If one wishes to work on engineering projects and have any idea of what is going on, this is critical. Even better is taking a finite differencing and/or finite element numerical methods class. This is obviously only for a subset of programmers, but the lack of CS trained people able to convert partial differential equations into code means that engineers end up doing the programming instead...with predictable results.
Anecdotally, I didn't get a CS degree, I'm an engineer that happens to be able to cobble together code (poorly). I keep ending up coding on projects because it takes so much effort to get the programmers up to speed as to what is desired, what it means, how to optimize it, etc. In the end my code is awful and inefficient, but functional. It would be a vast improvement if we could get some CS educated guys who at least remembered their calculus.
I voted in Austin, Texas. My electronic vote-o-matic had a big selection wheel, a large select button, and a smaller, off to the side nuke-launcher red "Cast Vote" button. You never touch the screen. Had no problems, nothing weird. I can see how it might have put my grandmother off, but back in the day of limited literacy the same problems existed. Honestly it was easier and more enviromentally friendly than the last time I voted in the US (paper ballot) or I voted overseas (which probably never got read).
while normally I would rant against such generalizations, unfortunately I have found this one to be, in my experience, true.
I am a masters student at a state university in petroleum engineering. Due to current market forces (60+ bucks a barrel) most US students stop at an undergraduate degree and start working. As a result the current nationality distribution is skewed towards foreign students.
I quickly discovered that every major national network (iranian, turkish, south american, chinese, etc) had all of the previous years' assignments and exams. Woe to you if you did not belong to said networks (ie US and the poor Dutch exchange students), you were at a serious disadvantage...at least in the general classes. The moment you got into a specialized class it became basically impossible to cheat. Even if you had previous years' stuff, it doesn't help if you do not understand how to even read the stuff. Try faking it on well logging, enhance oil recovery, or a numerical methods class, and it very quickly becomes clear who are muppets and who are not. As a result ther is a real statification of students, capable ones, and those who are just squeezing by. You never see any of the latter in the interesting classes.
What happens in a tunnel? No signal, I would assume, yet one would hope the car continues to operate normally. If that is the case, just surround the receiver with lead and block the signal to the car. Problem solved.
It's not only the US, Denmark and Albania have similar taxation rules. Also, unless British school teachers are earning more than $80k a year you are exempt as long as you can prove bonafide residence and in any case you can offset you English tax liabilities against your US ones. All you have to do is fill out the paperwork once a year.
They did something amazing and my hat is off to them, however, it is silly to compare that to Alan Shepard. Technological difference besides Shepard went to 116 statute miles (according to Nasa) above the earth and Scaled Composites made just under 64 statute miles (according to Scaled's press release). Twice as high is quite a difference.
what were the Airforce RFP requirements? I know that the Shuttle got maimed in conflicting requirements from different administrations/organizations, but I don't recall airforce specs being involved.
I'm sorry, this is just silly. If we are going to blow trillions, why not just build a giant heat sink with high-heat-transfer nanotubuals space elevator style. That's gotta be cheaper. And did anyone consider the amount of greenhouse gasses produced with every rocket launch?
That's right Germany is so enviromentally friendly that people will gladly waste energy to make sure that they are doing things the green way. Where I live in Lower Saxony, we have to divide waste into 5+ bins. I had always wondered how it was economic to seperate plastic from metal (include products that have both plastic and metal components, thus rendering a magnet sorting method useless). Finally, when I had to go to the dump myself to apply for a pick up of branches, I discovered that some of the waste that I so laboriously seperated for recycling was being recombined with the restmul (general trash). The German system has some good things, but it is just as beset by special interest groups and legal oddities as the American one. Sure there are no toxic Texan with vested oil interests, but there are not very nice coal concerns that have managed to protect thier operation under a number of guises.
Gas supply is a major issue for continental Europe. Since relying on the burning huge quantities of coal as the major energy source is no longer ecologically palatable, natural gas (nowadays supplemented by wind power here in Germany) is being used as a cleaner/cheaper (depending)/more convenient option. That natural gas has to come from somewhere. Germany and France are not even close to self sufficient in gas production so you need to pipe it in from somewhere. The North Sea produces enough gas to satiate England, but not to supply the continent. So the gas comes from the East. Russia. Extra gas pipelines in Russia means more to export, Central Europe is a helpless customer. More exports, more hard currency. More hard currency, more spent on arms race. More exports also mean more leverage over client countries.
And yes, controlling a pipeline does equate to being able to switch off the lights in some cases. Read into the pipeline politics of Eastern Europe and Central Asia is you are curious.
Even now Germany is drilling gas storage wells. Why would they need to spend money to refill old, depleted gas wells when you can get the stuff right out of the pipe? Officially to help mitigate price swings, which is the nice way of saying that some sort of instability in the east (Poland, Ukraine, Byelorussia, or Russia) causes the flow of gas to stop.
As an American living in Germany (Vechta to be exact), I would say the exact opposite, regarding pressure to conform. Of course, now I live in a small German town, opposed to the large city in the U.S. where I grew up. One might put this down to not having a sufficiently large sample. That being said it would be very interesting to compare relatively homogeneous western socities (say maybe Norway or Iceland) with more heterogeneous ones (U.K. and/or U.S.) and see the results.
I work in the oilfield operating a 2 tons monstrosity called an MWD. These things are used to transmit data from up to a 10 km deep hole and on the basis of this data the decision of which way to drill a well are made (oil wells are usually not vertical affairs these days). Multi-million dollar decisions are regularly made on a data from a transfer rate of less than 10 bps, 6 bps is excellent and transmission rates are often in the range of 0.5-3 bits per second. You would be surprised at how much system information can be crammed into that bandwidth if the programmers are clever. Incidentally, my tools use a modulation/demodulation scheme similar to that used on the Voyager probes, we just have to transmit through viscous mud with pressure instead of light across the solar system.
I am curious how powerful the centrifuge is in this thing. My mom worked in a med-lab and they had centrifuge repair guys on call in case one started to make funny noises. Unstable high RPM systems of blood and glass can get a little nasty.
I donno, I live in Germany, the autobahns are packed, especially in the summer. The Germans I know happily take their cars where ever they can, especially to work as the fuel is sometimes tax deductible. And while the rail system is ok, my company flies people everywhere, even for short jumps like Den Haag to Bremen or Hannover. Trains between different countries are still a pain when you are not connecting between major cities. Plus the call out nature of my job means a 6 hour trip by plane (including car rides/airport waiting, etc.) is far preferable to a 12 hour train ride between Hamburg and Vienna. Also, have you watch trains in the US outside of the North East? They are not passenger trains, they are kilometer+ long freight trains. That is something I do not see nearly as often here. Instead the roads are filled with trucks carrying the same goods.
just don't leave the window open
on
Google's new toys
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I played with the google viewer a bit, I thought it was pretty cool. Except that when I did not close the window and got back to work, I noticed that it was sucking up bandwidth downloading the next pages to display. All right on my office machine, but at home through a digital straw, it would not be much fun.
Reasons for surcharges
on
Add-Ons Add Up
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
While I am as tired of being nickled and dimed to death as the next person, this simply is not going to go away. The basic charge for a service does not necessarily reflect what the final charge to the customer will be. It almost never will, there are too many extras, options, and case by case variations (especially in the service industry). Sales tax is tacked on to every purchase in the US. You always have to remember that 8.25% (in Houston) will be added for state and city tax. But here in Germany the "rough" equivalent, VAT, is added before the price sticker is placed on. While that is more convenient to the customer, unless you have been paying attention, you never know how much is tax. The problem is not the extra charges, the problem is transparency and when "options" are mandatory.
As much as I enjoy watch us launch anything into space, it seems to me that rocket design is nearing the point of diminishing returns. The Atlas 5 is undoubtably better than the previous versions, but does it really add something new to our launch capability? Maybe if that R&D money had been dumped into something a little more unconventional we might have a fesible rail-gun launcher or some progress towards a space elevator. Maybe it's just me wanting to see life a little more like B5 and less like reality...
Slashdot Mirror
In a post-Hitler world, many places do not allow an idiot with a radical idea to speak freely. Specifically if that idea involves Hitler.
Differential Equations.
If one wishes to work on engineering projects and have any idea of what is going on, this is critical. Even better is taking a finite differencing and/or finite element numerical methods class. This is obviously only for a subset of programmers, but the lack of CS trained people able to convert partial differential equations into code means that engineers end up doing the programming instead...with predictable results.
Anecdotally, I didn't get a CS degree, I'm an engineer that happens to be able to cobble together code (poorly). I keep ending up coding on projects because it takes so much effort to get the programmers up to speed as to what is desired, what it means, how to optimize it, etc. In the end my code is awful and inefficient, but functional. It would be a vast improvement if we could get some CS educated guys who at least remembered their calculus.
I voted in Austin, Texas. My electronic vote-o-matic had a big selection wheel, a large select button, and a smaller, off to the side nuke-launcher red "Cast Vote" button. You never touch the screen. Had no problems, nothing weird. I can see how it might have put my grandmother off, but back in the day of limited literacy the same problems existed. Honestly it was easier and more enviromentally friendly than the last time I voted in the US (paper ballot) or I voted overseas (which probably never got read).
while normally I would rant against such generalizations, unfortunately I have found this one to be, in my experience, true.
I am a masters student at a state university in petroleum engineering. Due to current market forces (60+ bucks a barrel) most US students stop at an undergraduate degree and start working. As a result the current nationality distribution is skewed towards foreign students.
I quickly discovered that every major national network (iranian, turkish, south american, chinese, etc) had all of the previous years' assignments and exams. Woe to you if you did not belong to said networks (ie US and the poor Dutch exchange students), you were at a serious disadvantage...at least in the general classes. The moment you got into a specialized class it became basically impossible to cheat. Even if you had previous years' stuff, it doesn't help if you do not understand how to even read the stuff. Try faking it on well logging, enhance oil recovery, or a numerical methods class, and it very quickly becomes clear who are muppets and who are not. As a result ther is a real statification of students, capable ones, and those who are just squeezing by. You never see any of the latter in the interesting classes.
Let the flaming begin...
What happens in a tunnel? No signal, I would assume, yet one would hope the car continues to operate normally. If that is the case, just surround the receiver with lead and block the signal to the car. Problem solved.
It's not only the US, Denmark and Albania have similar taxation rules.
Also, unless British school teachers are earning more than $80k a year you are exempt as long as you can prove bonafide residence and in any case you can offset you English tax liabilities against your US ones. All you have to do is fill out the paperwork once a year.
Please don't go...the drones need you...the look up to you...
a quiting screen on AC
nearly brought me to tears.
They did something amazing and my hat is off to them, however, it is silly to compare that to Alan Shepard. Technological difference besides Shepard went to 116 statute miles (according to Nasa) above the earth and Scaled Composites made just under 64 statute miles (according to Scaled's press release). Twice as high is quite a difference.
Uhh, do you mean Cisco or Nokia by the "behemoth"?
what were the Airforce RFP requirements? I know that the Shuttle got maimed in conflicting requirements from different administrations/organizations, but I don't recall airforce specs being involved.
IIRC the was only one Buran completed. It is in an amusement park in Moscow now, and not flight worthy.
I'm sorry, this is just silly. If we are going to blow trillions, why not just build a giant heat sink with high-heat-transfer nanotubuals space elevator style. That's gotta be cheaper. And did anyone consider the amount of greenhouse gasses produced with every rocket launch?
Dumbest FA ever.
This is not just the US...remember the heat wave in France last year...when all the elderly died while their decentents froliced on the beaches?
That's right Germany is so enviromentally friendly that people will gladly waste energy to make sure that they are doing things the green way. Where I live in Lower Saxony, we have to divide waste into 5+ bins. I had always wondered how it was economic to seperate plastic from metal (include products that have both plastic and metal components, thus rendering a magnet sorting method useless). Finally, when I had to go to the dump myself to apply for a pick up of branches, I discovered that some of the waste that I so laboriously seperated for recycling was being recombined with the restmul (general trash). The German system has some good things, but it is just as beset by special interest groups and legal oddities as the American one. Sure there are no toxic Texan with vested oil interests, but there are not very nice coal concerns that have managed to protect thier operation under a number of guises.
Gas supply is a major issue for continental Europe. Since relying on the burning huge quantities of coal as the major energy source is no longer ecologically palatable, natural gas (nowadays supplemented by wind power here in Germany) is being used as a cleaner/cheaper (depending)/more convenient option. That natural gas has to come from somewhere. Germany and France are not even close to self sufficient in gas production so you need to pipe it in from somewhere. The North Sea produces enough gas to satiate England, but not to supply the continent. So the gas comes from the East. Russia. Extra gas pipelines in Russia means more to export, Central Europe is a helpless customer. More exports, more hard currency. More hard currency, more spent on arms race. More exports also mean more leverage over client countries.
And yes, controlling a pipeline does equate to being able to switch off the lights in some cases. Read into the pipeline politics of Eastern Europe and Central Asia is you are curious.
Even now Germany is drilling gas storage wells. Why would they need to spend money to refill old, depleted gas wells when you can get the stuff right out of the pipe? Officially to help mitigate price swings, which is the nice way of saying that some sort of instability in the east (Poland, Ukraine, Byelorussia, or Russia) causes the flow of gas to stop.
As an American living in Germany (Vechta to be exact), I would say the exact opposite, regarding pressure to conform. Of course, now I live in a small German town, opposed to the large city in the U.S. where I grew up. One might put this down to not having a sufficiently large sample. That being said it would be very interesting to compare relatively homogeneous western socities (say maybe Norway or Iceland) with more heterogeneous ones (U.K. and/or U.S.) and see the results.
I work in the oilfield operating a 2 tons monstrosity called an MWD. These things are used to transmit data from up to a 10 km deep hole and on the basis of this data the decision of which way to drill a well are made (oil wells are usually not vertical affairs these days). Multi-million dollar decisions are regularly made on a data from a transfer rate of less than 10 bps, 6 bps is excellent and transmission rates are often in the range of 0.5-3 bits per second. You would be surprised at how much system information can be crammed into that bandwidth if the programmers are clever. Incidentally, my tools use a modulation/demodulation scheme similar to that used on the Voyager probes, we just have to transmit through viscous mud with pressure instead of light across the solar system.
I like the bit about how it tournaments and matches are shown on cable...come home, grab a beer, turn on the TV and watch an hour of Counter-Strike?
I am curious how powerful the centrifuge is in this thing. My mom worked in a med-lab and they had centrifuge repair guys on call in case one started to make funny noises. Unstable high RPM systems of blood and glass can get a little nasty.
I donno, I live in Germany, the autobahns are packed, especially in the summer. The Germans I know happily take their cars where ever they can, especially to work as the fuel is sometimes tax deductible. And while the rail system is ok, my company flies people everywhere, even for short jumps like Den Haag to Bremen or Hannover. Trains between different countries are still a pain when you are not connecting between major cities. Plus the call out nature of my job means a 6 hour trip by plane (including car rides/airport waiting, etc.) is far preferable to a 12 hour train ride between Hamburg and Vienna. Also, have you watch trains in the US outside of the North East? They are not passenger trains, they are kilometer+ long freight trains. That is something I do not see nearly as often here. Instead the roads are filled with trucks carrying the same goods.
I played with the google viewer a bit, I thought it was pretty cool. Except that when I did not close the window and got back to work, I noticed that it was sucking up bandwidth downloading the next pages to display. All right on my office machine, but at home through a digital straw, it would not be much fun.
While I am as tired of being nickled and dimed to death as the next person, this simply is not going to go away. The basic charge for a service does not necessarily reflect what the final charge to the customer will be. It almost never will, there are too many extras, options, and case by case variations (especially in the service industry). Sales tax is tacked on to every purchase in the US. You always have to remember that 8.25% (in Houston) will be added for state and city tax. But here in Germany the "rough" equivalent, VAT, is added before the price sticker is placed on. While that is more convenient to the customer, unless you have been paying attention, you never know how much is tax. The problem is not the extra charges, the problem is transparency and when "options" are mandatory.
As much as I enjoy watch us launch anything into space, it seems to me that rocket design is nearing the point of diminishing returns. The Atlas 5 is undoubtably better than the previous versions, but does it really add something new to our launch capability? Maybe if that R&D money had been dumped into something a little more unconventional we might have a fesible rail-gun launcher or some progress towards a space elevator. Maybe it's just me wanting to see life a little more like B5 and less like reality...
could this be the first post?