What may be happening is that you are being probed to gauge the extent of exaggeration in the travel brochures. Most Americans are savvy enough to know that the brochures are exaggerated, but it is hard to know how much. And of course many Scots (through tourism promotion) are complicit in the distortion; those $5000 travel packages are a tough sell if Scotland seems just like the local neighborhood. Better to go to Italy, where everyone wears designer clothing all the time, or Ireland, where all the houses have thatched rooves.
Combine that with American-style ethnic identity, where intermarriage allows one to choose ethnicity from a whole menu of ancestry, and wearing plaid makes you Scottish. (And changing your name from the German Kohn to the Irish Kerry makes you....more electable, apparently.)
Not just size but also population and economic metrics. The size of California's economy, for example, sits neatly between UK & France. So, by implication, people should know were California is before they bother learning where France is.
But then nobody will ever learn to tell Wyoming & Colorado apart.
Beyond that, what incentive would someone in Germany have to know where Ohio is?
About as much as the incentive for a Ohioan (or Buckeye) to know where Schwabia is. Like the US, the Germans have a federal form of gov't, but with smaller states and proportional representation in the Reichstag, it is not as noticable.
Can any US people name even one of the Swiss canons?
They seemed to have fixed it now, but I was looking for locations of a CVS drugstore (maybe it was Rite-Aid), and their site blocked out non-IE browsers. My usual workaround is to google around the top level page, but this site locked out the Google webcrawler!
Not being indexed on Google might convince the PHB's.
I'm assuming you're using 8" floppies with this thing...
Heh, just scrapped an 8" floppy-based production test device about a year ago. The 8" stuff is actually more common now than 5" stuff. Embedded stuff stuck with the 8-inchers for reliability.
My RF test equipment uses 3.5" 1440k floppies, but it does have the short filename restriction (long names might be sorta clumsy on the small screen anyway). We have a laser system here (built in 1991..we bought it used for $50,000) that uses 3.5" floppies and runs CP/M. You may laugh at CP/M, but I'm sure glad they didn't use Windows/286!
The usual market for these things is low unit-volume embedded applications. They develop a protoype using garden-variety PC harware, then just swap out the hard drive for flash. The unit volume is too low to justify a hadware re-design.
You can "roll your own" flash storage, but then you have to do your own error correcting soft/hardware. Or you can get a module and dispense with cabling without having to re-work the system architecture, at the cost of spinning your own board layout. It's all a trade-off between development cost and price/performance.
To give a concrete example, sitting behind me on my lab bench is a piece of RF test equipment that, when new, cost as much as the mortgage on my first house. No USB drive. It does have an ethernet socket, but it is simpler to move data with the old floppy sneakernet. Because it is so expensive to replace, it is not unusual to see RF test equipment like this that was built in the 60's still in use. (RF test equipment never dies...it just circulates in HAM conventions forever.) So I fully expect this floppy-based item to still be dutifully gronking floppies when the college students on./ reach retirement age.
Besides a wear-leveling filesystem (which means you can't use ext3 or Reiser) these devices have error correcting code chips. As the bits wear out, the ECC detects it & segments are marked bad; the capacity declines as the flash cells wear out.
These days you can get your flash any way you want it. Flash that looks like memory, flash that looks like a disk (but is in a chip package), flash that plugs on an IDE cable, flash that plugs onto your motherboard's USB header. Great for certain embedded designs (do really want rotating media inside your Linux-powered combination gas pump / vending machine / WiFi hot spot?), but consumer stuff will probably sitck with roatating media for low cost-per-bit, or CF/SD cards for personal portability.
Schlotsky's is really a front for a Mafia money-laundering operation. That's why they need 500 IT guys, perferably with expereince in international banking software protocols, and inventory management for a drug company. The lunchroom has free imported South American Stimulants...coffee, plus that white powder....that you put in your coffee.
In terms of actual damage, 9/11 was a mosquito bite on the the US's massive politcal and economic strength. But because those attacks were so bold, so imaginative, and made such good camera fodder, it created the perception of vulnerability. That would encourage more attacks, all of which would be futile in the absence of the perception factor. The US could take a 9/11 type hit twice a year, and, militarily the Arab world would not move one iota closer to a return of the Caliphate. But the perception of it not being worth the fight could catch on, and the terrorists get what they want. It sure seems to have worked on the/. crowd.
So the Iraq war has everything to do with 9/11, to the extent that facing down Iraq buys street cred. So far, Bush has it. Whatever his other faults, when he said that puliing out "will not happen on my watch," hostages got released. Compare that to days of President Carter. So convincing is Bush's perception of power, that he could change the minds of terrorist actors to work within the nascent democratic systems. That, my dear fellow./ers, is impressive.
Or for that matter, other dino-based fuels. Gasoline can be made from coal for about $3 a gallon. The Candian tar sands contain as much oil as the middle east, but it is more dificult to extract. The oil sheiks know what price they can get for their oil, and set production just high enough that alternatives are unprofitable. They maximize the return on a fixed asset, pure & simple.
But if the political situation falls apart and oil production falls, the world economy will take a serious hit. This is why the US and the Saudis are so buddy-buddy. Of course the US hedges its bets with the strategic petroleum reserve, which has been buying despite record prices...
Well, the "beating up crowds on TV" comment is an oversimplification, but nevertheless, Brown v. Board came after a long line cases dating back to the 19-teens that chipped away at the legality of segregation. Those cases arguably got their popular impetus from well-publicized lynchings that date as far back 1899. And the abuses of segregation were precisely the sort of thing that the equal protection clause was supposed to prevent, so the legal arguments were easy.
Not that the court never surprises us with a sweeping ruling. That's what Roe v. Wade was. But it doesn't happen very often.
And no, you won't see a new case everytime a justice is replaced. The Supreme court takes only the cases it wants (except for the rare cases where it has original jurisdiction). They listen to a case once and then refuse similar cases for decades. They have bigger fish to fry.
My 5mx (actually Diamond Mako, the US version) just died. It appears to be a bum battery but I can't figure out how to open that bizarrely-hinged case. Though I keep a Palm IIIxe in my pocket all the time, my Psion always lived in my briefcase as a laptop substitute. With the IR modem (or even IR cellphone) it was a nice little email device and a passable web browser in a pinch.
Now I am faced with putting in real effort to fix it, scrounging one up on Ebay, or finding a new keyboarded PDA that is small and doesn't suck. In today's market you get either a Palm-like form factor, or a clamshell with laptop-like bettery life (and price). A true PDA with the hinge along the long axis permitted the wide screen and a passable chiclet keyboard. It was Psion's unique feature.
it shouldn't be too hard to come up with a Judge who will say so.
Not as easy as you think. Missouri, by popular vote, amended its state constitution to exclude gay marriage. Sure, the 9th Circuit would overturn that just for kicks (if they had jurisdiction there), but with legally enforced segregation pretty much dead, the Supreme Court has been establishing case law that defends federalism. You don't overturn a popular mandate as stong as that unless (as happened with segregation) you have the police beating up peaceful crowds on TV. Not if you value independence in the judiciary.
It looks to me like gay marriage will end up a perpetual mish-mash, much like adoption law, which varies from, "Here, have this kid," in Arkansas, to stacks of paperwork, 6 months of profiling and divining-the-future-that-you-will-never-become-abu sive in the Northeast. Some states permit non-resident adoptions and some don't (though all recognize adoptions once finalized).
First past the post acts as a stabilizer. For one candidate to get a majority is a high hurdle, so a strong vetting process evolves, which in the US is the two-party system. More extreme parties (like the European Fascist & Communist parties) can't make it past that hurdle. But on the minus side, exceptionally good candidates can't either.
On balance I would say the US system comes out ahead. The US system perpetuated slavery for way too long and that brought on a war that killed 600,000. But that pales next to the poorly vetted European fascists that brought us WWII.
You can (sorta) if you do it probabilistically. Everyone writes the name of the candidate they want on a piece of paper and then drop all the names into a really big hat....
Yes, they are, but patents are not as effective as a tool for producing customer lock-in as copyrights are. The reason for this is that patents require enablement. With the current state of copyright law, MS sells OS software and nobody knows what it does, so oops, you as a customer find yourself dependent on features that come from only one supplier, hence the customer is tricked into being locked-in. Patented features must be publicly disclosed in an understandable way (called enablement). That makes it harder to trick people. (It also makes SCO-like FUD more difficult, but that's another story.)
Also patents are harder to get than copyrights, so there are fewer of them. That reduces the accumulated weight of feature-dependency lock-in.
I don't mean to belittle engineers outside the US. For example, as an engineer, I have encountered people who can do such things as manually repair the wirebonds between a semiconductor device & its package. I have all the respect in the world for someone who can do that. But, for whatever reason, we don't call that engineering.
The situation uncannily reminds me of Apple in the early 90's. They were so fixated on competing with IBM that they never saw the real enemy was Microsoft.
The way things are going, MS could end up like the GE small appliance business. When Jack Welch was asked why he was selling the business even though GE toasters & irons had dominant market share, and thereby seeming to violate his rules of when to buy/sell a business, he answered that market dominance isn't worth anything if you don't get control. The business didn't have any ability to introduce new, more featureful products at higher margins; they were stuck competing on price like everyone else. In a like fashion Microsoft could end up maintaining dominant marketshare, but with Wine facilitating migration from their OS and open-source solutions running on top of their OS, they may wind up unable drive sales of any new profitable producs.
In the 80's, when everyone was expectng the Japanese to take over the world, the statistic that Japan graduated five times as many engineers as the US often got bantered about. What was pointed out less often is that the Japanese definition of an engineer was more broad than the US definition. Similarly, the free-tuition colleges of Europe make degrees more common, but the academic environment is less rigorous...more like an extra 4 years of High School. In the US, we call people "Operations managers" or "Technicians" and reserve the term Engineer to those who do design work.
I've since learned to take all figures comparing the number of US engineers vs the rest of the world with a grain of salt.
PE's are useless outside the civil engineering though. Among EE's they are paricularly scoffed at. The test for EIT certification is so incongruent with modern electrical engineering that even recent (or imminent) graduates take a separate course to master the material. EE's who feature PE's too prominently in their resumes are actually given less consideration than those who don't have them (or leave it off); the reasoning is that such a candidate is looking for a different sort of job than what most EE's do.
It is not impossible to work your way up to "real" engineering, with little to no formal education, even today. It does seem less common than 15 years ago, not that it was common even then. To do that you need to work in a large engineering organization for a long time, a work environment that becomes rarer with every passing year. Most who do that are ME's; I've heard of such EE's & ChemE's but never actually worked with one. I can't speak for CivE's but I suspect that it is rare gven the pevalence of PE certification.
Most EE's who get PE certification get it so they can
Advertize a consulting shop using the word engineer
Give expert testimony in court, in patent cases for example. Some go on to get a law degree and then really rake it in doing the most unrewarding work imaginable.
Be able to sign drawings for particuar sorts of government work.
But can "They" hang together enough to pull it off? It is a prisoner's dilemma. If all the bigwigs work together and keep the price down, the old boy's network survives and all of "Them" benefit. But if a significant fraction scoops up undervalued stock, the deserters win at the others' expense.
The classic solution to a prisoner's dilemma is to have some way for the group to enforce behavior on the individuals (this is why we have governments). How can "They" punish deserters or reward participants?
I suppose there is a happy medium in there, mixing some hand-operated functions for formatting control and disambiguation hints, with voice for "bulk" text input. But it is definitely more complicated than sticking a mic onto a PC and adding 4 million lines of software. As you mention, new interface hardware will have to be invented, and user training, or at least a change in user habits, will be required.
Re:When did the Communists take over outer space?
on
Lawyers In Space...
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· Score: 1
If you must know I'm not a huge fan of Limbaugh. At his best he is a popularizer of some of the conservatives' better ideas, and a deflater of some of the left's more self-serving conceits, but he lacks the depth of analysis to keep me interested for long. To his credit, however, he is very careful about his facts. I cited him simply because he had a retelling of Bradford's account on a high google-ranked page.
Moore on the other hand, is a pure demogouge and misrepresents facts all the time. He uses his skill with the camera to create imagery that impedes rational thought. Phooey on him.
Slashdot Mirror
What may be happening is that you are being probed to gauge the extent of exaggeration in the travel brochures. Most Americans are savvy enough to know that the brochures are exaggerated, but it is hard to know how much. And of course many Scots (through tourism promotion) are complicit in the distortion; those $5000 travel packages are a tough sell if Scotland seems just like the local neighborhood. Better to go to Italy, where everyone wears designer clothing all the time, or Ireland, where all the houses have thatched rooves.
Combine that with American-style ethnic identity, where intermarriage allows one to choose ethnicity from a whole menu of ancestry, and wearing plaid makes you Scottish. (And changing your name from the German Kohn to the Irish Kerry makes you....more electable, apparently.)
But then nobody will ever learn to tell Wyoming & Colorado apart.
Beyond that, what incentive would someone in Germany have to know where Ohio is?
About as much as the incentive for a Ohioan (or Buckeye) to know where Schwabia is. Like the US, the Germans have a federal form of gov't, but with smaller states and proportional representation in the Reichstag, it is not as noticable.
Can any US people name even one of the Swiss canons?
Not being indexed on Google might convince the PHB's.
I'm assuming you're using 8" floppies with this thing...
Heh, just scrapped an 8" floppy-based production test device about a year ago. The 8" stuff is actually more common now than 5" stuff. Embedded stuff stuck with the 8-inchers for reliability.
My RF test equipment uses 3.5" 1440k floppies, but it does have the short filename restriction (long names might be sorta clumsy on the small screen anyway). We have a laser system here (built in 1991..we bought it used for $50,000) that uses 3.5" floppies and runs CP/M. You may laugh at CP/M, but I'm sure glad they didn't use Windows/286!
The usual market for these things is low unit-volume embedded applications. They develop a protoype using garden-variety PC harware, then just swap out the hard drive for flash. The unit volume is too low to justify a hadware re-design.
You can "roll your own" flash storage, but then you have to do your own error correcting soft/hardware. Or you can get a module and dispense with cabling without having to re-work the system architecture, at the cost of spinning your own board layout. It's all a trade-off between development cost and price/performance.
To give a concrete example, sitting behind me on my lab bench is a piece of RF test equipment that, when new, cost as much as the mortgage on my first house. No USB drive. It does have an ethernet socket, but it is simpler to move data with the old floppy sneakernet. Because it is so expensive to replace, it is not unusual to see RF test equipment like this that was built in the 60's still in use. (RF test equipment never dies...it just circulates in HAM conventions forever.) So I fully expect this floppy-based item to still be dutifully gronking floppies when the college students on ./ reach retirement age.
These days you can get your flash any way you want it. Flash that looks like memory, flash that looks like a disk (but is in a chip package), flash that plugs on an IDE cable, flash that plugs onto your motherboard's USB header. Great for certain embedded designs (do really want rotating media inside your Linux-powered combination gas pump / vending machine / WiFi hot spot?), but consumer stuff will probably sitck with roatating media for low cost-per-bit, or CF/SD cards for personal portability.
Schlotsky's is really a front for a Mafia money-laundering operation. That's why they need 500 IT guys, perferably with expereince in international banking software protocols, and inventory management for a drug company. The lunchroom has free imported South American Stimulants...coffee, plus that white powder....that you put in your coffee.
Perception matters.
In terms of actual damage, 9/11 was a mosquito bite on the the US's massive politcal and economic strength. But because those attacks were so bold, so imaginative, and made such good camera fodder, it created the perception of vulnerability. That would encourage more attacks, all of which would be futile in the absence of the perception factor. The US could take a 9/11 type hit twice a year, and, militarily the Arab world would not move one iota closer to a return of the Caliphate. But the perception of it not being worth the fight could catch on, and the terrorists get what they want. It sure seems to have worked on the /. crowd.
So the Iraq war has everything to do with 9/11, to the extent that facing down Iraq buys street cred. So far, Bush has it. Whatever his other faults, when he said that puliing out "will not happen on my watch," hostages got released. Compare that to days of President Carter. So convincing is Bush's perception of power, that he could change the minds of terrorist actors to work within the nascent democratic systems. That, my dear fellow ./ers, is impressive.
Or for that matter, other dino-based fuels. Gasoline can be made from coal for about $3 a gallon. The Candian tar sands contain as much oil as the middle east, but it is more dificult to extract. The oil sheiks know what price they can get for their oil, and set production just high enough that alternatives are unprofitable. They maximize the return on a fixed asset, pure & simple.
But if the political situation falls apart and oil production falls, the world economy will take a serious hit. This is why the US and the Saudis are so buddy-buddy. Of course the US hedges its bets with the strategic petroleum reserve, which has been buying despite record prices...
Well, the "beating up crowds on TV" comment is an oversimplification, but nevertheless, Brown v. Board came after a long line cases dating back to the 19-teens that chipped away at the legality of segregation. Those cases arguably got their popular impetus from well-publicized lynchings that date as far back 1899. And the abuses of segregation were precisely the sort of thing that the equal protection clause was supposed to prevent, so the legal arguments were easy.
Not that the court never surprises us with a sweeping ruling. That's what Roe v. Wade was. But it doesn't happen very often.
And no, you won't see a new case everytime a justice is replaced. The Supreme court takes only the cases it wants (except for the rare cases where it has original jurisdiction). They listen to a case once and then refuse similar cases for decades. They have bigger fish to fry.
My 5mx (actually Diamond Mako, the US version) just died. It appears to be a bum battery but I can't figure out how to open that bizarrely-hinged case. Though I keep a Palm IIIxe in my pocket all the time, my Psion always lived in my briefcase as a laptop substitute. With the IR modem (or even IR cellphone) it was a nice little email device and a passable web browser in a pinch.
Now I am faced with putting in real effort to fix it, scrounging one up on Ebay, or finding a new keyboarded PDA that is small and doesn't suck. In today's market you get either a Palm-like form factor, or a clamshell with laptop-like bettery life (and price). A true PDA with the hinge along the long axis permitted the wide screen and a passable chiclet keyboard. It was Psion's unique feature.
it shouldn't be too hard to come up with a Judge who will say so.
Not as easy as you think. Missouri, by popular vote, amended its state constitution to exclude gay marriage. Sure, the 9th Circuit would overturn that just for kicks (if they had jurisdiction there), but with legally enforced segregation pretty much dead, the Supreme Court has been establishing case law that defends federalism. You don't overturn a popular mandate as stong as that unless (as happened with segregation) you have the police beating up peaceful crowds on TV. Not if you value independence in the judiciary.
It looks to me like gay marriage will end up a perpetual mish-mash, much like adoption law, which varies from, "Here, have this kid," in Arkansas, to stacks of paperwork, 6 months of profiling and divining-the-future-that-you-will-never-become-abu sive in the Northeast. Some states permit non-resident adoptions and some don't (though all recognize adoptions once finalized).
First past the post acts as a stabilizer. For one candidate to get a majority is a high hurdle, so a strong vetting process evolves, which in the US is the two-party system. More extreme parties (like the European Fascist & Communist parties) can't make it past that hurdle. But on the minus side, exceptionally good candidates can't either.
On balance I would say the US system comes out ahead. The US system perpetuated slavery for way too long and that brought on a war that killed 600,000. But that pales next to the poorly vetted European fascists that brought us WWII.
You can (sorta) if you do it probabilistically. Everyone writes the name of the candidate they want on a piece of paper and then drop all the names into a really big hat....
Patents are a problem
Yes, they are, but patents are not as effective as a tool for producing customer lock-in as copyrights are. The reason for this is that patents require enablement. With the current state of copyright law, MS sells OS software and nobody knows what it does, so oops, you as a customer find yourself dependent on features that come from only one supplier, hence the customer is tricked into being locked-in. Patented features must be publicly disclosed in an understandable way (called enablement). That makes it harder to trick people. (It also makes SCO-like FUD more difficult, but that's another story.)
Also patents are harder to get than copyrights, so there are fewer of them. That reduces the accumulated weight of feature-dependency lock-in.
I don't mean to belittle engineers outside the US. For example, as an engineer, I have encountered people who can do such things as manually repair the wirebonds between a semiconductor device & its package. I have all the respect in the world for someone who can do that. But, for whatever reason, we don't call that engineering.
The problem is: Linux isn't their enemy
The situation uncannily reminds me of Apple in the early 90's. They were so fixated on competing with IBM that they never saw the real enemy was Microsoft.
The way things are going, MS could end up like the GE small appliance business. When Jack Welch was asked why he was selling the business even though GE toasters & irons had dominant market share, and thereby seeming to violate his rules of when to buy/sell a business, he answered that market dominance isn't worth anything if you don't get control. The business didn't have any ability to introduce new, more featureful products at higher margins; they were stuck competing on price like everyone else. In a like fashion Microsoft could end up maintaining dominant marketshare, but with Wine facilitating migration from their OS and open-source solutions running on top of their OS, they may wind up unable drive sales of any new profitable producs.
In the 80's, when everyone was expectng the Japanese to take over the world, the statistic that Japan graduated five times as many engineers as the US often got bantered about. What was pointed out less often is that the Japanese definition of an engineer was more broad than the US definition. Similarly, the free-tuition colleges of Europe make degrees more common, but the academic environment is less rigorous...more like an extra 4 years of High School. In the US, we call people "Operations managers" or "Technicians" and reserve the term Engineer to those who do design work.
I've since learned to take all figures comparing the number of US engineers vs the rest of the world with a grain of salt.
PE's are useless outside the civil engineering though. Among EE's they are paricularly scoffed at. The test for EIT certification is so incongruent with modern electrical engineering that even recent (or imminent) graduates take a separate course to master the material. EE's who feature PE's too prominently in their resumes are actually given less consideration than those who don't have them (or leave it off); the reasoning is that such a candidate is looking for a different sort of job than what most EE's do.
It is not impossible to work your way up to "real" engineering, with little to no formal education, even today. It does seem less common than 15 years ago, not that it was common even then. To do that you need to work in a large engineering organization for a long time, a work environment that becomes rarer with every passing year. Most who do that are ME's; I've heard of such EE's & ChemE's but never actually worked with one. I can't speak for CivE's but I suspect that it is rare gven the pevalence of PE certification.
Most EE's who get PE certification get it so they can
Do synthetic benchmark writers optimize for Intel
Given the history of the industry, I would more suspect the reverse, that the processor is tweaked to the benchmark.
But can "They" hang together enough to pull it off? It is a prisoner's dilemma. If all the bigwigs work together and keep the price down, the old boy's network survives and all of "Them" benefit. But if a significant fraction scoops up undervalued stock, the deserters win at the others' expense.
The classic solution to a prisoner's dilemma is to have some way for the group to enforce behavior on the individuals (this is why we have governments). How can "They" punish deserters or reward participants?
I suppose there is a happy medium in there, mixing some hand-operated functions for formatting control and disambiguation hints, with voice for "bulk" text input. But it is definitely more complicated than sticking a mic onto a PC and adding 4 million lines of software. As you mention, new interface hardware will have to be invented, and user training, or at least a change in user habits, will be required.
If you must know I'm not a huge fan of Limbaugh. At his best he is a popularizer of some of the conservatives' better ideas, and a deflater of some of the left's more self-serving conceits, but he lacks the depth of analysis to keep me interested for long. To his credit, however, he is very careful about his facts. I cited him simply because he had a retelling of Bradford's account on a high google-ranked page.
Moore on the other hand, is a pure demogouge and misrepresents facts all the time. He uses his skill with the camera to create imagery that impedes rational thought. Phooey on him.