what can a drone do that a well placed spy satellite can't?
Get a low-angle view in your windows, doors, under your hat, into your car. Change its viewing angle and position on command. Be dedicated to one task: watching you. Deliver payloads locally. Follow you. Acquire imagery of you that is of vastly greater resolution than a satellite can, in visible, illuminated or emissive IR, or even at terahertz (naked) wavelengths. Be used as a ballistic weapon. Carry chemical sensors (for instance, looking for Cannabis smoke or other vapors of interest.) Carry extremely sensitive directional microphones. Carry equipment that can read your LCD monitor's screen from behind opaque walls and etc. Cost very little by comparison to a satellite. Much more easily available to task to you by comparison to a satellite.
Any of those, or combinations of those, of concern?
who doesn't want pizza delivered by a small helicopter hovering out your apartment window.
Perhaps if you took a little time and learned how slashdot actually functions, the smell of fish would resolve itself as being actually the smell of your own ignorance. Those articles are visible before they are published in several ways, some paid, some not. It's trivial to prepare a response ready to go when an article goes live. If you pay attention. Or, you can wallow in conspiracy theories. Ball's in your court.
They're not taking heat for doing better. They're taking heat because they're the most influential. Hence, they are the natural vector if one wishes to impose one's will upon a client company of theirs.
Quite aside from that, there are a lot of ways this can go wrong: I hope no one actually thinks that because these people are being compensated in a particular manner, that they don't deserve to have those jobs. Because that is a real potential of complaining about sweatshops, etc... instead of a few bucks in their pockets, the workers can end up outside a shuttered business, jobless, hungry and worse.
It's always dicey when the citizens of one country decide they want to "do something" about working conditions in another country. It's never a matter of "just fixing things." There are economic balances at work, and no matter how good one's intentions might be (I should qualify that as by one's own lights), odds are good that damage will be taken by the very people who are the target of the "help."
what exactly in the text of the Qur'an makes you label it as "science fiction"?
Well for one thing, the claim that there is a god is an SF/fantasy element. It's a claim without any backing in the secular world -- no evidence, etc., so it's either based on outright fantasy or it is based on natural law we don't get, one or the other. Which one is the case, I leave as an exercise for the reader, lol.
Koran: (Qur'an if you really want to be snippy about Romanization, which is sort of pointless, but I digress.) Quoting the Penguin translation by Dawood, sura 56 verses 12- 39: "They shall recline on jewelled couches face to face, and there shall wait on them immortal youths with bowls and ewers and a cup of purest wine (that will neither pain their heads nor take away their reason); with fruits of their own choice and flesh of fowls that they relish. And theirs shall be the dark-eyed houris, chaste as hidden pearls: a guerdon for their deeds... We created the houris and made them virgins, loving companions for those on the right hand..."
That whole life after death thing, not to mention the described life after death existance as flesh-and-blood... yeah, I'm quite comfortable calling that SF/fantasy. As far as we know now, based on every bit of evidence we've been able to gather, you die, you're completely gone. No virgins, no succulent fowl, no visits with supernatural figures. Any other description of the process is an exercise in imagination (to be kind.)
Careful, FoolishOwl, observe my post's mods -- the religious nutbars have mod points tonight, lol. Guess I offended the believers in Odin or something.
The NT/OT, the Koran, Hindu legends, etc... these far predate Frankenstein, and even if you subscribe to one of them as the literal truth, that means the other(s) are science fiction by definition. And then there are the Greek myths, the Norse myths... all featuring technology beyond that of the population (and as we've been told by well regarded recent SF authors, any sufficiently advanced technology is often regarded as magic.) Now, personally, I'd put these in the fantasy realm more often than the SF realm, modern SF is rarely free of fantasy elements these days, and I suspect that when most people say science fiction, they actually mean fantasy... there's little to no requirement for the 1940's vision of scientific extrapolation or theory-based test for reasonableness.
No, the GPL *is* different in that regard, specifically because if the GPL'd object is modified in any way, that modification has to be passed on to your competitors, which is a stop-dead problem for any business that isn't based upon simply servicing the object. Which is to say, most of them.
I'm talking about objects like that do X, but need Y added to them; source code for X that one would wish to embed in one's own code, etc.
GPL is fine if you're free-in and free-out. It's *not* fine if you are trying to pay salaries, and hope to do so into the future from continuing income off these same projects.
Even worse is his baseless assertion that GPL is a "box of landmines" and unsuitable for commercial use. Obviously, Google disagrees with this,
And you'll note that in fact, Google makes its money off of its search and advertising undertakings, neither of which are open source. While its open-source projects cost it money (of which it has plenty due to the aforementioned closed source efforts, so that's ok.)
Thinking about this from the viewpoint of the opposing commander, I'd make this thing the first target. Why? Because the soldier, initially free from carrying some part of their current 100 lb load because of the LS3, will then have to shoulder (whatever is left of) the load -- and they won't have the correct pack, harness, etc. to do it, so it will slow them down even more than the original state of packing the 100 lbs prior to the advent of the LS3. Not to mention that shooting at the LS3 will probably put some highly inconvenient holes in the soldier's equipment.
A properly configured mobile force -- at the individual combatant level -- carries everything it needs in an optimally loaded manner. Start adding in support vehicles -- autonomous or piloted -- and what you have done is put the soldier's supplies at risk, and therefore, likely the mission as well.
OTOH, these would be great in civilian roles. With a decent muffler system...
I just signed up for 100mbit cable internet that costs less than my old ISDN line.
Yeah, and at 4am local, you might even get 100 mb. In the evening, when all the other cable subscribers are on, getting 100mb is going to be quite unlikely. Cable companies, just like phone companies, habitually oversell their capacity.
Well, the first step is to get the HR department out of the equation. They have no idea what a competent engineer is.
The second step is to read the resumes for actual engineering achievements -- not degrees, not certificates, not CE credits, not age, not "I know VB" or "I studied computer science" but things like "I designed the widget you see in the whatsit made by whosit." Look for evidence of the skills you need, not for boilerplate.
Then for goodness sake have a series of engineers talk to them. Not some useless HR weenie. See what they say after talking to the candidate. Don't use tests or "trick questions", like those cluetards at Google do; talk *design*, see if they have the skillsets you need. Most engineering is careful, meticulous work, and a shitload of it, work that arises from already knowing what is required to solve most problems, not frigging puzzle-solving. If you're doing RF, can they intelligently discuss RF issues? If we're talking microwave, have the "plumbing" PC board discussion, that'll winnow out the pretenders. If you're doing microcontrollers, do they know their way around a macro assembler, understand how to design an RF-quiet PCB, do they blink when you start talking about fan out, do they have decent choices or metrics for a micro for a proposed job... how much time have they spent in front of a spectrum analyzer? A scope? A logic analyzer? If you need FCC certification, have they paid their dues there? What about UL? What about supplier choices? Do they know how to second- (and third-, etc.) source design components and fabs so you don't end up hung out to dry by a bottleneck in a supply chain? Is your work math heavy? Not all engineering is, and sometimes it can all be calculator-fu. But there are tasks where you specifically need a mathhead, and if you have one of those, you'd better figure that into the interview. I ran into a programmer a year or two ago that, while really quite skillful in many ways, didn't understand the advantage of working with 1.0 normalized math... these are the kind of things you might need to watch for, or not, depending on what you're doing. In the end, "engineering" covers such a broad scope - even just in EE - that it's crazy to either try to find someone who knows everything, or assume that some college has stuffed some kid with everything they need to know as if the student was a jelly donut.
So there's a lot of questions that end up being specific to various areas of endeavor, and your engineers will know just what to ask -- and what *not* to ask. But I guarantee you that your HR people won't. Let the HR people do the selection and you'll probably end up with someone who has a really pretty degree and is no more than a new teaching load on your department.
The reality is simply this: finding good people in the tech sector is very hard.
You are either completely full of shit, or you have no idea where to look, which means you're incompetent for the position you claim to hold, or the "requirements" you've been given are ridiculous.
This country is crawling with highly skilled engineers. I *never* had a problem finding anyone in the last ten years, ever. Of course, I was willing to pay them what they were worth, and I was also able to properly evaluate them prior to hiring them. No HR department, and anyone that tried to suggest "saving money" on engineering costs got kicked in the shins.
Beancounters see salary and associated costs, and nothing else. And that view rewards them next quarter after a replacement with many dollars. Later in the year, when the second hire has to be made, the beancounter's sole reaction will be to make sure it's the cheapest person they can find -- and there is no realization that the entire cost came from the beancounter's error in the first place.
There are age-related costs you can't control. Insurance is one of them. Declining health is another. Kids are often another. The mortgage an older person usually has is another. Sometimes an actual age-predjudice exists; we've heard many reports of ageism out of companies we know well in the last few years. "The kids" sometimes don't play well with older folks.
Beancounters set policy based on those sorts of things in order to push short term results to the front of the importance queue, and HR executes those policies by winnowing the resume stack up front based on age unless someone actively steps in, which is unlikely these days.
I'm not defending these practices -- I think the people implementing them should be shot for incompetence -- but that's the way it usually works.
Speaking as a guy who just retired from running a tech company, yes, it is. In the EE realm, with which I am most familiar, the experienced guy has been through the FCC testing rigamarole and can just be sent off to do it without supervision -- and he'll come back with a product that passed, because he knew what the requirements were when he designed it.
The experienced guy knows all the suppliers; knows where to call for what components; knows to check for multiple sources and to avoid single source vulnerabilities if at all possible; has written in programming languages A..M and when presented with N, can learn it in very little time, whereas New EE Guy knows languages L,M and N and is absolutely clueless when it comes to maintaining product X's assembly code written in F, nor has he the depth needed to pick it up, and the product design with all its little foibles, that the experienced guy has.
The experienced guy has tons of product experience and puts that to work for you every time a new design is required. New EE guy will probably get caught asking your techs questions instead of educating them. The experienced guy knows that the GPL is a box of landmines, and that it must be avoided at all costs; New EE Guy is likely to walk around for quite some time proclaiming open source is great before he actually understands that the company needs to make money and needs to retain the technology to do so exclusively for as long as possible in order to to pay him.
The experienced EE can do a myriad of things; interview new hires (if you let HR do this, you're already half way to screwed, frankly) he can answer questions at any level from customer to any tier of technical support, he can actually *resolve* problems and in minutes because he's familiar with your products (if you kept him on... if he's experienced but a new hire to you, his benefit is he will learn them a lot faster.) The experienced guy probably even knows a lot about things he wasn't directly involved with, by a sort of office osmosis... people talk about the biz, especially if they're well compensated and treated well, and a synergy arises that New EE Guy simply can't roll into blind.
New EE guy has a limited number of tools in his "toolbox" and very little, if any, experience employing them. The experienced guy has enormous depth and is likely to solve any given problem faster, better, and more to the company's long term benefit than the New EE guy can.
Yes, the experienced EE costs more for insurance, deserves (doesn't always get) higher compensation, should have accrued more vacation time, probably has kids... he or she costs more, all right, but you get so much more it's an obvious decision if the goal is for the company to do well in the long run.
If, however, the goal is to appease myopic beancounters about the upcoming quarter... yeah, that experienced guy is getting replaced by New EE Guy, the bottom line looks better for a few months, and future products will have to look after themselves. And looking at the state of today's US tech companies, with the notable exception of Apple... I can't say I'm surprised at all. By and large, they are reaping what they have sown.
Having said all that, companies still need New EE Guy. but not as a means to kick out some experienced fellow; you want the new guy hired ten years or more before the experienced guy is going to retire so he can learn FROM the experienced guy, and then, when Really Experienced Guy retires, New EE Guy isn't New EE Guy any more, he is Experienced Guy.
If you don't invest in the future, you won't fucking have a future. Company executives should inscribe that on a bat and beat the damned beancounters over the head with it on a regular basis. Figuratively speaking.
This is a distinction without a difference. If the government wants to search you, they can, by the laws they have written. Saying "but the dogcatcher can't" doesn't resolve or ameliorate the problem.
Either we are fully protected by the 4th amendment, or we aren't. And we aren't. The constitution no longer constrains the government. End of story.
lol. I apologize if I *ever* gave you the impression that we should have "appeased the Muslims." I have said, multiple times and in multiple ways, that when an actor attacks our country, we should step on them. Hard.
Yes, of course we should have responded to the Saudi/Muslim 9/11 attack. Attacking Iraq, which had nothing to do with it, and Afghanistan, which had very little to do with it, were just sops to the ignorant; the attacks were sourced from Saudi Arabia, carried out by Saudis, funded by Saudis (including the training camps in Afghanistan), done in the name of a religion that emanates from Saudi Arabia, and which is the state religion of Saudi Arabia, according to the precepts written in the "holy book" of that religion, and at the behest of Islamic religious authorities specifically because they believe what they read in that same book.
That may, frankly, not be enough for you; it certainly wasn't enough for our government, but our government was directly controlled by oil interests through lobbyists and led by an oil executive at the time of the attack, so that's no particular surprise. We're free of the oil executive at the moment, but not the lobbyists.
Further, crushing US citizen's rights and liberties via the Patriot act was no more than a transparent power-grab, in many ways in direct and flagrant violation of the constitution that serves as the government's basic right to exist. Not to mention failing to address the actual problem in any useful way.
Of course, if you are one of those that thinks otherwise, you are entitled to your opinion, That doesn't change mine.
Slashdot Mirror
Get a low-angle view in your windows, doors, under your hat, into your car. Change its viewing angle and position on command. Be dedicated to one task: watching you. Deliver payloads locally. Follow you. Acquire imagery of you that is of vastly greater resolution than a satellite can, in visible, illuminated or emissive IR, or even at terahertz (naked) wavelengths. Be used as a ballistic weapon. Carry chemical sensors (for instance, looking for Cannabis smoke or other vapors of interest.) Carry extremely sensitive directional microphones. Carry equipment that can read your LCD monitor's screen from behind opaque walls and etc. Cost very little by comparison to a satellite. Much more easily available to task to you by comparison to a satellite.
Any of those, or combinations of those, of concern?
I want this instead, only staffed by Hooters.
Check out the ballistic characteristics of a .222 round topping a 50 V-Max cartidge. You'll be most cheered, I suspect. tl;dr? Still going 1471 fps at 500 yards (1500 feet.) Inexpensive round, inexpensive rifle.
Orwell was an optimist.
Perhaps if you took a little time and learned how slashdot actually functions, the smell of fish would resolve itself as being actually the smell of your own ignorance. Those articles are visible before they are published in several ways, some paid, some not. It's trivial to prepare a response ready to go when an article goes live. If you pay attention. Or, you can wallow in conspiracy theories. Ball's in your court.
They're not taking heat for doing better. They're taking heat because they're the most influential. Hence, they are the natural vector if one wishes to impose one's will upon a client company of theirs.
Quite aside from that, there are a lot of ways this can go wrong: I hope no one actually thinks that because these people are being compensated in a particular manner, that they don't deserve to have those jobs. Because that is a real potential of complaining about sweatshops, etc... instead of a few bucks in their pockets, the workers can end up outside a shuttered business, jobless, hungry and worse.
It's always dicey when the citizens of one country decide they want to "do something" about working conditions in another country. It's never a matter of "just fixing things." There are economic balances at work, and no matter how good one's intentions might be (I should qualify that as by one's own lights), odds are good that damage will be taken by the very people who are the target of the "help."
Thanks for making my exact point -- again. Dumbass. :)
Check out these examples of James P Hogan's work: Thrice Upon A Time, The Genesis Machine, The Two Faces of Tomorrow, Endgame Enigma.
All, as I recall anyway, good SF in the classic sense: science extrapolated or conformed.
Well for one thing, the claim that there is a god is an SF/fantasy element. It's a claim without any backing in the secular world -- no evidence, etc., so it's either based on outright fantasy or it is based on natural law we don't get, one or the other. Which one is the case, I leave as an exercise for the reader, lol.
Koran: (Qur'an if you really want to be snippy about Romanization, which is sort of pointless, but I digress.) Quoting the Penguin translation by Dawood, sura 56 verses 12- 39: "They shall recline on jewelled couches face to face, and there shall wait on them immortal youths with bowls and ewers and a cup of purest wine (that will neither pain their heads nor take away their reason); with fruits of their own choice and flesh of fowls that they relish. And theirs shall be the dark-eyed houris, chaste as hidden pearls: a guerdon for their deeds... We created the houris and made them virgins, loving companions for those on the right hand..."
That whole life after death thing, not to mention the described life after death existance as flesh-and-blood... yeah, I'm quite comfortable calling that SF/fantasy. As far as we know now, based on every bit of evidence we've been able to gather, you die, you're completely gone. No virgins, no succulent fowl, no visits with supernatural figures. Any other description of the process is an exercise in imagination (to be kind.)
Careful, FoolishOwl, observe my post's mods -- the religious nutbars have mod points tonight, lol. Guess I offended the believers in Odin or something.
The NT/OT, the Koran, Hindu legends, etc... these far predate Frankenstein, and even if you subscribe to one of them as the literal truth, that means the other(s) are science fiction by definition. And then there are the Greek myths, the Norse myths... all featuring technology beyond that of the population (and as we've been told by well regarded recent SF authors, any sufficiently advanced technology is often regarded as magic.) Now, personally, I'd put these in the fantasy realm more often than the SF realm, modern SF is rarely free of fantasy elements these days, and I suspect that when most people say science fiction, they actually mean fantasy... there's little to no requirement for the 1940's vision of scientific extrapolation or theory-based test for reasonableness.
No, the GPL *is* different in that regard, specifically because if the GPL'd object is modified in any way, that modification has to be passed on to your competitors, which is a stop-dead problem for any business that isn't based upon simply servicing the object. Which is to say, most of them.
I'm talking about objects like that do X, but need Y added to them; source code for X that one would wish to embed in one's own code, etc.
GPL is fine if you're free-in and free-out. It's *not* fine if you are trying to pay salaries, and hope to do so into the future from continuing income off these same projects.
And you'll note that in fact, Google makes its money off of its search and advertising undertakings, neither of which are open source. While its open-source projects cost it money (of which it has plenty due to the aforementioned closed source efforts, so that's ok.)
If that thing couldn't hunker down just about flat, it wouldn't last more than about ten seconds on the battlefield.
And you can eat them, as was commonly done in warfare in the past.
Thinking about this from the viewpoint of the opposing commander, I'd make this thing the first target. Why? Because the soldier, initially free from carrying some part of their current 100 lb load because of the LS3, will then have to shoulder (whatever is left of) the load -- and they won't have the correct pack, harness, etc. to do it, so it will slow them down even more than the original state of packing the 100 lbs prior to the advent of the LS3. Not to mention that shooting at the LS3 will probably put some highly inconvenient holes in the soldier's equipment.
A properly configured mobile force -- at the individual combatant level -- carries everything it needs in an optimally loaded manner. Start adding in support vehicles -- autonomous or piloted -- and what you have done is put the soldier's supplies at risk, and therefore, likely the mission as well.
OTOH, these would be great in civilian roles. With a decent muffler system...
"Bill them from orbit..."
Yeah, and at 4am local, you might even get 100 mb. In the evening, when all the other cable subscribers are on, getting 100mb is going to be quite unlikely. Cable companies, just like phone companies, habitually oversell their capacity.
Underwear beat a city? WTF?
Well, the first step is to get the HR department out of the equation. They have no idea what a competent engineer is.
The second step is to read the resumes for actual engineering achievements -- not degrees, not certificates, not CE credits, not age, not "I know VB" or "I studied computer science" but things like "I designed the widget you see in the whatsit made by whosit." Look for evidence of the skills you need, not for boilerplate.
Then for goodness sake have a series of engineers talk to them. Not some useless HR weenie. See what they say after talking to the candidate.
Don't use tests or "trick questions", like those cluetards at Google do; talk *design*, see if they have the skillsets you need. Most engineering is careful, meticulous work, and a shitload of it, work that arises from already knowing what is required to solve most problems, not frigging puzzle-solving. If you're doing RF, can they intelligently discuss RF issues? If we're talking microwave, have the "plumbing" PC board discussion, that'll winnow out the pretenders. If you're doing microcontrollers, do they know their way around a macro assembler, understand how to design an RF-quiet PCB, do they blink when you start talking about fan out, do they have decent choices or metrics for a micro for a proposed job... how much time have they spent in front of a spectrum analyzer? A scope? A logic analyzer? If you need FCC certification, have they paid their dues there? What about UL? What about supplier choices? Do they know how to second- (and third-, etc.) source design components and fabs so you don't end up hung out to dry by a bottleneck in a supply chain? Is your work math heavy? Not all engineering is, and sometimes it can all be calculator-fu. But there are tasks where you specifically need a mathhead, and if you have one of those, you'd better figure that into the interview. I ran into a programmer a year or two ago that, while really quite skillful in many ways, didn't understand the advantage of working with 1.0 normalized math... these are the kind of things you might need to watch for, or not, depending on what you're doing. In the end, "engineering" covers such a broad scope - even just in EE - that it's crazy to either try to find someone who knows everything, or assume that some college has stuffed some kid with everything they need to know as if the student was a jelly donut.
So there's a lot of questions that end up being specific to various areas of endeavor, and your engineers will know just what to ask -- and what *not* to ask. But I guarantee you that your HR people won't. Let the HR people do the selection and you'll probably end up with someone who has a really pretty degree and is no more than a new teaching load on your department.
You are either completely full of shit, or you have no idea where to look, which means you're incompetent for the position you claim to hold, or the "requirements" you've been given are ridiculous.
This country is crawling with highly skilled engineers. I *never* had a problem finding anyone in the last ten years, ever. Of course, I was willing to pay them what they were worth, and I was also able to properly evaluate them prior to hiring them. No HR department, and anyone that tried to suggest "saving money" on engineering costs got kicked in the shins.
Yes, exactly, precisely, perfectly on-target.
Beancounters see salary and associated costs, and nothing else. And that view rewards them next quarter after a replacement with many dollars. Later in the year, when the second hire has to be made, the beancounter's sole reaction will be to make sure it's the cheapest person they can find -- and there is no realization that the entire cost came from the beancounter's error in the first place.
There are age-related costs you can't control. Insurance is one of them. Declining health is another. Kids are often another. The mortgage an older person usually has is another. Sometimes an actual age-predjudice exists; we've heard many reports of ageism out of companies we know well in the last few years. "The kids" sometimes don't play well with older folks.
Beancounters set policy based on those sorts of things in order to push short term results to the front of the importance queue, and HR executes those policies by winnowing the resume stack up front based on age unless someone actively steps in, which is unlikely these days.
I'm not defending these practices -- I think the people implementing them should be shot for incompetence -- but that's the way it usually works.
Speaking as a guy who just retired from running a tech company, yes, it is. In the EE realm, with which I am most familiar, the experienced guy has been through the FCC testing rigamarole and can just be sent off to do it without supervision -- and he'll come back with a product that passed, because he knew what the requirements were when he designed it.
The experienced guy knows all the suppliers; knows where to call for what components; knows to check for multiple sources and to avoid single source vulnerabilities if at all possible; has written in programming languages A..M and when presented with N, can learn it in very little time, whereas New EE Guy knows languages L,M and N and is absolutely clueless when it comes to maintaining product X's assembly code written in F, nor has he the depth needed to pick it up, and the product design with all its little foibles, that the experienced guy has.
The experienced guy has tons of product experience and puts that to work for you every time a new design is required. New EE guy will probably get caught asking your techs questions instead of educating them. The experienced guy knows that the GPL is a box of landmines, and that it must be avoided at all costs; New EE Guy is likely to walk around for quite some time proclaiming open source is great before he actually understands that the company needs to make money and needs to retain the technology to do so exclusively for as long as possible in order to to pay him.
The experienced EE can do a myriad of things; interview new hires (if you let HR do this, you're already half way to screwed, frankly) he can answer questions at any level from customer to any tier of technical support, he can actually *resolve* problems and in minutes because he's familiar with your products (if you kept him on... if he's experienced but a new hire to you, his benefit is he will learn them a lot faster.) The experienced guy probably even knows a lot about things he wasn't directly involved with, by a sort of office osmosis... people talk about the biz, especially if they're well compensated and treated well, and a synergy arises that New EE Guy simply can't roll into blind.
New EE guy has a limited number of tools in his "toolbox" and very little, if any, experience employing them. The experienced guy has enormous depth and is likely to solve any given problem faster, better, and more to the company's long term benefit than the New EE guy can.
Yes, the experienced EE costs more for insurance, deserves (doesn't always get) higher compensation, should have accrued more vacation time, probably has kids... he or she costs more, all right, but you get so much more it's an obvious decision if the goal is for the company to do well in the long run.
If, however, the goal is to appease myopic beancounters about the upcoming quarter... yeah, that experienced guy is getting replaced by New EE Guy, the bottom line looks better for a few months, and future products will have to look after themselves. And looking at the state of today's US tech companies, with the notable exception of Apple... I can't say I'm surprised at all. By and large, they are reaping what they have sown.
Having said all that, companies still need New EE Guy. but not as a means to kick out some experienced fellow; you want the new guy hired ten years or more before the experienced guy is going to retire so he can learn FROM the experienced guy, and then, when Really Experienced Guy retires, New EE Guy isn't New EE Guy any more, he is Experienced Guy.
If you don't invest in the future, you won't fucking have a future. Company executives should inscribe that on a bat and beat the damned beancounters over the head with it on a regular basis. Figuratively speaking.
This is a distinction without a difference. If the government wants to search you, they can, by the laws they have written. Saying "but the dogcatcher can't" doesn't resolve or ameliorate the problem.
Either we are fully protected by the 4th amendment, or we aren't. And we aren't. The constitution no longer constrains the government. End of story.
lol. I apologize if I *ever* gave you the impression that we should have "appeased the Muslims." I have said, multiple times and in multiple ways, that when an actor attacks our country, we should step on them. Hard.
Yes, of course we should have responded to the Saudi/Muslim 9/11 attack. Attacking Iraq, which had nothing to do with it, and Afghanistan, which had very little to do with it, were just sops to the ignorant; the attacks were sourced from Saudi Arabia, carried out by Saudis, funded by Saudis (including the training camps in Afghanistan), done in the name of a religion that emanates from Saudi Arabia, and which is the state religion of Saudi Arabia, according to the precepts written in the "holy book" of that religion, and at the behest of Islamic religious authorities specifically because they believe what they read in that same book.
That may, frankly, not be enough for you; it certainly wasn't enough for our government, but our government was directly controlled by oil interests through lobbyists and led by an oil executive at the time of the attack, so that's no particular surprise. We're free of the oil executive at the moment, but not the lobbyists.
Further, crushing US citizen's rights and liberties via the Patriot act was no more than a transparent power-grab, in many ways in direct and flagrant violation of the constitution that serves as the government's basic right to exist. Not to mention failing to address the actual problem in any useful way.
Of course, if you are one of those that thinks otherwise, you are entitled to your opinion, That doesn't change mine.