Seriously, the services have nothing to offer IT-education wise. Don't join for that!
Here's my rundown of the 5 branches, and a disclaimer: I was in the Navy, 72-76, on a carrier mostly in Japan and around the far East, and had a great time.
Navy, and at sea, for an adventure none of the others can match. That old slogan really was true (It's not just a job, it's an adventure). Pick a rating which goes to sea on destroyers (radioman, quartermaster, supply, etc) and transfer after two years to a carrier. Get one Pacific ship and the other Mediterranean.
Navy, shore based. A joke. What's the point of joining a sea service and not going to sea?
Navy, if married. Forget it. Sea duty ain't for newlyweds.
Marines. If you want to join the MILITARY, this is it. Again, make sure you at least get one sea tour.
Air Force. I used to think the Air Force would be better technical education wise, but have talked to enough people who knew both and said otherwise. So I personally think the Air Force is just a ho-hum choice; nothing marks it special.
Army. Ditto; nothing to make it special.
Coast Guard. The only one which actually does anything every day other than train. If you want the satisfaction of doing something real every day, like search and rescue, this is it. A plus for many is short sea stays and stateside duty.
To sum it up, if you want to do something you will always remember and will never be able to do after you're married and settled down, join the Navy and make double damned sure you go to sea all four years. Do it for the adventure, not for what you might learn. If you think you might want to make a career of the service, join the Coast Guard. If you simply like military pomp, join the Marines. If you want to join a boring corporation, join the Air Force or Army.
You will never get another chance like those four years, so make the most of it AS AN ADVENTURE.
Think about it: the military has no use for programmers or hardware engineers. That's what industry does. The military is about bodies and weapons, not about IT. Any military job is there to support the guys in trenches.
There are NO such parachutes. Let's do some real simple calcs. I believe a standard human parachute is 28 feet in diameter, for a human weighing 200 pounds. A fully loaded 747 is around 800,000 pounds, 4000 times as much. Let's see, square root of 4000 is roughly 64, and 64 * 28 = 1770 feet -- ONE KILOMETER!
Are you so nuts as to think that practical?
And do you think it could be deployed at several hundred miles an hour without shredding?
Dropping an egg is one thing, an airline entirely difefrent. A egg has a pretty low terminal air velocity because of the weight per surface area. Comparing this to an airliner is like saying an ant can fall safely, why can't humans? Even cats have a sufficiently low terminal velocity that once they fall past 10 stories or so, they don't fall any faster, and they still don't have a great survival rate. Let's give that cat the density of an airliner and see what happens to the terminal velocity.
Now as to material. The HMS Sheffield DID NOT BURN due to aluminum. It burned because the Exocet has an explosive warhead which scattered and ignited the remaining rocket fuel. It was not a giant inescapable fireball. Jeez, your hyperbole is incredible.
It's easy enough for you to worry about aluminum burning, but what does that have to do with airliners burning? Hey! It's the FUEL that explodes and burns, not the structure! Maybe we should all fly naked too, so our clothes won't contribute to the fire.
As for arbitrarily increasing the weight by getting rid of aluminum, common sense ought to inform you that they use expensive materials for a reason. Don't you think that if they could make heavier cheaper planes that they would? There's no secret airplane cabal conspiring to jack up the prices just to keep the bauxite miners employed. Man, they fret over new seat materials to save a pound per seat.
As for airplane design not being the brightest ideas out there, sounds to me like they've got you beat at any rate.
A bunch of posters haven't bothered to read the article and wonder why the MPAA etc don't clobber them. This card encrypts using its serial number, so it can only be played back by itself. If this encryption and decryption happens in the hardware, it might not be feasible to reverse engineer it and get the raw stream.
Jeez, why does everybody parrot the guy's original error in his web page?
Is the DMCA so accepted that no one remebers what it stands for any more?
First minute free is NOT ubiquitous in the US
on
GPS Meets PCS
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· Score: 3, Informative
In fact, when I bought a new Sprint PCS phone a year ago, that business went away when I switched to a newer plan.
It's my understanding that common practice in Europe (and Japan?) is no charge for incoming calls. It sure ain't so here. I figure they are going to get a certain price per minute, whether they double the Tx charge or have separate Tx and Rx charges. BUT, again as I understand it, Eurpoean practice is that land lines charge by the minute too, so there's no big discrepancy. In the US, however, local landline calls are unlimited with the basic monthly plan, so a landline call to a cell phone makes it hard to charge the Tx end. There is NO WAY the US regulatory bodies would allow Tx surcharges for landline calls to cellphones. Customers would howl bloody murder!
Think of a hypothetical new law outlawing unsafe toys (kids might swallow parts, etc.). There may well be such a law already, but let's ignore that for now:-)
Now one way to craft such a law would eb to define in detail what harmful means. For instance, where I live, the rule for deck and stair railings is that a 4.5 inch (I think) ball can't pass through, on the grounds that you don't want small toddlers toddling over the deck edge.
However, for kids toys, there are so many variables (squishy? strange shaped? sharp?) that any such alw owuld be pretty complex, and would need constant revision as new hazards were discovered (not chemically inert, too rough,...). And you know there would be companies taking advantage of these loopholes and lawyers all too willing to back them up.
I believe that's how France's Napoleonic Code works.
What English-based countries have is Common Law. The law itself is vague, and prcedent sets the details. The end result is the same. Think of precedent as minor revisions of the law in the spirit of the legislature's wisdom.
I personally like common law slightly better. It is more amenable to bogus precedent, but legislatures can come back and clarify what they meant. The main benefit is that precedent is subject to higher court appeal, so any precedent outside the scope of the legislature's intent is generall discarded sooner or later. Meanwhile, the legislature doesn't feel the urge to revise laws quite so often, thus lessening the temptation to change the law altogether in bizarre ways.
Not that I find fault with it, but Lethyos has just as much to gain from posting his comment as we readers ourselves. Lethyos will gain a great deal of press and attention, whether or not his comment is highly moderated.
Yada yada yada. What a ridiculous comment! of COURSE both people gain from the deal! What else COULD there be -- Would you feel better if someone were holding a gun to Mr. Keker's head? Or if he had been drafted with the alternative a prison sentence?
And who the heck are you to say this lawyer doesn't support "our" causes? What causes would that be? Your cause? My cause? How about Dmitri's cause? Maybe Mr. Keker supports the cause of stopping Big Brother?
Good gosh, get a new hat -- your head's so swelled up you'll need a custom size.
I don't waste time calling it GNU/Linux either, but at least I understand his point. It's not the amoount of software involved, it's the fact that it uses the GPL, and that the FSF was *the* pioneer in enforcing free software (as opposed to open source).
So many people continue to harp on how other software makes a bigger part of any distro that I can only assume that they have blinders on and do not want to admit that he has a point, at least from his point of view. I think they just want to bash RMS and the hell with needing a valid reason.
Depends on your definition of "quality"
on
MenuetOS Debuts
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· Score: 2
If your definition means extremely well optimized at the expense of long dev time and completely unportable, so be it.
Indy cars have exceptional quality for that particular track; aren't they even optimized for left hand turns? But most people would choose to own a well done street car.
The parallels in dev time and portability say enough.
Suppose a Russian company offered you, an American, a Russion salary. Would you laugh at them, or accept?
If the Russian programmer accepted the deal, why is it any of your concern? If he's making the Russian equivalent of what an American would make here, and has what he considers a good enough life style, what makes it any of your business?
It's their contract, not yours. Show he was forced at gunpoint to work cheap or shut up.
A bunch of smarties think they are oh so clever by pointing out that without power, internet access is kinda useless.
Hey dudes, some people have UPS power backup, others have propane genarators. That's not just homes. There are businesses in the area too. And it's not just inside out. Maybe others who still have power want to access a computer inside the blackout area.
Somehow the idea of government enforced intellectual property doesn't strike me as quite the libertarian philosophy. Maybe you have decided to overlook that patents and copyrights were deemed a necessary evil only for limited periods and expressly against the wish of Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers.
IP is theft from the people. It was accepted by some of the founding fathers as an exception to the first amendment (free speech). It was not, and is not, universally accepted as proper.
The theory that anything Intellectual can be Property is a far cry from naturally scarce physical goods being Property.
If you want to bring up that old chestnut about pharmaceuticals needing to recover their R&D costs, why not also mention that the typical marketing costs of new drugs are higher than the R&D costs? Surely any truly marvelous new drug would not need such exorbitant marketing.
Why not also wonder at the exorbitant tests necessitated by that non-libertarian entity otherwise known as the FDA, somewhat in self defense against ridiculous lawsuits? Surely there's a lot of money to be saved here in exchange for the small loss that whiners would have to accept some of the risk that a potential life-saving drug might have side effects.
Why not also wonder at those pharmaceuticals who stretch out the patent lifetime with bogus lawsuits against the generic manufacturers?
Why not also wonder at those pharmaceuticals who dream up trivial new uses for those drugs so they can delay the entry of generic equivalents?
If one found it, others could too
on
Hotmail Hacked
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· Score: 2
What you seem to be saying is that if the people hadn't reported it / found it, there would be no problem. This seems to imply you think they are the only ones capable of finding this particular hole.
So if I see a dangerous condition -- say, a truck moving down the highway with a flat tire falling to pieces, or a leaking gasoline tank, or a fallen power line, or a boat coming unmoored, or a building with loose masonry, or a bad pothole, any number of things -- if I see any of these, rather than warn the public of the danger, better I should leave a note for the owner, who may be off on vacation and won't respond for several weeks? Am I supposed to be so worried that some lunatic might throw a match into the leaking gasoline that I say nothing at all?
I think you need to bury your head in the sand a bit deeper, instead of surfacing now and then to say such silly things.
There are fine reasons to think there is about 10 times the matter out there than can be seen, such as galaxies could not rotate as they do without more mass. Theory my ass, it's standard calculations, nothing tricky. in fact, one could even go so far as to say that EVIDENCE requires the extra mass, and they are bending theories to fit the evidence.
Suit was brought against the parent UK paper in the UK, and if the American reporter who was an agent for the UK paper had not "voluntarily" taken the article off his personal web site, the settlement owuld have cost the UK paper more.
They are playing the STOCK MARKET. They buy stocks according to the various submissions, gradually weed out the bad performers, and end up making a pile, with which they can pay the prize and still have a tidy profit.
Most PC users don't get a choice. SPARC users don't get a choice. Don't know about IBM systems, nor HP. But anyone who installs BSD or Linux has made a choice, and can make another one if it doesn't work out.
I'd guess it's pretty important to him. If the rafter dude doesn't think that's important, maybe that's the problem, and maybe he ought to stew in jail for a while far away from home.
In the early 1970s, at the Cal Computer Club, we had a 10 year old Univac SS-90, which had lots of little circuit cards, each having one or a very few AND or OR gates, etc. (Been a long time, these details escape me!) We wired in new instructions, modded existing instructions, disabled old instructions.
Not too may computers since then you could do that to.
Shall I complain about the demise of computers you could REALLY hack?
Should farts older than me complain that the SS-90 was a piss-poor imitation of a computer where you could hack individual AND and OR gates?
Keerist, things change. Get on with what you CAN do. Hack what levels are important, which is not the guts of a box any more, it's how the boxes are connected, and the software that drives them. And 20 years from now it will be a higher aspect. That's the way things work.
--
Your attitude is what's wrong with NASA
on
Movies in Space?
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· Score: 1
This attitude that you know what's best, that you should decide what belongs in space and what doesn't. I quote you:
I am stunned and appalled that SpaceHab would stoop to this
as if there is something wrong with somebody else wanting to do something.
We'd probably have single stage to orbit, orbital hotels, cheap transport to orbit, and maybe even a start on a moon colony if it weren't for NASA's holier than thou attitude. They have blocked so much private enterprise that we ought to rename them the new communists. A bunch of damned puritans protecting their turf, better keep it expensive and to ourselves than cheap and let just anybody in.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, the services have nothing to offer IT-education wise. Don't join for that!
Here's my rundown of the 5 branches, and a disclaimer: I was in the Navy, 72-76, on a carrier mostly in Japan and around the far East, and had a great time.
Navy, and at sea, for an adventure none of the others can match. That old slogan really was true (It's not just a job, it's an adventure). Pick a rating which goes to sea on destroyers (radioman, quartermaster, supply, etc) and transfer after two years to a carrier. Get one Pacific ship and the other Mediterranean.
Navy, shore based. A joke. What's the point of joining a sea service and not going to sea?
Navy, if married. Forget it. Sea duty ain't for newlyweds.
Marines. If you want to join the MILITARY, this is it. Again, make sure you at least get one sea tour.
Air Force. I used to think the Air Force would be better technical education wise, but have talked to enough people who knew both and said otherwise. So I personally think the Air Force is just a ho-hum choice; nothing marks it special.
Army. Ditto; nothing to make it special.
Coast Guard. The only one which actually does anything every day other than train. If you want the satisfaction of doing something real every day, like search and rescue, this is it. A plus for many is short sea stays and stateside duty.
To sum it up, if you want to do something you will always remember and will never be able to do after you're married and settled down, join the Navy and make double damned sure you go to sea all four years. Do it for the adventure, not for what you might learn. If you think you might want to make a career of the service, join the Coast Guard. If you simply like military pomp, join the Marines. If you want to join a boring corporation, join the Air Force or Army.
You will never get another chance like those four years, so make the most of it AS AN ADVENTURE.
Think about it: the military has no use for programmers or hardware engineers. That's what industry does. The military is about bodies and weapons, not about IT. Any military job is there to support the guys in trenches.
Musta been thinking 1620 meters per mile, got it backwards. Duh.
Well, it's still way too damned big to be practical.
Offhand (a damn good place for it! :-), I'd say you answered your own question by posting....
There are NO such parachutes. Let's do some real simple calcs. I believe a standard human parachute is 28 feet in diameter, for a human weighing 200 pounds. A fully loaded 747 is around 800,000 pounds, 4000 times as much. Let's see, square root of 4000 is roughly 64, and 64 * 28 = 1770 feet -- ONE KILOMETER!
Are you so nuts as to think that practical?
And do you think it could be deployed at several hundred miles an hour without shredding?
Dropping an egg is one thing, an airline entirely difefrent. A egg has a pretty low terminal air velocity because of the weight per surface area. Comparing this to an airliner is like saying an ant can fall safely, why can't humans? Even cats have a sufficiently low terminal velocity that once they fall past 10 stories or so, they don't fall any faster, and they still don't have a great survival rate. Let's give that cat the density of an airliner and see what happens to the terminal velocity.
Now as to material. The HMS Sheffield DID NOT BURN due to aluminum. It burned because the Exocet has an explosive warhead which scattered and ignited the remaining rocket fuel. It was not a giant inescapable fireball. Jeez, your hyperbole is incredible.
It's easy enough for you to worry about aluminum burning, but what does that have to do with airliners burning? Hey! It's the FUEL that explodes and burns, not the structure! Maybe we should all fly naked too, so our clothes won't contribute to the fire.
As for arbitrarily increasing the weight by getting rid of aluminum, common sense ought to inform you that they use expensive materials for a reason. Don't you think that if they could make heavier cheaper planes that they would? There's no secret airplane cabal conspiring to jack up the prices just to keep the bauxite miners employed. Man, they fret over new seat materials to save a pound per seat.
As for airplane design not being the brightest ideas out there, sounds to me like they've got you beat at any rate.
I want AC's message up there for all posterity. Maybe I will capture it and make it my root picture.
In addition, it eliminates the concepts of files and folders, opting instead for child-parent relationships between any data stores.
Doesn't sound too hard to make up a traditional ftp repository.
A bunch of posters haven't bothered to read the article and wonder why the MPAA etc don't clobber them. This card encrypts using its serial number, so it can only be played back by itself. If this encryption and decryption happens in the hardware, it might not be feasible to reverse engineer it and get the raw stream.
Not D-C-M-A
Jeez, why does everybody parrot the guy's original error in his web page?
Is the DMCA so accepted that no one remebers what it stands for any more?
In fact, when I bought a new Sprint PCS phone a year ago, that business went away when I switched to a newer plan.
It's my understanding that common practice in Europe (and Japan?) is no charge for incoming calls. It sure ain't so here. I figure they are going to get a certain price per minute, whether they double the Tx charge or have separate Tx and Rx charges. BUT, again as I understand it, Eurpoean practice is that land lines charge by the minute too, so there's no big discrepancy. In the US, however, local landline calls are unlimited with the basic monthly plan, so a landline call to a cell phone makes it hard to charge the Tx end. There is NO WAY the US regulatory bodies would allow Tx surcharges for landline calls to cellphones. Customers would howl bloody murder!
Think of a hypothetical new law outlawing unsafe toys (kids might swallow parts, etc.). There may well be such a law already, but let's ignore that for now :-)
...). And you know there would be companies taking advantage of these loopholes and lawyers all too willing to back them up.
Now one way to craft such a law would eb to define in detail what harmful means. For instance, where I live, the rule for deck and stair railings is that a 4.5 inch (I think) ball can't pass through, on the grounds that you don't want small toddlers toddling over the deck edge.
However, for kids toys, there are so many variables (squishy? strange shaped? sharp?) that any such alw owuld be pretty complex, and would need constant revision as new hazards were discovered (not chemically inert, too rough,
I believe that's how France's Napoleonic Code works.
What English-based countries have is Common Law. The law itself is vague, and prcedent sets the details. The end result is the same. Think of precedent as minor revisions of the law in the spirit of the legislature's wisdom.
I personally like common law slightly better. It is more amenable to bogus precedent, but legislatures can come back and clarify what they meant. The main benefit is that precedent is subject to higher court appeal, so any precedent outside the scope of the legislature's intent is generall discarded sooner or later. Meanwhile, the legislature doesn't feel the urge to revise laws quite so often, thus lessening the temptation to change the law altogether in bizarre ways.
Not that I find fault with it, but Lethyos has just as much to gain from posting his comment as we readers ourselves. Lethyos will gain a great deal of press and attention, whether or not his comment is highly moderated.
Yada yada yada. What a ridiculous comment! of COURSE both people gain from the deal! What else COULD there be -- Would you feel better if someone were holding a gun to Mr. Keker's head? Or if he had been drafted with the alternative a prison sentence?
And who the heck are you to say this lawyer doesn't support "our" causes? What causes would that be? Your cause? My cause? How about Dmitri's cause? Maybe Mr. Keker supports the cause of stopping Big Brother?
Good gosh, get a new hat -- your head's so swelled up you'll need a custom size.
I don't waste time calling it GNU/Linux either, but at least I understand his point. It's not the amoount of software involved, it's the fact that it uses the GPL, and that the FSF was *the* pioneer in enforcing free software (as opposed to open source).
So many people continue to harp on how other software makes a bigger part of any distro that I can only assume that they have blinders on and do not want to admit that he has a point, at least from his point of view. I think they just want to bash RMS and the hell with needing a valid reason.
If your definition means extremely well optimized at the expense of long dev time and completely unportable, so be it.
Indy cars have exceptional quality for that particular track; aren't they even optimized for left hand turns? But most people would choose to own a well done street car.
The parallels in dev time and portability say enough.
Suppose a Russian company offered you, an American, a Russion salary. Would you laugh at them, or accept?
If the Russian programmer accepted the deal, why is it any of your concern? If he's making the Russian equivalent of what an American would make here, and has what he considers a good enough life style, what makes it any of your business?
It's their contract, not yours. Show he was forced at gunpoint to work cheap or shut up.
They are worried about somone taking 24 business days off in a row, with no one to cover that area. I doubt it's much to do with the money.
A bunch of smarties think they are oh so clever by pointing out that without power, internet access is kinda useless.
Hey dudes, some people have UPS power backup, others have propane genarators. That's not just homes. There are businesses in the area too. And it's not just inside out. Maybe others who still have power want to access a computer inside the blackout area.
Somehow the idea of government enforced intellectual property doesn't strike me as quite the libertarian philosophy. Maybe you have decided to overlook that patents and copyrights were deemed a necessary evil only for limited periods and expressly against the wish of Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers.
IP is theft from the people. It was accepted by some of the founding fathers as an exception to the first amendment (free speech). It was not, and is not, universally accepted as proper.
The theory that anything Intellectual can be Property is a far cry from naturally scarce physical goods being Property.
If you want to bring up that old chestnut about pharmaceuticals needing to recover their R&D costs, why not also mention that the typical marketing costs of new drugs are higher than the R&D costs? Surely any truly marvelous new drug would not need such exorbitant marketing.
Why not also wonder at the exorbitant tests necessitated by that non-libertarian entity otherwise known as the FDA, somewhat in self defense against ridiculous lawsuits? Surely there's a lot of money to be saved here in exchange for the small loss that whiners would have to accept some of the risk that a potential life-saving drug might have side effects.
Why not also wonder at those pharmaceuticals who stretch out the patent lifetime with bogus lawsuits against the generic manufacturers?
Why not also wonder at those pharmaceuticals who dream up trivial new uses for those drugs so they can delay the entry of generic equivalents?
What you seem to be saying is that if the people hadn't reported it / found it, there would be no problem. This seems to imply you think they are the only ones capable of finding this particular hole.
So if I see a dangerous condition -- say, a truck moving down the highway with a flat tire falling to pieces, or a leaking gasoline tank, or a fallen power line, or a boat coming unmoored, or a building with loose masonry, or a bad pothole, any number of things -- if I see any of these, rather than warn the public of the danger, better I should leave a note for the owner, who may be off on vacation and won't respond for several weeks? Am I supposed to be so worried that some lunatic might throw a match into the leaking gasoline that I say nothing at all?
I think you need to bury your head in the sand a bit deeper, instead of surfacing now and then to say such silly things.
There are fine reasons to think there is about 10 times the matter out there than can be seen, such as galaxies could not rotate as they do without more mass. Theory my ass, it's standard calculations, nothing tricky. in fact, one could even go so far as to say that EVIDENCE requires the extra mass, and they are bending theories to fit the evidence.
Suit was brought against the parent UK paper in the UK, and if the American reporter who was an agent for the UK paper had not "voluntarily" taken the article off his personal web site, the settlement owuld have cost the UK paper more.
The article is still available online elsewhere.
Next time, read the article, chump.
They are playing the STOCK MARKET. They buy stocks according to the various submissions, gradually weed out the bad performers, and end up making a pile, with which they can pay the prize and still have a tidy profit.
Wish I'd thought of it!
Most PC users don't get a choice. SPARC users don't get a choice. Don't know about IBM systems, nor HP. But anyone who installs BSD or Linux has made a choice, and can make another one if it doesn't work out.
I'd guess it's pretty important to him. If the rafter dude doesn't think that's important, maybe that's the problem, and maybe he ought to stew in jail for a while far away from home.
--
In the early 1970s, at the Cal Computer Club, we had a 10 year old Univac SS-90, which had lots of little circuit cards, each having one or a very few AND or OR gates, etc. (Been a long time, these details escape me!) We wired in new instructions, modded existing instructions, disabled old instructions.
Not too may computers since then you could do that to.
Shall I complain about the demise of computers you could REALLY hack?
Should farts older than me complain that the SS-90 was a piss-poor imitation of a computer where you could hack individual AND and OR gates?
Keerist, things change. Get on with what you CAN do. Hack what levels are important, which is not the guts of a box any more, it's how the boxes are connected, and the software that drives them. And 20 years from now it will be a higher aspect. That's the way things work.
--
This attitude that you know what's best, that you should decide what belongs in space and what doesn't. I quote you:
I am stunned and appalled that SpaceHab would stoop to this
as if there is something wrong with somebody else wanting to do something.
We'd probably have single stage to orbit, orbital hotels, cheap transport to orbit, and maybe even a start on a moon colony if it weren't for NASA's holier than thou attitude. They have blocked so much private enterprise that we ought to rename them the new communists. A bunch of damned puritans protecting their turf, better keep it expensive and to ourselves than cheap and let just anybody in.
Paaahhh!
--