Yes training on some specific example you'll never use is a waste of time. Memorizing something that might be useful is well targeted training, memorizing something you never use is wasted training.
No there is no such thing as wasted education. Building your "thinking muscles" is never a loss because you can always retarget to something else, synthesize something new, etc.
Standard/. car example:
Getting training to cut 1/100th off your time around one specific standardized SCCA track does nothing to help you in the real world on the road. Getting education on how to properly apex a turn in general, is always useful in the real world on the road. Maybe a better one would be training on replacing the front brake disks on a '98 Saturn is not terribly useful for almost all home mechanics, but getting an education in how to replace brake disks in general is useful for almost all mechanics, even if they swear today that they'll never do a brake job, just knowing the concept of bleeding air out of a fluid filled hose might help them figure out they need to bleed the air out of their heater core if they intend to get any heat, or just knowing the concept that brake fluid is not generally interchangeable with power steering fluid might save them from using brake fluid to top up their steering (spare me the anecdote that an '81 AMC gremlin used ATF for both brakes and steering fluid, I'm talking about in general)
Well, yeah, I agree, but I'm not going to list every class I took for my CS degree. That was just the first one that sprang to mind that didn't require higher math.
I think you're going to have serious issues teaching something like statistical OS scheduling/queuing theory or numerical analysis of sorting algorithm efficiency to schoolkids, but relational databases are a pretty good match to anyone older than, I donno, ten or something. I'm not sure why codd-normal-forms have to be taught at age 22 in a senior level CS class instead of much earlier in life... The sad fact is anyone working in business knows that way too many non-CS non-IT people implement their own database systems using Excel, Word, etc, with utterly horrific design instead of even half way attempt at a real design...
An interesting relatively non-higher math class that kids could probably handle would be a comparative study of programming paradigms. Simple procedural, functional, automata, object oriented, recursive, theres plenty out there. This would teach different ways of thinking about problems. Not just "writing a program" problems, but problem solving in general...
One cost of this "cheaper" system that no one has discussed yet, is it slows down research. Lets say it takes a week to do a nano sensor run, an a week to do a rodent run.
So old fashioned technique is 100 mice get 10 samples in one week for a rodent run
The new technique is 100 nanosensors get 10 samples in one week, result is 8 totally suck but 2 might either work or give mice cancer or something. Then 20 mice get 2 samples in week two, the rodent run. Now, yes, you've saved the life of 80 mice, but "one week's worth" of human victims just died, and you just paid an extra weeks pay to the chemists and docs and statisticians, an extra week of capital costs, interest payments, etc. I hope you really love mice, because each one saved might divide out to cost a dead human patient and tens of thousands of dollars and maybe a person-lifetime of human labor.
Another weird thing to think about is my wife traps and kills about a mouse per week in the summer in the garage. So a weird balance exists where if the company has more than 80 employees, then wasting a week saves the lives of 80 mice at work, while they kill more than 80 mice in their garages...sort of like the people standing in front of the KFC restaurant protesting that windmills kill birds, or serving turkey subs at the anti-bird killing windmill protest march.
Junior IT support roles routinely start at higher salaries than qualified teachers.
The Inflation Adjusted pay slope/1st derivative is zero to negative for IT support or weakly positive if you are in the minority who get promotions. The union teaching contract has a strong positive slope, every year you get "X" percent more. The crossover point is pretty locality specific but generally by the time you have kids of your own the teachers are making more than the IT people. Also ageism means your IT career will be shorter than a NFL quarterback's career, but teachers can and do teach until retirement age. If you factor in having to work at Walmart from 35 to 65 for IT workers, suddenly teachers come out far ahead in lifetime earnings. Its a cruddy job and they earn every penny, from what I've seen.
Will they pay me more for knowing what I'm doing? Of course not.
Actually, yes, they will, and they'll reimburse you for your education expenses too. The details depend on your local union contract, I suppose in the slums you might not get a good deal, but the bottom 10% of all jobs across all categories suck, so I don't think that proves anything.
Where do you get these weird ideas about teachers and pay? I have a few in my family, and you seem almost trollishly opposite of reality.
But none of those are going to make you into a programmer, engineer, mechanic, or carpenter.
LOL of course they do. A novice/noob/junior/apprentice programmer, engineer, mechanic, or carpenter, obviously. Just for laughs, if proven ability to do, doesn't define a persons skillset, then what in your opinion does define a persons skillset? LOL.
Programming education done right forces people to think logically and break down from top level goals to individual machine language instructions/microcode. Very applicable for any person in almost any field. Much virtually no one uses calculus once they graduate, but everyone has to learn it, because its excellent logical/mental training for hard science related work. Programming training (aka code monkey and IT) is probably not necessarily useful.
Another interesting area is everyone likes to think they're very "special" and no outsiders can understand them, but at least some traditional programming development strategies (waterfall, agile, etc) can be applied in completely non-programming environments. You can run a project designing RF amplifiers using waterfall perfectly well without involving a line of code. Its probably way the heck easier to teach these project management techniques in the field they developed in, rather than shoehorning them somewhere weird.
Finally, insert Barbie doll saying "Math is hard!". If its mentally challenging, its good mental exercise, and no further justification is necessary.
can the new system break away from the old product-centric regime when it will apparently be sponsored by companies including Google and Microsoft?
Sponsors are fine. The correct sponsors for a programming curriculum are my personal favorites microchip.com and xilinx.com, not The Mighty GOOG and MS. Give the kids a Spartan-3 FPGA starter kit, a PIC32MX1 starter kit, and a whole lot of tabs of acid, or at least 2 of the 3, and they'll do just fine.
Note that a "real CS curriculum" is a lot of discrete math and database theory (Codd normal forms, etc) so about 50% to 75% of a real CS curriculum just needs a whiteboard, no hardware, and optionally a box set of Knuth. This confuses the hell of out people who can't tell the difference between IT and CS, just like its easy to confuse the hell out of people who can't tell the difference between education and training.
We are past the tipping point. Forward thinkers need to begin focusing on survival and recovery from catastrophe, not avoidance.
There never was a balancing point to begin with. Where I am sitting now in the past was the bottom of the ocean (we sell some legendary good limestone and marbles from numerous local quarries) and has much more recently been underneath about a mile or two of ice.
The biggest swindle was selling "we must prepare for climate change that was caused by (induce guilt)" What we really need is "we must prepare for climate change". Period. No disclaimer guilt trip or weasel words. Because no matter what indignity we inflict on each other, the climate is going to change, just as it always has.
I often wonder where people who deny pollution is having any effect on the earth think they are going to live if they are wrong.
Probably figure they'll live right next door to the "terr'ists behind every tree stump so we must molest all Americans" FUD farmers. They should get along famously, similar outlook of controlling the populace thru terror, etc.
Obviously the marketing is enviroloonie and useless from an engineering perspective, because to store say, a barrel of crude oil worth of carbon, you need to use more than a barrel worth of crude as a raw material, refine the heck out of it using oil, burn refined diesel oil to ship it around, burn lots of refined gasoline for the factory workers to get to work to make the stuff, blah blah blah. The military analogy of this environmental plan would be the classic Vietnam era "we had to destroy the village to save the village".
Aside from that lunacy, I wonder what non-energy purposes this could be applied to. Could I make a scuba rebreather out of this stuff inside a stainless steel canister that can be reused by boiling it in water for 10 minutes or whatever? That is cool, and convenient.
I wonder if it is stable / biocompatible enough to be used in some kind of weird self carbonating drink, like instant carbonated hot coffee or something? Maybe using two cans, one boiling, and one in ice, I could carbonate drinks while camping or something weird like that.
Also if it outputs CO2 when really hot, could I make, say, childrens bedclothes out of it? In the olden days it was cool to invent kids clothes that would self extinguish when removed from a flame (you know, like the house is burning down?) but kids clothes made out of this would actually act to extinguish the fire... interesting. Obviously you don't want to output enough CO2 to suffocate the kid, but enough to put out a smouldering ember would be convenient. Or make mattresses out of this plastic for those stinky smokers who get drunk, smoke in bed, and incinerate themselves, well if the mattress gave off just enough CO2 as it burned to put the cigarette out... Now its humane and decent to save kids from fire but in sharp contrast saving adults from smoking in bed fires so they can die of lung cancer is probably immoral acting against Darwin and all that. Maybe just making chemistry lab fire blankets out of this CO2 emitting plastic would be a good idea?
Does it output enough CO2 so that lit on fire it could inflate a life jacket instead of traditional pressurized cylinders? Or does it spew out enough CO2 to make a "fire extinguisher grenade"? Could I mandate lithium battery powered laptops/phones be made of this plastic so when they explode into fire, once the lithium fire goes out, the CO2 prevented the surroundings from catching fire?
If you mean legal civil liability its not a whole heck of a lot different than dropping things from a bridge, or tossing something off the top of a building.
I think i'm missing something here. Obviously the cure for diabetes is giving people antibiotics so they reset their gut bacteria?
gut bacteria depend, in part, on what you eat. The easy way to change them is to flamethrower out your intestines with antibiotics and transplant a new selection, but the ratios can be influenced by food, which is no great surprise I guess. That would be a very interesting follow up paper.
Apparently pretty well. I have my "real name" G+ page and a G+ pages business page or whatever you want to call it, for what amounts to an electronics club I promote/curate/whatever you want to call it.
As near as I can tell, someone looking at the club page has no idea I'm the one running it.
So you create a real name page for the real you which you never use, then create a business page for "aestetix" which you always use, then I think you're all good?
As a bonus I guess you'd have your "real name" page for Mom to circle, and everyone else can circle the "aestetix" page.
I have not tested this extensively because I'm not paranoid enough to care, but this seems to function.
Welcome to youtube, see you in a couple hours. There's a lot to see and every video maker claims to be an expert with the One True Technique. My only advice is there's quite a few different ways to do it, so don't mix and match parts of one with parts of another if they don't go together (traditional roll solder with a paste stencil don't logically go together very well, unless maybe you're applying liquid flux using the soldering stencil or something weird like that)
Its a hobby, so economic constraints of its not worth the time etc are kind of inappropriate other than don't throw down more cash than your're comfortable with, and doing something new is the definition of fun. There is no risk other than being out some cash, beyond the thru hole soldering risks (don't drop the hot iron in your lap, etc)
The best place to start isn't hard drives but hunt down the "usual electronics kit suppliers" like Ramsey etc and order a couple different "intro to SMD" kits and give a couple different techniques a try. Given existing thru-hole tools and ability, clean and tin your regular iron with a regular tip to perfection, use a toothpick as a spudger or probe or whatever you want to call it to position parts, and buy a small roll of the smallest possible solder you can find. Some swear by the paste technique instead of using roll solder, which in my opinion is wasteful and expensive, but to each their own. Also some people insist it can only be done with a hot air rework wand, which is really code words for they only know how to do it with a hot air rework wand, not that "it can't be done"
Please note that some people try to so "SMD at home" by replicating industrial mass production SMD techniques as a hack onto itself. This is kind of like a standard/. car analogy that you can't work on your car unless you have a full size robotic assembly line in your garage, which is not exactly true. You want to do SMD at home using at home techniques, not solder paste stencils with reflow ovens... unless you want to get into the hobby of doing industrial mass production at home, which is a perfectly valid and interesting subhobby, but completely off topic from basic hand assembly. Sometimes you need a translator, and what you'll be doing with each part, is what the mass production pros would call "hand rework/repair". You have to do reflow ovens and paste and stencils to make a profit in China as a mass production assembler, but those market forces don't impact you individually.
Get a ham radio license and talk to the local hams. You can't build anything RF these days without SMD somewhere; probably some guy on the radio within a mile is a wizard at smd hand soldering and would simply give you a couple feet of ultra fine pitch solder, or the remainder of a flux bottle, or an old slightly worn pro-grade ESD proof spudger etc, reducing your mandatory tool purchase list from maybe $25 to maybe $0. And probably more free advice than you'll have use for.
Expect to get an education in surface tension management of liquid solder, and also an education in not drinking coffee / energy drinks when working on 0402 size components.
Speaking of 0402, don't even think about really small stuff like that, or BGAs, until you have way more experience.
As an amateur lacking in equipment, I'd say my primary issue with SMD components is that I can't prototype with them on stripboard..... So anything I want to do with these more complex SMD components means breaking out the copper-clad board, printing up a design on etch-resist transfer paper, and etching it, which for me is an error-prone process that more often results in a wasted board than anything actually useful.
The term/product you didn't know to google for is "schmartboard" aka http://www.schmartboard.com/ They have about a zillion competitors, some doing their own thing, some just ripping off the schmartboard guys.
You buy a tiny little PCBs where you solder your SOIC or SOT or whatever device to the tiny PCB and the other edge of the PCB is precision designed to connect to standard pitch protoboards or whatever, using header strips or short wires. You can think of it (heck some are marketed as) a SOIC to DIP adapter board.
In the narrow little world of RF tech that I work in, this general concept extends to weird specialized applications like "generic MMIC amplifier PCB" and so on. First gen MMICs pretty much all used the same package and pinout and general biasing ckts so any manufacturers MMIC could be made to work on a generic MMIC amp board, sometimes with some strange hot wiring for bias ckts, but it did work. Life is a little more complicated now, but still.. Generic VCO PCB. Generic diode mixer PCB. Generic SMD filter PCB. All off the shelf in bulk.
I really wish the USB spec for parallel ports had included the bit banging capabilities.
From personal experience in the CNC field the killer for USB "parallel" port CNC is USB jitter.
There's nothing stopping you from implementing a "USB printer" client device where every time the "printer" sees UTF-8 left arrow it jogs the table in a +X direction.
Its just that real world experiments with that have miserably failed due to jitter. Move the attached USB mouse and the endmill snaps off, etc.
This opens up a million (bad) quantum mechanics Heisenberg Uncertainty principle jokes. Women, either you're drunk, or they don't make any sense, never both at the same time (which is closer to a pauli exclusionary principle joke I guess) or something to do with their emotional state being an unknown quantity until the wavefunction collapses?
In Hawkings honor, any black hole thermodynamics jokes? I'm thinking something along the lines of every time a male makes a mistake that information never escapes past the female event horizon, or make something weird (even for me) involving sex, virtual particle emission, and childbirth?
As a closely related issue, everyone is aware that there exists "nerdy hiphop rap". But does anyone know of "nerdy stand up comedy"? Clearly this post shows I'm not cut out to blaze a trail thru that new genre, but the non-internet equivalent of/. +1 funny mod must exist for some sorta technical stand up comedian? I just want to hear someone say the F word 6 times per minute while saying something funny about microsoft, to laughing drunks, or something like that. The closest I can think of is some podcasts like "the phone show" by the PLA, but thats not quite it.
I read an article where he said he takes the robotic voice very personally, he regards it as his voice.
He's a geek so wants the real thing, not some stupid software emulation.
The first thing that instantly struck me is its rather like women and their rack. Some fraction love the idea of an upgrade, some hate the idea of an upgrade, but the feature that makes it most like the female chest situation is that Everybody Seems to Have A Strong Opinion about what upgrade strategy, if any, is best, and all the women I've talked to about that topic pretty much want all the folks with opinions one way or another to F off and when they want an opinion they'll darn well ask for it first.
The other interesting thing Ive not considered is the legal / financial / employment minefield of whoever is the "new voice of Hawking" is absolutely going to advertise that, and he might not be cool with getting into that whole scene. So on one hand he should get money, on the other hand he doesn't need money, on the other hand the money would be coming from his fellow sufferers so that would make him a jerk, on the other hand he could donate his endorsement money to a charity, but what if the device he signs the contract for sucks and he wants to switch back, but if he doesn't sign an endorsement contract he's basically pulling money out of a charity, I can see a guy just saying F-it forget about the whole topic now back to black hole thermodynamics.
The final part is/. and IT in general are populated by noobs who think nothing of upgrading because they've only been in the game 2 years so whats one upgrade during an entire lifetime? But he's pretty much in it for life, and I know from personal experience that when you can skip upgrade cycles, you're best off doing so if at all possible. Sometimes not possible. At work I do not scrap the old gear and spec out an entirely new amplifier line solely because one corporation released one new microwave RF transistor today (and someone will release another next week, repeat into the indefinite future). I can totally see the guy saying there is no point in upgrading every time something new is released and therefore living life as a perma-noob, especially if the performance gain is minor. I'm sure the world would rather have him thinking about physics than endlessly re-learning this months new synth release.
I donno man. Smallest feature size I've heard for flash is 19 nm and I'm sure it'll continue to drop. DNA single nucleotide unit length aka pitch is about a third of a nm and has not shrunk at all in a couple billion years for some basic chemistry reasons.
Lets say you get flash down to 5 nm and shove 20 bits worth of multiple levels (basically analog storage with A/D and D/A interface). This in unrealistic at this time, but then again, DNA storage is unrealistic at this time. That flash data density would spell serious trouble for DNA storage on a pure size basis.
They better hurry up and get this DNA tech off the ground before its left in the dust like happened to bubble memory in the 70s/80s. Bubble memory would have displaced core back in the 50s but it took too long and by the time it hit the market, it was technologically obsolete. This could happen to DNA memory.
The Silmarillion was written as a mythological history for England
Have you ever stopped to think how weird it would be if Tolkien had tried to pull a L Ron Hubbard Scientology move and turn the LOTR into a "real religion"?
I stopped to think about it, and it was weird, let me tell you.
Slashdot Mirror
Classic confusion of education vs training.
Yes training on some specific example you'll never use is a waste of time. Memorizing something that might be useful is well targeted training, memorizing something you never use is wasted training.
No there is no such thing as wasted education. Building your "thinking muscles" is never a loss because you can always retarget to something else, synthesize something new, etc.
Standard /. car example:
Getting training to cut 1/100th off your time around one specific standardized SCCA track does nothing to help you in the real world on the road. Getting education on how to properly apex a turn in general, is always useful in the real world on the road. Maybe a better one would be training on replacing the front brake disks on a '98 Saturn is not terribly useful for almost all home mechanics, but getting an education in how to replace brake disks in general is useful for almost all mechanics, even if they swear today that they'll never do a brake job, just knowing the concept of bleeding air out of a fluid filled hose might help them figure out they need to bleed the air out of their heater core if they intend to get any heat, or just knowing the concept that brake fluid is not generally interchangeable with power steering fluid might save them from using brake fluid to top up their steering (spare me the anecdote that an '81 AMC gremlin used ATF for both brakes and steering fluid, I'm talking about in general)
Well, yeah, I agree, but I'm not going to list every class I took for my CS degree. That was just the first one that sprang to mind that didn't require higher math.
I think you're going to have serious issues teaching something like statistical OS scheduling/queuing theory or numerical analysis of sorting algorithm efficiency to schoolkids, but relational databases are a pretty good match to anyone older than, I donno, ten or something. I'm not sure why codd-normal-forms have to be taught at age 22 in a senior level CS class instead of much earlier in life... The sad fact is anyone working in business knows that way too many non-CS non-IT people implement their own database systems using Excel, Word, etc, with utterly horrific design instead of even half way attempt at a real design...
An interesting relatively non-higher math class that kids could probably handle would be a comparative study of programming paradigms. Simple procedural, functional, automata, object oriented, recursive, theres plenty out there. This would teach different ways of thinking about problems. Not just "writing a program" problems, but problem solving in general...
1) Get shipping container
2) Get mailing address of SOPA supporting corporation
3) Do I really have to spell this out for you?
One cost of this "cheaper" system that no one has discussed yet, is it slows down research. Lets say it takes a week to do a nano sensor run, an a week to do a rodent run.
So old fashioned technique is 100 mice get 10 samples in one week for a rodent run
The new technique is 100 nanosensors get 10 samples in one week, result is 8 totally suck but 2 might either work or give mice cancer or something. Then 20 mice get 2 samples in week two, the rodent run. Now, yes, you've saved the life of 80 mice, but "one week's worth" of human victims just died, and you just paid an extra weeks pay to the chemists and docs and statisticians, an extra week of capital costs, interest payments, etc. I hope you really love mice, because each one saved might divide out to cost a dead human patient and tens of thousands of dollars and maybe a person-lifetime of human labor.
Another weird thing to think about is my wife traps and kills about a mouse per week in the summer in the garage. So a weird balance exists where if the company has more than 80 employees, then wasting a week saves the lives of 80 mice at work, while they kill more than 80 mice in their garages...sort of like the people standing in front of the KFC restaurant protesting that windmills kill birds, or serving turkey subs at the anti-bird killing windmill protest march.
Junior IT support roles routinely start at higher salaries than qualified teachers.
The Inflation Adjusted pay slope/1st derivative is zero to negative for IT support or weakly positive if you are in the minority who get promotions. The union teaching contract has a strong positive slope, every year you get "X" percent more. The crossover point is pretty locality specific but generally by the time you have kids of your own the teachers are making more than the IT people. Also ageism means your IT career will be shorter than a NFL quarterback's career, but teachers can and do teach until retirement age. If you factor in having to work at Walmart from 35 to 65 for IT workers, suddenly teachers come out far ahead in lifetime earnings. Its a cruddy job and they earn every penny, from what I've seen.
Will they pay me more for knowing what I'm doing? Of course not.
Actually, yes, they will, and they'll reimburse you for your education expenses too. The details depend on your local union contract, I suppose in the slums you might not get a good deal, but the bottom 10% of all jobs across all categories suck, so I don't think that proves anything.
Where do you get these weird ideas about teachers and pay? I have a few in my family, and you seem almost trollishly opposite of reality.
But none of those are going to make you into a programmer, engineer, mechanic, or carpenter.
LOL of course they do. A novice/noob/junior/apprentice programmer, engineer, mechanic, or carpenter, obviously. Just for laughs, if proven ability to do, doesn't define a persons skillset, then what in your opinion does define a persons skillset? LOL.
Programming education done right forces people to think logically and break down from top level goals to individual machine language instructions/microcode.
Very applicable for any person in almost any field. Much virtually no one uses calculus once they graduate, but everyone has to learn it, because its excellent logical/mental training for hard science related work.
Programming training (aka code monkey and IT) is probably not necessarily useful.
Another interesting area is everyone likes to think they're very "special" and no outsiders can understand them, but at least some traditional programming development strategies (waterfall, agile, etc) can be applied in completely non-programming environments. You can run a project designing RF amplifiers using waterfall perfectly well without involving a line of code. Its probably way the heck easier to teach these project management techniques in the field they developed in, rather than shoehorning them somewhere weird.
Finally, insert Barbie doll saying "Math is hard!". If its mentally challenging, its good mental exercise, and no further justification is necessary.
can the new system break away from the old product-centric regime when it will apparently be sponsored by companies including Google and Microsoft?
Sponsors are fine. The correct sponsors for a programming curriculum are my personal favorites microchip.com and xilinx.com, not The Mighty GOOG and MS. Give the kids a Spartan-3 FPGA starter kit, a PIC32MX1 starter kit, and a whole lot of tabs of acid, or at least 2 of the 3, and they'll do just fine.
Note that a "real CS curriculum" is a lot of discrete math and database theory (Codd normal forms, etc) so about 50% to 75% of a real CS curriculum just needs a whiteboard, no hardware, and optionally a box set of Knuth. This confuses the hell of out people who can't tell the difference between IT and CS, just like its easy to confuse the hell out of people who can't tell the difference between education and training.
We are past the tipping point. Forward thinkers need to begin focusing on survival and recovery from catastrophe, not avoidance.
There never was a balancing point to begin with. Where I am sitting now in the past was the bottom of the ocean (we sell some legendary good limestone and marbles from numerous local quarries) and has much more recently been underneath about a mile or two of ice.
The biggest swindle was selling "we must prepare for climate change that was caused by (induce guilt)" What we really need is "we must prepare for climate change". Period. No disclaimer guilt trip or weasel words. Because no matter what indignity we inflict on each other, the climate is going to change, just as it always has.
But how do you patent a tree and retire a millionaire after the IPO?
I often wonder where people who deny pollution is having any effect on the earth think they are going to live if they are wrong.
Probably figure they'll live right next door to the "terr'ists behind every tree stump so we must molest all Americans" FUD farmers. They should get along famously, similar outlook of controlling the populace thru terror, etc.
Obviously the marketing is enviroloonie and useless from an engineering perspective, because to store say, a barrel of crude oil worth of carbon, you need to use more than a barrel worth of crude as a raw material, refine the heck out of it using oil, burn refined diesel oil to ship it around, burn lots of refined gasoline for the factory workers to get to work to make the stuff, blah blah blah. The military analogy of this environmental plan would be the classic Vietnam era "we had to destroy the village to save the village".
Aside from that lunacy, I wonder what non-energy purposes this could be applied to. Could I make a scuba rebreather out of this stuff inside a stainless steel canister that can be reused by boiling it in water for 10 minutes or whatever? That is cool, and convenient.
I wonder if it is stable / biocompatible enough to be used in some kind of weird self carbonating drink, like instant carbonated hot coffee or something? Maybe using two cans, one boiling, and one in ice, I could carbonate drinks while camping or something weird like that.
Also if it outputs CO2 when really hot, could I make, say, childrens bedclothes out of it? In the olden days it was cool to invent kids clothes that would self extinguish when removed from a flame (you know, like the house is burning down?) but kids clothes made out of this would actually act to extinguish the fire... interesting. Obviously you don't want to output enough CO2 to suffocate the kid, but enough to put out a smouldering ember would be convenient. Or make mattresses out of this plastic for those stinky smokers who get drunk, smoke in bed, and incinerate themselves, well if the mattress gave off just enough CO2 as it burned to put the cigarette out... Now its humane and decent to save kids from fire but in sharp contrast saving adults from smoking in bed fires so they can die of lung cancer is probably immoral acting against Darwin and all that. Maybe just making chemistry lab fire blankets out of this CO2 emitting plastic would be a good idea?
Does it output enough CO2 so that lit on fire it could inflate a life jacket instead of traditional pressurized cylinders? Or does it spew out enough CO2 to make a "fire extinguisher grenade"? Could I mandate lithium battery powered laptops/phones be made of this plastic so when they explode into fire, once the lithium fire goes out, the CO2 prevented the surroundings from catching fire?
in any case, I'm wondering what the rules are for dropping random things from the sky.
This is a secondary source, but pretty good
http://www.eoss.org/pubs/far_annotated.htm
If you mean legal civil liability its not a whole heck of a lot different than dropping things from a bridge, or tossing something off the top of a building.
I think i'm missing something here. Obviously the cure for diabetes is giving people antibiotics so they reset their gut bacteria?
gut bacteria depend, in part, on what you eat. The easy way to change them is to flamethrower out your intestines with antibiotics and transplant a new selection, but the ratios can be influenced by food, which is no great surprise I guess. That would be a very interesting follow up paper.
I just care if mine can handle my all the pieces of my computer and won't melt them while operating.
Also, I think there's a request for colo space joke lurking around in here somewhere.
Apparently pretty well. I have my "real name" G+ page and a G+ pages business page or whatever you want to call it, for what amounts to an electronics club I promote/curate/whatever you want to call it.
As near as I can tell, someone looking at the club page has no idea I'm the one running it.
So you create a real name page for the real you which you never use, then create a business page for "aestetix" which you always use, then I think you're all good?
As a bonus I guess you'd have your "real name" page for Mom to circle, and everyone else can circle the "aestetix" page.
I have not tested this extensively because I'm not paranoid enough to care, but this seems to function.
Because google reader is not desktop based? I have more than one computing device.
I ran feedonfeeds for years on my own server, but eventually switched to GR.
Welcome to youtube, see you in a couple hours. There's a lot to see and every video maker claims to be an expert with the One True Technique. My only advice is there's quite a few different ways to do it, so don't mix and match parts of one with parts of another if they don't go together (traditional roll solder with a paste stencil don't logically go together very well, unless maybe you're applying liquid flux using the soldering stencil or something weird like that)
Its a hobby, so economic constraints of its not worth the time etc are kind of inappropriate other than don't throw down more cash than your're comfortable with, and doing something new is the definition of fun. There is no risk other than being out some cash, beyond the thru hole soldering risks (don't drop the hot iron in your lap, etc)
The best place to start isn't hard drives but hunt down the "usual electronics kit suppliers" like Ramsey etc and order a couple different "intro to SMD" kits and give a couple different techniques a try. Given existing thru-hole tools and ability, clean and tin your regular iron with a regular tip to perfection, use a toothpick as a spudger or probe or whatever you want to call it to position parts, and buy a small roll of the smallest possible solder you can find. Some swear by the paste technique instead of using roll solder, which in my opinion is wasteful and expensive, but to each their own. Also some people insist it can only be done with a hot air rework wand, which is really code words for they only know how to do it with a hot air rework wand, not that "it can't be done"
Please note that some people try to so "SMD at home" by replicating industrial mass production SMD techniques as a hack onto itself. This is kind of like a standard /. car analogy that you can't work on your car unless you have a full size robotic assembly line in your garage, which is not exactly true. You want to do SMD at home using at home techniques, not solder paste stencils with reflow ovens... unless you want to get into the hobby of doing industrial mass production at home, which is a perfectly valid and interesting subhobby, but completely off topic from basic hand assembly. Sometimes you need a translator, and what you'll be doing with each part, is what the mass production pros would call "hand rework/repair". You have to do reflow ovens and paste and stencils to make a profit in China as a mass production assembler, but those market forces don't impact you individually.
Get a ham radio license and talk to the local hams. You can't build anything RF these days without SMD somewhere; probably some guy on the radio within a mile is a wizard at smd hand soldering and would simply give you a couple feet of ultra fine pitch solder, or the remainder of a flux bottle, or an old slightly worn pro-grade ESD proof spudger etc, reducing your mandatory tool purchase list from maybe $25 to maybe $0. And probably more free advice than you'll have use for.
Expect to get an education in surface tension management of liquid solder, and also an education in not drinking coffee / energy drinks when working on 0402 size components.
Speaking of 0402, don't even think about really small stuff like that, or BGAs, until you have way more experience.
As an amateur lacking in equipment, I'd say my primary issue with SMD components is that I can't prototype with them on stripboard..... So anything I want to do with these more complex SMD components means breaking out the copper-clad board, printing up a design on etch-resist transfer paper, and etching it, which for me is an error-prone process that more often results in a wasted board than anything actually useful.
The term/product you didn't know to google for is "schmartboard" aka
http://www.schmartboard.com/
They have about a zillion competitors, some doing their own thing, some just ripping off the schmartboard guys.
You buy a tiny little PCBs where you solder your SOIC or SOT or whatever device to the tiny PCB and the other edge of the PCB is precision designed to connect to standard pitch protoboards or whatever, using header strips or short wires. You can think of it (heck some are marketed as) a SOIC to DIP adapter board.
In the narrow little world of RF tech that I work in, this general concept extends to weird specialized applications like "generic MMIC amplifier PCB" and so on. First gen MMICs pretty much all used the same package and pinout and general biasing ckts so any manufacturers MMIC could be made to work on a generic MMIC amp board, sometimes with some strange hot wiring for bias ckts, but it did work. Life is a little more complicated now, but still.. Generic VCO PCB. Generic diode mixer PCB. Generic SMD filter PCB. All off the shelf in bulk.
I really wish the USB spec for parallel ports had included the bit banging capabilities.
From personal experience in the CNC field the killer for USB "parallel" port CNC is USB jitter.
There's nothing stopping you from implementing a "USB printer" client device where every time the "printer" sees UTF-8 left arrow it jogs the table in a +X direction.
Its just that real world experiments with that have miserably failed due to jitter. Move the attached USB mouse and the endmill snaps off, etc.
This opens up a million (bad) quantum mechanics Heisenberg Uncertainty principle jokes.
Women, either you're drunk, or they don't make any sense, never both at the same time (which is closer to a pauli exclusionary principle joke I guess)
or
something to do with their emotional state being an unknown quantity until the wavefunction collapses?
In Hawkings honor, any black hole thermodynamics jokes? I'm thinking something along the lines of every time a male makes a mistake that information never escapes past the female event horizon, or make something weird (even for me) involving sex, virtual particle emission, and childbirth?
As a closely related issue, everyone is aware that there exists "nerdy hiphop rap". But does anyone know of "nerdy stand up comedy"? Clearly this post shows I'm not cut out to blaze a trail thru that new genre, but the non-internet equivalent of /. +1 funny mod must exist for some sorta technical stand up comedian? I just want to hear someone say the F word 6 times per minute while saying something funny about microsoft, to laughing drunks, or something like that. The closest I can think of is some podcasts like "the phone show" by the PLA, but thats not quite it.
your alternative is what, put the Apple flag on it?
I read an article where he said he takes the robotic voice very personally, he regards it as his voice.
He's a geek so wants the real thing, not some stupid software emulation.
The first thing that instantly struck me is its rather like women and their rack. Some fraction love the idea of an upgrade, some hate the idea of an upgrade, but the feature that makes it most like the female chest situation is that Everybody Seems to Have A Strong Opinion about what upgrade strategy, if any, is best, and all the women I've talked to about that topic pretty much want all the folks with opinions one way or another to F off and when they want an opinion they'll darn well ask for it first.
The other interesting thing Ive not considered is the legal / financial / employment minefield of whoever is the "new voice of Hawking" is absolutely going to advertise that, and he might not be cool with getting into that whole scene. So on one hand he should get money, on the other hand he doesn't need money, on the other hand the money would be coming from his fellow sufferers so that would make him a jerk, on the other hand he could donate his endorsement money to a charity, but what if the device he signs the contract for sucks and he wants to switch back, but if he doesn't sign an endorsement contract he's basically pulling money out of a charity, I can see a guy just saying F-it forget about the whole topic now back to black hole thermodynamics.
The final part is /. and IT in general are populated by noobs who think nothing of upgrading because they've only been in the game 2 years so whats one upgrade during an entire lifetime? But he's pretty much in it for life, and I know from personal experience that when you can skip upgrade cycles, you're best off doing so if at all possible. Sometimes not possible. At work I do not scrap the old gear and spec out an entirely new amplifier line solely because one corporation released one new microwave RF transistor today (and someone will release another next week, repeat into the indefinite future). I can totally see the guy saying there is no point in upgrading every time something new is released and therefore living life as a perma-noob, especially if the performance gain is minor. I'm sure the world would rather have him thinking about physics than endlessly re-learning this months new synth release.
I donno man. Smallest feature size I've heard for flash is 19 nm and I'm sure it'll continue to drop. DNA single nucleotide unit length aka pitch is about a third of a nm and has not shrunk at all in a couple billion years for some basic chemistry reasons.
Lets say you get flash down to 5 nm and shove 20 bits worth of multiple levels (basically analog storage with A/D and D/A interface). This in unrealistic at this time, but then again, DNA storage is unrealistic at this time. That flash data density would spell serious trouble for DNA storage on a pure size basis.
They better hurry up and get this DNA tech off the ground before its left in the dust like happened to bubble memory in the 70s/80s. Bubble memory would have displaced core back in the 50s but it took too long and by the time it hit the market, it was technologically obsolete. This could happen to DNA memory.
The Silmarillion was written as a mythological history for England
Have you ever stopped to think how weird it would be if Tolkien had tried to pull a L Ron Hubbard Scientology move and turn the LOTR into a "real religion"?
I stopped to think about it, and it was weird, let me tell you.