Sexual orientation is becoming less important, especially to the younger generation. Unfortunately, there are still people, even parents, to whom it matters. Those people are the problem, not Facebook. Facebook is just one more avenue for a person's orientation to be revealed.
The best defense against your parents finding out about your sexual orientation from someone else will always be to tell them yourself, from whatever distance is safe.
I've been doing electronics work in my home workshop for about 35 years. My workshop is equipped with the following;
I have 20 units of 36-drawer Akro-Mills parts cabinets, the kind with the clear plastic drawers. These have SMD components, through-hole components, nuts, bolts, connectors, switches, etc. I occasionally devote a parts cabinet to the parts for a particular project that I build a few hundred of.
Hand tools: I have a red plastic screwdriver caddy that's full of screwdrivers. About 80 different tools to open anything I may encounter. There is a very expensive pair of diagonal cutters and a nice pair of long-nose pliers on the bench, and some tweezers and an X-acto knife.
I have a Hakko soldering station and a Bauch & Lomb stereo microscope to see what I'm doing.
On the bench, I have a 3 digit digital voltmeter and a couple HP bench power supplies to activate my current project.
Next to the bench, I have a 6 foot tall rack with a Tektronix R7704 oscilloscope with appropirate plugins, a vintage Fluke 6-digit Nixie tube voltmeter, an HP 5245L Nixie tube frequency counter, a signal generator, an old HP spectrum analyzer and tracking generator, and a Nixie tube atomic clock.
You're very lucky to have a school that would teach that. I built a similar thing (a frequency counter) as an 8th grader, using the RCA CMOS data book's application notes as a guide. And my dad was an electrical engineer who taught me a bunch. But I brought the counter into my electronics class and got credit for it, although I don't think the teacher knew the first thing bout digital logic - he was a TV repair sorta teacher.
My high school obtained a PDP-11 (with dual 8" floppy drives) while I was a sophomore. I was given free reign to use it as much as I wanted, with no supervision. I ended up writing assembly language and parlayed the experience into a nice job at the local university programming and building interfaces for a couple PDP-11s, then building custom S-100 graphics systems, etc.
For starters, Tesla came up with the three-phase AC power distribution system that has been in use everywhere in the world for the last hundred years. There's enough material there to fill a few rooms. I imagine we'll see some Tesla coils as well. Plus all the really exotic stuff, such as the proposed wireless power transmission scheme and the marvelous conspiracy theories about its suppression.
It's all fun stuff. The most interesting pieces I have are an IBM 704 module with eight IBM vacuum tubes, and a CDC6600 cordwood logic module (see it on Wikipedia). Just sold a Remington Rand tube module to a collector. Apparently, it was the only one from its type of computer still in existence.
I was just playing with some cores the other day. I found them on ebay a while back, two bottles each with 1.2 megabits of 1/64" diameter ferrite donuts. Add your own wire and sense amps.
Curiously, they're just bringing ALMA online. It was a billion dollar project that ran over budget. I imagine that it costs about $50 million a year to run.
That's the nature of Big Science. They have to cut a dozen old scopes to pay for one new instrument. fortunately, the new instrument can do wonderful new things. Unfortunately, it only can do one astronomer's observation at a time.
It takes $10 million a year. That money pays for engineers, mechanics, office staff to take care of the paperwork, staff scientists, a lot of electricity, etc.
You'd need a dedicated millionaire to support it, or find some way to make its operation sexy enough to bring in advertising revenue. Good luck with that.
As long as you don't do anything with the company, then it's just maintenance of the registrations and filing of very short annual reports. Your stockholder's meetings could take place in your bathroom.
Yeah, he's a much nicer guy, but engineers tend to make lousy CEOs. Jobs had some rather negative attributes, but he did change the world. Woz doesn't have that drive, so much as the drive to do the impossible and have fun doing it. It was the combination that was so powerful.
I'm highly aware of when I'm being lied to by shills for products, as they tend to use the same wording as the professional marketers. The other, more subtle stuff, is harder to turn off. But it can be done to some extent. I just took the radio out of my car and replaced it with a bare amplifier for my music player. Google is the biggest problem - it used to provide information, but now it offers up all sorts of web pages that are selling something (or just want me to click to improve their income).
I cringe when I see those shirts that advertise themselves. I only advertise robot teams, bands I love and pirate radio stations on the shirts that I wear.
Furthermore, the cuts proposed are to older telescopes that cost a tiny fraction of JWST's construction budget to keep running. Every generation of new telescopes costs about 5x the previous generation, since Big Science keeps needing bigger telescopes to reach new frontiers. I work in astronomy, and as far as I can tell, the staff to keep one modern telescope (the LBT) going is similar in size to the staff required to keep several older machines operating. Heck, one of the telescopes I work on (the Kitt Peak 12 meter radio telescope) was abandoned by NRAO in 2000 and sold to the U of Arizona for a dollar. We keep it and another radio telescope running with a dozen people. The LBT has over 50 engineers on staff.
Fact: over half of the advance fee fraud email solicitations that show up in my spam folder self-identify as Nigerian.
Curiously, the only spam I get is this sort of thing, punctuated by a very infrequent resending of exactly the same Chinese programming outfit's solicitation.
I don't use much math in my work on radio telescopes, which is mostly making gizmos to control physical stuff. Someone else worked out the algorithms long ago, and I do the hardware end of it.
But I work with coders who have to do some rather intense math to solve problems (mostly coordinate transformations or path generation) that had been solved poorly in the old software.
Slashdot Mirror
Sexual orientation is becoming less important, especially to the younger generation. Unfortunately, there are still people, even parents, to whom it matters. Those people are the problem, not Facebook. Facebook is just one more avenue for a person's orientation to be revealed.
The best defense against your parents finding out about your sexual orientation from someone else will always be to tell them yourself, from whatever distance is safe.
I've been doing electronics work in my home workshop for about 35 years. My workshop is equipped with the following;
I have 20 units of 36-drawer Akro-Mills parts cabinets, the kind with the clear plastic drawers. These have SMD components, through-hole components, nuts, bolts, connectors, switches, etc. I occasionally devote a parts cabinet to the parts for a particular project that I build a few hundred of.
Hand tools: I have a red plastic screwdriver caddy that's full of screwdrivers. About 80 different tools to open anything I may encounter. There is a very expensive pair of diagonal cutters and a nice pair of long-nose pliers on the bench, and some tweezers and an X-acto knife.
I have a Hakko soldering station and a Bauch & Lomb stereo microscope to see what I'm doing.
On the bench, I have a 3 digit digital voltmeter and a couple HP bench power supplies to activate my current project.
Next to the bench, I have a 6 foot tall rack with a Tektronix R7704 oscilloscope with appropirate plugins, a vintage Fluke 6-digit Nixie tube voltmeter, an HP 5245L Nixie tube frequency counter, a signal generator, an old HP spectrum analyzer and tracking generator, and a Nixie tube atomic clock.
Although by that time, they had changed the dictionary definition (if you had a new dictionary) of "computer" from a person to a machine.
You're very lucky to have a school that would teach that.
I built a similar thing (a frequency counter) as an 8th grader, using the RCA CMOS data book's application notes as a guide. And my dad was an electrical engineer who taught me a bunch. But I brought the counter into my electronics class and got credit for it, although I don't think the teacher knew the first thing bout digital logic - he was a TV repair sorta teacher.
My high school obtained a PDP-11 (with dual 8" floppy drives) while I was a sophomore. I was given free reign to use it as much as I wanted, with no supervision. I ended up writing assembly language and parlayed the experience into a nice job at the local university programming and building interfaces for a couple PDP-11s, then building custom S-100 graphics systems, etc.
For starters, Tesla came up with the three-phase AC power distribution system that has been in use everywhere in the world for the last hundred years. There's enough material there to fill a few rooms. I imagine we'll see some Tesla coils as well. Plus all the really exotic stuff, such as the proposed wireless power transmission scheme and the marvelous conspiracy theories about its suppression.
It's all fun stuff. The most interesting pieces I have are an IBM 704 module with eight IBM vacuum tubes, and a CDC6600 cordwood logic module (see it on Wikipedia). Just sold a Remington Rand tube module to a collector. Apparently, it was the only one from its type of computer still in existence.
I was just playing with some cores the other day. I found them on ebay a while back, two bottles each with 1.2 megabits of 1/64" diameter ferrite donuts. Add your own wire and sense amps.
These things would have been threaded with three 46 gauge wires each. They had machines to make that easier, but not quite automatic. http://www.nixiebunny.com/ibmcore/ibmcore.html
True, but for 25 years they were made out of ferrite donuts.
Curiously, they're just bringing ALMA online. It was a billion dollar project that ran over budget. I imagine that it costs about $50 million a year to run.
That's the nature of Big Science. They have to cut a dozen old scopes to pay for one new instrument. fortunately, the new instrument can do wonderful new things. Unfortunately, it only can do one astronomer's observation at a time.
It's above 10,000 feet altitude, and we work in the winter. Waking up frozen stiff would not be preferable to some creaking and groaning.
It takes $10 million a year. That money pays for engineers, mechanics, office staff to take care of the paperwork, staff scientists, a lot of electricity, etc.
You'd need a dedicated millionaire to support it, or find some way to make its operation sexy enough to bring in advertising revenue. Good luck with that.
I sleep under a radio telescope (the SMT on Mt. Graham) when I'm on site for several days. It creaks and groans like an old pirate ship.
Yahoo's customers are advertisers, and viewers are their product, just the same as any television or radio station.
As long as you don't do anything with the company, then it's just maintenance of the registrations and filing of very short annual reports. Your stockholder's meetings could take place in your bathroom.
This sounds like a ploy to retain employees by tempting them with shiny objects.
Yeah, he's a much nicer guy, but engineers tend to make lousy CEOs.
Jobs had some rather negative attributes, but he did change the world. Woz doesn't have that drive, so much as the drive to do the impossible and have fun doing it.
It was the combination that was so powerful.
The article is about ads on screens. I'm talking about ads on screens.
I'm highly aware of when I'm being lied to by shills for products, as they tend to use the same wording as the professional marketers.
The other, more subtle stuff, is harder to turn off. But it can be done to some extent. I just took the radio out of my car and replaced it with a bare amplifier for my music player.
Google is the biggest problem - it used to provide information, but now it offers up all sorts of web pages that are selling something (or just want me to click to improve their income).
I cringe when I see those shirts that advertise themselves. I only advertise robot teams, bands I love and pirate radio stations on the shirts that I wear.
I don't watch TV, and I use AdBlock Plus on my computer. So in a sense I am blind.
Ads will take over the world. We'll have to jailbreak our devices with illicit ad-blocking software.
Furthermore, the cuts proposed are to older telescopes that cost a tiny fraction of JWST's construction budget to keep running. Every generation of new telescopes costs about 5x the previous generation, since Big Science keeps needing bigger telescopes to reach new frontiers. I work in astronomy, and as far as I can tell, the staff to keep one modern telescope (the LBT) going is similar in size to the staff required to keep several older machines operating. Heck, one of the telescopes I work on (the Kitt Peak 12 meter radio telescope) was abandoned by NRAO in 2000 and sold to the U of Arizona for a dollar. We keep it and another radio telescope running with a dozen people. The LBT has over 50 engineers on staff.
Fact: over half of the advance fee fraud email solicitations that show up in my spam folder self-identify as Nigerian.
Curiously, the only spam I get is this sort of thing, punctuated by a very infrequent resending of exactly the same Chinese programming outfit's solicitation.
I don't use much math in my work on radio telescopes, which is mostly making gizmos to control physical stuff. Someone else worked out the algorithms long ago, and I do the hardware end of it.
But I work with coders who have to do some rather intense math to solve problems (mostly coordinate transformations or path generation) that had been solved poorly in the old software.