If you don't admit to a past drug problem and they find out about it, you don't get a clearance, or you lose it if you had it. If you tell the truth about it and it's in the past you probably will get a clearance. They ask about it on the SF85 (the form for non-sensitive positions) and people have been denied employment or fired for lying about it.
Now consider the cable company. You want to add service? No problem--you can do that by yourself online. Want to cancel something or downgrade it? You *have* to call. Then you find that that part of the system is understaffed and it takes over an hour to do. Oh, and the cancellation is only open from 9-5, so I have to call during work. I kept a service at an old home for months (still owned it) after because I didn't have time to call to deal with it; only $20 a month for really cheap internet that was meant to tide over during a transition, but it shows how much hassle canceling can be.
Comcast was particularly evil about cancelling-- my mom was in competitive territory where she could have Comcast or WOW, and had signed up for a Comcast deal where she had no end of equipment trouble, and they would send her random stuff that she hadn't ordered. She died before the contract ran out and when I was managing her estate, they demanded that I come in to their office with the death certificate and letters of authority and wouldn't accept it by mail or give me a mailing address when I talked to them on the phone. I live 2000 miles away and was able to do the entire probate by mail and phone with the use of notaries and few medallion signature guarantees. *Every* other business and government entity was perfectly fine with mail (sometimes fax) and notaries or guarantees from my bank. Surprisingly, though, twitter shaming ended up working with comcast-- one tweet about it with details (because they can't hide it) and they gave me an email address to send details to and I got it worked out. Dealing with them was frustrating enough that I actually wrote to the FCC and my congress people to oppose the Comcast/TW merger.
Charter, on the other hand, has actually been pretty decent. I got them after PacBell was unable to make DSL work at my new house, and I've had very few problems. For a long time if I called them up for anything (add a service or ask a question) they'd actually offer to *lower* my rate and then backdate it 3 months. That happened several times. When I got my own cable modem it was no hassle to switch, and the few times I've had to go in for hardware swaps (e.g. to trade analog equipment for digital) there's been no more than one or two people in line. Last time I talked to them they said they'd stopped charging for the cable modems and I could switch back to one of theirs if I felt like it, or not. Recently I had problems due to rain (animals chewing on the cable insulation) and they sent someone out in the rain to fix it-- it took two trips because the pole access requires putting a ladder on a neighbors roof, but they were very easy to schedule with them and the neighbor. If they can buy TWC and make TWC be like the Charter I deal with (SoCal) it would actually be a good thing.
Portable power for a Wireless router. Take a router with you for tethering and range extension. The lighter socket in the car goes off with the key, but a 5V router can provide some run time for mobile road warriors.
My portable wireless router has a built in 6 Ah battery that can be used to charge other devices.
And the lighters/aux power in my car don't turn off til you open the door after you turn the key to off.
I've seen it for lots of detailed technical meetings. But when it's useful, most of the slides are blank plus a title (and with the title removed if it gets in the way) with graphics of some sort (drawing, flowchart, photo, plot of actual data) pasted in and the only ppt features used are circles and arrows and text boxes for labels.
Amazon does a decent job of both flagging things and responding appropriately. I've got a small ebook publishing company and we've occasionally picked up the rights to books that were either published by another publisher first, or self published and we help the author do a major edit and better cover and republish. Usually amazon asks us to confirm that we really have the rights to publish something, generally just by declaration, but in at least one case they asked us for a scan of the contract (which was easy enough to supply). They also do a lot of searching in the background and will flag a book if it's got a lot of links in it (this has happened when we had detailed references in books) and if it looks like it's got similar content to someone's blog. Google doesn't seem to do any of that, despite having fairly complete copies of the interwebs back pretty far.
Sodastream is comparable in price to soda water on sale at the grocery, maybe even more expensive.
I drink a lot of soda water, so I got a corny keg, a 5 lb CO2 cylinder, and a soda gun. A good premix gun is hard to find and the most expensive part, but you can use a post-mix gun, too. It's a few hundred $$ up front, but operating costs are a) water from the filtered tap and b) $10 every 6-7 months for a CO2 refill c) $20 every 5 years to get the cylinder proof tested. You can save on the cylinder by getting swappable steel ones from the gas supplier, but they don't look as nice. I go through 5 gallons of soda water every couple weeks and never have to deal with plastic bottles anymore.
Get an Aeropress. It's like a giant syringe with a filter on the end, and squeegees itself clean as you make the coffee. You throw away the grounds and a small piece of filter paper, then rinse the end lightly and you're done. I bring one and a hand grinder when I travel for work and use the hotel coffeemaker to heat the water.
Yeah, my dad would count, too. We had tons of punchcards at home when I was a kid, and he at one point mentioned programming by setting a bunch of toggle switches and then pushing the spring loaded toggle at the end to push the byte into memory. I'm at the very leading edge of Gen X and have been using computers pretty much all my life (not as my main thing post school though), and manage to be reasonably current for something that's mostly peripheral to my work. If I had to, I could go to the beach and make a computer from scratch and then program it, though it might take a while.
Now I wish those kids would get offa my lawn! (throws handful of 4004s at them)
only the ali'i and kahuna were allowed on the Mauna, not commoners like them
When Isabella Bird wanted to go to the summit of Mauna Loa in the 1870s, the only major issue was that there were no warm clothes on the island of Hawaii because nobody went to the summit. They rounded up some warm clothes for her (scoured the islands for them) and she did a solo camping trip.
But then, there wasn't much interest in Astronauts driving around the moon, because it interrupted soap operas and game shows on TV.
Shuttle stopped making the news a long time ago except when it was threatened with shutdown, hubble was threatened with shutdown, or one crashed. People have been in LEO fairly regularly for a long time now.
The problem with that is *something* is *always* offensive to someone. No matter what.
If I pick a male face it's offensive because I underrepresent women. If I pick a black face it's offensive because I'm a racist. If I pick an Asian female I'm sexualizing. If I pick a cute animal I'm promoting abuse. And so on and so forth.
Whatever.
Use the six face panel that the onion uses for the person on the street interviews. It's diverse and everybody will recognize the source and get a chuckle. You probably have to get permission though.
You must have conniption fits when you go to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. Or the Los Angeles County Art Museum's Egyptian section.
Those are not for children, and they don't require mandatory attendance.
We had field trips to the Detroit Institute of Arts nearly every year throughout elementary school after 4th grade or so, and occasionally later in school, and yes, we did see the racy stuff from the 16th-18th centuries. The trips weren't manadatory, but I don't recall anybody getting opted out by their parents. But in the 70's you could dress your kid as a 50lb bag of weed for halloween and send them to their 3rd grade class and people would say "how cute!" rather than sending them to prison as an adult and confiscating your home.
You can't have your luggage deliberately fly on a plane without you. It's common for luggage to get on an earlier or later flight when there's weather, delayed planes, or baggage issues, but they'll pull your bags if you check in and check your luggage and then don't fly.
A battery is a simpler design, requires no maintenance, and it's able to alert you when its capacity drops to a level that's likely to cause you problems if you ever need to use it. That additional functionality makes the battery superior to the point there's good reason to choose it over a gasoline engine even if it supposedly costs more dollars.
I went through exactly this trade in putting together a UPS for my mom when she was on oxygen. She was in a city with occasional severe weather that could lead to blackouts and needed her O2 generator to function so she could move around at all. A friend of hers was at the home depot and saw generators on sale and called her, pushing her to get one. She had him call me, and I had to explain that there was no way it would be useful-- it would have to be stored in the house (out of the weather), maintained, and then if there was a power outage would have to be moved out and started up, probably in the dark with bad weather, by a 68 year old dependent on a high flow of oxygen. After that I put together a 1 kWh battery backup system with a Tripplite inverter/charger and some scooter batteries that her O2 machine ran off and would give her enough time to sleep through most of a power outage without knowing it, and then get to the LOX supply and switch to that. Almost no maintenance and no active operation required for the user. It cost more than a cheap generator, but it met the use case and worked.
It depends on where you live. In SoCal people use the AC for the heat-- it's often ~100+F and 10% RH in the hot months. People sit around in my neighborhood and report the line voltage over email until it goes out completely. I don't have AC - a couple oak trees over the house take care of that about 99.9% of the time, but neighbors without trees run their AC pretty hard.
LFD might be slightly better at this but holography is the ultimate solution here.
Holography is much further off than practical LFD, which is further off than stereogram goggles. Realtime holographic imaging with useful performance has only become practical recently, and still only in limited applications. Realtime true holographic display is a whole different animal.
There are numerous 3D depth perception cues, among which are stereo-vision,
stereo vision is constructed in your brain from the two slightly different images on your retinas. Your brain does a lot of complicated things in constructing 3D models-- to the extent that you can have perfect refraction in both eyes and perfect retinas, but be missing half of your field of view due to neural damage in between your eyeball and your conscious brain.
depth of field
which is part of the 2D map of photons on your retina. I can construct a 2D image that has proper DOF cues.
prior knowledge of the objects size
which is also in your brain and unnecessary for a 3D display (but is necessary in the computer that constructs the images to project)
LFD can make the job easier so you can be less vomit-inducing without retinal tracking, but it's not necessary.
Neither holography nor light-field-display is necessary for a goggle based device. Each retina collects photons on a surface and with a single eye you get a 2D image*. Your brain combines the images from your eyes in very complex ways to create a 3D internal model, but as far as what needs to get shined into your eyes, it's just the 2D image constructed on your retina that matters. Slightly different images to form a realtime stereogram is all that's necessary.
(*although with one eye that moves around your brain can construct 3D models. I've known people with one eye that had very depth perception for athletic things, and have experimented a little throwing and catching with one eye and it is possible to be accurate).
Probably not long after you can get the on-road version.
There are very real commercial applications for OR autonomous driving, and keep in mind that this was 10 years ago and those were self-funded (or by whatever sponsors they could round up) university teams doing one-off vehicles. If you look at what they achieved for what they spent, and extrapolate it to mass production it's very reasonable to expect off-road autonomy to be available on the same time scale as on-road.
And as zippthorne notes, you have to put a ton of time in to get any good at driving off road. With the autonomous version you pay some money and get tens of thousands of hours of experience built into the system at delivery.
Only complaint I have, I really wish most of these telescopes were open to the public. I have never had the opportunity to look through anything bigger than a backyard telescope and it would be amazing to be able to see what a thirty meter telescope can do.
You don't really "look through" them so much as reserve time and then sit in a control room in Waimea, or more likely your home institution anywhere in the world, and wait for digital data. Some stuff is done with a realtime observer making decisions (based on the digital data), but a lot of it's automated and planned on schedules that optimize the amount of observing vs. the amount of repointing and other overhead. There's various ways to get access, but mostly they require being part of a research institution and proposing for time. The various institutions involved in building them get observing time in return, and then some amount is probably also available through gov't grants to "buy" time. A nice thing about ground based telescopes over space based is the amount of effective observing time relative to things like calibration and maintenance, so they're effectively accessible to more people. The number of people on the summit is getting to be fairly small and tending toward the people who are doing construction, maintenance, installation, or any kind of hand-on instrument calibration or adjustment, but observing is moving to be more and more remote, which also makes it more accessible to more people.
It's got a good balance of elevation, good seeing, dry atmosphere to look through, accessibility, and political stability. There aren't very many places that have all of those (among other factors) which is why there are so many telescopes there. The Atacama desert in Chile is one of the few realistically competitive areas (and it's better in some of those features), but it's not as accessible and maybe less politically stable.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't admit to a past drug problem and they find out about it, you don't get a clearance, or you lose it if you had it. If you tell the truth about it and it's in the past you probably will get a clearance. They ask about it on the SF85 (the form for non-sensitive positions) and people have been denied employment or fired for lying about it.
you want money you have to play live. the era of living off royalties, reselling your music in new formats and greatest hits collections is over
That era never existed for most artists, even large, well known ones. The money has always been in live shows, merch, and more recently licensing.
Now consider the cable company. You want to add service? No problem--you can do that by yourself online. Want to cancel something or downgrade it? You *have* to call. Then you find that that part of the system is understaffed and it takes over an hour to do. Oh, and the cancellation is only open from 9-5, so I have to call during work. I kept a service at an old home for months (still owned it) after because I didn't have time to call to deal with it; only $20 a month for really cheap internet that was meant to tide over during a transition, but it shows how much hassle canceling can be.
Comcast was particularly evil about cancelling-- my mom was in competitive territory where she could have Comcast or WOW, and had signed up for a Comcast deal where she had no end of equipment trouble, and they would send her random stuff that she hadn't ordered. She died before the contract ran out and when I was managing her estate, they demanded that I come in to their office with the death certificate and letters of authority and wouldn't accept it by mail or give me a mailing address when I talked to them on the phone. I live 2000 miles away and was able to do the entire probate by mail and phone with the use of notaries and few medallion signature guarantees. *Every* other business and government entity was perfectly fine with mail (sometimes fax) and notaries or guarantees from my bank. Surprisingly, though, twitter shaming ended up working with comcast-- one tweet about it with details (because they can't hide it) and they gave me an email address to send details to and I got it worked out. Dealing with them was frustrating enough that I actually wrote to the FCC and my congress people to oppose the Comcast/TW merger.
Charter, on the other hand, has actually been pretty decent. I got them after PacBell was unable to make DSL work at my new house, and I've had very few problems. For a long time if I called them up for anything (add a service or ask a question) they'd actually offer to *lower* my rate and then backdate it 3 months. That happened several times. When I got my own cable modem it was no hassle to switch, and the few times I've had to go in for hardware swaps (e.g. to trade analog equipment for digital) there's been no more than one or two people in line. Last time I talked to them they said they'd stopped charging for the cable modems and I could switch back to one of theirs if I felt like it, or not. Recently I had problems due to rain (animals chewing on the cable insulation) and they sent someone out in the rain to fix it-- it took two trips because the pole access requires putting a ladder on a neighbors roof, but they were very easy to schedule with them and the neighbor. If they can buy TWC and make TWC be like the Charter I deal with (SoCal) it would actually be a good thing.
Portable power for a Wireless router. Take a router with you for tethering and range extension. The lighter socket in the car goes off with the key, but a 5V router can provide some run time for mobile road warriors.
My portable wireless router has a built in 6 Ah battery that can be used to charge other devices.
And the lighters/aux power in my car don't turn off til you open the door after you turn the key to off.
I've seen it for lots of detailed technical meetings. But when it's useful, most of the slides are blank plus a title (and with the title removed if it gets in the way) with graphics of some sort (drawing, flowchart, photo, plot of actual data) pasted in and the only ppt features used are circles and arrows and text boxes for labels.
Amazon does a decent job of both flagging things and responding appropriately. I've got a small ebook publishing company and we've occasionally picked up the rights to books that were either published by another publisher first, or self published and we help the author do a major edit and better cover and republish. Usually amazon asks us to confirm that we really have the rights to publish something, generally just by declaration, but in at least one case they asked us for a scan of the contract (which was easy enough to supply). They also do a lot of searching in the background and will flag a book if it's got a lot of links in it (this has happened when we had detailed references in books) and if it looks like it's got similar content to someone's blog. Google doesn't seem to do any of that, despite having fairly complete copies of the interwebs back pretty far.
Sodastream is comparable in price to soda water on sale at the grocery, maybe even more expensive.
I drink a lot of soda water, so I got a corny keg, a 5 lb CO2 cylinder, and a soda gun. A good premix gun is hard to find and the most expensive part, but you can use a post-mix gun, too. It's a few hundred $$ up front, but operating costs are a) water from the filtered tap and b) $10 every 6-7 months for a CO2 refill c) $20 every 5 years to get the cylinder proof tested. You can save on the cylinder by getting swappable steel ones from the gas supplier, but they don't look as nice. I go through 5 gallons of soda water every couple weeks and never have to deal with plastic bottles anymore.
Get an Aeropress. It's like a giant syringe with a filter on the end, and squeegees itself clean as you make the coffee. You throw away the grounds and a small piece of filter paper, then rinse the end lightly and you're done. I bring one and a hand grinder when I travel for work and use the hotel coffeemaker to heat the water.
He certainly did it from paper, not doing it real time.
Yeah, my dad would count, too. We had tons of punchcards at home when I was a kid, and he at one point mentioned programming by setting a bunch of toggle switches and then pushing the spring loaded toggle at the end to push the byte into memory. I'm at the very leading edge of Gen X and have been using computers pretty much all my life (not as my main thing post school though), and manage to be reasonably current for something that's mostly peripheral to my work. If I had to, I could go to the beach and make a computer from scratch and then program it, though it might take a while.
Now I wish those kids would get offa my lawn! (throws handful of 4004s at them)
only the ali'i and kahuna were allowed on the Mauna, not commoners like them
When Isabella Bird wanted to go to the summit of Mauna Loa in the 1870s, the only major issue was that there were no warm clothes on the island of Hawaii because nobody went to the summit. They rounded up some warm clothes for her (scoured the islands for them) and she did a solo camping trip.
But then, there wasn't much interest in Astronauts driving around the moon, because it interrupted soap operas and game shows on TV.
Shuttle stopped making the news a long time ago except when it was threatened with shutdown, hubble was threatened with shutdown, or one crashed. People have been in LEO fairly regularly for a long time now.
The problem with that is *something* is *always* offensive to someone. No matter what.
If I pick a male face it's offensive because I underrepresent women. If I pick a black face it's offensive because I'm a racist. If I pick an Asian female I'm sexualizing. If I pick a cute animal I'm promoting abuse. And so on and so forth.
Whatever.
Use the six face panel that the onion uses for the person on the street interviews. It's diverse and everybody will recognize the source and get a chuckle. You probably have to get permission though.
You must have conniption fits when you go to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. Or the Los Angeles County Art Museum's Egyptian section.
Those are not for children, and they don't require mandatory attendance.
We had field trips to the Detroit Institute of Arts nearly every year throughout elementary school after 4th grade or so, and occasionally later in school, and yes, we did see the racy stuff from the 16th-18th centuries. The trips weren't manadatory, but I don't recall anybody getting opted out by their parents. But in the 70's you could dress your kid as a 50lb bag of weed for halloween and send them to their 3rd grade class and people would say "how cute!" rather than sending them to prison as an adult and confiscating your home.
You can't have your luggage deliberately fly on a plane without you. It's common for luggage to get on an earlier or later flight when there's weather, delayed planes, or baggage issues, but they'll pull your bags if you check in and check your luggage and then don't fly.
A battery is a simpler design, requires no maintenance, and it's able to alert you when its capacity drops to a level that's likely to cause you problems if you ever need to use it. That additional functionality makes the battery superior to the point there's good reason to choose it over a gasoline engine even if it supposedly costs more dollars.
I went through exactly this trade in putting together a UPS for my mom when she was on oxygen. She was in a city with occasional severe weather that could lead to blackouts and needed her O2 generator to function so she could move around at all. A friend of hers was at the home depot and saw generators on sale and called her, pushing her to get one. She had him call me, and I had to explain that there was no way it would be useful-- it would have to be stored in the house (out of the weather), maintained, and then if there was a power outage would have to be moved out and started up, probably in the dark with bad weather, by a 68 year old dependent on a high flow of oxygen. After that I put together a 1 kWh battery backup system with a Tripplite inverter/charger and some scooter batteries that her O2 machine ran off and would give her enough time to sleep through most of a power outage without knowing it, and then get to the LOX supply and switch to that. Almost no maintenance and no active operation required for the user. It cost more than a cheap generator, but it met the use case and worked.
It depends on where you live. In SoCal people use the AC for the heat-- it's often ~100+F and 10% RH in the hot months. People sit around in my neighborhood and report the line voltage over email until it goes out completely. I don't have AC - a couple oak trees over the house take care of that about 99.9% of the time, but neighbors without trees run their AC pretty hard.
LFD might be slightly better at this but holography is the ultimate solution here.
Holography is much further off than practical LFD, which is further off than stereogram goggles. Realtime holographic imaging with useful performance has only become practical recently, and still only in limited applications. Realtime true holographic display is a whole different animal.
There are numerous 3D depth perception cues, among which are stereo-vision,
stereo vision is constructed in your brain from the two slightly different images on your retinas. Your brain does a lot of complicated things in constructing 3D models-- to the extent that you can have perfect refraction in both eyes and perfect retinas, but be missing half of your field of view due to neural damage in between your eyeball and your conscious brain.
depth of field
which is part of the 2D map of photons on your retina. I can construct a 2D image that has proper DOF cues.
prior knowledge of the objects size
which is also in your brain and unnecessary for a 3D display (but is necessary in the computer that constructs the images to project)
LFD can make the job easier so you can be less vomit-inducing without retinal tracking, but it's not necessary.
Neither holography nor light-field-display is necessary for a goggle based device. Each retina collects photons on a surface and with a single eye you get a 2D image*. Your brain combines the images from your eyes in very complex ways to create a 3D internal model, but as far as what needs to get shined into your eyes, it's just the 2D image constructed on your retina that matters. Slightly different images to form a realtime stereogram is all that's necessary.
(*although with one eye that moves around your brain can construct 3D models. I've known people with one eye that had very depth perception for athletic things, and have experimented a little throwing and catching with one eye and it is possible to be accurate).
Probably not long after you can get the on-road version.
There are very real commercial applications for OR autonomous driving, and keep in mind that this was 10 years ago and those were self-funded (or by whatever sponsors they could round up) university teams doing one-off vehicles. If you look at what they achieved for what they spent, and extrapolate it to mass production it's very reasonable to expect off-road autonomy to be available on the same time scale as on-road.
And as zippthorne notes, you have to put a ton of time in to get any good at driving off road. With the autonomous version you pay some money and get tens of thousands of hours of experience built into the system at delivery.
You mean like in the DARPA grand challenge?
Only complaint I have, I really wish most of these telescopes were open to the public. I have never had the opportunity to look through anything bigger than a backyard telescope and it would be amazing to be able to see what a thirty meter telescope can do.
You don't really "look through" them so much as reserve time and then sit in a control room in Waimea, or more likely your home institution anywhere in the world, and wait for digital data. Some stuff is done with a realtime observer making decisions (based on the digital data), but a lot of it's automated and planned on schedules that optimize the amount of observing vs. the amount of repointing and other overhead. There's various ways to get access, but mostly they require being part of a research institution and proposing for time. The various institutions involved in building them get observing time in return, and then some amount is probably also available through gov't grants to "buy" time. A nice thing about ground based telescopes over space based is the amount of effective observing time relative to things like calibration and maintenance, so they're effectively accessible to more people. The number of people on the summit is getting to be fairly small and tending toward the people who are doing construction, maintenance, installation, or any kind of hand-on instrument calibration or adjustment, but observing is moving to be more and more remote, which also makes it more accessible to more people.
It's got a good balance of elevation, good seeing, dry atmosphere to look through, accessibility, and political stability. There aren't very many places that have all of those (among other factors) which is why there are so many telescopes there. The Atacama desert in Chile is one of the few realistically competitive areas (and it's better in some of those features), but it's not as accessible and maybe less politically stable.
Red Laser. It's been around for years.