People who do have the skill sets did (do) exist in the labor force, they are simply not captured by BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) data sets. If they are disgruntled, the economic term for those no longer looking for work in their and/or any field, they aren't counted. If they are working in another job category, they are not counted. If they have opted for early retirement, they are not counted. One of my specializations in economics is econometrics and there are a heck of a lot of ways to not get counted. I know. I'm not counted as one of those systems engineers/analysts;-).
As for the dearth of engineering students, if you actually go and examine our college and university curricula and compare them to the skills needed in engineering disciplines, they are intentionally designed to drastically reduce the number of candidates in their programs at any one time even during times of rapidly increasing salaries and low unemployment. I've worked in almost every engineering discipline that exists (nuclear to electronic to mechanical and in-between, and every IT related one) and all my projects, none of them small, were under-budget, well under-schedule, and defect free even twenty years later. That was both as a senior team member and immendiately thereafter as project manager. I know precisely what you have to know to succeed. I've also taught engineering, computer science, mathematics, and related fields at the university and for the US Navy from the '70's. There exist more requirements to achieve the degree than are required in actual practice; they only exist as a gateway filter just as they have also existed for decades in the fields of medicence and computer science, to give two firmly documented examples. I still scout engineering prospects and mentor them through our so-called education system (I just found a potential mechanical engineer last week, and female to boot) which is another bone of contention but I will table that for another discussion.
Frankly, what I see are, again, rational actors. It is far easier to get degreed in another discipline entirely with less effort, much less risk, and with much higher returns than engineering Almost any 'light-weight' degree with an MBA is sure to get your foot in the door [I use the term light-weight advisedly]. Doubling down a degree with law school is another fine technique for maximal returns on investment. Sure, if as an engineer you invent the next great thing, don't get taken to the cleaners by patent trolls, financiers, or lawyers, and get your IPO off the ground into high-flier territory, you might become rich beyond the dreams of avarice. This is increasingly rare these days, especially for increasingly risk adverse Americans. More than a third of new IT startups are by immigrants (and of those more than a few H1-B holders I might add). That should tell us something. I am most emphatically not returning to the market. I will spend my remaining days 'playing' if you will testing hardware and software, thinking things up, and staying away from 80 hour work-weeks which were ever counter-productive.
Lastly, take the number of reported engineers with a huge grain of salt from India and especially China. Auto mechanics, electricians, and other 'blue-collar' jobs (I hate that term!), are counted as engineers. This isn't to put down auto-mechanics or others in those categories, I value their skills very highly even if I don't use/need them. It is simply observe that comparison of data sets requires absolutely comparable sampling/counting techniques. Not that I expect that to ever happen in econometrics or sociometrics! Epidemiology has a lot more practice at it and they can't even agree on techniques.
The sad thing about nuclear power in the US is that it is not a technological problem that prevents its deployment. Inherently safe plant designs do exist (one of my fields of engineering), ones where every safety system can and does fail, yet the plant simply cannot meltdown (a CLOCA - Complete Loss Of Coolant Accident - is more an internal radiological cleanup problem than anything else. These designs are not new. Nuclear waste is not only managable but can be rendered inert and safely stored for tens of thousands of years. Nothing new here either. Nor are finding geologically stable sites for construction of these sites. Again nothing new, look for salt domes which only occur, I might add, in geologically stable areas (and which is why they are great for storing real nuclear waste).
The problem is solely socio-political. It costs more to prepare, obtain, and shepherd through a totally uncertain legal system the required permits for construction than the actual construction itself. Add the decade long lead time to ground-breaking for which interest on capital is charged but not recouped. As icing on our heaping pile of fecal matter pie here, toss in unknown legal liability concerns due to the unresolved waste repository issue. No ration economic actor will engage in construction of such plants. Actually, given what I know about the problems that we will also be facing with fusion plants, I firmly believe that we will never construct any for civilian power production in this country either. So much for that man on the white horse.
The best we can do from absolute recycling of all wastes for power production, assuming 100% recovery of energy with no recovery energy costs (yeah, right, just toss the second law of thermodynamics) is just under 5% of total power production in this country. Wind power, which is problematic at best, however let's again assume it is perfect, gets you another 5% assuming you cover this country with wind farms even in inappropriate areas. Forget tidal, it's a non-starter even if you capture all the tidal energy for the coastal US, total recovery less than a tenth of a percent. Solar is out even before it leaves the gate. The best sites for massive solar arrays, ignoring space, are our deserts and that won't fly against our 'environmentally-minded' 'friends'. Frankly, there is no way to come up with the rest of the power this country needs to function without increasing nuclear-based power production. [I'm leaving OTEC out of this as it would not be based in the US if maximum efficiencies are desired.]
One hopes that we will get a radical breakthrough in the near future. We engineers can actually solve the problems in front of us as is, nothing new required. Just lots of capital investment. Although I wouldn't turn down some breakthroughs.
[Disclaimer: Former member of Greenpeace who broke from the membership over nuclear power. I was the only one at the meetings that could even explain what the various types of radiation were or their health hazards.]
The only thing tricky about it is that the models are consistently wrong in
predicting actual climatological behavior so any manipulation of extent
conditions could easily throw the entire system out of whack (i.e. towards a, or
more accurately more than one, strange attractor to global ice age and/or
radical warming. I've been creating and validating models for the last thirty-
three years at least mine are accurate to +/- 1% or better. None of the current
models can get even close to 60% of the variation explained. So tinkering on
this level with the overall green-house gas levels and/or absorbed solar energy
is fraught with hazard.
In any case, you do not have to throw particulates
into the atmosphere. That's the stupid solution. Seeding of, say, the Antarctic
Ocean shelf and other regions with particulate iron, of which we have much
available, could easily radically increase the growth of plankton (and it's that
radical change I worry about, just as a radical change in reactor criticality
can cause a near instantaneous meltdown). The installation of OTEC (Ocean
Thermal Electric Conversion) plants in the tropics would have the same result
with the added benefit reducing reliance on fossil fuels for power production
and industrializing the developing world in a more 'environmentally friendly'
manner. Speaking as a multi-disciplinary systems engineer and
economist/econometrician, there are quite literally dozens if not more than a
hundred technological solutions that can be implemented would we had the
political courage to do so. This observation is not unique to myself although I
did notice the trend early. It's not my problem, nor my children's problem as I
have none. I won't be around long enough for it to be a problem.
I didn't even have to think about this one. I used Net2Phone back in 1997-2000, one of their first sign-ups AAMOF, and what they provided back then seems to match the claims of this patent. I hope the EFF is paying attention to this discussion.
Amen! Your bullet points are dead on, especially the point about the interview process being where I decide if I want to work for/with you. By the time I've reached that point, I will probably know more about the company than the company does. Arrogant? Yep. Deservedly so (see profile).
That's not strictly true. There is a growing segment of software engineers that do apply solid engineering principles to software development. I know I do and I've been a software engineer for over thirty years. From the people I've run into in RL and on the 'net, almost every one of them is a practitioner of more than one engineering discipline. I have all the IT related engineering disciplines, a half-dozen of the non-IT, and a few other non-engineering disciplines as well. What can I say, I get easily bored. In any case, you know when you run into one when they firmly believe in zero defects, by that I mean bugs and security holes, delivering on-time, and on- or under-budget.
What universe do you live in? It sure isn't the real one. I'm your worst fragging nightmare, a born multi-disciplinary engineer and mathematician and I know for a fact that what one man or many men can invent, one or many men can break via one mechanism or another. I can visualize a mechanism that would work for DRM, which I will not describe for obvious reasons, but even that will not work in the consumer market. So long as DRM is used as a mechanism to protect outdated/superceded market mechanisms it will be rejected by the consumer, and yes I'm an economist besides. When/if the media industries get a fragging clue and embrace the digital market, then their revenue streams will either recover or they will be out of business, just as the scribes of yesteryear went out of business when Gutenburg did his number on publishing the first time around.
Very knowledgable actually. Among other things, they trained me as a nuclear engineer {sigh}. With a heavy water nuclear reactor you can incorporate U-238 around the core and convert it to Pu-239. You can also use convert lithium to tritium (H-3) which is one of the possible elements to create a hydrogen (fusion) bomb. U-238 is very plentiful and once converted to Pu-239 by capturing a fast nuetron, easily separated from the rest of the U-238. Separating U-235 from U-238 on the other hand is a very difficult process and very dangerous since their (and our) gaseous diffusion process uses the highly toxic and flammable combination of uranium hexaflouride. They must be doing something right though since I haven't heard of any major accidents while we had several that I've heard about publicly while developing the process.
Of course I can't go into any actual numbers, the people in the spiffy suits and sunglasses would take me away for a long vacation elsewhere. You've got it about right though and yes, Pu-239 aside from being highly radioactive also is extremely toxic. Turn a few kilograms, if that, into a dust and you could wipe out NYC easily with the right approach, the heck with turning it into a nuke.
I've been teaching statistics, computer sci/programming, electronic and electrical engineering, physics (newtonian and up), and numerous military occupations/duties over the last thirty-two years. I hate to say it since it will seem less than helpful, but if you really want to teach children and young adults about computers, you shouldn't be teaching any of the spaghetti languages or trying one of the various OOPs. I've always taught, children included, that basics of how a computer works and then taught them how to create and run programs in assembly. Given that virtual machine software can be had for free from Microsoft and VMWare, I see no reason why you shouldn't turn them loose and let them play. The worst that can happen is freeze the VM which they can stop and restore from a snapshot to try again.
Once they get a handle on why a computer works the way it does, i.e. all it understands is one's and zero's, then you can turn to higher level languages of some flavor. Then as a final six to eight week segment you can give a preview of how OOP works. I lost track of how many people I've had to take back to ground zero and start over teaching them how the computer actually does what it does. If the students do not have a solid grounding on the hardware and basics of it's low-level software, they will build an internal (mind) model which bears little to no resemblence to the reality of the machine.
I have mine split three ways. First up is my DOS setup with every free tool I could find as well as NTFSDOS.SYS so I can read/write NTFS partitions. The second split is my windows utilities folder with my benchmarking, burn-in, testing tools (DocMem and all HD test utilities), all the tools from the http://www.systernals.com/ freeware collection and my AdminPack from the http://www.winternals.com/ site, and the usual suspects for scanning for virii, worms, spyware, etc. ad nauseum. It also has my partitioning tool (Paragon Hard Disk Manager) that I love, my complete driver collection, and all the updates for 98/98SE, 2000, XP, and Server 2003 that I've collected over the years.
You could just as easily put all those on a CD as well. Howver, what gives my setup character is that I've collected a ton of freeware and free for personal use stuff over the years that I install on all my clients machines (they all use Windows, sad to say). Firewalls, AdAware SE Personal, ClamWin, Spybot S&D, Hijack This!, IrfanView, WinRAR (and I encourage them to register it!), CacheMem 5.11, Easy Burn, X-SetUp free or Pro depending on if they want to register it which they usually do, and a ton of other stuff. It's a tight fit actually. Between the NewOwner folder, my massive collection of drivers, and those service packs, it's a wonder it fits at all. Still it beats trying to get this stuff via dial-up which is what most of my clients, even business (!), are still using.
Yeah, I've met my share of the stupid ones as well. Fortunately, most of them torpedo their careers somewhere along the way, although there are some pretty extreme exceptions (thinking of a couple of generals and admirals I know). Amazing what the right political connections will buy you, although again they usually manage to frag it up somewhere along the way.
Actually, yes, I've been using it for thirty some odd years. Secure routing would be a simple extension of the same techniques that are used for secure DNS, but hey, I don't know anything, I'm just an engineer.
Again, you are "ass-u-ming" the use of existing routing technologies just as someone above "ass-u-med" the use of one frequency. The article points out that existing routing technologies are inadequate in this regard. I can easily envisision a routing technology that uses public-key encryption for the hand-shaking which would be unspoofable in this context. Your other "ass-u-mption" is that only finite amounts of energy are available to the routers. If they were battery-powered this might be true, but that last time I looked, we were getting away from battery power save in the context of survival radios. Even if this were true, these power sources can be augmented in many ways (fuel-cells, solar-cells, etc. ad nauseum). Especially if vehicle to vehicle nodes are added to the equation.
Too bad I don't have mod points, otherwise this would get the obligatory (-1 Troll). You can't be a warrior today and be in any way, shape, or form stupid. Not and live. Been there, done that, burned the t-shirt.
"Ass-u-ming" that you only use one frequency. That's a huge assumption. I can think of half a dozen ways around the problem and that's just off the cuff and using tech that I can talk about.
I'm with swillden (191260). With a math major and a CS minor, you can pretty much write your own ticket and yes, I'd recommend at least going on to pick up a masters if not a Ph. D. For credentials here, I started with a dual major in statistics and comp. sci. with a strong math minor. By the age of 14, I was teaching both in the lab at the university and picked up my first consulting gig (yeah, I was the ultimate geek). Three years later I joined the US Navy and added nuclear, electronic, electrical, mechanical, network, computer (hardware & software), and database engineering to the mix, with a side order of navigation, logistics, and just to lighten things up [dripping sarcasm here] counter-terrorism. It didn't matter where I started, the plain fact was that every one of those fields involved nice hairy math, well all except the last.
After they put me out on a medical, I went back to the university and added economics with a focus on econometrics, international development, and international finance and investment with a heavy dose of business cycle theory and the history of economics and economic thought. I also had a strong minor in sociology. Again, the math background, especially the statistical background, was extremely useful here as well. Heck, with the software and database engineering the econ. faculty were having gunfights in the hallways over who would get me. I ended up studying under the top guy in international development as a result.
Over the years I have worked/consulted in fields as diverse as archeology (statistical analysis of indian burial grounds), medical research (experimental design, big call for this), epidemiology, sociometrics (analysis of capital punishment data), finance (especially time-series analysis), logistics (predictive analysis), and more modeling of systems than you can shake a stick at. The key here is not to get yourself bogged down in one little speciality unless that is what you want. Speaking for myself, once I've done it two or three times, I'm ready to move on to something new. If you are serious about your math and CS skills, a job on wall-street is definitely the gig for you, but it is there no matter where you go, so long as it isn't teaching. The people who create the computer models that they use for programmed trading are always in demand (and burn out real quick). In my case it was never about the money though it was there since my models were saving them millions every time I picked up a pencil.
Yep, price is less than shelling out for Vista witchitymajig version. One thing the article didn't talk about is what happens when you have a corporate or volume license key, as I do. I imagine it gets even more fun (NOT!). Now I get to explain this to all my clients, although the home/pro matrix is a piece of cake by comparison.
That's pretty much what happened here. When I took physics, during the first lab the instructor went around the room asking what our majors were. I told him "economics" with a smile. He said, "I've never had an economist before." I didn't have the heart to tell him (he's with the gamma-ray observatory team) that I could have taught the course in my sleep. Stupid fraggin' breadth requirements.
While I don't use NoScript (instead I have an inline web-proxy to filter all my browsers) I don't consider it overreacting. My default here is no cookies, no scripts, no flash, no referrer, no blinking text, no nothing. Just the text Ma'am. This proxy rewrites the HTML on the fly;-). There are a few, very few, sites where I do enable some things, but I've had it with sites that require anything more than basic HTML.
Try scrolling down on the page. You don't have to install WGA in IE to download the file. Use the second method, i.e. download GenuineAdvantage.exe, have it generate the code, and feed it back. Hell, I don't use IE unless I'm talking to SharePoint or a really stupid site (which never happens since I never go back). Using the.exe allows you to use Firefox, Opera, or whatever and has the advantage of never phoning home later on.
Unfortunately most sysadmins (and it seems most commentators here) have zero experience working in that context. It's a whole different world at that level. BTW, there are TEMPEST-certified Windows machines out there in use today, but they are barely recognizable to your typical Windows sysadmin. That's the level I run at here, although lacking the actual hardware. I do my best though.
Sorry that you feel that way. I have two leadership modes. Where it involves lives, prison time, fines, or loss of my job, I'm an authoritarian every time. For any thing else, I'm democratic (cooperative). If you have a problem with that, find another patsy.
Or option C. Use virtualization in the form of VM's, Altiris, or Softricity (now owned by MS, btw). There are other solutions. For instance, you don't have to allow/use the roll-up packages. If you know what you are doing (ever hear of qchain?), you can roll your own patch packages that meet your needs. I'll be doing exactly that to create a new Win'XP install disk here in a few days that incorporates everything up to and including the various anti-virus, spyware detection, and other tools that make up a default install here. A few mouse clicks and I end up with a system I can live with that is fully locked down. All it requires is some effort on my part and keeping current with the tools out there. The latter is the hard part.
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As for the dearth of engineering students, if you actually go and examine our college and university curricula and compare them to the skills needed in engineering disciplines, they are intentionally designed to drastically reduce the number of candidates in their programs at any one time even during times of rapidly increasing salaries and low unemployment. I've worked in almost every engineering discipline that exists (nuclear to electronic to mechanical and in-between, and every IT related one) and all my projects, none of them small, were under-budget, well under-schedule, and defect free even twenty years later. That was both as a senior team member and immendiately thereafter as project manager. I know precisely what you have to know to succeed. I've also taught engineering, computer science, mathematics, and related fields at the university and for the US Navy from the '70's. There exist more requirements to achieve the degree than are required in actual practice; they only exist as a gateway filter just as they have also existed for decades in the fields of medicence and computer science, to give two firmly documented examples. I still scout engineering prospects and mentor them through our so-called education system (I just found a potential mechanical engineer last week, and female to boot) which is another bone of contention but I will table that for another discussion.
Frankly, what I see are, again, rational actors. It is far easier to get degreed in another discipline entirely with less effort, much less risk, and with much higher returns than engineering Almost any 'light-weight' degree with an MBA is sure to get your foot in the door [I use the term light-weight advisedly]. Doubling down a degree with law school is another fine technique for maximal returns on investment. Sure, if as an engineer you invent the next great thing, don't get taken to the cleaners by patent trolls, financiers, or lawyers, and get your IPO off the ground into high-flier territory, you might become rich beyond the dreams of avarice. This is increasingly rare these days, especially for increasingly risk adverse Americans. More than a third of new IT startups are by immigrants (and of those more than a few H1-B holders I might add). That should tell us something. I am most emphatically not returning to the market. I will spend my remaining days 'playing' if you will testing hardware and software, thinking things up, and staying away from 80 hour work-weeks which were ever counter-productive.
Lastly, take the number of reported engineers with a huge grain of salt from India and especially China. Auto mechanics, electricians, and other 'blue-collar' jobs (I hate that term!), are counted as engineers. This isn't to put down auto-mechanics or others in those categories, I value their skills very highly even if I don't use/need them. It is simply observe that comparison of data sets requires absolutely comparable sampling/counting techniques. Not that I expect that to ever happen in econometrics or sociometrics! Epidemiology has a lot more practice at it and they can't even agree on techniques.
The problem is solely socio-political. It costs more to prepare, obtain, and shepherd through a totally uncertain legal system the required permits for construction than the actual construction itself. Add the decade long lead time to ground-breaking for which interest on capital is charged but not recouped. As icing on our heaping pile of fecal matter pie here, toss in unknown legal liability concerns due to the unresolved waste repository issue. No ration economic actor will engage in construction of such plants. Actually, given what I know about the problems that we will also be facing with fusion plants, I firmly believe that we will never construct any for civilian power production in this country either. So much for that man on the white horse.
The best we can do from absolute recycling of all wastes for power production, assuming 100% recovery of energy with no recovery energy costs (yeah, right, just toss the second law of thermodynamics) is just under 5% of total power production in this country. Wind power, which is problematic at best, however let's again assume it is perfect, gets you another 5% assuming you cover this country with wind farms even in inappropriate areas. Forget tidal, it's a non-starter even if you capture all the tidal energy for the coastal US, total recovery less than a tenth of a percent. Solar is out even before it leaves the gate. The best sites for massive solar arrays, ignoring space, are our deserts and that won't fly against our 'environmentally-minded' 'friends'. Frankly, there is no way to come up with the rest of the power this country needs to function without increasing nuclear-based power production. [I'm leaving OTEC out of this as it would not be based in the US if maximum efficiencies are desired.]
One hopes that we will get a radical breakthrough in the near future. We engineers can actually solve the problems in front of us as is, nothing new required. Just lots of capital investment. Although I wouldn't turn down some breakthroughs.
[Disclaimer: Former member of Greenpeace who broke from the membership over nuclear power. I was the only one at the meetings that could even explain what the various types of radiation were or their health hazards.]
In any case, you do not have to throw particulates into the atmosphere. That's the stupid solution. Seeding of, say, the Antarctic Ocean shelf and other regions with particulate iron, of which we have much available, could easily radically increase the growth of plankton (and it's that radical change I worry about, just as a radical change in reactor criticality can cause a near instantaneous meltdown). The installation of OTEC (Ocean Thermal Electric Conversion) plants in the tropics would have the same result with the added benefit reducing reliance on fossil fuels for power production and industrializing the developing world in a more 'environmentally friendly' manner. Speaking as a multi-disciplinary systems engineer and economist/econometrician, there are quite literally dozens if not more than a hundred technological solutions that can be implemented would we had the political courage to do so. This observation is not unique to myself although I did notice the trend early. It's not my problem, nor my children's problem as I have none. I won't be around long enough for it to be a problem.
I didn't even have to think about this one. I used Net2Phone back in 1997-2000, one of their first sign-ups AAMOF, and what they provided back then seems to match the claims of this patent. I hope the EFF is paying attention to this discussion.
Amen! Your bullet points are dead on, especially the point about the interview process being where I decide if I want to work for/with you. By the time I've reached that point, I will probably know more about the company than the company does. Arrogant? Yep. Deservedly so (see profile).
That's not strictly true. There is a growing segment of software engineers that do apply solid engineering principles to software development. I know I do and I've been a software engineer for over thirty years. From the people I've run into in RL and on the 'net, almost every one of them is a practitioner of more than one engineering discipline. I have all the IT related engineering disciplines, a half-dozen of the non-IT, and a few other non-engineering disciplines as well. What can I say, I get easily bored. In any case, you know when you run into one when they firmly believe in zero defects, by that I mean bugs and security holes, delivering on-time, and on- or under-budget.
What universe do you live in? It sure isn't the real one. I'm your worst fragging nightmare, a born multi-disciplinary engineer and mathematician and I know for a fact that what one man or many men can invent, one or many men can break via one mechanism or another. I can visualize a mechanism that would work for DRM, which I will not describe for obvious reasons, but even that will not work in the consumer market. So long as DRM is used as a mechanism to protect outdated/superceded market mechanisms it will be rejected by the consumer, and yes I'm an economist besides. When/if the media industries get a fragging clue and embrace the digital market, then their revenue streams will either recover or they will be out of business, just as the scribes of yesteryear went out of business when Gutenburg did his number on publishing the first time around.
Of course I can't go into any actual numbers, the people in the spiffy suits and sunglasses would take me away for a long vacation elsewhere. You've got it about right though and yes, Pu-239 aside from being highly radioactive also is extremely toxic. Turn a few kilograms, if that, into a dust and you could wipe out NYC easily with the right approach, the heck with turning it into a nuke.
Once they get a handle on why a computer works the way it does, i.e. all it understands is one's and zero's, then you can turn to higher level languages of some flavor. Then as a final six to eight week segment you can give a preview of how OOP works. I lost track of how many people I've had to take back to ground zero and start over teaching them how the computer actually does what it does. If the students do not have a solid grounding on the hardware and basics of it's low-level software, they will build an internal (mind) model which bears little to no resemblence to the reality of the machine.
Great Links. Thank ye kindly!
You could just as easily put all those on a CD as well. Howver, what gives my setup character is that I've collected a ton of freeware and free for personal use stuff over the years that I install on all my clients machines (they all use Windows, sad to say). Firewalls, AdAware SE Personal, ClamWin, Spybot S&D, Hijack This!, IrfanView, WinRAR (and I encourage them to register it!), CacheMem 5.11, Easy Burn, X-SetUp free or Pro depending on if they want to register it which they usually do, and a ton of other stuff. It's a tight fit actually. Between the NewOwner folder, my massive collection of drivers, and those service packs, it's a wonder it fits at all. Still it beats trying to get this stuff via dial-up which is what most of my clients, even business (!), are still using.
Ah yes, the ID10T error.
Yeah, I've met my share of the stupid ones as well. Fortunately, most of them torpedo their careers somewhere along the way, although there are some pretty extreme exceptions (thinking of a couple of generals and admirals I know). Amazing what the right political connections will buy you, although again they usually manage to frag it up somewhere along the way.
Actually, yes, I've been using it for thirty some odd years. Secure routing would be a simple extension of the same techniques that are used for secure DNS, but hey, I don't know anything, I'm just an engineer.
Again, you are "ass-u-ming" the use of existing routing technologies just as someone above "ass-u-med" the use of one frequency. The article points out that existing routing technologies are inadequate in this regard. I can easily envisision a routing technology that uses public-key encryption for the hand-shaking which would be unspoofable in this context. Your other "ass-u-mption" is that only finite amounts of energy are available to the routers. If they were battery-powered this might be true, but that last time I looked, we were getting away from battery power save in the context of survival radios. Even if this were true, these power sources can be augmented in many ways (fuel-cells, solar-cells, etc. ad nauseum). Especially if vehicle to vehicle nodes are added to the equation.
Too bad I don't have mod points, otherwise this would get the obligatory (-1 Troll). You can't be a warrior today and be in any way, shape, or form stupid. Not and live. Been there, done that, burned the t-shirt.
"Ass-u-ming" that you only use one frequency. That's a huge assumption. I can think of half a dozen ways around the problem and that's just off the cuff and using tech that I can talk about.
After they put me out on a medical, I went back to the university and added economics with a focus on econometrics, international development, and international finance and investment with a heavy dose of business cycle theory and the history of economics and economic thought. I also had a strong minor in sociology. Again, the math background, especially the statistical background, was extremely useful here as well. Heck, with the software and database engineering the econ. faculty were having gunfights in the hallways over who would get me. I ended up studying under the top guy in international development as a result.
Over the years I have worked/consulted in fields as diverse as archeology (statistical analysis of indian burial grounds), medical research (experimental design, big call for this), epidemiology, sociometrics (analysis of capital punishment data), finance (especially time-series analysis), logistics (predictive analysis), and more modeling of systems than you can shake a stick at. The key here is not to get yourself bogged down in one little speciality unless that is what you want. Speaking for myself, once I've done it two or three times, I'm ready to move on to something new. If you are serious about your math and CS skills, a job on wall-street is definitely the gig for you, but it is there no matter where you go, so long as it isn't teaching. The people who create the computer models that they use for programmed trading are always in demand (and burn out real quick). In my case it was never about the money though it was there since my models were saving them millions every time I picked up a pencil.
Good luck!
Yep, price is less than shelling out for Vista witchitymajig version. One thing the article didn't talk about is what happens when you have a corporate or volume license key, as I do. I imagine it gets even more fun (NOT!). Now I get to explain this to all my clients, although the home/pro matrix is a piece of cake by comparison.
That's pretty much what happened here. When I took physics, during the first lab the instructor went around the room asking what our majors were. I told him "economics" with a smile. He said, "I've never had an economist before." I didn't have the heart to tell him (he's with the gamma-ray observatory team) that I could have taught the course in my sleep. Stupid fraggin' breadth requirements.
While I don't use NoScript (instead I have an inline web-proxy to filter all my browsers) I don't consider it overreacting. My default here is no cookies, no scripts, no flash, no referrer, no blinking text, no nothing. Just the text Ma'am. This proxy rewrites the HTML on the fly ;-). There are a few, very few, sites where I do enable some things, but I've had it with sites that require anything more than basic HTML.
Try scrolling down on the page. You don't have to install WGA in IE to download the file. Use the second method, i.e. download GenuineAdvantage.exe, have it generate the code, and feed it back. Hell, I don't use IE unless I'm talking to SharePoint or a really stupid site (which never happens since I never go back). Using the .exe allows you to use Firefox, Opera, or whatever and has the advantage of never phoning home later on.
Unfortunately most sysadmins (and it seems most commentators here) have zero experience working in that context. It's a whole different world at that level. BTW, there are TEMPEST-certified Windows machines out there in use today, but they are barely recognizable to your typical Windows sysadmin. That's the level I run at here, although lacking the actual hardware. I do my best though.
Sorry that you feel that way. I have two leadership modes. Where it involves lives, prison time, fines, or loss of my job, I'm an authoritarian every time. For any thing else, I'm democratic (cooperative). If you have a problem with that, find another patsy.
Or option C. Use virtualization in the form of VM's, Altiris, or Softricity (now owned by MS, btw). There are other solutions. For instance, you don't have to allow/use the roll-up packages. If you know what you are doing (ever hear of qchain?), you can roll your own patch packages that meet your needs. I'll be doing exactly that to create a new Win'XP install disk here in a few days that incorporates everything up to and including the various anti-virus, spyware detection, and other tools that make up a default install here. A few mouse clicks and I end up with a system I can live with that is fully locked down. All it requires is some effort on my part and keeping current with the tools out there. The latter is the hard part.