You consider it unethical to do any computing work for the financial, medical, or pharmaceutical industries? But yet you want a job with a high salary? I think your ethical determinations need some reconsideration.
Your services to this company are worth whatever value your negotiate with them. There is no way to assign an objective value based on evidence of salaries in the industry. What other employment opportunities do you have? What other options does the company have besides placing you in that position? Once you've taken stock of the answers to those questions, you'll have a better idea of what leverage you have here. The HR department is not a neutral decision maker that will rationally weigh whatever convincing evidence you present to them about market salaries and maybe decide in your favor. They are your negotiation adversary. Don't plead for them to pay you more and harp on other peoples' salaries for different jobs elsewhere - that's not relevant. Negotiate. Sometimes this doesn't even involve stating a basis for your demand. If they NEED you in that position and can't achieve the same business goals otherwise for anywhere near the same price, then all you need to say is, "Those are fine arguments, but you'll need to pay me 50% more to take the job." But if they can use a different management structure and avoid the position, or hire a new grad who doesn't do as well but costs half as much, then you'd better take their offer or find work elsewhere.
Where do you live that only rich people have fences or hedges? More importantly where all have you traveled that you've never seen towns where everyone has those things? I've lived all over the USA, and I'd in say about 1/3 to 1/2 of the places I've lived it's been common for most people to have fences or hedges for privacy. In Phoenix almost every house has a 6' block wall fence, including in very poor neighborhoods.
I would never agree to a contract with a judge.me arbitration clause if there were any real money at stake. There is a very serious difference between their arbitration process and almost all others: they attempt to completely replace all statutory and case law with "principles of fairness". There are two problems with this: First, statutes and case law exist because they are helpful in resolving cases. Without them to control the outcome, there is no way to accurately analyze the dispute in advance (or even the original contract itself) to determine the probable outcome. You have no way of knowing what whim the arbitrator will use to guide the decision, and no right to complain even if it's unpredictable or contrary to the real law. Make no mistake, the ambiguity is huge - thus so is the risk. This vast unpredictability defeats the entire purpose of having a dispute resolution process.
The second problem is even bigger: Not all law is waivable. Many procedural protections, consumer protection laws, and some case law cannot be waived by contract. Although the judge.me arbitration clause purports to waive all law in favor of their own ideas of equity, this is not legally possible. This creates a total mess. If the arbitrator fails to correctly consider and apply non-waivable law, the losing party could sue in real court to overturn the arbitration award.
Very interesting. I'm surprised the Texas bar allows attorneys to use a different name professionally from the name they're licensed under. I don't believe that would fly here in Arizona. I suppose we'll see how long she keeps her license, with behavior like this. It's disgraceful to the profession.
Martindale has two entries for her, both showing that she was admitted in Texas in 1998 but providing no further useful information. Upon closer examination, her Linkedin profile says she is still an attorney at her own solo practice. However, the Texas Bar website shows only two attorneys with the last name "Schwager" and she is neither of them. This database appears to include former members as well, though, so I'm not sure why she isn't showing up at all.
Although her Linkedin profile states that she has worked as an attorney in the past, the Texas bar website does not show her as a current member. She claims to have made a voluntary career change and left the practice of law to become an attorney marketing guru. That's somewhat plausible, except that NO attorney who has been admitted to the bar would allow their admission to lapse voluntarily except in VERY unusual circumstances. Even those who leave the practice of law almost always maintain their bar memberships. I would bet she was disbarred or suspended for an extended time.
FTFA: "We harness the local knowledge of our 60 million satnav customers, who can make corrections through TomTom Map Share." So... open mapping projects are worse than their closed mapping product because their closed mapping product is collaboratively edited by the users... Nice argument.
Um, wrong. Where did you get the idea that the US views malware-based foreign espionage as an act of war?
So if important US systems were infested with Iranian-government malware, Congress wouldn't be demanding that Obama bomb Iran this afternoon?
Important US government systems ARE being continuously attacked by Chinese-government actors, and Congress is NOT demanding that Obama bomb China. I don't think the result would be any different if it were Iran doing it (and they're probably trying). "Cyber-warfare" is not real war, and in practice it does not provoke a military response these days. It's happening all the time.
Should the details of the latest stealth aircraft technology be publicly disclosed so voters can make informed decisions? The latest in radar-absorbing paint, if it exists in a usable form? Nuclear weapon design details (the important details, not the general info that's already public)? Every detail of the President's personal security? Come on. Some things are relevant enough to the political process that voters must be informed. Other things are not, and secrecy is critically important for some of them.
Here we declare that any such actions against us are an act of war, right? If it's an act of war against us, isn't it an act of war against them? Are we behind this? If so, WTF?
Um, wrong. Where did you get the idea that the US views malware-based foreign espionage as an act of war? If we did, we'd be bombing China. If we're not behind this I'll be disappointed.
In my opinion, Us, European, and Russian security firms should ALL be looking the other way and keeping their mouths shut. Once it's reasonably clear that a piece of malware is an espionage tool directed at our mutual targets of intelligence interest, and that it doesn't pose a general threat to our own information security, they should keep it to themselves. There's nothing patriotic, altruistic, laudable, or beneficial about screwing up legitimate national intelligence projects. This ain't a scandal, corruption, or anything of the sort.
If the researchers quickly surmised that this is a spy tool deployed by our allies against targets of intelligence interest, it seems like a bad idea to publicly disclose it. This isn't a "Wikileaks" type scenario where they're exposing government corruption for the good of the public. They're just compromising the usefulness of an (apparently sophisticated and expensive) spying tool. Chant all you want about the futility of security through obscurity; it is the entire basis of much espionage, and historically the cooperation of the public in hiding information about intelligence programs has been critical to their effectiveness. That has been true not only in the US but also in Russia where Kaspersky is based. Of course we used to be concealing our intelligence activities from each other, but now our interests are aligned, at least with respect to Iran.
Why in the world would he capitulate to her insane demands? She violated his copyright, and has not successfully intimidated him into leaving her alone AND taking down his blog post about the incident? Nail her to the courtroom wall.
Almost every TV broadcast transmitter and most FM radio broadcast transmitters still use vacuum tubes for the high power output stages. Every microwave oven uses a vacuum tube to produce the microwaves. Most radar transmitters use vacuum tubes for the output stages, and often for signal generation too. The fact is that semiconductors have simply not been able to catch up to vacuum tubes for high power applications at UHF frequencies and above. 1960's technology still reigns supreme.
It's called corn. Yeah, I know there are some places that call it maize. But not where Slashdot is based, and not where the vast majority of English speakers live. It's corn. Thanks.
Build a watch. From parts. I am currently wearing my general-purpose utility watch, a waterproof automatic I made with an ETA 2824-2 movement and a one-of-a-kind nickel and brass dial I made that evokes a mid-century modern aesthetic. I've built several others, but they're more decorative than utilitarian. This is a watch I can wear no matter what I'm doing without worrying about it. Mechanical watches are AMAZING instances of applied science, and even though the technology hasn't changed substantially in decades, they still represent the pinnacle of micro-mechanical manufacturing. Understanding and working on watches is a decidedly geeky pursuit, but it isn't that big an undertaking to obtain the necessary knowledge to assemble and maintain one if you're already a well qualified geek. And chances are that you'll start to appreciate the aesthetic design aspects more once you get into it. Let me tell you, ladies do love interesting, classy watches - and telling them you made it yourself and there's only one in the world is catnip.
So, Iran with its 70+ million population, is sanctioned for building reactor, while in USA individual private companies. Makes sense in global media idiocracy we live in!
Right. Because a tiny research reactor in a federally licensed facility in the US with tight control over its small load of enriched uranium, and which does not breed more weapons-grade material, is EXACTLY THE SAME as a program of large reactors in an unstable nation that's actively trying to develop nuclear weapons. Yeah, that sounds like a problem with the media to me.
If the doctor doesn't need to do an x-ray, then performing one is negligent.
It's nowhere near that simple. Like most medical procedures, imaging has costs (in a medical sense) and benefits. The medical "cost" of performing a few radiographs of a potentially broken limb are very low, but the diagnostic benefit is very high. The medical "cost" of doing a thoracic CT is significant enough that every radiologist thinks it over in some detail before ordering one - the radiation dose is several orders of magnitude higher than a single peripheral radiograph. However, the diagnostic benefit in many circumstances is so thoroughly outweighed by the tiny risk of cancer that the CT is often worthwhile. There are many borderline circumstances though, where it's simply a judgment call as to whether the radiation dose is worthwhile to obtain the image. What about a person who loses consciousness and falls, doesn't remember whether he hit is head, but shows no signs of brain injury? Is a head CT worthwhile? Most ER docs say yes, but some would wait and see if any neurological symptoms appear. The increased cancer risk from radio-imaging in children has to be balanced against the increased sensitivity of children to injury, the difficulty of using other (more subjective) non-imaging diagnostic approaches with children, and the increased impact on quality of life of a missed diagnosis in a child. Bottom line: There is no clear answer as to whether radiological imaging is worth the risk in some cases. I tend to believe that radiation exposure is less harmful than most people make it out to be, and that the established limits for exposure are already extremely cautious, and there's little reason to avoid most imaging procedures. At the same time, I am reluctant to get repeated abdominal CT's for my kidney stones because I know that if the procedure is repeated every time I have a problem my cumulative exposure will eventually be very substantial.
Mod this AC up! These problems have already been solved - decades ago. Sometimes it's better to look for solutions to your problem in another industry than to engineer it yourself. In fact, it's almost always better.
That would be a MASER (microwave, not light), and they predate lasers. However, a maser holds no advantage over a regular microwave transmitter for terrestrial communications. The distance of point to point microwave links with standard radio technology is limited by the curvature of the earth, not power or beam divergence. Even with tall towers, it's very hard to obtain a line of sight path between two points on earth more than about 50 miles apart.
A 50-milliwatt green laser would be a class-IIIb device, right?
Yeah, and it's well into the IIIb territory (which covers such a broad power range it's hardly a helpful classification). 50mW is sufficient to cause instant permanent retinal burns, or permanent blindness due to retinal bleeding. Even an extremely brief exposure to one eye could cause permanent damage, and will certainly cause temporary blindness and disorientation. I have never gotten a beam quite that powerful in my eye, but I have gotten a brief (few millisecond) flash from a 25mW DPSS laser and it was extremely unpleasant and took hours to recover. I love lasers and "play" with some very powerful ones. In fact, I may have indirectly supplied Wicked Lasers with thousands of multi-watt blue laser diodes a couple years ago. But I would NOT want to be diving in that crystal-clear water with a bitey shark indiscriminately waving a 50mW beam all over the place!
Nobody's reading this anymore, possibly including you, but I'll write it anyway. The beer begins foaming as soon as it is exposed to a pressure any less than the vapor pressure of CO2 dissolved into it, combined with sufficient (minimal) agitation or surface roughness in the plumbing to cause nucleation. Thus, it starts foaming as soon as it passes through any sort of restriction in the plumbing. Good beer plumbing minimizes foaming by reducing turbulence and minimizing pressure differentials, but it can't be completely eliminated. A volumetric flow sensor itself creates a significant pressure differential and massive shear. So if it wasn't foaming much before the sensor, it sure will be on the way out.
...not just app coding. Trying to dispense a measured solid volume of beer in the form of an expanding compressible foam is challenging, but that's how a tap works. That's why making a perfect pour is a skill for a bartender to learn. The most obvious failure here is trying to measure the beer quantity with a volumetric flow sensor. That's absolutely useless - and anyone who's ever worked on beer dispensing equipment would know that if they had a hint of engineering sense! A mass flow sensor would be good, but extremely expensive. A volumetric sensor located ahead of a restrictor plate could work, if the dispensing pressure were elevated above the carbonation pressure briefly. A better solution would probably be to use ultrasonic or laser distance measurement to make it FILL THE GLASS. That's what you really want - a full glass of beer. It should pour in stages to allow the head to settle, like a bartender. Then the beer plumbing can be optimized to reduce agitation (as in any good tap setup) and an automated pour shouldn't be too difficult. Need one sensor (or array thereof) to measure the height of the glass, and another to measure the beer level.
Slashdot Mirror
You consider it unethical to do any computing work for the financial, medical, or pharmaceutical industries? But yet you want a job with a high salary? I think your ethical determinations need some reconsideration.
Your services to this company are worth whatever value your negotiate with them. There is no way to assign an objective value based on evidence of salaries in the industry. What other employment opportunities do you have? What other options does the company have besides placing you in that position? Once you've taken stock of the answers to those questions, you'll have a better idea of what leverage you have here. The HR department is not a neutral decision maker that will rationally weigh whatever convincing evidence you present to them about market salaries and maybe decide in your favor. They are your negotiation adversary. Don't plead for them to pay you more and harp on other peoples' salaries for different jobs elsewhere - that's not relevant. Negotiate. Sometimes this doesn't even involve stating a basis for your demand. If they NEED you in that position and can't achieve the same business goals otherwise for anywhere near the same price, then all you need to say is, "Those are fine arguments, but you'll need to pay me 50% more to take the job." But if they can use a different management structure and avoid the position, or hire a new grad who doesn't do as well but costs half as much, then you'd better take their offer or find work elsewhere.
Where do you live that only rich people have fences or hedges? More importantly where all have you traveled that you've never seen towns where everyone has those things? I've lived all over the USA, and I'd in say about 1/3 to 1/2 of the places I've lived it's been common for most people to have fences or hedges for privacy. In Phoenix almost every house has a 6' block wall fence, including in very poor neighborhoods.
I would never agree to a contract with a judge.me arbitration clause if there were any real money at stake. There is a very serious difference between their arbitration process and almost all others: they attempt to completely replace all statutory and case law with "principles of fairness". There are two problems with this: First, statutes and case law exist because they are helpful in resolving cases. Without them to control the outcome, there is no way to accurately analyze the dispute in advance (or even the original contract itself) to determine the probable outcome. You have no way of knowing what whim the arbitrator will use to guide the decision, and no right to complain even if it's unpredictable or contrary to the real law. Make no mistake, the ambiguity is huge - thus so is the risk. This vast unpredictability defeats the entire purpose of having a dispute resolution process.
The second problem is even bigger: Not all law is waivable. Many procedural protections, consumer protection laws, and some case law cannot be waived by contract. Although the judge.me arbitration clause purports to waive all law in favor of their own ideas of equity, this is not legally possible. This creates a total mess. If the arbitrator fails to correctly consider and apply non-waivable law, the losing party could sue in real court to overturn the arbitration award.
Very interesting. I'm surprised the Texas bar allows attorneys to use a different name professionally from the name they're licensed under. I don't believe that would fly here in Arizona. I suppose we'll see how long she keeps her license, with behavior like this. It's disgraceful to the profession.
Martindale has two entries for her, both showing that she was admitted in Texas in 1998 but providing no further useful information. Upon closer examination, her Linkedin profile says she is still an attorney at her own solo practice. However, the Texas Bar website shows only two attorneys with the last name "Schwager" and she is neither of them. This database appears to include former members as well, though, so I'm not sure why she isn't showing up at all.
Although her Linkedin profile states that she has worked as an attorney in the past, the Texas bar website does not show her as a current member. She claims to have made a voluntary career change and left the practice of law to become an attorney marketing guru. That's somewhat plausible, except that NO attorney who has been admitted to the bar would allow their admission to lapse voluntarily except in VERY unusual circumstances. Even those who leave the practice of law almost always maintain their bar memberships. I would bet she was disbarred or suspended for an extended time.
FTFA: "We harness the local knowledge of our 60 million satnav customers, who can make corrections through TomTom Map Share." So... open mapping projects are worse than their closed mapping product because their closed mapping product is collaboratively edited by the users... Nice argument.
Um, wrong. Where did you get the idea that the US views malware-based foreign espionage as an act of war?
So if important US systems were infested with Iranian-government malware, Congress wouldn't be demanding that Obama bomb Iran this afternoon?
Important US government systems ARE being continuously attacked by Chinese-government actors, and Congress is NOT demanding that Obama bomb China. I don't think the result would be any different if it were Iran doing it (and they're probably trying). "Cyber-warfare" is not real war, and in practice it does not provoke a military response these days. It's happening all the time.
Should the details of the latest stealth aircraft technology be publicly disclosed so voters can make informed decisions? The latest in radar-absorbing paint, if it exists in a usable form? Nuclear weapon design details (the important details, not the general info that's already public)? Every detail of the President's personal security? Come on. Some things are relevant enough to the political process that voters must be informed. Other things are not, and secrecy is critically important for some of them.
Here we declare that any such actions against us are an act of war, right? If it's an act of war against us, isn't it an act of war against them? Are we behind this? If so, WTF?
Um, wrong. Where did you get the idea that the US views malware-based foreign espionage as an act of war? If we did, we'd be bombing China. If we're not behind this I'll be disappointed.
In my opinion, Us, European, and Russian security firms should ALL be looking the other way and keeping their mouths shut. Once it's reasonably clear that a piece of malware is an espionage tool directed at our mutual targets of intelligence interest, and that it doesn't pose a general threat to our own information security, they should keep it to themselves. There's nothing patriotic, altruistic, laudable, or beneficial about screwing up legitimate national intelligence projects. This ain't a scandal, corruption, or anything of the sort.
If the researchers quickly surmised that this is a spy tool deployed by our allies against targets of intelligence interest, it seems like a bad idea to publicly disclose it. This isn't a "Wikileaks" type scenario where they're exposing government corruption for the good of the public. They're just compromising the usefulness of an (apparently sophisticated and expensive) spying tool. Chant all you want about the futility of security through obscurity; it is the entire basis of much espionage, and historically the cooperation of the public in hiding information about intelligence programs has been critical to their effectiveness. That has been true not only in the US but also in Russia where Kaspersky is based. Of course we used to be concealing our intelligence activities from each other, but now our interests are aligned, at least with respect to Iran.
Why in the world would he capitulate to her insane demands? She violated his copyright, and has not successfully intimidated him into leaving her alone AND taking down his blog post about the incident? Nail her to the courtroom wall.
Almost every TV broadcast transmitter and most FM radio broadcast transmitters still use vacuum tubes for the high power output stages. Every microwave oven uses a vacuum tube to produce the microwaves. Most radar transmitters use vacuum tubes for the output stages, and often for signal generation too. The fact is that semiconductors have simply not been able to catch up to vacuum tubes for high power applications at UHF frequencies and above. 1960's technology still reigns supreme.
It's called corn. Yeah, I know there are some places that call it maize. But not where Slashdot is based, and not where the vast majority of English speakers live. It's corn. Thanks.
Build a watch. From parts. I am currently wearing my general-purpose utility watch, a waterproof automatic I made with an ETA 2824-2 movement and a one-of-a-kind nickel and brass dial I made that evokes a mid-century modern aesthetic. I've built several others, but they're more decorative than utilitarian. This is a watch I can wear no matter what I'm doing without worrying about it. Mechanical watches are AMAZING instances of applied science, and even though the technology hasn't changed substantially in decades, they still represent the pinnacle of micro-mechanical manufacturing. Understanding and working on watches is a decidedly geeky pursuit, but it isn't that big an undertaking to obtain the necessary knowledge to assemble and maintain one if you're already a well qualified geek. And chances are that you'll start to appreciate the aesthetic design aspects more once you get into it. Let me tell you, ladies do love interesting, classy watches - and telling them you made it yourself and there's only one in the world is catnip.
So, Iran with its 70+ million population, is sanctioned for building reactor, while in USA individual private companies. Makes sense in global media idiocracy we live in!
Right. Because a tiny research reactor in a federally licensed facility in the US with tight control over its small load of enriched uranium, and which does not breed more weapons-grade material, is EXACTLY THE SAME as a program of large reactors in an unstable nation that's actively trying to develop nuclear weapons. Yeah, that sounds like a problem with the media to me.
If the doctor doesn't need to do an x-ray, then performing one is negligent.
It's nowhere near that simple. Like most medical procedures, imaging has costs (in a medical sense) and benefits. The medical "cost" of performing a few radiographs of a potentially broken limb are very low, but the diagnostic benefit is very high. The medical "cost" of doing a thoracic CT is significant enough that every radiologist thinks it over in some detail before ordering one - the radiation dose is several orders of magnitude higher than a single peripheral radiograph. However, the diagnostic benefit in many circumstances is so thoroughly outweighed by the tiny risk of cancer that the CT is often worthwhile. There are many borderline circumstances though, where it's simply a judgment call as to whether the radiation dose is worthwhile to obtain the image. What about a person who loses consciousness and falls, doesn't remember whether he hit is head, but shows no signs of brain injury? Is a head CT worthwhile? Most ER docs say yes, but some would wait and see if any neurological symptoms appear. The increased cancer risk from radio-imaging in children has to be balanced against the increased sensitivity of children to injury, the difficulty of using other (more subjective) non-imaging diagnostic approaches with children, and the increased impact on quality of life of a missed diagnosis in a child. Bottom line: There is no clear answer as to whether radiological imaging is worth the risk in some cases. I tend to believe that radiation exposure is less harmful than most people make it out to be, and that the established limits for exposure are already extremely cautious, and there's little reason to avoid most imaging procedures. At the same time, I am reluctant to get repeated abdominal CT's for my kidney stones because I know that if the procedure is repeated every time I have a problem my cumulative exposure will eventually be very substantial.
Mod this AC up! These problems have already been solved - decades ago. Sometimes it's better to look for solutions to your problem in another industry than to engineer it yourself. In fact, it's almost always better.
Are there any radio lasers around?
That would be a MASER (microwave, not light), and they predate lasers. However, a maser holds no advantage over a regular microwave transmitter for terrestrial communications. The distance of point to point microwave links with standard radio technology is limited by the curvature of the earth, not power or beam divergence. Even with tall towers, it's very hard to obtain a line of sight path between two points on earth more than about 50 miles apart.
A 50-milliwatt green laser would be a class-IIIb device, right?
Yeah, and it's well into the IIIb territory (which covers such a broad power range it's hardly a helpful classification). 50mW is sufficient to cause instant permanent retinal burns, or permanent blindness due to retinal bleeding. Even an extremely brief exposure to one eye could cause permanent damage, and will certainly cause temporary blindness and disorientation. I have never gotten a beam quite that powerful in my eye, but I have gotten a brief (few millisecond) flash from a 25mW DPSS laser and it was extremely unpleasant and took hours to recover. I love lasers and "play" with some very powerful ones. In fact, I may have indirectly supplied Wicked Lasers with thousands of multi-watt blue laser diodes a couple years ago. But I would NOT want to be diving in that crystal-clear water with a bitey shark indiscriminately waving a 50mW beam all over the place!
Nobody's reading this anymore, possibly including you, but I'll write it anyway. The beer begins foaming as soon as it is exposed to a pressure any less than the vapor pressure of CO2 dissolved into it, combined with sufficient (minimal) agitation or surface roughness in the plumbing to cause nucleation. Thus, it starts foaming as soon as it passes through any sort of restriction in the plumbing. Good beer plumbing minimizes foaming by reducing turbulence and minimizing pressure differentials, but it can't be completely eliminated. A volumetric flow sensor itself creates a significant pressure differential and massive shear. So if it wasn't foaming much before the sensor, it sure will be on the way out.
...not just app coding. Trying to dispense a measured solid volume of beer in the form of an expanding compressible foam is challenging, but that's how a tap works. That's why making a perfect pour is a skill for a bartender to learn. The most obvious failure here is trying to measure the beer quantity with a volumetric flow sensor. That's absolutely useless - and anyone who's ever worked on beer dispensing equipment would know that if they had a hint of engineering sense! A mass flow sensor would be good, but extremely expensive. A volumetric sensor located ahead of a restrictor plate could work, if the dispensing pressure were elevated above the carbonation pressure briefly. A better solution would probably be to use ultrasonic or laser distance measurement to make it FILL THE GLASS. That's what you really want - a full glass of beer. It should pour in stages to allow the head to settle, like a bartender. Then the beer plumbing can be optimized to reduce agitation (as in any good tap setup) and an automated pour shouldn't be too difficult. Need one sensor (or array thereof) to measure the height of the glass, and another to measure the beer level.
Why didn't the girl get the kidney back? I can understand her willing to give it up for her brother, but not for some random person.
Because she's fine with only one kidney, and the risks of reinstalling the other one are very substantial for almost no benefit.