Your german experience is basically the USA "virgin mobile" experience, although there's a bunch of microscopically more expensive competitors. A couple years back I paid $20 for my new dumbphone and then used, on a long term average, around $8/month of minutes. Which was something like 80 minutes per month, which is a lot of talking. I believe the prices have risen somewhat to something like 25 cents per minute, but the phones are still about the cost of a restaurant lunch.
I got into the republic wireless beta over a year ago, its open to the public now I believe. I think I paid $200 for my phone and its been $20/month since then. So far no problems at all. That's why my dumbphone non-contract price data might be a little obsolete.
It is, however, impossible to get a phone heavily advertised on TV in the US or from a retail "cell phone store" for less than $100/mo or whatever. Those TV commercials and $2000/month storefront rentals cost a lot of money. In the old days people used to describe USA as the place where 1/2 the TV commercials were car commercials, but in the future we'll probably describe USA TV commercials as 1/3 or so cell phone ads. Endless self promotion costs a lot of money, mostly paid for at a rate of $120/month.
Whoops that would be $2880 for two years because you get a "free" phone. I keep forgetting about what a great deal you're getting with that "free" phone. It only cost you $2100 more than paying for it yourself. Kind of the ultimate subprime loan.
I've been prepaid / non-contract since the early 00s when I got sick of paying $80 for two dumbphones and switched to about $8/month/phone prepay. I think the business logic "big cell providers" use, is anyone dumb enough to sign a contract is dumb enough to be taken advantage of in pretty much any technically possible way. I mean how dumb do you have to be, to pay $120/month for two years for a $300 phone? Thats $3180. I'm getting the same service for a grand total of $780 over the two years (24*20+300). I'm sure I'll find some way to spend the $2400 I'll save merely by selecting an alternative billing method.
You drive one of the rare cars that actually requires high octane gas (turbo'd sportcar or whatever) Your lawnmower works fine with low octane gas. So you drive to the gas station, fill your little one gallon lawnmower gas can with the cheaper low octane gas. See on the bill that you are being charged for high octane gas. "Its company policy that if you have a car requiring high octane gas, we will charge you for high octane gas, no matter what you actually use or want". Finally, you can't go to an alternative gas station provider because you were dumb enough to sign a 2-year gasoline contract and there's only a handful of gas stations who collude WRT prices and services anyway.
Yeah I got some AC followup that the bad astronomer and him go way back, but my point was tell me an interesting story, not just "yeah we worked together"
The power consumption claims sound a lot more like plain old static ram, even older than 25 years. In sleepy mode, a large sram draws a current low enough that there's no need to use anything bigger than a rechargeable AA battery, because the battery self draining current of an AA is already a multiple of the sram current so the battery will last almost as long as it would take to die on the shelf. Maybe shortening the "shelf life" by a couple hours or even a day. Dallas Semiconductor makes a lot of interesting controllers for this task. Something like the DS1210 senses when the main power is shutting off, then it slams the sram its connected to into sleep mode and disables CPU access so it doesn't get messed with by the powering off CPU. Just soldered one in last weekend for a little experiment, but its really old tech. It likes a very clean power supply, otherwise it thinks the power is failing and disables the sram, which can be annoying... it has to be more sensitive to the supply voltage than any realistically connectable CPU would be, otherwise it might leave the CPU connected to the SRAM while the CPU is in low voltage bonkers mode thus defeating the purpose of having a backup...
One of the minor mfgrs, maybe DS don't remember, used to sell a big and chunky DIP package with a lithium watch battery and associated hardware that was plug compatible with traditional sram except it had an almost magic 10 year battery backup. That was over a decade ago and I remember it was a PITA when they all started croaking. There is a way to dremel the package open and stick a new battery inside, supposedly anyway.
No need for the VR hardware BS, just ask a DM / GM about how their players behave after leveling up. In fact you need a correction factor for "3 dimensional thinking" vs "2 dimensional thinking". Think how cranky Kahn was in ST:2 and his legendary two-dimensional thinking.
I think you need to correct the study for happiness, although how you'd do it without bias is a mystery. Its probably easy to half ass it, like most soft sciences.
Hey/. UK people is that true or false? In the US our unfilled job position news reports are lies, all lies. If there really are 0.1M job openings in the UK I'd think I'd have heard about it.
Oxidized stuff is kind of vague, chemically speaking. I'd love to look at the real paper (as opposed to the journalist interpretation) but I can't gain access. Just spins. Donno if its a free paper or paywall time.
Organic compounds containing oxygen... well, its been 20 years but are they talking about organic acids or ketones or aldehydes or alcohols or some freaky epoxides (that would be a WTF for sure). Doesn't have to be exclusive could be any mix of course.
I'm not a petroleum engineer but I play one on/. After cooking a million years underground I would think any trapped O2 would turn into water and CO2 as opposed to halfway stuff, so this indicates bioavailability after it leaked out... in other words its already half eaten up.
Seems like everyone is implying that US Citizens are too dump to do STEM
Too smart to do STEM. You'll end up $100K in debt unemployable past age XYZ due to ageism, any position in industry is gonna get outsourced probably to employees of the foreigners in your CS program (in america your boss in industry will be an art history BA degree holder, making twice as much as you might I add, not a foreign PHD). The good news is although we massively overproduce PHDs there are job openings at that level for like maybe 20% of them, so there's at least a chance you'll get a PHD level job when you're done. Small, but a chance.
I've "forbidden" my kids from going into STEM weirdly enough the school is all about STEM initiatives. As if there's going to be any STEM jobs in the entire country in 20 years LOL. May as well open a textile worker program and maybe an auto assembly line worker program while they're at it, LOL. As a life skill its handy, as a career its useless, but as an educational tool to encourage critical thinking, its not bad. Kind of the USA's version of how every (mid to upper class) kid in England had to learn Latin and Greek to teach them logic and reasoning, not because its a very useful career skill.
There is a balance. We feel free to bomb anywhere on the world, its only fair we provide free.edu anywhere on the world. It balances out, sorta kinda not really.
One very good reason to use a license is its liability disclaimer.
This is denial of service technique #2 that anyone with a little money can use to bankrupt or destroy or at least profit off anyone with less money who posts unlicensed code to github.
Lets say I am a bored unemployed lawyer or somehow have some "edge" where I can prosecute cheaper than the author can defend. All I need is to file a lawsuit blaming the code for something bad, doesn't matter if its true or even likely, that will cost an absolute minimum of $X to defend against. Then offer a pre-trial settlement to the author where I'll drop charges for $X-delta. As long as my cost to file a lawsuit is less than $X-delta (which is likely) I profit.
With a reasonable liability disclaimer $X is probably "laugh them out of the courtroom range" like 3 digits, maybe less. Without a disclaimer there is a reasonable chance of loss (after all, if you didn't want liability, why didn't you say so?) and its gonna cost a lot.
If I'm a mega corporation merely out to destroy someone, then I don't even need to profit off the transaction, I just need the perceived value of my vitrol to exceed the cost of a lawsuit.
(DOS technique #1 above was basically licensing and stealing the unlicensed code)
You are free to copy that software down for your own use if someone uploaded it to github.
That makes no sense at all. Thought experiment, I upload microsoft windows to github/vlm then you magically have a license to download and use it, just because it was on github.
There's an interesting hack you can do against unlicensed / unattributed code. Slap your name on it, now tell github to stop violating your copyright and remove "your" code from their server that someone else stole and uploaded. After all, the original author didn't care enough about his work to put a license on it, so you have a minor moral and ethical permission to take it as yours, after all, its abandonware, and if you no longer want your code distributed on github, well...
I imagine the trial would be hilarious.
"He stole my code and deleted it from my github account" "its not the plaintiffs code, the only known licensed version of it in the whole world is from the defendant. The plaintiff himself repeatedly stated the code he was publishing was not licensed, our position is the plaintiff stole the defendant's code, deleted the copyright and license from the headers, and uploaded it to his pirating account, which we shut down" "..."
This is like debating McDonalds vs Burger King in a story about a taco stand on main street that served 5 customers yesterday at lunch time. I think the three blackberry users still left are going to get annoyed at you guys for going off topic.
Slightly on topic I recently visited a Barnes and Noble and they have an entire section for "paranormal romance". No not a shelf, not a bookcase, a section of bookcases.
I wonder if trends over the decades have varied, like a graph of phone psychics in the olden days was low, then pretty high in the 80s/90s now low again (or is it?) vs a graph of vampire BS would seem to be an exponential growth over the last 20 years. Faith healers seem to have peaked in the 80s. What graphs would Randi draw?
Hanging out with the mythbusters would likely be hilarious. So they try to build an apparatus to remotely move stuff using magnets, and at the end of the show blow it up (because they always blow something up in every episode). Well that was a lame example but there must be some "myth" that would be amenable to being tested on mythbusters.
Ever work with others in the popular science / journalism community like the "bad astronomy" guy or bill nye (the science guy) or semi-famous real scientists and if so drop some commentary. Not reality show trash talking (unless you really want to, I guess) but do you have any interesting stories?
I ask all the "computer programmer" interview types for their proudest chunk of code, in your case I'm just asking for the coolest anecdote / story / bust / event. Not a one liner and not a novel, just a paragraph or so about the coolest most interesting single incident / anecdote you were involved in. Here's one paragraph on your coolest/favorite single incident.
Boeing managers should have made sure that those engineers from various suppliers do in fact talk to each other, and talk often.
If they put resources toward general contractor-type work that eliminates the whole purpose of outsourcing / eliminating the general contractor work. "We'll pay you guys to do it, but since you won't, we'll do it too, to save money"
Operating in direct opposition to the bosses new management style is probably career limiting.
Why? Assuming its a technical thing rather than a bunch of economic handwaving.
LiFe is deployed in general aviation and aviation grade batts are COTS from the usual aerospace suspects. I read up on that battery system yesterday, apparently that specific chemistry is pretty tough and something about a ceramic cell separator
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Your german experience is basically the USA "virgin mobile" experience, although there's a bunch of microscopically more expensive competitors. A couple years back I paid $20 for my new dumbphone and then used, on a long term average, around $8/month of minutes. Which was something like 80 minutes per month, which is a lot of talking. I believe the prices have risen somewhat to something like 25 cents per minute, but the phones are still about the cost of a restaurant lunch.
I got into the republic wireless beta over a year ago, its open to the public now I believe. I think I paid $200 for my phone and its been $20/month since then. So far no problems at all. That's why my dumbphone non-contract price data might be a little obsolete.
It is, however, impossible to get a phone heavily advertised on TV in the US or from a retail "cell phone store" for less than $100/mo or whatever. Those TV commercials and $2000/month storefront rentals cost a lot of money. In the old days people used to describe USA as the place where 1/2 the TV commercials were car commercials, but in the future we'll probably describe USA TV commercials as 1/3 or so cell phone ads. Endless self promotion costs a lot of money, mostly paid for at a rate of $120/month.
Whoops that would be $2880 for two years because you get a "free" phone. I keep forgetting about what a great deal you're getting with that "free" phone. It only cost you $2100 more than paying for it yourself. Kind of the ultimate subprime loan.
I've been prepaid / non-contract since the early 00s when I got sick of paying $80 for two dumbphones and switched to about $8/month/phone prepay. I think the business logic "big cell providers" use, is anyone dumb enough to sign a contract is dumb enough to be taken advantage of in pretty much any technically possible way. I mean how dumb do you have to be, to pay $120/month for two years for a $300 phone? Thats $3180. I'm getting the same service for a grand total of $780 over the two years (24*20+300). I'm sure I'll find some way to spend the $2400 I'll save merely by selecting an alternative billing method.
You drive one of the rare cars that actually requires high octane gas (turbo'd sportcar or whatever)
Your lawnmower works fine with low octane gas.
So you drive to the gas station, fill your little one gallon lawnmower gas can with the cheaper low octane gas. See on the bill that you are being charged for high octane gas. "Its company policy that if you have a car requiring high octane gas, we will charge you for high octane gas, no matter what you actually use or want". Finally, you can't go to an alternative gas station provider because you were dumb enough to sign a 2-year gasoline contract and there's only a handful of gas stations who collude WRT prices and services anyway.
Yeah I got some AC followup that the bad astronomer and him go way back, but my point was tell me an interesting story, not just "yeah we worked together"
The power consumption claims sound a lot more like plain old static ram, even older than 25 years.
In sleepy mode, a large sram draws a current low enough that there's no need to use anything bigger than a rechargeable AA battery, because the battery self draining current of an AA is already a multiple of the sram current so the battery will last almost as long as it would take to die on the shelf. Maybe shortening the "shelf life" by a couple hours or even a day.
Dallas Semiconductor makes a lot of interesting controllers for this task. Something like the DS1210 senses when the main power is shutting off, then it slams the sram its connected to into sleep mode and disables CPU access so it doesn't get messed with by the powering off CPU. Just soldered one in last weekend for a little experiment, but its really old tech. It likes a very clean power supply, otherwise it thinks the power is failing and disables the sram, which can be annoying... it has to be more sensitive to the supply voltage than any realistically connectable CPU would be, otherwise it might leave the CPU connected to the SRAM while the CPU is in low voltage bonkers mode thus defeating the purpose of having a backup...
One of the minor mfgrs, maybe DS don't remember, used to sell a big and chunky DIP package with a lithium watch battery and associated hardware that was plug compatible with traditional sram except it had an almost magic 10 year battery backup. That was over a decade ago and I remember it was a PITA when they all started croaking. There is a way to dremel the package open and stick a new battery inside, supposedly anyway.
No need for the VR hardware BS, just ask a DM / GM about how their players behave after leveling up. In fact you need a correction factor for "3 dimensional thinking" vs "2 dimensional thinking". Think how cranky Kahn was in ST:2 and his legendary two-dimensional thinking.
I think you need to correct the study for happiness, although how you'd do it without bias is a mystery. Its probably easy to half ass it, like most soft sciences.
100,000 unfilled IT jobs
Hey /. UK people is that true or false? In the US our unfilled job position news reports are lies, all lies. If there really are 0.1M job openings in the UK I'd think I'd have heard about it.
Oxidized stuff is kind of vague, chemically speaking. I'd love to look at the real paper (as opposed to the journalist interpretation) but I can't gain access. Just spins. Donno if its a free paper or paywall time.
Organic compounds containing oxygen... well, its been 20 years but are they talking about organic acids or ketones or aldehydes or alcohols or some freaky epoxides (that would be a WTF for sure). Doesn't have to be exclusive could be any mix of course.
I'm not a petroleum engineer but I play one on /. After cooking a million years underground I would think any trapped O2 would turn into water and CO2 as opposed to halfway stuff, so this indicates bioavailability after it leaked out... in other words its already half eaten up.
Seems like everyone is implying that US Citizens are too dump to do STEM
Too smart to do STEM. You'll end up $100K in debt unemployable past age XYZ due to ageism, any position in industry is gonna get outsourced probably to employees of the foreigners in your CS program (in america your boss in industry will be an art history BA degree holder, making twice as much as you might I add, not a foreign PHD). The good news is although we massively overproduce PHDs there are job openings at that level for like maybe 20% of them, so there's at least a chance you'll get a PHD level job when you're done. Small, but a chance.
I've "forbidden" my kids from going into STEM weirdly enough the school is all about STEM initiatives. As if there's going to be any STEM jobs in the entire country in 20 years LOL. May as well open a textile worker program and maybe an auto assembly line worker program while they're at it, LOL. As a life skill its handy, as a career its useless, but as an educational tool to encourage critical thinking, its not bad. Kind of the USA's version of how every (mid to upper class) kid in England had to learn Latin and Greek to teach them logic and reasoning, not because its a very useful career skill.
There is a balance. We feel free to bomb anywhere on the world, its only fair we provide free .edu anywhere on the world. It balances out, sorta kinda not really.
One very good reason to use a license is its liability disclaimer.
This is denial of service technique #2 that anyone with a little money can use to bankrupt or destroy or at least profit off anyone with less money who posts unlicensed code to github.
Lets say I am a bored unemployed lawyer or somehow have some "edge" where I can prosecute cheaper than the author can defend. All I need is to file a lawsuit blaming the code for something bad, doesn't matter if its true or even likely, that will cost an absolute minimum of $X to defend against. Then offer a pre-trial settlement to the author where I'll drop charges for $X-delta. As long as my cost to file a lawsuit is less than $X-delta (which is likely) I profit.
With a reasonable liability disclaimer $X is probably "laugh them out of the courtroom range" like 3 digits, maybe less. Without a disclaimer there is a reasonable chance of loss (after all, if you didn't want liability, why didn't you say so?) and its gonna cost a lot.
If I'm a mega corporation merely out to destroy someone, then I don't even need to profit off the transaction, I just need the perceived value of my vitrol to exceed the cost of a lawsuit.
(DOS technique #1 above was basically licensing and stealing the unlicensed code)
You are free to copy that software down for your own use if someone uploaded it to github.
That makes no sense at all. Thought experiment, I upload microsoft windows to github/vlm then you magically have a license to download and use it, just because it was on github.
There's an interesting hack you can do against unlicensed / unattributed code. Slap your name on it, now tell github to stop violating your copyright and remove "your" code from their server that someone else stole and uploaded. After all, the original author didn't care enough about his work to put a license on it, so you have a minor moral and ethical permission to take it as yours, after all, its abandonware, and if you no longer want your code distributed on github, well...
I imagine the trial would be hilarious.
"He stole my code and deleted it from my github account"
"its not the plaintiffs code, the only known licensed version of it in the whole world is from the defendant. The plaintiff himself repeatedly stated the code he was publishing was not licensed, our position is the plaintiff stole the defendant's code, deleted the copyright and license from the headers, and uploaded it to his pirating account, which we shut down"
"..."
If a company decides to use my code for mad moneys, good for them.
Actually its bad for them, very bad, because they can't prove they are allowed to use it.
This is like debating McDonalds vs Burger King in a story about a taco stand on main street that served 5 customers yesterday at lunch time. I think the three blackberry users still left are going to get annoyed at you guys for going off topic.
Slightly on topic I recently visited a Barnes and Noble and they have an entire section for "paranormal romance". No not a shelf, not a bookcase, a section of bookcases.
I wonder if trends over the decades have varied, like a graph of phone psychics in the olden days was low, then pretty high in the 80s/90s now low again (or is it?) vs a graph of vampire BS would seem to be an exponential growth over the last 20 years. Faith healers seem to have peaked in the 80s. What graphs would Randi draw?
Ultra short version: In your experience, whats the approximate crooks to nuts ratio? 50/50 or 10/90 or 90/10 ...
AC wants to hear about the groupies. I suppose if its a good story...
Hanging out with the mythbusters would likely be hilarious. So they try to build an apparatus to remotely move stuff using magnets, and at the end of the show blow it up (because they always blow something up in every episode). Well that was a lame example but there must be some "myth" that would be amenable to being tested on mythbusters.
Ever work with others in the popular science / journalism community like the "bad astronomy" guy or bill nye (the science guy) or semi-famous real scientists and if so drop some commentary. Not reality show trash talking (unless you really want to, I guess) but do you have any interesting stories?
I ask all the "computer programmer" interview types for their proudest chunk of code, in your case I'm just asking for the coolest anecdote / story / bust / event. Not a one liner and not a novel, just a paragraph or so about the coolest most interesting single incident / anecdote you were involved in. Here's one paragraph on your coolest/favorite single incident.
Ever done work, or seriously considered doing work against other money making fraud areas like financial / real estate / religion / politics?
Boeing managers should have made sure that those engineers from various suppliers do in fact talk to each other, and talk often.
If they put resources toward general contractor-type work that eliminates the whole purpose of outsourcing / eliminating the general contractor work. "We'll pay you guys to do it, but since you won't, we'll do it too, to save money"
Operating in direct opposition to the bosses new management style is probably career limiting.
Why? Assuming its a technical thing rather than a bunch of economic handwaving.
LiFe is deployed in general aviation and aviation grade batts are COTS from the usual aerospace suspects. I read up on that battery system yesterday, apparently that specific chemistry is pretty tough and something about a ceramic cell separator