Who is to say that some of these were not background investigations into government employees or applicants? People with a security clearance basically sign away their privacy rights and the background investigations start. They would likely issue gag orders because they don't want the names of those employees and/or future employees to get out.
The gov't uses a non-secret mail out form to references and current and former employers for the initial investigation for everything from vanilla gov't employee up through top secret clearance. They send out interviewers for some levels of clearance (I think only TS and higher, based on what the clearances cost), and interviewees aren't given gag orders- I've been interviewed (though not in the time since the NSLs came out) and know people who have been interviewed in the recent past.
It's more likely that the NSLs are the least amount of effort for agents to get the information they want, so they use them. Got marginal justification for a warrent and don't feel like digging around? Send out an NSL. The basis for the request is marginal and wouldn't get you a warrant? Check the "gag order" box and nobody will ever know.
It's what workers everywhere do- expend the least amount of effort to get stuff done.
because of the way the finishes work in a pool vs. on a track.
On the track (and for cycling and other racing sports) they use a line scan camera (I describe it in another post nearby) but it won't work in a pool where they don't actually cross a finish line, but touch a wall.
And from other posts it sounds like the swimming rules have been designed to accomodate the differences.
Finish cameras (at least for racing events where you cross a line) are of a totally different sort than regular square format image array cameras.
They use a "line scan" camera that just photographs the finish line (and nothing around it) with a line of pixels at MHz pixel readout rates and get effectively tens of kHz rates for the whole line. The images are then reconstructions of the time series of data at the line- hence the lack of background and the distortion you often see on photo-finish cameras. There are systems now that also combine this with a regular video camera (synced) looking at the line from the front so they can read numbers off of runners.
I'm not sure how they deal with it for swimming--the line scan doesn't seem like a good approach, but a quick search will probably turn up details...
Clearly, you're not going to hire MORE people if you're getting RID of people -- nor would you fire 30 people just so you can hire 10 new ones.
Don't be so sure about that-- it's quite common for employers to try to get rid of older people so they can replace them with younger ones (for a variety of reasons). It has to be done really carefully to avoid major lawsuits, but it is done.
This is correct. The best and brightest US citizens are not US born, and not eligible to work for these groups. The first example I could think of off the top of my head is the story of the student who builds rail guns and laser guns for fun and for his doctorate, the DOD approached him with 2 jobs and then found out he was not a born US citizen. You don't have to be born in the US to get clearances (even very high level ones), you just have to be a US citizen and be able to pass all the background checks. If your documentable history doesn't go back far enough it's probably hard-- I think a secret clearance goes back at least 7 years. You also can't be a direct employee of the US gov't unless you're a citizen, but most agencies deal with that by trying to have small populations of direct employees and lots of contractors (who just have to be able to work legally in the US, typically a green card).
I don't know. How do you handle that if you've done super double secret stuff for the Government and you want to go into private industry? It's not just a problem with doing it in the gov't-- most of the actual work of classified stuff gets done in private industry. What happens is that once you go into the black world you stay there. There are even job fairs where you have to have a clearance to get in.
I work at a place that has mostly unclassified, and some classified work, with occasional things where a clearance might get you into meetings where you can see the details of something that you're otherwise only allowed to see the basic function of. I like to be able to talk about what I do, and I like to point out that the laws of physics are the same in the classified and unclassified worlds, so I've avoided classified work like the plague.
I agree on selling recorded music. I'm not a huge fan of most live music performances, because you end up somewhere where a band puts so much electronics between you and them that you may as well just listen to a recording at home and end up with better quality. You need to get out more. There are tons of acts that sound great live, even with full PA systems etc. Venues bigger than a few thousand people suck, because you really don't get much feel for the act, and the act has a harder time playing off the audience, but theaters and small clubs are awesome.
I know bands that sound live pretty close to how they sound recorded, but with more energy. There are bands that use really different arrangements live and recorderd, or even from live show to live show-- sometimes playing stuff that was recorded acoustic with a full band, sometimes the other way around. And everything in between.
I've known a few bands that never sounded as good recorded as they did live. Birdsongs of the Mesozoic was one of those. I saw them bunches of times live in Boston and the live show was amazing, but the recordings never captured it.
As an indie musician and producer, I can assure you that successful indie bands do not sell CD's for $10, much less several. Stage-side CD sales should be for $20 or more, partly because of the opportunity to get them signed by the band, also because it's an inelastic demand - anyone willing to spend $10 on a CD at a show will typically spend $20, so selling for less does not sell more copies. It's only when there is a selection of 100's of bands that purse strings tighten.
I go to a *lot* of indie shows in LA and I've never seen a CD for $20 from the band, no matter whether they're national or local, new, or wildly successful. I don't think it was even that much to get a CD of a live Neubauten show that I picked up 10 minutes after the band got offstage. And nobody charges extra to get close enough to get them signed. $10 is typical for back catalog, and $10-$15 for the most recent CD. Usually they'll throw in stickers or buttons, too.
As pointed out in the article, why should they get additional privacy protection that the average citizen doesn't? Why not a flag that alerts the subject (regardless of fame level) any time their file is accessed by anyone, along with a brief explanation as to the purpose of the access?
You can do that anyway if you're looking far enough ahead. If you keep your attention way up the road (a half mile or so) you can react to things up there smoothly by changing lanes or taking the foot off the gas. You can detect close up stuff with your peripheral vision, which is better for things you have to react fast to anyway.
The biggest pain in trying to look far ahead in heavy traffic is where there are a lot of big SUVs blocking your vision. Sometimes you can see around them a little, or through their windows if the road goes up and down a little, but they do have an impact on seeing traffic up ahead.
In the end, what problem are we solving? I keep on hearing in the US the Real ID solves the issue of multiple drivers licenses from multiple states. But if that hole was plugged would it prevent terrorism? Probably not I'm thinking. Then what problem would it really help with? Tracking down and punishing people for trivial crimes will end up being the #1 application of these things. It will make it easier for a bar in California to tell if that Iowa drivers license that says you're over 21 or not is real.
Definitely not worth the intrusions that are going to come with it.
I spent several days stressed out of my head over it, and finally resolved to get out and do something else.
Whilst I was relaxing the solution suddenly popped into my head, complete. If that isn't a Eureka moment, then I don't know what is. That kind of thing happens all the time and is pretty normal-- there's a lot of hidden stuff going on in your head, and you can't always get to it if you focus directly on the problem, but if you change your context or do something else then sometimes it will pop in.
That's why lots of people say things like "I get all my ideas in the shower/car/commute/playing tennis/laying on the beach/whatever"-- they get the problems posed in a formal context, and may even think about them formally for a while, too, but the solutions come when they aren't looking. Then you just have to recognize and remember them.
So ask yourself. What ISP would limit a popular service to such a degree that it becomes 100% unusable for their entire user base? One that has a monopoly (or nearly so) on connections and wants to push its own content.
you really need to hook it up to a dynamo that's driven by the water coming in through the fill line. Use that to charge the battery and you can really decrease the amount of maintenance.
LA can get pretty toasty (105+F) for a week or two out of the year, but how hot it is inside depends a lot on hour your house is made. In 11 years here I've never had a whole house AC, and only used room AC for a few nights (the AC was one of the rooms in the house I was renting).
Vaulted ceilings (only a few inches of wood, sometimes some foam, and shingles between the inside and outside) can turn a house into an oven pretty quickly, but a space in between can improve things a lot. One place I lived had an upstairs that we didn't use much in the summer. Though we had some undergrads stay there for a few months one summer and they never used the AC either.
I'm currently in a place with vaulted ceilings, but it's well designed for the environment, with several large oak trees shading most of the roof and a concrete slab floor for about half the house. It's generally quite a bit cooler in the house than at the street, and with a whole house roof fan and some big windows I can vent the heat of the day (which is rarely even that hot) in a few minutes as soon as the sun goes down. My electric bills are pretty uniform year round.
More trees and a little more thought in construction and/or use could reduce peak loads a lot at pretty moderate cost. The thermostats are a good start and can really be a low impact on users-- increasing the setpoint during the hottest part of the day will reduce the load without causing much, if any, discomfort for a large number of people, rather than blacking people out with much greater impact on a possibly smaller number of people.
I came to RoR relatively from scratch-- there was some web stuff with a database backend that I wanted to do and I hadn't done much programming in a while, and no web programming at all. I've done a *lot* of C and Pascal (and even a little Forth. ick) for data acquisition and analysis, but hadn't done any web stuff. I looked at a bunch of different things and went through some decent books to learn various new things. Coming at it almost completely from scratch I ended up liking RoR quite a lot and found it very easy to figure out how to do what I needed to do and have the development be manageable, since it was all in my spare time.
A summary of my probably poorly informed opinions in sort of chronological order: C++: I took a look at it years ago but didn't have much I needed to do with it, and felt like it made it easy to obscure Really Bad Things (TM) so I didn't really consider it for this project.
Java: initially seemed to be a likely choice, since I wanted to do a database backed web app that was fed by a bit of spidering. I went through the better part of what seemed like a decent book (with K&R being my reference standard for excellent book to learn from), and decided that a) Java was a little annoying because it took a ton of files to get to "Hello, World" (I may be totally wrong about that) but it did improve a lot on the things I didn't like about C++. It also didn't make my problems obviously more tractable, since I didn't immediately see useful libraries to help reduce the amount I would have to do from scratch.
Using a CMS as a base, and writing my own module: Took a look at a few PHP based ones, went through a PHP/MySQL book. PHP4 is easy, but feels too much like BASIC. PHP5 might be better, but I didn't get there, and I started getting the impression that OOP added onto procedural languages leads to clumsiness. PHP also ends up mixing code and display a lot, which also bothered me.
Perl: Seemed at first like the last language I would ever have to learn. You really can write any language in Perl. CPAN has a lot of nice modules, but I did start running into situations where new versions of one module would break another in a way that was getting frustrating for a relative beginner. Some modules are quite good, though, and it was very promising. Found a good book on Perl and MySQL development for the web that addressed most of what I wanted to do pretty well. Poked a little further and found Catalyst, and thought it would be really useful-- I had used frameworks before (including an OO one written in ANSI C, which was confusing the first read through, but eventually made a lot of sense), and thought it would be great to have all the mundane stuff taken care of by the framework. I got really frustrated installing it though, because there was always some bunch of tests failing, sending me back to try to fix things. Argh. Almost there.
Rails: Almost on a whim I decided to try Rails. I could do what I wanted in Perl, but some of the tools were clumsy, or I'd have to code a lot from scratch. I went through one of the web tutorials using Locomotive, and it actually seemed to work, behave, and do what I wanted without a lot of fuss. It looked a little funny. I got a little more into it and shelled out for the Agile Book-- it seemed too good to be true. I started actually working on the thing I wanted to do and made a lot of progress fast. Then I discovered things that were either a little awkward to do, or seemed a little clumsy either in how I had understood how to do things or how it would behave. And I discovered that I had learned enough in getting to each sticky point that I could rework things quickly to be better behaved. The main things I like about rails are that the MVC structure is strongly reinforced by the language and framework so it makes it easy to keep things where they should be and it's relatively easy to rework even something quickly (even major changes in the models and database) without breaking a bunch of things. I find that I
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Who is to say that some of these were not background investigations into government employees or applicants? People with a security clearance basically sign away their privacy rights and the background investigations start. They would likely issue gag orders because they don't want the names of those employees and/or future employees to get out.
The gov't uses a non-secret mail out form to references and current and former employers for the initial investigation for everything from vanilla gov't employee up through top secret clearance. They send out interviewers for some levels of clearance (I think only TS and higher, based on what the clearances cost), and interviewees aren't given gag orders- I've been interviewed (though not in the time since the NSLs came out) and know people who have been interviewed in the recent past.
It's more likely that the NSLs are the least amount of effort for agents to get the information they want, so they use them. Got marginal justification for a warrent and don't feel like digging around? Send out an NSL. The basis for the request is marginal and wouldn't get you a warrant? Check the "gag order" box and nobody will ever know.
It's what workers everywhere do- expend the least amount of effort to get stuff done.
because of the way the finishes work in a pool vs. on a track.
On the track (and for cycling and other racing sports) they use a line scan camera (I describe it in another post nearby) but it won't work in a pool where they don't actually cross a finish line, but touch a wall.
And from other posts it sounds like the swimming rules have been designed to accomodate the differences.
Finish cameras (at least for racing events where you cross a line) are of a totally different sort than regular square format image array cameras.
They use a "line scan" camera that just photographs the finish line (and nothing around it) with a line of pixels at MHz pixel readout rates and get effectively tens of kHz rates for the whole line. The images are then reconstructions of the time series of data at the line- hence the lack of background and the distortion you often see on photo-finish cameras. There are systems now that also combine this with a regular video camera (synced) looking at the line from the front so they can read numbers off of runners.
I'm not sure how they deal with it for swimming--the line scan doesn't seem like a good approach, but a quick search will probably turn up details...
Call me when string theorists make a testable prediction.
The only testable prediction they've made so far is that they would make a testable prediction, and they haven't managed to even do that.
Flyingpigs theory does have a more realistic name.
Big department stores had computerized wishlists connected to their databases long before there was a web.
They were sometimes called "wedding registries"
Clearly, you're not going to hire MORE people if you're getting RID of people -- nor would you fire 30 people just so you can hire 10 new ones.
Don't be so sure about that-- it's quite common for employers to try to get rid of older people so they can replace them with younger ones (for a variety of reasons). It has to be done really carefully to avoid major lawsuits, but it is done.
I was too lazy to google it this morning:
Nature Article on MIT Study
MIT did a very careful study of pay and resource equity internally among faculty and discovered that they had a very measurable bias.
They then acknowledged it publicly and made a serious effort to correct it.
I work at a place that has mostly unclassified, and some classified work, with occasional things where a clearance might get you into meetings where you can see the details of something that you're otherwise only allowed to see the basic function of. I like to be able to talk about what I do, and I like to point out that the laws of physics are the same in the classified and unclassified worlds, so I've avoided classified work like the plague.
I know bands that sound live pretty close to how they sound recorded, but with more energy. There are bands that use really different arrangements live and recorderd, or even from live show to live show-- sometimes playing stuff that was recorded acoustic with a full band, sometimes the other way around. And everything in between.
I've known a few bands that never sounded as good recorded as they did live. Birdsongs of the Mesozoic was one of those. I saw them bunches of times live in Boston and the live show was amazing, but the recordings never captured it.
As an indie musician and producer, I can assure you that successful indie bands do not sell CD's for $10, much less several. Stage-side CD sales should be for $20 or more, partly because of the opportunity to get them signed by the band, also because it's an inelastic demand - anyone willing to spend $10 on a CD at a show will typically spend $20, so selling for less does not sell more copies. It's only when there is a selection of 100's of bands that purse strings tighten.
I go to a *lot* of indie shows in LA and I've never seen a CD for $20 from the band, no matter whether they're national or local, new, or wildly successful. I don't think it was even that much to get a CD of a live Neubauten show that I picked up 10 minutes after the band got offstage. And nobody charges extra to get close enough to get them signed. $10 is typical for back catalog, and $10-$15 for the most recent CD. Usually they'll throw in stickers or buttons, too.
As pointed out in the article, why should they get additional privacy protection that the average citizen doesn't? Why not a flag that alerts the subject (regardless of fame level) any time their file is accessed by anyone, along with a brief explanation as to the purpose of the access?
The Big Bang Theory.
Both more technically accurate and more entertaining than Numb3rs (another show with geeks in a positive light)
That's an inside out calzone.
You can do that anyway if you're looking far enough ahead. If you keep your attention way up the road (a half mile or so) you can react to things up there smoothly by changing lanes or taking the foot off the gas. You can detect close up stuff with your peripheral vision, which is better for things you have to react fast to anyway.
The biggest pain in trying to look far ahead in heavy traffic is where there are a lot of big SUVs blocking your vision. Sometimes you can see around them a little, or through their windows if the road goes up and down a little, but they do have an impact on seeing traffic up ahead.
I've done some, but it looks like C.
Definitely not worth the intrusions that are going to come with it.
Whilst I was relaxing the solution suddenly popped into my head, complete. If that isn't a Eureka moment, then I don't know what is. That kind of thing happens all the time and is pretty normal-- there's a lot of hidden stuff going on in your head, and you can't always get to it if you focus directly on the problem, but if you change your context or do something else then sometimes it will pop in.
That's why lots of people say things like "I get all my ideas in the shower/car/commute/playing tennis/laying on the beach/whatever"-- they get the problems posed in a formal context, and may even think about them formally for a while, too, but the solutions come when they aren't looking. Then you just have to recognize and remember them.
you really need to hook it up to a dynamo that's driven by the water coming in through the fill line. Use that to charge the battery and you can really decrease the amount of maintenance.
LA can get pretty toasty (105+F) for a week or two out of the year, but how hot it is inside depends a lot on hour your house is made. In 11 years here I've never had a whole house AC, and only used room AC for a few nights (the AC was one of the rooms in the house I was renting).
Vaulted ceilings (only a few inches of wood, sometimes some foam, and shingles between the inside and outside) can turn a house into an oven pretty quickly, but a space in between can improve things a lot. One place I lived had an upstairs that we didn't use much in the summer. Though we had some undergrads stay there for a few months one summer and they never used the AC either.
I'm currently in a place with vaulted ceilings, but it's well designed for the environment, with several large oak trees shading most of the roof and a concrete slab floor for about half the house. It's generally quite a bit cooler in the house than at the street, and with a whole house roof fan and some big windows I can vent the heat of the day (which is rarely even that hot) in a few minutes as soon as the sun goes down. My electric bills are pretty uniform year round.
More trees and a little more thought in construction and/or use could reduce peak loads a lot at pretty moderate cost. The thermostats are a good start and can really be a low impact on users-- increasing the setpoint during the hottest part of the day will reduce the load without causing much, if any, discomfort for a large number of people, rather than blacking people out with much greater impact on a possibly smaller number of people.
I came to RoR relatively from scratch-- there was some web stuff with a database backend that I wanted to do and I hadn't done much programming in a while, and no web programming at all. I've done a *lot* of C and Pascal (and even a little Forth. ick) for data acquisition and analysis, but hadn't done any web stuff. I looked at a bunch of different things and went through some decent books to learn various new things. Coming at it almost completely from scratch I ended up liking RoR quite a lot and found it very easy to figure out how to do what I needed to do and have the development be manageable, since it was all in my spare time.
A summary of my probably poorly informed opinions in sort of chronological order:
C++: I took a look at it years ago but didn't have much I needed to do with it, and felt like it made it easy to obscure Really Bad Things (TM) so I didn't really consider it for this project.
Java: initially seemed to be a likely choice, since I wanted to do a database backed web app that was fed by a bit of spidering. I went through the better part of what seemed like a decent book (with K&R being my reference standard for excellent book to learn from), and decided that a) Java was a little annoying because it took a ton of files to get to "Hello, World" (I may be totally wrong about that) but it did improve a lot on the things I didn't like about C++. It also didn't make my problems obviously more tractable, since I didn't immediately see useful libraries to help reduce the amount I would have to do from scratch.
Using a CMS as a base, and writing my own module: Took a look at a few PHP based ones, went through a PHP/MySQL book. PHP4 is easy, but feels too much like BASIC. PHP5 might be better, but I didn't get there, and I started getting the impression that OOP added onto procedural languages leads to clumsiness. PHP also ends up mixing code and display a lot, which also bothered me.
Perl: Seemed at first like the last language I would ever have to learn. You really can write any language in Perl. CPAN has a lot of nice modules, but I did start running into situations where new versions of one module would break another in a way that was getting frustrating for a relative beginner. Some modules are quite good, though, and it was very promising. Found a good book on Perl and MySQL development for the web that addressed most of what I wanted to do pretty well. Poked a little further and found Catalyst, and thought it would be really useful-- I had used frameworks before (including an OO one written in ANSI C, which was confusing the first read through, but eventually made a lot of sense), and thought it would be great to have all the mundane stuff taken care of by the framework. I got really frustrated installing it though, because there was always some bunch of tests failing, sending me back to try to fix things. Argh. Almost there.
Rails: Almost on a whim I decided to try Rails. I could do what I wanted in Perl, but some of the tools were clumsy, or I'd have to code a lot from scratch. I went through one of the web tutorials using Locomotive, and it actually seemed to work, behave, and do what I wanted without a lot of fuss. It looked a little funny. I got a little more into it and shelled out for the Agile Book-- it seemed too good to be true. I started actually working on the thing I wanted to do and made a lot of progress fast. Then I discovered things that were either a little awkward to do, or seemed a little clumsy either in how I had understood how to do things or how it would behave. And I discovered that I had learned enough in getting to each sticky point that I could rework things quickly to be better behaved. The main things I like about rails are that the MVC structure is strongly reinforced by the language and framework so it makes it easy to keep things where they should be and it's relatively easy to rework even something quickly (even major changes in the models and database) without breaking a bunch of things. I find that I