I'm a mac user and have just started using OSS stuff for the first time. I'm finding that with a little bit of effort (mostly related to differences in directory structure) I've been able to dl and install a fair bit of stuff that was developed for linux.
I've also seen this among astronomers (I'm not one, but I live among them)-- a few years ago they were all carrying laptops running linux at conferences. After OS X came out, I started noticing a fair number of TiBooks among the astronomers, and then the white iBooks. They seem to like the interoperability.
I took a look at that standard for legal information, the Wikipedia (I'm not a lawyer and don't play one on TV), and in the brief description of US libel law they give a couple of standards-- for public figures there has to be "actual malice" or "reckless negligence" for whether the statement is true, but for a private person, simple "negligence" is enough. If ~30% of credit reports have substantive errors in them, I'd suspect them of being pretty reckless.
(FWIW, last time I checked mine there were no 'errors', but there were substantive differences in how the different agencies classified the same accounts)
ChoicePoint says "Our data, our mistake, your tough luck." Even worse in the case when they helped disqualify legitimate voters because they were paid to do so...
It's always seemed to me that bad data in credit reports could/should constitute libel. They're making untrue claims about you in print that damage your reputation.
I'm sure the defense they use is that "We're making a credible effort to ensure that the data are accurate, and therefore any untrue statements are unintentional". That argument seems a bit specious, given the reported prevalence of errors in credit reports-- if there were errors in 1-2% or less, it might be plausible, but when nearly a third of reports have significant errors in them (according to consumer reports) that's starting to look like negligence. Similarly with ID theft--a friend had her identity borrowed, and the utility that her name was used with was given a made up drivers license number over the phone. They certainly failed to do even the minimum to verify identity, so why shouldn't they be sued for libel when they say something bad about her?
It seems like libel is a straigtforward way to force the credit agencies to bear liability for maintaining their records (and other companies for reporting accurate data to them). And this may be a case where millions of individual suits is more effective than class action-- death by millions of tiny cuts.
that audiophiles lose their ability to distinguish 128 from 192 and CD from MP3 as long as the testing is blind.
Audiophiles are people who listen to their stereo (or try to), not the music playing on it. They tend to make a lot of weird claims about being able to hear the oak volume knob on the amplifier. If you actually listen to music it's not hard to hear the difference between a lossily compressed MP3 and a CD played on decent (not audiophile) quality equipment.
as everyone on/. knows you only need to break the DRM once, convert it to a non DRM format (say Ogg Vorbis) and then the cat is out of bag.
And more importantly, breaking DRM on an audio file is trivial-- it has to be converted to an analog signal to listen to it, and can be easily and inexpensively redigitized into a DRMless format. Good quality D/A and A/D converters are cheap. Really good ones aren't very expensive. Short of requiring digital brain implants to "listen" to audio, there's nothing that can be done to prevent this.
And the small amount of loss in the signal in doing the conversion is pretty insignificant compared to the amount of downsampling that usually gets applied to get things down to a shareable/iPod-able size.
Just because something sounds crazy, doesn't mean it is. People from 100 years ago, if told about MRIs, CAT scans, GeoSyncSats, GPS, Sat Phones, Computers, the Internet, and Microwave ovens would say you are crazy and such things would never be possible.
Nobody plopped an MRI machine into a barber shop 100 years ago and said it would give a picture of your insides. X-rays did exist 100 years ago, were subjected to some high quality scientific inquiry and rapidly yielded their secrets (and some Nobel prizes). The same for those other devices - none of them came into existence before the physical principles they're based on were understood-- they're all products of engineering (application of known principles to produce something of use) and were developed well after the physical principles they depend on were discovered and explained.
I spend/have spent a fair bit of time surfing the crackpot line (that's where the fun is) and I'm pretty skeptical of this one. Sure, it deserves a good poking with a sharp stick (the foundation of good experimental science), but I doubt this will stand up to it.
Believing in superstitious quackery like this black box has serious ramifications. If enough people believed in this nonsense, then we would end up in setting national policy based on this block box. How would you like the USA to be guided by witches and warlocks?
Also point out to both Microcenter and Warrantech that it's up on a page that gets a gazillion hits a day, and their company's name is in the headline as ripping off customers on extended warranties.
Point out that there are plenty of consumer review sites that you can also post to at very little effort-- copy and paste is cheap.
Also point out that you plan to post a follow-up describing how things turned out.
Another option that worked for a friend of mine who was having trouble with a student loan servicer is to spend about 5 minutes talking to a lawyer. (Student loans [and their servicing] get sold around to a lot of companies who have no interest in making it easy for you to pay or get deferments [if you default the gov't covers it and they screw your credit], and some of them will refuse to accept documentation, or not give you an address to send it, and all sorts of difficult things). Her loans were sold to one of these bad companies, and they were refusing to accept official transcripts showing her as being in school. She called the law office across the street and got hooked up with a laywer who told her to ask for some things in the form "My attorney told me to ask you for these things" (and give him a call back if she got any more trouble). Instant 3 year deferral.
I've bought a lot of stuff in the last ten years that has great album flow/unified-work appeal. I've also bought very little that was released by major labels, and instead get a lot of stuff from small bands on indy labels where they're driven by their own desire to produce great music, and aren't forced to do what some label exec thinks is going to sell.
A few of my recent favorites: 100 Watt Smile - two different albums, one called 100 Watt Smile, the other is "...and Reason Flew" Gram Rabbit - Music to Start a Cult to. Einstürzende Neubauten - all their albums are cohesive works and very different from one another. Amazing band.
My main credit card company calls me once or twice a year. The transactions always go through (unlike with one of the sibling posts), but sometimes I get home from a vacation and within a day or so get a call from their automated transaction checking machine. It starts giving a rundown of transactions by date, merchant category and amount, and asks for confirmation.
It doesn't bother me, but the way the transactions are recorded means I always have to call them back and ask about some of them, and they always turn out to be ok. The problem is twofold: 1) they don't say "transaction at shell station" or "transaction at Bob's kayak rental", or otherwise give the name of the merchant. Instead they use the merchant category ("weird trinkets" or "restaurant") so it takes some time to figure out what they're referring to, and there's always at least one category that's utterly ambiguous.
2) The dollar amounts aren't necessarily the amount of the real transaction. When you buy gas with a credit card, you swipe the card first and it does a transaction for $100 or something like that to verify that the card is good for the money. After you finish, the real amount gets put in through what seems to be another transaction, and the earlier one gets cancelled. I notice this when I check online, too-- often there will be pending transactions for a large amount that turn out to be a smaller amount when they come through. When the machine calls, it sometimes lists the initial $100 transaction, when all I got was $8 worth of gas on the way back to the airport. It's further complicated if the transaction was in foreign currency, since the machine reads it to you in US$.
Wire transfers are sender iniated only. Nobody can contact bank and take money by wire, you contact the bank and send money by wire....
(lots of other interesting text cut for space)
All good points about different kinds of transfers.
I had to make some large transfers (to another country, of all things) recently and can add a little more: At my bank, unless I do a bunch of (fairly involved) paperwork in advance, the only way I can do a wire transfer is to show up in person at the bank, fill out the paperwork, show a picture ID (that they then photocopy) and sign the form. They don't ask a lot of questions, but they definitely document it carefully, and they do look like they check the signature cards (because it was large amounts, I made sure to use the branch where my account is). If you submit it before a particular time (4 pm or something) they are pretty good about the money being available at the receiving end by 10am or so the next day.
I also looked into setting things up for being able to do wire transfers by phone (they don't seem to offer online, though their online banking is pretty good), and there are a lot of variations on how you can set things up. You have to specify what account the money will come from, and you can set things up so that you can only wire money into particular other accounts (what I was going to do), or allow transfer into any account at all. You can also specify things like the currency that they'll send it in (foreign banks tend to give better rates than US ones, so it was better to send dollars), what kind of limits you want on how much can be moved, who can authorize, etc. At any rate, it turned out to be more trouble (and potential risk) than it was worth, and we use a joint account for smaller transfers that are less time critical.
The scope of government should be limited to protecting us from force or fraud, providing for a common defence, and construction and/or regulation of essential infrastructure
What about public parks, public spaces, (even public restrooms) and the like?
They aren't "essential infrastructure" or "common defense" but they are management of a limited resource for the common good-- they provide something that many people "want, use, and enjoy".
I've often been tempted to put easter eggs in documents that I had to release as PDFs after I discovered way back that it's easy to move objects around in a PDF. I'm pretty sure I didn't leave anything that says "All your base are belong to us" hidden under what looks like a blank box, but you never know...
Physics is one of the hardest fields to find a job, especially if you only have a B.S. Most companies will prefer a Masters when it comes to the research positions.
It's probably easier to get a job with a BS in physics than with a Masters. There are very few programs that even admit people for terminal masters (some of those are quite good though, and it's usually engineering oriented)-- usually it's what you get instead of turtle wax when you bail out of a PhD program. I've occasionally seen people grab the masters on the way to the PhD when they pretty much knew where in industry they were going to work and that the pay scale actually gave you a few extra $K for the MS in between the BS and PhD. Large numbers (most?) of PhDs in physics don't have an MS.
Engineering is very different, and there are lots of terminal MS programs--PhDs in engineering are sometimes too abstract to do "real work"-- and the MS will generally help.
Part of the job of an HR person is to find applicants who will actually stick around.
HR is mostly there to keep the company from getting sued over various forms of employee grievance.
If the job is very technical the decisions will usually get made by technical managers. HR sometimes causes trouble (that person is over/under qualified, doesn't dress well, costs too much, etc), but if they're doing technical filtering they're probably hurting the company more than helping.
If you want to go industry, why get the PhD if you have the skills you want to use right now? I'm not sure the 6 years of time off are made up for by the added pay.
It depends on the field you want to work in and how much independence you want. With a BS/BA in physics you can fake your way into various flavors of engineering jobs, but I haven't seen many people who stopped with a BS who get the flexibility you get with a PhD (I know one, and he's actually going for a PhD now because it is part of the price of admission for a lot of research grants/contracts). I got the PhD because I was working as an engineer (with a BS in physics) and it looked like the PhDs I was working for were having more fun-- they passed along a lot of the grunt work and got the data in return. And the money doesn't suck, but it can vary a lot depending on the industry and particular company.
As far as spending some time with a company then leaving to get a PhD, it's a small world. I was at a very small company (about 20 people when I left) in an industry pretty far from where I am now, but I still manage to run into them pretty regularly, and people who know them and work with them, all the time. Even had a subcontract to them for a while several years ago, and have collaborated with people who I first encountered as customers of the small company.
The catch with getting through the PhD program is that you have to really want to do the work. It can suck a lot of the time, depending on the field-- you can spend years building an experiment before you get any data, so you have to find entertainment in the building of it, but you also have to be ready to figure out what your data mean when they suddenly arrive in volume.
Covering the outside by sticking the popcorn to sheets of something and covering the house is probably not too hard-- termite extermination companies routinely completely cover rather large houses with tarps in less than a day (for 2-3 guys) so they can hold the gas in.
The amount of popcorn is formidable, but plausible--my ~1600 ft^2 roof can get pretty much completely covered with leaves a couple times in a month from the oak trees above it. The trees never seem to be missing any leaves, but there sure are a lot on the roof. If I put down tarps and spread glue on them I could probably supply enough leaf covered tarps to blanket a reasonable house in two to three months.
A more creative solution is to set up a "popcorn wrap" manufacturing plant. You would make large sheets of dimpled plastic, where the dimples were pretty close together and about the right size for an unpopped kernal. They get spread with an adhesive that will stay slightly tacky when it's hot, and then covered with unpopped corn. Then each kernal gets a small magnifying lenslet glued to it with a special adhesive (this is the hard part) that won't stick at the velocity of the "popping front" of the popcorn so that it won't start a fire after popping. Then you make large rolls of the stuff, and unroll it on the victim's house. The sun then pops each kernal individually, hurling the lenslets into a sparkly pile on the ground and encasing the house in fluffy white popcorn.
I'm sure if you set up such a plant you could make millions from people wanting to play pranks on their friends. The only barrier to getting rich on this is picking the right adhesives.
Also, for making the popcorn, can I recommend an oil drum mounted at an angle over a barbecue and slowly, constantly spun?
That still won't bury a whole house. A better solution might be a jet engine with an automatic popcorn feed.
A related option would be a propane heater with a fan. There's a whole house termite extermination technique where they blanket your house and instead of pumping in gas, they use a large heater and heat up all the structure to about 140F. That won't pop popcorn, but the heat at the output of the heater probably would. It also has a blower attached, so you could blow it into a pile. That would be pretty noisy though.
The quieter approach is to just get it from a popcorn manufacturer. When I was much younger I sold popcorn at the Pontiac Silverdome. When I started the poppers actually worked, and you popped it as needed. Later they switched ot pre-bagged-- there was some company that must have popped thousands of garbage bags full of popcorn in not very much time-- there were probably a hundred or so concession stands, and when you got there there were already tens of trash bags of popcorn piled up, already popped. You just dumped them into the machine whenever it got low.
Either way, to actually bury even a shed would take many cubic yards of popcorn. A cubic yard is a pretty large volume, and a small dumptruck only holds a few yards. You're not going to sneak up and do something like this.
I did a similar thing, but went to work for a small high tech (not computer related) company rather than a University. It paid reasonably well and I got stock options way before they were fashionable. I also saved up a fair bit of money so that when the crunch came in grad school I could remove most problems by spending money (thesis too large for computer in the days when memory cost real money? more memory overnight. Dishes stacking up? Dishwasher. Apartment such a mess you couldn't move? Cleaning service.)
I definitely recommend working for a bit before going to grad school, especially if you haven't spent time with the day to day reality of research. I tended to work as a programmer as an undergrad, rather than in the physics dept, and while it kept me fed, I didn't get the experience of really working in a physics lab until my first job.
Another tip for grad school is that if you don't mind housemates and can live without a car, you can live much better than people who have to live alone and have a car.
I tend to buy my apple stuff right after they introduce new stuff, but I snag the old stuff at steep discounts.
I use an 800 MHz TiBook at home that I got as a refurb about a month after the faster ones came out. I got it because it would still boot into OS9 for some legacy stuff, and had a graphics card that works with an old game that I was addicted to.
I use a 1 GHz TiBook at work that I got a while later, and I honestly don't notice any real difference between the two machines' performance (and I use both daily).
I also have some sort of high end WinXP "workstation" at work that I use for running FEM software (and really not much else). It's only a few months old, so it really screams, but because I trust windows so little, I don't use it for much else. It solves transient models really fast though, and the most significant thing about it is that it's really quiet, despite the speed. I've heard older machines that sound like a jet landing in your office.
Also, I'd wonder about any colo facility located in a former bank vault. It sounds cool, but it doesn't strike me as a very cost-effective place to put a data center.
I went to a Halloween party/haunted house this past halloween that was in a former bank in a dumpy part of LA. The haunted house was in the basement and one of the exhibits included going into the vault (which was pretty much intact). I can't imagine they were paying much to rent the whole facility.
In the case of the colo facility in a vault, it could just be that they got the location cheap and decided they could market it as extra safe even though it may not be, or it could have thermal problems. Money doesn't generate much heat when it's just sitting there, and the vault is probably well insulated and didn't come with good ventilation.
I would agree with the parent poster that social factors are probably much more important in keeping women away from science research.
As a male with a PhD in physics I'd have to agree. There are filters starting from a very young age to discourage girls/young women/women from going into science and math, and at various points the hostility tends to filter a very large number of them out.
You only have to lose 5-10 percent per year to end up with almost none after 30 years, which is the approximate length of the pipeline from kindergarten to tenure. I've seen more than a few very talented women leave physics because of it. The result is that the few women who stay in it tend to be both the most competent and tenacious, and the distribution of women who stay is more towards the high end, where there is a pretty normal distribution of men.
It's probably not just a highest bidder thing-- they probably have to demonstrate technical capability as well.
And in light of that, I can't help but wonder if the Panix domain-jacking wasn't someone's attempt to make Verisign look technically inept with low security, in addition to the complaints about their business practices. The timing is too close...
It's very much in Verisigns interest to figure out how it happened, who's responsible, and make sure it's less likely to happen in the future.
I think there are plenty of people who are willing (and interested in) looking more broadly for life, but it isn't easy, it's very expensive, and you have to start somewhere.
Right now we have one example of a planet where life formed, so we look for things like that. As we get better at it, I have little doubt that the search will broaden, but people are going for what look like the easy pickings first-- things that we more or less know how to detect and could probably get lots of people to agree are signs of life.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a mac user and have just started using OSS stuff for the first time. I'm finding that with a little bit of effort (mostly related to differences in directory structure) I've been able to dl and install a fair bit of stuff that was developed for linux.
I've also seen this among astronomers (I'm not one, but I live among them)-- a few years ago they were all carrying laptops running linux at conferences. After OS X came out, I started noticing a fair number of TiBooks among the astronomers, and then the white iBooks. They seem to like the interoperability.
I took a look at that standard for legal information, the Wikipedia (I'm not a lawyer and don't play one on TV), and in the brief description of US libel law they give a couple of standards-- for public figures there has to be "actual malice" or "reckless negligence" for whether the statement is true, but for a private person, simple "negligence" is enough. If ~30% of credit reports have substantive errors in them, I'd suspect them of being pretty reckless.
(FWIW, last time I checked mine there were no 'errors', but there were substantive differences in how the different agencies classified the same accounts)
ChoicePoint says "Our data, our mistake, your tough luck." Even worse in the case when they helped disqualify legitimate voters because they were paid to do so...
It's always seemed to me that bad data in credit reports could/should constitute libel. They're making untrue claims about you in print that damage your reputation.
I'm sure the defense they use is that "We're making a credible effort to ensure that the data are accurate, and therefore any untrue statements are unintentional". That argument seems a bit specious, given the reported prevalence of errors in credit reports-- if there were errors in 1-2% or less, it might be plausible, but when nearly a third of reports have significant errors in them (according to consumer reports) that's starting to look like negligence. Similarly with ID theft--a friend had her identity borrowed, and the utility that her name was used with was given a made up drivers license number over the phone. They certainly failed to do even the minimum to verify identity, so why shouldn't they be sued for libel when they say something bad about her?
It seems like libel is a straigtforward way to force the credit agencies to bear liability for maintaining their records (and other companies for reporting accurate data to them). And this may be a case where millions of individual suits is more effective than class action-- death by millions of tiny cuts.
that audiophiles lose their ability to distinguish 128 from 192 and CD from MP3 as long as the testing is blind.
Audiophiles are people who listen to their stereo (or try to), not the music playing on it. They tend to make a lot of weird claims about being able to hear the oak volume knob on the amplifier. If you actually listen to music it's not hard to hear the difference between a lossily compressed MP3 and a CD played on decent (not audiophile) quality equipment.
as everyone on /. knows you only need to break the DRM once, convert it to a non DRM format (say Ogg Vorbis) and then the cat is out of bag.
And more importantly, breaking DRM on an audio file is trivial-- it has to be converted to an analog signal to listen to it, and can be easily and inexpensively redigitized into a DRMless format. Good quality D/A and A/D converters are cheap. Really good ones aren't very expensive. Short of requiring digital brain implants to "listen" to audio, there's nothing that can be done to prevent this.
And the small amount of loss in the signal in doing the conversion is pretty insignificant compared to the amount of downsampling that usually gets applied to get things down to a shareable/iPod-able size.
Just because something sounds crazy, doesn't mean it is. People from 100 years ago, if told about MRIs, CAT scans, GeoSyncSats, GPS, Sat Phones, Computers, the Internet, and Microwave ovens would say you are crazy and such things would never be possible.
Nobody plopped an MRI machine into a barber shop 100 years ago and said it would give a picture of your insides. X-rays did exist 100 years ago, were subjected to some high quality scientific inquiry and rapidly yielded their secrets (and some Nobel prizes). The same for those other devices - none of them came into existence before the physical principles they're based on were understood-- they're all products of engineering (application of known principles to produce something of use) and were developed well after the physical principles they depend on were discovered and explained.
I spend/have spent a fair bit of time surfing the crackpot line (that's where the fun is) and I'm pretty skeptical of this one. Sure, it deserves a good poking with a sharp stick (the foundation of good experimental science), but I doubt this will stand up to it.
Believing in superstitious quackery like this black box has serious ramifications. If enough people believed in this nonsense, then we would end up in setting national policy based on this block box. How would you like the USA to be guided by witches and warlocks?
s/box/book/;
Possibly better advice than you realize.
Also point out to both Microcenter and Warrantech that it's up on a page that gets a gazillion hits a day, and their company's name is in the headline as ripping off customers on extended warranties.
Point out that there are plenty of consumer review sites that you can also post to at very little effort-- copy and paste is cheap.
Also point out that you plan to post a follow-up describing how things turned out.
Another option that worked for a friend of mine who was having trouble with a student loan servicer is to spend about 5 minutes talking to a lawyer. (Student loans [and their servicing] get sold around to a lot of companies who have no interest in making it easy for you to pay or get deferments [if you default the gov't covers it and they screw your credit], and some of them will refuse to accept documentation, or not give you an address to send it, and all sorts of difficult things). Her loans were sold to one of these bad companies, and they were refusing to accept official transcripts showing her as being in school. She called the law office across the street and got hooked up with a laywer who told her to ask for some things in the form "My attorney told me to ask you for these things" (and give him a call back if she got any more trouble). Instant 3 year deferral.
I've bought a lot of stuff in the last ten years that has great album flow/unified-work appeal. I've also bought very little that was released by major labels, and instead get a lot of stuff from small bands on indy labels where they're driven by their own desire to produce great music, and aren't forced to do what some label exec thinks is going to sell.
A few of my recent favorites:
100 Watt Smile - two different albums, one called 100 Watt Smile, the other is "...and Reason Flew"
Gram Rabbit - Music to Start a Cult to.
Einstürzende Neubauten - all their albums are cohesive works and very different from one another. Amazing band.
My main credit card company calls me once or twice a year. The transactions always go through (unlike with one of the sibling posts), but sometimes I get home from a vacation and within a day or so get a call from their automated transaction checking machine. It starts giving a rundown of transactions by date, merchant category and amount, and asks for confirmation.
It doesn't bother me, but the way the transactions are recorded means I always have to call them back and ask about some of them, and they always turn out to be ok. The problem is twofold:
1) they don't say "transaction at shell station" or "transaction at Bob's kayak rental", or otherwise give the name of the merchant. Instead they use the merchant category ("weird trinkets" or "restaurant") so it takes some time to figure out what they're referring to, and there's always at least one category that's utterly ambiguous.
2) The dollar amounts aren't necessarily the amount of the real transaction. When you buy gas with a credit card, you swipe the card first and it does a transaction for $100 or something like that to verify that the card is good for the money. After you finish, the real amount gets put in through what seems to be another transaction, and the earlier one gets cancelled. I notice this when I check online, too-- often there will be pending transactions for a large amount that turn out to be a smaller amount when they come through. When the machine calls, it sometimes lists the initial $100 transaction, when all I got was $8 worth of gas on the way back to the airport. It's further complicated if the transaction was in foreign currency, since the machine reads it to you in US$.
Wire transfers are sender iniated only. Nobody can contact bank and take money by wire, you contact the bank and send money by wire....
(lots of other interesting text cut for space)
All good points about different kinds of transfers.
I had to make some large transfers (to another country, of all things) recently and can add a little more:
At my bank, unless I do a bunch of (fairly involved) paperwork in advance, the only way I can do a wire transfer is to show up in person at the bank, fill out the paperwork, show a picture ID (that they then photocopy) and sign the form. They don't ask a lot of questions, but they definitely document it carefully, and they do look like they check the signature cards (because it was large amounts, I made sure to use the branch where my account is). If you submit it before a particular time (4 pm or something) they are pretty good about the money being available at the receiving end by 10am or so the next day.
I also looked into setting things up for being able to do wire transfers by phone (they don't seem to offer online, though their online banking is pretty good), and there are a lot of variations on how you can set things up. You have to specify what account the money will come from, and you can set things up so that you can only wire money into particular other accounts (what I was going to do), or allow transfer into any account at all. You can also specify things like the currency that they'll send it in (foreign banks tend to give better rates than US ones, so it was better to send dollars), what kind of limits you want on how much can be moved, who can authorize, etc. At any rate, it turned out to be more trouble (and potential risk) than it was worth, and we use a joint account for smaller transfers that are less time critical.
The scope of government should be limited to protecting us from force or fraud, providing for a common defence, and construction and/or regulation of essential infrastructure
What about public parks, public spaces, (even public restrooms) and the like?
They aren't "essential infrastructure" or "common defense" but they are management of a limited resource for the common good-- they provide something that many people "want, use, and enjoy".
I've often been tempted to put easter eggs in documents that I had to release as PDFs after I discovered way back that it's easy to move objects around in a PDF. I'm pretty sure I didn't leave anything that says "All your base are belong to us" hidden under what looks like a blank box, but you never know...
Physics is one of the hardest fields to find a job, especially if you only have a B.S. Most companies will prefer a Masters when it comes to the research positions.
It's probably easier to get a job with a BS in physics than with a Masters. There are very few programs that even admit people for terminal masters (some of those are quite good though, and it's usually engineering oriented)-- usually it's what you get instead of turtle wax when you bail out of a PhD program. I've occasionally seen people grab the masters on the way to the PhD when they pretty much knew where in industry they were going to work and that the pay scale actually gave you a few extra $K for the MS in between the BS and PhD. Large numbers (most?) of PhDs in physics don't have an MS.
Engineering is very different, and there are lots of terminal MS programs--PhDs in engineering are sometimes too abstract to do "real work"-- and the MS will generally help.
Part of the job of an HR person is to find applicants who will actually stick around.
HR is mostly there to keep the company from getting sued over various forms of employee grievance.
If the job is very technical the decisions will usually get made by technical managers. HR sometimes causes trouble (that person is over/under qualified, doesn't dress well, costs too much, etc), but if they're doing technical filtering they're probably hurting the company more than helping.
If you want to go industry, why get the PhD if you have the skills you want to use right now? I'm not sure the 6 years of time off are made up for by the added pay.
It depends on the field you want to work in and how much independence you want. With a BS/BA in physics you can fake your way into various flavors of engineering jobs, but I haven't seen many people who stopped with a BS who get the flexibility you get with a PhD (I know one, and he's actually going for a PhD now because it is part of the price of admission for a lot of research grants/contracts). I got the PhD because I was working as an engineer (with a BS in physics) and it looked like the PhDs I was working for were having more fun-- they passed along a lot of the grunt work and got the data in return. And the money doesn't suck, but it can vary a lot depending on the industry and particular company.
As far as spending some time with a company then leaving to get a PhD, it's a small world. I was at a very small company (about 20 people when I left) in an industry pretty far from where I am now, but I still manage to run into them pretty regularly, and people who know them and work with them, all the time. Even had a subcontract to them for a while several years ago, and have collaborated with people who I first encountered as customers of the small company.
The catch with getting through the PhD program is that you have to really want to do the work. It can suck a lot of the time, depending on the field-- you can spend years building an experiment before you get any data, so you have to find entertainment in the building of it, but you also have to be ready to figure out what your data mean when they suddenly arrive in volume.
Covering the outside by sticking the popcorn to sheets of something and covering the house is probably not too hard-- termite extermination companies routinely completely cover rather large houses with tarps in less than a day (for 2-3 guys) so they can hold the gas in.
The amount of popcorn is formidable, but plausible--my ~1600 ft^2 roof can get pretty much completely covered with leaves a couple times in a month from the oak trees above it. The trees never seem to be missing any leaves, but there sure are a lot on the roof. If I put down tarps and spread glue on them I could probably supply enough leaf covered tarps to blanket a reasonable house in two to three months.
A more creative solution is to set up a "popcorn wrap" manufacturing plant. You would make large sheets of dimpled plastic, where the dimples were pretty close together and about the right size for an unpopped kernal. They get spread with an adhesive that will stay slightly tacky when it's hot, and then covered with unpopped corn. Then each kernal gets a small magnifying lenslet glued to it with a special adhesive (this is the hard part) that won't stick at the velocity of the "popping front" of the popcorn so that it won't start a fire after popping. Then you make large rolls of the stuff, and unroll it on the victim's house. The sun then pops each kernal individually, hurling the lenslets into a sparkly pile on the ground and encasing the house in fluffy white popcorn.
I'm sure if you set up such a plant you could make millions from people wanting to play pranks on their friends. The only barrier to getting rich on this is picking the right adhesives.
Also, for making the popcorn, can I recommend an oil drum mounted at an angle over a barbecue and slowly, constantly spun?
That still won't bury a whole house. A better solution might be a jet engine with an automatic popcorn feed.
A related option would be a propane heater with a fan. There's a whole house termite extermination technique where they blanket your house and instead of pumping in gas, they use a large heater and heat up all the structure to about 140F. That won't pop popcorn, but the heat at the output of the heater probably would. It also has a blower attached, so you could blow it into a pile. That would be pretty noisy though.
The quieter approach is to just get it from a popcorn manufacturer. When I was much younger I sold popcorn at the Pontiac Silverdome. When I started the poppers actually worked, and you popped it as needed. Later they switched ot pre-bagged-- there was some company that must have popped thousands of garbage bags full of popcorn in not very much time-- there were probably a hundred or so concession stands, and when you got there there were already tens of trash bags of popcorn piled up, already popped. You just dumped them into the machine whenever it got low.
Either way, to actually bury even a shed would take many cubic yards of popcorn. A cubic yard is a pretty large volume, and a small dumptruck only holds a few yards. You're not going to sneak up and do something like this.
I did a similar thing, but went to work for a small high tech (not computer related) company rather than a University. It paid reasonably well and I got stock options way before they were fashionable. I also saved up a fair bit of money so that when the crunch came in grad school I could remove most problems by spending money (thesis too large for computer in the days when memory cost real money? more memory overnight. Dishes stacking up? Dishwasher. Apartment such a mess you couldn't move? Cleaning service.)
I definitely recommend working for a bit before going to grad school, especially if you haven't spent time with the day to day reality of research. I tended to work as a programmer as an undergrad, rather than in the physics dept, and while it kept me fed, I didn't get the experience of really working in a physics lab until my first job.
Another tip for grad school is that if you don't mind housemates and can live without a car, you can live much better than people who have to live alone and have a car.
no comments on the annoying use of flash?
I didn't even see a button for "flash annoys me, get me to your 'content'"
I tend to buy my apple stuff right after they introduce new stuff, but I snag the old stuff at steep discounts.
I use an 800 MHz TiBook at home that I got as a refurb about a month after the faster ones came out. I got it because it would still boot into OS9 for some legacy stuff, and had a graphics card that works with an old game that I was addicted to.
I use a 1 GHz TiBook at work that I got a while later, and I honestly don't notice any real difference between the two machines' performance (and I use both daily).
I also have some sort of high end WinXP "workstation" at work that I use for running FEM software (and really not much else). It's only a few months old, so it really screams, but because I trust windows so little, I don't use it for much else. It solves transient models really fast though, and the most significant thing about it is that it's really quiet, despite the speed. I've heard older machines that sound like a jet landing in your office.
Also, I'd wonder about any colo facility located in a former bank vault. It sounds cool, but it doesn't strike me as a very cost-effective place to put a data center.
I went to a Halloween party/haunted house this past halloween that was in a former bank in a dumpy part of LA. The haunted house was in the basement and one of the exhibits included going into the vault (which was pretty much intact). I can't imagine they were paying much to rent the whole facility.
In the case of the colo facility in a vault, it could just be that they got the location cheap and decided they could market it as extra safe even though it may not be, or it could have thermal problems. Money doesn't generate much heat when it's just sitting there, and the vault is probably well insulated and didn't come with good ventilation.
I would agree with the parent poster that social factors are probably much more important in keeping women away from science research.
As a male with a PhD in physics I'd have to agree. There are filters starting from a very young age to discourage girls/young women/women from going into science and math, and at various points the hostility tends to filter a very large number of them out.
You only have to lose 5-10 percent per year to end up with almost none after 30 years, which is the approximate length of the pipeline from kindergarten to tenure. I've seen more than a few very talented women leave physics because of it. The result is that the few women who stay in it tend to be both the most competent and tenacious, and the distribution of women who stay is more towards the high end, where there is a pretty normal distribution of men.
It's probably not just a highest bidder thing-- they probably have to demonstrate technical capability as well.
And in light of that, I can't help but wonder if the Panix domain-jacking wasn't someone's attempt to make Verisign look technically inept with low security, in addition to the complaints about their business practices. The timing is too close...
It's very much in Verisigns interest to figure out how it happened, who's responsible, and make sure it's less likely to happen in the future.
I think there are plenty of people who are willing (and interested in) looking more broadly for life, but it isn't easy, it's very expensive, and you have to start somewhere.
Right now we have one example of a planet where life formed, so we look for things like that. As we get better at it, I have little doubt that the search will broaden, but people are going for what look like the easy pickings first-- things that we more or less know how to detect and could probably get lots of people to agree are signs of life.