At least we'd know that their brains heard and recognized the words.... whether or not they actually understood them is left for another system to determine.
First of all, get experience and knowledge in many different systems (e.g.: MS, Unix, Linux, Cisco, Mac, etc.) and learn how to make them work together. Use your house LAN and your free time now to interconnect them in ways that would be useful to potential LOCAL clients. Combining free Linux applications (installed on cast-off computers your customer has in a closet) with local licensed applications can often save a small LOCAL company a lot of money.
Secondly, make a business... I suggest an LLC or an S-Corp... with business cards, letterhead, and web site of your own (I now use Bluehost).
Thirdly, get out there and join local business associations, clubs, and even fraternal organizations (Elks, etc.) and hand out business cards. This is the old-fashioned form of networking.
I subsidize my retirement income with remote administration of several databases, VPN networks and backup systems. Plus I have one Internet web forum that uses advertising to give me a small income.
You won't get rich but since you have to be around the house anyway you'll get some income (possibly), some more experience (probably) and have some interesting stories for when *you* retire.:)
At one time at least (back in the 60s and 70s) an employee who served 80 of their career abroad (outside the USA - which is where most of the jobs were then) could retire at age 50 with 25 years of service at 75% of their pay. It was the only way to keep them from going to work for other agencies or becoming anaylysts.
Frankly, we thought the service was crappy on both DVD and streaming. We had been waiting for a popular movie for weeks by mail and it never came and walked in to a local movie rental outfit and there it was... at $1.99.
Also annoying was the streamed offerings labeled as "recent"; most of which were so not recent.
And then, of course, they raised the price. We stopped our subscription that very day!
First of all, you don't just anchor a big ship 24 miles offshore in several thousand feet of water. You have to either keep the ship underway; essentially in a holding pattern... or you dynamically position the ship using thrusters and sea-floor beacons. Neither of these is cheap, requiring 24/7/365 licensed merchant marine officers on the bridge and in the engine room. And if the ship is dynamically positioned you need officers who are qualified to operate this equipment as well. Drill ships use these guys... and they are expensive and expect to work 28 days on and get 28 days off... with pay. So you'll need two crews.
Provisioning... getting food, fuel and other supplies out to the ship... is also not cheap and would probably require a "workboat" of the type drill rigs use. If nothing else, the insurance company (you *are* going to be insured, right?) will require this as a safety measure.
If you flag your ship offshore you cannot move it from one U.S. port to another... you have to touch at another - foreign - port in between. This is why cruise ships from Seattle to Alaska stop in British Columbia. Crew is cheaper but you incur a whole slew of other problems including convincing the USA that you can operate a foreign flag ship in the economic exclusion zone.
Cell phones do not work 24 nm at sea... or even 12 nm offshore... and satellite communication is remarkably expensive. And bandwidth is not all that great over the communications satellites. You can get bandwidth from other sources but the latency is terrible. At least it's cheaper.
Since I am a retired merchant marine officer (who also operated dynamic positioning equipment on several drill rigs) I can tell you that many people get very claustrophobic on a ship. Seven days on a cruise liner is no preparation for a couple of months on a converted whatever.
I'm sure there are other pitfalls but those are just the most obvious ones.
Seems to me you could quite easily use them to connect houses in an urban setting. Since they're cheap you could use one device for every home and since they're highly directional you could turn them off and on depending upon whether the homeowner wants to be connected (or has paid the bill). Put 15 or 20 in a central location and one at each house. This eliminates all the complexities of getting individual fiber to the houses, too.
One of the other interesting things about using OpenVPN is that it doesn't have to be on the edge of your network. Both OpenVPN boxes are inside the firewall and WAN router... both have only one physical interface and both have internal IP addresses. So all the boxes do is OpenVPN and only that port is open to the Internet and *that* one is filtered by the firewall so that only the other box gets to pass. The firewall also blocks the OpenVPN boxes from sending packets to any IP address other than the firewall at the other end. So they may technically be vulnerable but it's way down on the list because even if they're cracked they can't be used for anything and don't have anything on them of interest.
As an aside, I have had numerous instances of an update breaking something important. There are times when it's just not worth the risk.
In addition, no one was interested in paying for updates. It just worked. Not the only Linux installation I've put in that I never got called back on, by the way. One client didn't call me for 5 years after I put in a Linux box that worked as a file/print server. When he called me (because he had to move to MSSQL runtime and was forced to move to MS Server as a result) I told him that I thought he had found someone else to take care of things. He seemed surprised. He never called me because nothing broke. Everything just worked.
In Rio de Janeiro, when I lived there, if you looked at all agile the bus would not completely stop to let you on. It would slow down to a walking pace so you could grab the handle next to the door and let the momentum of the train swing you aboard. Since you boarded at the rear door and exited at the front door you never go in the way of disembarking passengers; who also often exited while the bus was moving.
It was great sport and probably saved a lot of fuel. Not sure I'd like to do it at my age now (68) but I might just for old times' sake. LOL
When VPN routers were hard to find I set up several OpenVPN links. Over the years most of those networks migrated to other VPN solutions but this one never changed and it always worked. Meanwhile I had to dick with the other solutions all the damn time. When the client with that old OpenVPN link wanted another link I took a good hard look at it. I never had to reconfigure it. I never had to reboot it. It was installed on two HP desktop mini-towers that the client gave to me. And I realized just how good that product was. So I used OpenVPN for the two new links, too. But I upgraded to version 2 and used Centos. That one has been up for two months and everyone is pleased as punch. I'm about to take the old one out of service and install a newer machine running version 2. I'm sure they'll last another ten years.
Holland has made a wise decision to support OpenVPN!
Distributed solar power... where we put as many 8kw solar systems with inverters and battery-backups on family homes around the country as we can... reduces the need for new nuclear, coal, hydro, wind, wave or biomass generators. And it also eliminates the "infrastructure" problem (the infrastructure that delivers that can also move it the other way without change). If we can get to the point where solar panels provide 90% of the daytime energy use of every family home then the other power generation systems will only need to be used to fill in the gaps and to provide the power for industry.
This can be done for about $20,000 per home rooftop and will also mean that a tree falling on a power line six blocks away won't take your power down; you'll just keep going on your backup system.
My wife and I used two 33-watt solar panels for five years on a sailboat cruising the Pacific augmented by a wind generator I made by carving a propellor and buying a surplus 36-vdc electric motor and hanging it in the rigging. We ran our diesel engine about 30 minutes a week and still had power for lights, ham radio, and our little 12-vdc refrigerator. And this was in 1981 long before the advent of LED lighting and new - farm more effective - insulation materials.
It *CAN* be done. We cannot eliminate point-source power generation systems but a nationwide thrust to do this will make new ones much less necessary.
I gave a hard-back copy of one of Anne's books to the very bright ten year old girl across the street. Her mom was having trouble finding books that she would read that weren't full of the wrong messages. I looked in my library shelf and Anne McCaffrey's book caught my eye. I don't know if she has read it... but Anne's books always had the right messages. Thanks, Anne. RIP.
Sadly, it happens. Usually it's in the form of reducing retirement benefits after employees have already put the time in.
I worked at a company that would fire employees who got close to the point at which they were "vested" in their retirement plan. At one point they had to scramble around and fire a poor guy who had been there almost ten years; they discovered he had enough vacation time to put him over the vesting period (which then was ten years).
That was when I - and several others - started looking for new jobs.
There are more. In fact Washington State back in the 1970s had a consortium of Public Utility Districts sell some $200 million in municipal bonds to build several nuclear power plants around the Pacific Northwest. The consortium, called Washington Public Power System (nicknamed "whoops") was plagued by corruption in the design and building of their nuclear plants. Finally they gave up... leaving several partially-built but never operated nuclear plants sprinkled here and there across the landscape. Then they repudiated $200 million in municipal bonds. That was big money in the 1970s and for many people who depended upon the supposed "safety" of municipal bonds it was a disaster. Largely forgotten now. But not for those of us who lived through it.
If you can't trust a corporation (and you can't) you REALLY can't trust any corporation that's going to build a nuclear plant. Or a public utility district, either.
Slashdot Mirror
MOD PARENT UP!!! LOL :)
At least we'd know that their brains heard and recognized the words.... whether or not they actually understood them is left for another system to determine.
The same guy who owns the WSJ owns Fox News.
First of all, get experience and knowledge in many different systems (e.g.: MS, Unix, Linux, Cisco, Mac, etc.) and learn how to make them work together. Use your house LAN and your free time now to interconnect them in ways that would be useful to potential LOCAL clients. Combining free Linux applications (installed on cast-off computers your customer has in a closet) with local licensed applications can often save a small LOCAL company a lot of money.
Secondly, make a business... I suggest an LLC or an S-Corp... with business cards, letterhead, and web site of your own (I now use Bluehost).
Thirdly, get out there and join local business associations, clubs, and even fraternal organizations (Elks, etc.) and hand out business cards. This is the old-fashioned form of networking.
I subsidize my retirement income with remote administration of several databases, VPN networks and backup systems. Plus I have one Internet web forum that uses advertising to give me a small income.
You won't get rich but since you have to be around the house anyway you'll get some income (possibly), some more experience (probably) and have some interesting stories for when *you* retire. :)
At least you can change the password... pretty hard to return virginity.
April 1st already, huh?
More seriously, why wouldn't groundside testing notice that there was a rag in the line?
Some of these positioning rockets are single-use. If you test one you have to build another to replace it. And then test it. And then.....
INSTALL THEM YOURSELF!
http://www.pvpower.com/126-to-200-watt-solar-panels.aspx
At one time at least (back in the 60s and 70s) an employee who served 80 of their career abroad (outside the USA - which is where most of the jobs were then) could retire at age 50 with 25 years of service at 75% of their pay. It was the only way to keep them from going to work for other agencies or becoming anaylysts.
From my vantage point they're probably still hot! :D
I should have become a patent lawyer instead of an engineer. (FACEPALM)
"Given what we know as FACTS, why would you think any other intelligent life would have more capacities than us?"
Because we don't know what we don't know. There may be other FACTS out there that others have discovered.
Frankly, we thought the service was crappy on both DVD and streaming. We had been waiting for a popular movie for weeks by mail and it never came and walked in to a local movie rental outfit and there it was... at $1.99.
Also annoying was the streamed offerings labeled as "recent"; most of which were so not recent.
And then, of course, they raised the price. We stopped our subscription that very day!
First of all, you don't just anchor a big ship 24 miles offshore in several thousand feet of water. You have to either keep the ship underway; essentially in a holding pattern... or you dynamically position the ship using thrusters and sea-floor beacons. Neither of these is cheap, requiring 24/7/365 licensed merchant marine officers on the bridge and in the engine room. And if the ship is dynamically positioned you need officers who are qualified to operate this equipment as well. Drill ships use these guys... and they are expensive and expect to work 28 days on and get 28 days off... with pay. So you'll need two crews.
Provisioning... getting food, fuel and other supplies out to the ship... is also not cheap and would probably require a "workboat" of the type drill rigs use. If nothing else, the insurance company (you *are* going to be insured, right?) will require this as a safety measure.
If you flag your ship offshore you cannot move it from one U.S. port to another... you have to touch at another - foreign - port in between. This is why cruise ships from Seattle to Alaska stop in British Columbia. Crew is cheaper but you incur a whole slew of other problems including convincing the USA that you can operate a foreign flag ship in the economic exclusion zone.
Cell phones do not work 24 nm at sea... or even 12 nm offshore... and satellite communication is remarkably expensive. And bandwidth is not all that great over the communications satellites. You can get bandwidth from other sources but the latency is terrible. At least it's cheaper.
Since I am a retired merchant marine officer (who also operated dynamic positioning equipment on several drill rigs) I can tell you that many people get very claustrophobic on a ship. Seven days on a cruise liner is no preparation for a couple of months on a converted whatever.
I'm sure there are other pitfalls but those are just the most obvious ones.
Seems to me you could quite easily use them to connect houses in an urban setting. Since they're cheap you could use one device for every home and since they're highly directional you could turn them off and on depending upon whether the homeowner wants to be connected (or has paid the bill). Put 15 or 20 in a central location and one at each house. This eliminates all the complexities of getting individual fiber to the houses, too.
One of the other interesting things about using OpenVPN is that it doesn't have to be on the edge of your network. Both OpenVPN boxes are inside the firewall and WAN router... both have only one physical interface and both have internal IP addresses. So all the boxes do is OpenVPN and only that port is open to the Internet and *that* one is filtered by the firewall so that only the other box gets to pass. The firewall also blocks the OpenVPN boxes from sending packets to any IP address other than the firewall at the other end. So they may technically be vulnerable but it's way down on the list because even if they're cracked they can't be used for anything and don't have anything on them of interest.
As an aside, I have had numerous instances of an update breaking something important. There are times when it's just not worth the risk.
In addition, no one was interested in paying for updates. It just worked. Not the only Linux installation I've put in that I never got called back on, by the way. One client didn't call me for 5 years after I put in a Linux box that worked as a file/print server. When he called me (because he had to move to MSSQL runtime and was forced to move to MS Server as a result) I told him that I thought he had found someone else to take care of things. He seemed surprised. He never called me because nothing broke. Everything just worked.
In Rio de Janeiro, when I lived there, if you looked at all agile the bus would not completely stop to let you on. It would slow down to a walking pace so you could grab the handle next to the door and let the momentum of the train swing you aboard. Since you boarded at the rear door and exited at the front door you never go in the way of disembarking passengers; who also often exited while the bus was moving.
It was great sport and probably saved a lot of fuel. Not sure I'd like to do it at my age now (68) but I might just for old times' sake. LOL
When VPN routers were hard to find I set up several OpenVPN links. Over the years most of those networks migrated to other VPN solutions but this one never changed and it always worked. Meanwhile I had to dick with the other solutions all the damn time. When the client with that old OpenVPN link wanted another link I took a good hard look at it. I never had to reconfigure it. I never had to reboot it. It was installed on two HP desktop mini-towers that the client gave to me. And I realized just how good that product was. So I used OpenVPN for the two new links, too. But I upgraded to version 2 and used Centos. That one has been up for two months and everyone is pleased as punch. I'm about to take the old one out of service and install a newer machine running version 2. I'm sure they'll last another ten years.
Holland has made a wise decision to support OpenVPN!
So... what if it was a country refusing entry to the book? Would that be censorship, then?
Distributed solar power... where we put as many 8kw solar systems with inverters and battery-backups on family homes around the country as we can... reduces the need for new nuclear, coal, hydro, wind, wave or biomass generators. And it also eliminates the "infrastructure" problem (the infrastructure that delivers that can also move it the other way without change). If we can get to the point where solar panels provide 90% of the daytime energy use of every family home then the other power generation systems will only need to be used to fill in the gaps and to provide the power for industry.
This can be done for about $20,000 per home rooftop and will also mean that a tree falling on a power line six blocks away won't take your power down; you'll just keep going on your backup system.
My wife and I used two 33-watt solar panels for five years on a sailboat cruising the Pacific augmented by a wind generator I made by carving a propellor and buying a surplus 36-vdc electric motor and hanging it in the rigging. We ran our diesel engine about 30 minutes a week and still had power for lights, ham radio, and our little 12-vdc refrigerator. And this was in 1981 long before the advent of LED lighting and new - farm more effective - insulation materials.
It *CAN* be done. We cannot eliminate point-source power generation systems but a nationwide thrust to do this will make new ones much less necessary.
I gave a hard-back copy of one of Anne's books to the very bright ten year old girl across the street. Her mom was having trouble finding books that she would read that weren't full of the wrong messages. I looked in my library shelf and Anne McCaffrey's book caught my eye. I don't know if she has read it... but Anne's books always had the right messages. Thanks, Anne. RIP.
Sadly, it happens. Usually it's in the form of reducing retirement benefits after employees have already put the time in.
I worked at a company that would fire employees who got close to the point at which they were "vested" in their retirement plan. At one point they had to scramble around and fire a poor guy who had been there almost ten years; they discovered he had enough vacation time to put him over the vesting period (which then was ten years).
That was when I - and several others - started looking for new jobs.
There are more. In fact Washington State back in the 1970s had a consortium of Public Utility Districts sell some $200 million in municipal bonds to build several nuclear power plants around the Pacific Northwest. The consortium, called Washington Public Power System (nicknamed "whoops") was plagued by corruption in the design and building of their nuclear plants. Finally they gave up... leaving several partially-built but never operated nuclear plants sprinkled here and there across the landscape. Then they repudiated $200 million in municipal bonds. That was big money in the 1970s and for many people who depended upon the supposed "safety" of municipal bonds it was a disaster. Largely forgotten now. But not for those of us who lived through it.
If you can't trust a corporation (and you can't) you REALLY can't trust any corporation that's going to build a nuclear plant. Or a public utility district, either.
Once it's absorbed radioactive material it becomes a problem all by itself. But at least it doesn't flow downhill.... much.
No one has ever had to evacuate a city - and stay out of it for years - because the solar panels broke.
(Is there an echo in here?)