well, RTFA. For mod points, it's disruptive because it runs Linux!
The second article describes this very well. One big extra is that this system can perform all of the standard drive-repair operations that typically only OEMs can. This helps to keep you from replacing drives that aren't bad, but had a hiccup.
It's also not just two drives in an ISE, but more like 10-20 (3.5" and 2.5" respectively) with a bunch of Linux software to give each ISE a pretty robust feature-set in itself. Then they also up the block size to 520 bytes, leaving space for data validity checks in order to keep the silent corruption problem from sneaking into the system.
In the end, it's probably not wholly revolutionary. It does seem like an evolutionary jump though; with great performance, great feature set, and a very well thought out system that brings new technology and ideas to bear.
Exactly. I find it hard to fault the administration (however much I like to) without more facts.
Like, for example, how many other countries are not currently complying with WTO rulings. I doubt that the answer is zero. There might be some countries ignoring a dozen rulings, but we have no idea. The US might be doing really well in this regard (although I doubt it just due to the world economic structure). But it would at least be good to know!
They didn't come anywhere close to meeting the 1.3 billion reserve. They fell something like 900 million short. They're not sure why, but they think it might be related to this company that was spreading FUD about charging an extra 50 million on top. Somehow I don't think it's that company.
The FCC had put in some pretty strong wording about building in first responder capability. It was more than what was typically done in the past, but it didn't seem totally outrageous. I think the problem is that a lot of the wireless carriers are moving towards commodization, and thus low margins. 90% of the population in the US can get good cell service from multiple providers. With low margins, why would you take on a huge risk that could be a brick around your neck? Better to spend the little bit extra and get a chunk of spectrum whose only restrictions were pretty much that you had to use it? I think it's that that piece of the spectrum just isn't worth the hassle if you have to build in tons of first responder equipment also.
It's just worth only 50% of what they thought it was. Oops, they messed up. But since they messed up big, they have to start an investigation.
Really neat setup. Easily spent over two hours browsing around this small museum. Mostly on reading about the war stories. They just had a lot of neat stuff.
You could actually encode and decode your own messages with actual ENIGMA machines. They had the actual bombe's that broke it, and tons of other stuff. The people there are also extremely helpful, knowledgeable, and nice. Even if you're just one person, they'll give you a whole tour and answer whatever questions you have. I highly recommend it!
This seems to be exactly his problem. It's mine. Everytime I express frustration with Java, I get a "you just don't have the right platform/tool, use this!" Then I need up with 50 more tools with people suggesting even more platforms and tools and enterprise solutions, with everyone having their own favorites. Not a bad language, but just too much other hassle.
I'm with you man. I would prefer to get 10 years of experience rather than 2 years of experience 5 times (aka working in a job with one hat where you do the same thing over and over again).
Of course you're always going to specialize...and hoping learning new things in that field everyday. The second that I have been practicing at a high level for a couple of months in a field is the second that I start training my replacement while I look for something new to sink my teeth into. That way I mostly master a trade and move on. Now, a lot of my knowledge is rusty, but since I'm used to picking up new things, re-learning is not a huge deal whenever it comes back up.
Yea, losing that is something that I would mourn also.
Gah, I'd just be *not there* until actual boarding....no way I'd voluntarily sit in those horrible seats that I can't even fully extend my legs in for another half hour than I have to!
Flyers who had their shit together generally got "A" boarding. When you were in A, everyone walked to their seat, slung their bags up and were seated in under 5 seconds.
People who were kind of together got B, these people took a while but they didn't have anyone to wait on and things backed up a little, but generally went pretty smooth. Still faster than other airlines.
People who were in C generally had lots of problems. But it was ok, as one searched their backpack for their book and ipod, the guy in front and behind was doing the same. Massive traffic jam, but they weren't significantly holding up anyone because everyone else was slow also.
Not to mention the hydrazine fuel that would kill the first chunk of people to find it. Talk about a big PR nightmare -- everyone close to wherever the hydrazine falls dies.
It's in a degenerate enough orbit to not cause any lasting space debris. We've done this before successfully, and we're going to see if we still can.
To be fair to the reviewer, he is actually fairly spot-on, if not a little jumpy in his recommendations.
To clear it up, he says if you want a new computer, save up a bit more. If you want something that performs as good as this computer of better, go dig up an old PIII. If you bought this computer and are looking for something to do with it, set it up as a file server or something (by putting Windows Home Server on it). He also recommended that if you want Linux, to just install the regular Ubuntu instead of this weird gOS.
He had a lot of recommendations, and it takes actually reading the article, and not just skimming it to see that all of his recommendations make sense. Sadly, this is Slashdot and you'll get modded to +5.
Yes, the oversight of a flash player is curious. Very curious since the computer touts itself about allowing you to watch YouTube. But it doesn't out of the box, and the installer doesn't really go to the right location! It goes to the generic macromedia flash page instead of popping up something else. It is really inexcusable to not have a "big feature" that you tout not working out of the box.
The fact that lots of companies get the documentation wrong doesn't mean that it's ok to get the documentation wrong....something as simple as plugging in an ethernet cable should be right. Period. End of story.
ok, so he put in a disclaimer that you can't run Windows programs. Given the ultra-cheap nature of this computer, it's something that any competent reviewer would put in the article "hey guys, just in case you didn't know, this Linux thing can't run Windows or Mac programs." Anyone who does their diligence would put that in their review. It's not a knock, just a fact that quite a few people might not know.
Yea, so he recommends a more expensive option. That's because his review concludes, that spending $200 and getting this PC is not a good value. But, for $150 more you could get something that is a good value. Maybe not helpful for someone who only has $200, but it lets you know where he stands.
Now to be fair to the guy, he spends most of his time complaining about how the gOS is just a messed up version of Ubuntu with all this random marketing crap to make it sound like a google computer, and to put all this weird, crazy marketing stuff on it. Basically, he complains that you get Ubuntu as designed by marketing-droids. A very useful point of knowledge -- that the first Linux PC offering was bastardized by marketing people, and that gOS is not a good representation of what Linux can do!
As a normal computer, this thing might not come up to snuff with what's expected.
I'm not sure that Enlightenment was a good choice over Xfce or any of the others. The Via C7 CPU really probably underpowers it for the average person who wants to watch some flash videos, etc. I have one in my house running MythTV, but only after I realized that it was very sluggish for trying to do my day to day work on.
The fact that it didn't ship with a flash plugin is pretty inexcusable. At least put in a quick script or something that would install it for the user if you couldn't ship with it installed. I've had one hell of a time keeping my flash plugin working over multiple upgrades of flash/firefox, etc. on my regular Ubuntu (64-bit though, so that makes it tougher).
I would've appreciated a little more polish on a good linux PC. I especially loathe all their gThis and gThat, and "Google-powered!" stuff, when in reality it's not a google product. Pretty low. Low RAM, and others too.
It just really seems that you can get a good computer with much better specs for not much more, and not have to deal with all the marketing BS of this company.
I know that we all creamed ourselves when a major retail store started carrying a linux computer, and that we creamed ourselves again when it sold out, but let's call this what it is: an anemic offering at best.
I've been kicking this around, and haven't found a good solution. I could conference everyone together, then create lists of people that create a net and whenever someone talks on that net, it whispers to the specific people -- but whisper isn't really mature in asterisk as far as I can tell.
Doing multiple conference calls and bridging them together sounds good, but I haven't been able to find ANY documentation on doing something like that.
I have been posting in their forums, etc. but have no good answers on how to implement something like that -- effectively a mission control architecture.
I'm going to try and roll my own, but there's a serious dearth in this area of people who want something similar (mission commander net, countdown net, and subsystem nets that the user can choose to monitor multiple/any combination they desire).
The real reason is that the FCC/government decided not to require some type of open access at a reasonable price they they require with the telephone company. A third party should be able to "rent" a data/voice line on their network for a nominal fee.....that is if our government wasn't cuddled up with the providers.
No, we did not go there because we thought that the Russians would go there first.
We were getting our asses handed to us with regards to the space race. They put satellites orders of magnitude larger than we could into orbit. They were hitting the moon with objects and sending objects around the moon. We could do none of those things.
So, when the brass came down and said "Let's beat the Russians!" We had to pick something that was an order of magnitude harder than what the Russians were currently doing. Anything less, and they would have had too much of a head start. But if we chose a goal that required much more advanced technology than was available at the time, then we might be able to catch up. That's where the moon landing came into play. And catch up we did.
This type of thing is fairly standard for people in creative positions. They're paying you to come up with cool, neat, innovative tech. If you come up with something really sweet, they don't want you to leave, start your own company and get rich. Don't know about IT though....guess it depends upon what your position is like.
I say sign it, it's not like something ground-breaking is going to hit you a month after you quit and that you have it perfected within the next couple. It's to keep you from getting a good idea at work and then running off with it.
Unlawful search and seizure -- this is information they couldn't have aggregated and searched via normal means
Rights not expressly given to the federal government and state are reserved for the people -- things such as having databases that CONTINUALLY scan all of my information to try and link it up with new activity to find criminals, and continually check to make sure that I'm not stepping over the line. To me, that's being secure in one's own home and life, being secure in their freedom and liberty, knowing what evidence/techniques that law enforcement uses to put marks on my record, hell keeping a record of all my activities for review.
I doubt that many people would argue that McCarthyism infringed only on one or two civil liberties -- the people he targeted had many hard to define, nearly intangible civil liberties lost that they did not know they had lost until the accusations and trials started kicking up. This database seems to be on the road to the same thing -- a file on everyone, always present, always being monitored. You better not have done anything sordid, ever, Timmy otherwise your ours when we decide to make it so.
No, he's saying that this massive database that spies deeply into our lives that's supposed to catch terrorists is now catching little 'ol grandmas (who killed a person, but is not a terrorist), and that we're supposed to be happy about it. I am not.
I would rather have her free on the street than lose some of my civil liberties. She didn't re-commit crimes, and she led a good life. She did/does deserve to be in jail, but this database is obviously not being used in the context that it was expected to be used in, and that's disturbing.
If you've ever watched an old western, or any outlaw movie -- there's a very romantic idea in America of old criminals righting their ways by themselves, relocating and turning into great, good productive citizens. Then in the end of the movie, some asshole sheriff shows up and drags the ex-criminal back into court/jail to the sadness of the whole town who then rallies behind him. So, yea, internally a lot of people are conflicted -- this person should be in jail, but there's some part of the rough and tumble American ideal inside of people still that says she made it right and should be left alone. She needs to go back into jail for precedence reasons (can't just let her go once they've found a jail-bird), but a part of me is disgusted at the way she was caught -- by this TERRORIST DATABASE, and not by something that would have happened if the government wasn't actively data-mining in places that they normally wouldn't be if it weren't for 9/11/PATRIOT ACT/Bush.
So yea, lock up the criminals (even better, rehabilitate), but don't justify a massive infringement in civil liberties by saying that it has allowed you to lock up grandma.
Possibly because at it's basest level, punishment is supposed to be about rehabilitation? A punishment makes you not want to do something again (generally).
Furthermore, as a caring society, our prisons DO have the mandate to rehabilitate as it is the best option for all involved. If you can take a criminal and turn them into a productive member of society, then society just got significantly better.
That said, for precedence reasons, they have to haul her in. Otherwise you're setting a really bad example.....but something in the back of my mind says that she stayed off the radar screen and lived a good life, and now this database that's supposed to CATCH THE OMG TERRORISTS!!!! instead catches a 65 year old lady, and the law enforcement authorities are using this case as their reason for why the database is so great?!?! WHAT ABOUT SHOWING US ALL THE TERRORISTS THAT THIS DATABASE WAS SUPPOSED TO CATCH RATHER THAN HAPPY OLD GRANDMAS??!
Agilent's stock values suck because they make absolutely horrid equipment. I routinely crash their freakin' Oscilloscope, and to even use most of it's features I need a mouse and keyboard hooked up to it! In many cases we "downgraded" back to the old HP equipment while we returned the Agilent items and went and bought R&S or aqny number of other people, who's business is doing just fine by the way!
Agilent going down the tubes is a result of the loss of the "HP way" -- everything made there, you can tell has hardly been touched by an engineer, but rather designed by some drone who has no idea what situation s the system might be used in. It was really one area that HP could have totally dominated if they had decided to re-focus. Instead they cut loose a division that was a huge market leader and that had insane brand recognition. Poor move. Over the past two years we've literally taken about $10 million dollars worth of money that was 100% locked up by HP and went elsewhere. It might have been a good business decision to gut and destroy a division that literally had hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue without having to even compete for it, but I doubt that it was.
Everyone has that problem at some point in their life. You need to try and find a way to stimulate yourself more at work. At a past job, I could be getting great sleep and work on very interesting projects all day long, but it would still hit me. I would still start to crash while very intellectually stimulated.
So when that started happening, I started taking walks and interacting with people. Surprise, surprise, I found that if I took some breaks to walk around, interact, get at least something physical in, I could go all day with no problems.
So I found a way to work it into that job that I could get my needed amount of activity, and eventually took a job with it built in.
I don't get why people don't understand that in quite a few people you need to stimulate the body and mind to be healthy! Try it. It'll work. Even if it's something as simple as doing 20 pushups when you wake up and 10 more around lunch. I bet that it will help. From anecdotal experience, I would say that a fairly large number of people in the industry experience this, and fix it with physical activity.
Theoretically
You could put a cal signal on the ground and apply software later to correct for distortions seen. That's all that "lucky" algorithm is doing -- seeing the errors in a reference signal and applying corrective factors to the image based upon that.
But it would only help so much. Distortion is a little weird -- I'd like further explanation on this, but from what optics people have told me, the atmosphere is like a piece of scotch tape. It you put tape on the object you're viewing, you don't notice much distortion. But hold it right in front of your eye and you will! So adaptive optics works best from the ground outwards rather than from space inwards.
There are already a number of satellites doing hundreds of megabytes a second down-links. You just need a big, sensitive dish on the ground, and a good-sized transmitter. Heck, with XM and Sirius satellites with a 7 meter dish I can easily see 70dB S/N ratios without even pointing it at the satellite. Since you need about 14dB SNR to pass a couple megabytes a second pretty error-free, a signal 56dB (~400,000 time stronger) above that should be able to pass obscene amounts of data.
That part has been done before.
Not only that, but most of our current pain-relievers (especially the really big ones like Morphine) typically ruin appetite. One of the key items to focus on for cancer patients and many other terminally ill people is their weight. Kepp that weight on, keep that body healthy. Hard to do on lots of our drugs. Not so hard baked out on weed. Marijuana could extend/save/better a very large portion of our terminally ill patients that end up perpetually medicated on Demarol, Vicadin and more anyways.
Oh, and I've never taken a hit of pot in my life, but I recognize something as beneficial when I see it.
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well, RTFA. For mod points, it's disruptive because it runs Linux!
The second article describes this very well. One big extra is that this system can perform all of the standard drive-repair operations that typically only OEMs can. This helps to keep you from replacing drives that aren't bad, but had a hiccup.
It's also not just two drives in an ISE, but more like 10-20 (3.5" and 2.5" respectively) with a bunch of Linux software to give each ISE a pretty robust feature-set in itself. Then they also up the block size to 520 bytes, leaving space for data validity checks in order to keep the silent corruption problem from sneaking into the system.
In the end, it's probably not wholly revolutionary. It does seem like an evolutionary jump though; with great performance, great feature set, and a very well thought out system that brings new technology and ideas to bear.
Exactly. I find it hard to fault the administration (however much I like to) without more facts.
Like, for example, how many other countries are not currently complying with WTO rulings. I doubt that the answer is zero. There might be some countries ignoring a dozen rulings, but we have no idea. The US might be doing really well in this regard (although I doubt it just due to the world economic structure). But it would at least be good to know!
They didn't come anywhere close to meeting the 1.3 billion reserve. They fell something like 900 million short. They're not sure why, but they think it might be related to this company that was spreading FUD about charging an extra 50 million on top. Somehow I don't think it's that company.
The FCC had put in some pretty strong wording about building in first responder capability. It was more than what was typically done in the past, but it didn't seem totally outrageous. I think the problem is that a lot of the wireless carriers are moving towards commodization, and thus low margins. 90% of the population in the US can get good cell service from multiple providers. With low margins, why would you take on a huge risk that could be a brick around your neck? Better to spend the little bit extra and get a chunk of spectrum whose only restrictions were pretty much that you had to use it? I think it's that that piece of the spectrum just isn't worth the hassle if you have to build in tons of first responder equipment also.
It's just worth only 50% of what they thought it was. Oops, they messed up. But since they messed up big, they have to start an investigation.
Was there yesterday.
Really neat setup. Easily spent over two hours browsing around this small museum. Mostly on reading about the war stories. They just had a lot of neat stuff.
You could actually encode and decode your own messages with actual ENIGMA machines. They had the actual bombe's that broke it, and tons of other stuff. The people there are also extremely helpful, knowledgeable, and nice. Even if you're just one person, they'll give you a whole tour and answer whatever questions you have. I highly recommend it!
This seems to be exactly his problem. It's mine. Everytime I express frustration with Java, I get a "you just don't have the right platform/tool, use this!" Then I need up with 50 more tools with people suggesting even more platforms and tools and enterprise solutions, with everyone having their own favorites. Not a bad language, but just too much other hassle.
I'm with you man. I would prefer to get 10 years of experience rather than 2 years of experience 5 times (aka working in a job with one hat where you do the same thing over and over again).
Of course you're always going to specialize...and hoping learning new things in that field everyday. The second that I have been practicing at a high level for a couple of months in a field is the second that I start training my replacement while I look for something new to sink my teeth into. That way I mostly master a trade and move on. Now, a lot of my knowledge is rusty, but since I'm used to picking up new things, re-learning is not a huge deal whenever it comes back up.
Yea, losing that is something that I would mourn also.
Gah, I'd just be *not there* until actual boarding....no way I'd voluntarily sit in those horrible seats that I can't even fully extend my legs in for another half hour than I have to!
The sled might work though.
The old southwest system seemed optimal.
Flyers who had their shit together generally got "A" boarding. When you were in A, everyone walked to their seat, slung their bags up and were seated in under 5 seconds.
People who were kind of together got B, these people took a while but they didn't have anyone to wait on and things backed up a little, but generally went pretty smooth. Still faster than other airlines.
People who were in C generally had lots of problems. But it was ok, as one searched their backpack for their book and ipod, the guy in front and behind was doing the same. Massive traffic jam, but they weren't significantly holding up anyone because everyone else was slow also.
I miss those days.
Not to mention the hydrazine fuel that would kill the first chunk of people to find it. Talk about a big PR nightmare -- everyone close to wherever the hydrazine falls dies.
It's in a degenerate enough orbit to not cause any lasting space debris. We've done this before successfully, and we're going to see if we still can.
To be fair to the reviewer, he is actually fairly spot-on, if not a little jumpy in his recommendations.
To clear it up, he says if you want a new computer, save up a bit more. If you want something that performs as good as this computer of better, go dig up an old PIII. If you bought this computer and are looking for something to do with it, set it up as a file server or something (by putting Windows Home Server on it). He also recommended that if you want Linux, to just install the regular Ubuntu instead of this weird gOS.
He had a lot of recommendations, and it takes actually reading the article, and not just skimming it to see that all of his recommendations make sense. Sadly, this is Slashdot and you'll get modded to +5.
Yes, the oversight of a flash player is curious. Very curious since the computer touts itself about allowing you to watch YouTube. But it doesn't out of the box, and the installer doesn't really go to the right location! It goes to the generic macromedia flash page instead of popping up something else. It is really inexcusable to not have a "big feature" that you tout not working out of the box.
The fact that lots of companies get the documentation wrong doesn't mean that it's ok to get the documentation wrong....something as simple as plugging in an ethernet cable should be right. Period. End of story.
ok, so he put in a disclaimer that you can't run Windows programs. Given the ultra-cheap nature of this computer, it's something that any competent reviewer would put in the article "hey guys, just in case you didn't know, this Linux thing can't run Windows or Mac programs." Anyone who does their diligence would put that in their review. It's not a knock, just a fact that quite a few people might not know.
Yea, so he recommends a more expensive option. That's because his review concludes, that spending $200 and getting this PC is not a good value. But, for $150 more you could get something that is a good value. Maybe not helpful for someone who only has $200, but it lets you know where he stands.
Now to be fair to the guy, he spends most of his time complaining about how the gOS is just a messed up version of Ubuntu with all this random marketing crap to make it sound like a google computer, and to put all this weird, crazy marketing stuff on it. Basically, he complains that you get Ubuntu as designed by marketing-droids. A very useful point of knowledge -- that the first Linux PC offering was bastardized by marketing people, and that gOS is not a good representation of what Linux can do!
As a normal computer, this thing might not come up to snuff with what's expected.
I'm not sure that Enlightenment was a good choice over Xfce or any of the others. The Via C7 CPU really probably underpowers it for the average person who wants to watch some flash videos, etc. I have one in my house running MythTV, but only after I realized that it was very sluggish for trying to do my day to day work on.
The fact that it didn't ship with a flash plugin is pretty inexcusable. At least put in a quick script or something that would install it for the user if you couldn't ship with it installed. I've had one hell of a time keeping my flash plugin working over multiple upgrades of flash/firefox, etc. on my regular Ubuntu (64-bit though, so that makes it tougher).
I would've appreciated a little more polish on a good linux PC. I especially loathe all their gThis and gThat, and "Google-powered!" stuff, when in reality it's not a google product. Pretty low. Low RAM, and others too.
It just really seems that you can get a good computer with much better specs for not much more, and not have to deal with all the marketing BS of this company.
I know that we all creamed ourselves when a major retail store started carrying a linux computer, and that we creamed ourselves again when it sold out, but let's call this what it is: an anemic offering at best.
I'd love to know how to implement nets.
I've been kicking this around, and haven't found a good solution. I could conference everyone together, then create lists of people that create a net and whenever someone talks on that net, it whispers to the specific people -- but whisper isn't really mature in asterisk as far as I can tell.
Doing multiple conference calls and bridging them together sounds good, but I haven't been able to find ANY documentation on doing something like that.
I have been posting in their forums, etc. but have no good answers on how to implement something like that -- effectively a mission control architecture.
I'm going to try and roll my own, but there's a serious dearth in this area of people who want something similar (mission commander net, countdown net, and subsystem nets that the user can choose to monitor multiple/any combination they desire).
No, providers are greedy in other countries too.
The real reason is that the FCC/government decided not to require some type of open access at a reasonable price they they require with the telephone company. A third party should be able to "rent" a data/voice line on their network for a nominal fee.....that is if our government wasn't cuddled up with the providers.
No, we did not go there because we thought that the Russians would go there first.
We were getting our asses handed to us with regards to the space race. They put satellites orders of magnitude larger than we could into orbit. They were hitting the moon with objects and sending objects around the moon. We could do none of those things.
So, when the brass came down and said "Let's beat the Russians!" We had to pick something that was an order of magnitude harder than what the Russians were currently doing. Anything less, and they would have had too much of a head start. But if we chose a goal that required much more advanced technology than was available at the time, then we might be able to catch up. That's where the moon landing came into play. And catch up we did.
This type of thing is fairly standard for people in creative positions. They're paying you to come up with cool, neat, innovative tech. If you come up with something really sweet, they don't want you to leave, start your own company and get rich. Don't know about IT though....guess it depends upon what your position is like.
I say sign it, it's not like something ground-breaking is going to hit you a month after you quit and that you have it perfected within the next couple. It's to keep you from getting a good idea at work and then running off with it.
Or you could just vote for someone with morals....
ok, stop laughing now. There are actually a couple who will vote what they think, not what they get paid to think (Ron Paul, Mike Gravel)
Did you not read the part about 12 usb 2.0 ports and 2 usb 1.1 ports?
That's plenty of 2.0, and even some 1.1's for devices that you don't want slowing down the 2.0 bus.
Unlawful search and seizure -- this is information they couldn't have aggregated and searched via normal means
Rights not expressly given to the federal government and state are reserved for the people -- things such as having databases that CONTINUALLY scan all of my information to try and link it up with new activity to find criminals, and continually check to make sure that I'm not stepping over the line. To me, that's being secure in one's own home and life, being secure in their freedom and liberty, knowing what evidence/techniques that law enforcement uses to put marks on my record, hell keeping a record of all my activities for review.
I doubt that many people would argue that McCarthyism infringed only on one or two civil liberties -- the people he targeted had many hard to define, nearly intangible civil liberties lost that they did not know they had lost until the accusations and trials started kicking up. This database seems to be on the road to the same thing -- a file on everyone, always present, always being monitored. You better not have done anything sordid, ever, Timmy otherwise your ours when we decide to make it so.
No, he's saying that this massive database that spies deeply into our lives that's supposed to catch terrorists is now catching little 'ol grandmas (who killed a person, but is not a terrorist), and that we're supposed to be happy about it. I am not.
I would rather have her free on the street than lose some of my civil liberties. She didn't re-commit crimes, and she led a good life. She did/does deserve to be in jail, but this database is obviously not being used in the context that it was expected to be used in, and that's disturbing.
If you've ever watched an old western, or any outlaw movie -- there's a very romantic idea in America of old criminals righting their ways by themselves, relocating and turning into great, good productive citizens. Then in the end of the movie, some asshole sheriff shows up and drags the ex-criminal back into court/jail to the sadness of the whole town who then rallies behind him. So, yea, internally a lot of people are conflicted -- this person should be in jail, but there's some part of the rough and tumble American ideal inside of people still that says she made it right and should be left alone. She needs to go back into jail for precedence reasons (can't just let her go once they've found a jail-bird), but a part of me is disgusted at the way she was caught -- by this TERRORIST DATABASE, and not by something that would have happened if the government wasn't actively data-mining in places that they normally wouldn't be if it weren't for 9/11/PATRIOT ACT/Bush.
So yea, lock up the criminals (even better, rehabilitate), but don't justify a massive infringement in civil liberties by saying that it has allowed you to lock up grandma.
Possibly because at it's basest level, punishment is supposed to be about rehabilitation? A punishment makes you not want to do something again (generally).
Furthermore, as a caring society, our prisons DO have the mandate to rehabilitate as it is the best option for all involved. If you can take a criminal and turn them into a productive member of society, then society just got significantly better.
That said, for precedence reasons, they have to haul her in. Otherwise you're setting a really bad example.....but something in the back of my mind says that she stayed off the radar screen and lived a good life, and now this database that's supposed to CATCH THE OMG TERRORISTS!!!! instead catches a 65 year old lady, and the law enforcement authorities are using this case as their reason for why the database is so great?!?! WHAT ABOUT SHOWING US ALL THE TERRORISTS THAT THIS DATABASE WAS SUPPOSED TO CATCH RATHER THAN HAPPY OLD GRANDMAS??!
Agilent's stock values suck because they make absolutely horrid equipment. I routinely crash their freakin' Oscilloscope, and to even use most of it's features I need a mouse and keyboard hooked up to it! In many cases we "downgraded" back to the old HP equipment while we returned the Agilent items and went and bought R&S or aqny number of other people, who's business is doing just fine by the way!
Agilent going down the tubes is a result of the loss of the "HP way" -- everything made there, you can tell has hardly been touched by an engineer, but rather designed by some drone who has no idea what situation s the system might be used in. It was really one area that HP could have totally dominated if they had decided to re-focus. Instead they cut loose a division that was a huge market leader and that had insane brand recognition. Poor move. Over the past two years we've literally taken about $10 million dollars worth of money that was 100% locked up by HP and went elsewhere. It might have been a good business decision to gut and destroy a division that literally had hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue without having to even compete for it, but I doubt that it was.
Dude, probably not a medical disorder.
Everyone has that problem at some point in their life. You need to try and find a way to stimulate yourself more at work. At a past job, I could be getting great sleep and work on very interesting projects all day long, but it would still hit me. I would still start to crash while very intellectually stimulated.
So when that started happening, I started taking walks and interacting with people. Surprise, surprise, I found that if I took some breaks to walk around, interact, get at least something physical in, I could go all day with no problems.
So I found a way to work it into that job that I could get my needed amount of activity, and eventually took a job with it built in.
I don't get why people don't understand that in quite a few people you need to stimulate the body and mind to be healthy! Try it. It'll work. Even if it's something as simple as doing 20 pushups when you wake up and 10 more around lunch. I bet that it will help. From anecdotal experience, I would say that a fairly large number of people in the industry experience this, and fix it with physical activity.
Theoretically You could put a cal signal on the ground and apply software later to correct for distortions seen. That's all that "lucky" algorithm is doing -- seeing the errors in a reference signal and applying corrective factors to the image based upon that. But it would only help so much. Distortion is a little weird -- I'd like further explanation on this, but from what optics people have told me, the atmosphere is like a piece of scotch tape. It you put tape on the object you're viewing, you don't notice much distortion. But hold it right in front of your eye and you will! So adaptive optics works best from the ground outwards rather than from space inwards.
There are already a number of satellites doing hundreds of megabytes a second down-links. You just need a big, sensitive dish on the ground, and a good-sized transmitter. Heck, with XM and Sirius satellites with a 7 meter dish I can easily see 70dB S/N ratios without even pointing it at the satellite. Since you need about 14dB SNR to pass a couple megabytes a second pretty error-free, a signal 56dB (~400,000 time stronger) above that should be able to pass obscene amounts of data. That part has been done before.
Here, here!
Not only that, but most of our current pain-relievers (especially the really big ones like Morphine) typically ruin appetite. One of the key items to focus on for cancer patients and many other terminally ill people is their weight. Kepp that weight on, keep that body healthy. Hard to do on lots of our drugs. Not so hard baked out on weed. Marijuana could extend/save/better a very large portion of our terminally ill patients that end up perpetually medicated on Demarol, Vicadin and more anyways.
Oh, and I've never taken a hit of pot in my life, but I recognize something as beneficial when I see it.