rd time, and haven't bought many new games since. I am enjoying talking with people and going out of doors (although the sun did hurt for the first few weeks of trying to go out in it).
You could have done all kinds of things ahead of time just as easily as after putting in the two weeks. Let us not all forget that any such acts, before or after are criminal and if caught, there can be repecussion, i.e. civil lawsuits for damamged! If you do malicious things and they can find evidence of it, you are liable!
/....I meant... take the pay, go home buy a new computer and have fun playing games and streaming porn for 2 weeks! GF for a /. user...what was I thinking!! ;)
My HR director worked at a facility where they fired the facility manager. He was a bit of a quack, which is part of the reason he was being fired, but a nice enough guy. They allowed him to go around the facility with HR escort to say goodbye to a few people after they fired him. As he walked by the production machine, he walked over to a control console and hit the main e-stop button and then whith his escort left the building never to return. It didn't take but a couple of days for the corporate lawyers to have the suit drawn up and file for damamges.
The company cutting off access is just covering themselves against possible wacko's. Don't let it bug you, take the pay, have a party, take your gf out to a fancy dinner and have a good time....hold on a sec, posting to
I had a buddy that I played DAOC with and he named his character BigWorm. He was fine for months with that name, unitl he hatched his master plan. In DAOC, after level 10 you can choose a surname to add to your name. His name became BigWorm InDaPants! He didn't last long and had to change his name!
That friend had a good friend who's character's name was Baconstriplicker!! No joke and he never had any problems! It is so hit or miss.
On a more personal note, I have names that violate policies and I would be crushed if they were revoked. Fortunately, very few people recognize them. I have other characters I play too and when I am playing them, I am constantly reintroducing myself by my main characters name so they realize who I am.
Last thing before I post, when DAOC started, the first guild I joined there was Fellowship of the Ring. Yes, blatantly in violoation as that is copyrighted, but we lasted a while. When the GM told us he would have to change it, luckily we got a nice one who told us to take a few days and figure out what we wanted the new name to be and that he would change it. We became the Tourtued Souls and the guild rallied around the fact that we had to change and were being violated, but it still was not the same feel to the guild. I joined the guild initally because of the name!! The one thing we always asked afterwards is why our name was changed and there are 18 thousand mis-spelling of Legolas and none of them are forced to change thier names! Oh well, what are you going to do when playing at thier house with thier toys!
Not as much a reply to this post as it was pretty funny, but to the rest of the posts that follow arguing about using .NET or other platforms for nuclear reactor controls.
Controls technology and IT technology are intertwined at the operator interface level/data mining for storage purposes and that is about the extenet of it. I am a Control Engineer and I have "controls servers" running Windows Server 2003 and my operator interfaces are dependant on this server. The Operator interfaces are on Industrial Computers running windows, I forget which version, but windows, XP I think. The operators are minorly screwed if the servers go down as they can't access the controls system and make changes. The actual controls systems continue to run, the operators just can't make changes, i.e. change set points, put things in manual/automatic etc. I don't work in Nuclear Power and if our stuff crashed it costs some money in downtime but won't kill people/blow things up and we don't rely on windows based stuff. We loose interfaces/windows server and we loose some historical data tracking, but that is it and the interfaces can be worked around in a matter of minutes. .NET and microsoft and windows are not ever put in a critical controls applications for something you use for controls, the actual controls are run by Distributed Cotnrols Systems (DCS) Programmable Logix Controllers (PLC) and other equipment that is 100% reliable, is designed to runs for years without interruption/downtime and does. I would bet this company was doing data mining/display interfaces/historical graphs/data analysis tools, not actual controls stuff. the stuff alot of the following posts talk about trying to run controls stuff on a box running this or that doens't happen. Controls Technology is extremely robust and doens't fail often, rarely as a matter of fact and to even get approval for Nuc Power and others, they have all kinds of proprietary hardened system that are designed to run for years and years, i.e. not Windows OS or the like.
Just as a point of interest (and off topic to main post, but relavent to the previous post), in case you wanted to know, if you didn't know already. The difference between black and white clouds is black clouds are alsmot always by products of burning something, i.e. coal, and are pollutants. White clouds are just that, clouds. They are nothing more than water vapor the condenses and shoots out thier exhausts. I work at a plant that gives out alot of "white clouds" (condensing water vapor) and every so often I have people say you polute things so bad, look at all that terrible smoke you let out! I tell them it is not smoke, it is water!
Bound to be very unpopular stating on slashdot, and late enough bound not to be read, but here goes anyway. As this posted put it, "the airlines have a security interest in knowing the identity of their customers", and if they want to mandate ids to fly, they can do that. I agree that if the government put this into affect, they need to put the law/reasoning available to see. If the airlines decide at some point to require id, there is nothing we can do about it. The airline is privately owned and when you step foot on a privately owned property, you all but give up all your rights except the right to life according to the owner of the properties dictates. Airlines can say, we will not allow you to fly without id, and they can do that and whil it may infringe on some privacy issues, they own the airline, they do not have to allow anyone not willing to follow their rules on their property. An airline could impose a ban on talking and if you fly our airline you agree to give up your right to communicate period. NO one would fly, but as they own the airline, they can set the terms of the contract and you would have to abide, or not fly them. Now, that being said, the government and the airlines stating this are two different things and like I said, the governemtn should put the laws and information out there available, they are held to a higher standard. Finally, even if this case wins and the government doens't require ids anymore, the airlines are already cehckign them and will undoubtedly not want to retrain thier people or stop verifying ids, so they would then leave it in as a policy and we would have no choice but to abide by their rules or not fly their arilines. So, fight the good fight, but in the end we will still need valid ids to fly, if not government imposed, privately owned airline imposed.
Variable speed is unecessary. Not sure if you were saying that is the way and how it works when you replied, but you don't need to vary the speed at all. The speed of the pump is set to have the ability to deliver the maximum required flow and pressure (pump sizing exercise) and then the amount of flow is varied by the muslces that contract on the artieries. In other words, the body continues ot regulate the flow/need of the blood and the pump just supplies it. THat is the way a centrifigual pump works, the impeller goes the same speed all the time and has the potential to deliver the maximum flow, but does not deliver the maximum flow until the discharge valve (in this case the muscles the constrict the arteries) are open 100%. Simply put in the pump so that the blood flow capacity is there and then the bodies natural mechanisms that already directy the flow of blood would do the rest. Variable speed is near impossible (probably completely impossible) due to the control/decisions of speed/input needs etc that we don't know how to read from the human body.
I coudl be wrong on this, not being a biologist or a doctor, but I do remember studies on this from a few years back in some bio classes. The viens have the back prevention valves, but the arteries do not. The pressure is highest closest to the heart, and drops the further you get (basic fluid flow) The arteries don't have the back flow prevention valves because the pressure is high enough even between beats that the blood keeps moving forward. The viens, the pressure has dropped anough to get a slow down/slight back flow of the blood, espically in the legs pumping against gravity, between beats. Organs/tissue already have a steady flow going to them and and unsteady flow going away from them. Correct me if I am wrong.
This is something I know about, I am an engineer and work with centrifugal pumps (engineering classification of these impeller/turbine pumps. You can make them variable speed and use the speed of the impeller to control the flow of the medium being pumped. There are many advantages to this, but it is not the common flow control scheme. Most of the time, the speed of the impeller is held constant and a control valve on the discharge side of the pump is opened and closed. As the discharge vale is open, flow goes up, as the valve is closed, the flow goes down. I woudl venture to guess, that the muscles that apply pressure to arteries to direct the blood flow (an everyday normal activity in all human beigns) acts as the flow control and the pump just sits at normal speed. If you have a variable speed pump, they would have to tap into the nervous system to determine the blood needs of various organs/tissues and use that as speed control, not going to happen, or give you a rheostat on your side that you coudl turn up and down the spped of the impeller based on what you were doing (sarcasm). Summary, constant speed centrifigal pump with the flow control being down by the discharge valve (this case muscles on the arteries that are already there) and the pump impeller speed never changes.
I think most of the people below missed the point of making the reports not available to the public. The article and the DHS are saying these reports contains a failure analysis of why the network went down, not just when it was down. All the posts I read talked about why would terrorists care when the network is down. What the Terrorists would care about, and the DHS is trying to keep away from them is HOW the network went down. If you had a whole list of problem A casued Area A to loose communication, problem B caused area B etc, it would be simple to pick the area you wanted a communication black out, go cut the line or whatever to reproduce that outage and then make an attack while communications is down. Communications is the key to emergency response to any situation and if the terrorists can interrupt communications and then attack, they will be more effective. The DHS is worried these reports will give them the ability to do just that, create specific communications outages at will because the reports will point out network weak points. And for the record, before I get flamed on this, I am not saying I am for or against what the FCC or DHS say on this, just pointing out that we missed the point of the article. If you flame/downgrade me for something, make it for what I said, not assuming I am for or against the FCC or DHS on this one.
Armed sysadmins tracking down spammers, breaking down the doors? I can't imagine my sysadmin doing more than picking up his cup of coffee or typing on his keyboard or taking his calculator out of his pocket protector, let alone being able to break down a door! Sysadmin 1: Break down the door! Group of sysadmins start hitting door repeatedly to try and break it down. 30 minutes later, police arrive. Police Officer: You are all under arrest for disturbing the peace, we had a call from the person living here about the excessive noise! Another failed attempt for the sysadmin bounty hunters to arrest a spammer!! ;)
The second part of finding out if they have power you may want to use is the service they offer. Many parks run power to shelters for group gatherings etc., but the power is alot lower wattage than you might expect/need. We have a company picnic every year out at a park that we have catered and what food selection is limited due to the power. The caterers need thier equipment and can only run so much off what the park has run there before blowing fuses. If the park has power, make sure you check that or you may arrive, plug everything in, and blow a fuse.
Not to jump on the conspiracy bandwagon, but there is a huge difference. The long term view is to have a unique code on every item. UPC codes tell you, this is a box of corn flakes. If it has an RFID tag, it tells you this is Box of Cornflakes serial number 123DFE545DFD, which is unique from the box of cornflakes sittign next to it. Tie cornflakes box 123DFE545DFD to you because you used a credit card and as long as you have the box, they know who you are. That is what they are all freaky about and the differenc between UPC and RFID. I agree though, I can't wait until, "the day when I pull my shopping cart up to the register and it gives me my total."
I agree with the other person that responded to you. You will ever be lauded as my personal hero when I play this game on my PALM and laptop when at work. You may not be well liked by my employer, but I will always remember you!!