I still have a Lisa II which hasn't been used since the external 10MB HDD crashed. The Lisa would run any Mac SW that did not use sound, and I don't recall the display looking funny when using MacPaint or MacWrite. Running the Ferrari sim with its engine sounds would crash it, though. I think we bought this Lisa used in 1985 or early '86 from Michael Dell, strangely enough, who had started a mail-order catalog business. What ever happenened to him, anyway?
I agree with your point about parents needing to spend more time on their kids than on their careers. That, however, does not give Google or any other company a free pass to abuse anybody, let alone a pregnant woman. Protecting pregnant women and infants is the primary reason for having human society at all.
Ordinarily pregnncy wouldn't have been a problem in a Google sales executive job- by chance, though, she found herself in the high-risk position of carrying quadruplets. Rather than obey the law, her jerk of a boss harassed her unmercifuly. That was where the stress came from, not the job per se.
Other studies have shown that moderate amounts of pot actually makes drivers slightly safer because they become more cautious and focused on the road and other cars. (i.e. freaking paranoid)
Yes, let's go to the proton mass or C12 as the mass standard, the absolute number of particles instead of the mole, the electron charge instead of the ampere, and for that matter, what the hell is the candela doing on the list at all? Or perhaps we could get rid of the second, meter and kelvin as fundamental units and use frequency and speed directly instead?
Nice stuff. The initial pictures don't show off the marquetry enough, though. Using solid hardwoods everywhere like that, you can't be making a big profit. If I weren't so broke, I'd offer to swap my HP 3562A for some of your gear.
Dammit, Jim! I'm an inventor, not a miracle-worker!
How about an automatic search for identical links plus having the person who approves the article select keywords from the article which are used in a search which pulls up the first few lines of each of the most similar stories posted during, say, the last two months? And if it is a dupe, give some negative reinforcement to the person who approved the article - something like 10 seconds of flashing goatse, or whatever lesser punishment the Geneva conventions allow.
"Christina Elwell, who was promoted to national sales director in late 2003, alleges her supervisor began discriminating against her in May 2004, a month after informing him of her pregnancy and the medical complications she was encountering, according to the lawsuit filed July 17 in a U.S. District Court in New York."
In May 2004, after she became pregnant with quadruplets and during the same month that she lost two of the unborn children, her superior told her that her job as VP of national sales had been eliminated and requested that she take a job in Google's operations division, a position for which she had no experience. Google refused to allow her to take the lower position of East Coast regional sales director, instead firing her and hiring someone with no Internet sales experience.
In mid-June, another Google executive offered to place Christina in the operations job she had already rejected, while in the same email accused Christina's husband of "acting under false pretenses by telling Google that Elwell was having a health crisis".
After Google's director of HR confirmed that Christina had been terminated improperly, she accepted the lower ranking position offered, but then lost a third unborn child and within two days of returning to work on July 19, her doctors ordered her to cease her work because the stress that Google and her supervisor were putting her under created an even higher risk of losing her remaining unborn child.
After she returned from disability leave, rather than allow her to work in sales, Google fired her.
And even so you would be underpaid if you really are the kind of engineer who can make new markets, or even new kinds of products. The average income for the top 1% of earners nationwide is over $700,000.
You're so right. Tech jobs, like jobs in general, have always been almost entirely about getting the right cogs for the corporate machine. Sure, if you do anything creative, they'll demand to own it, but even the richest corporations can't afford to actually develop or explore more than one idea in a hundred, and perhaps one in a hundred of those will actually make it to market. The problem is not coming up with good ideas, but getting the political and financial resources to develop them.
For every one of these "top engineers" there are ten others just as smart and more inventive who, for whatever reason, have never become known to the handful of people making high-level recruiting decisions. I know a guy, Quinn Tyler Jackson who developed the theory of adaptive, context-sensitive grammars and built a fast parser that could handle any language with no ad-hoc cruft. It can naturally parse ambiguous things like "time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana". Ten years ago, it parsed the Gospel of Mark starting with just a single noun in its tiny dictionary and only a couple of pages of rules. Is Google or Microsoft or Yahoo! knocking on his door? No, of course not. He doesn't already have a top spot in a top firm, so how good can he be, they figure... if they figure.
I have dozens of patentable inventions lying around. They are in various areas - no one company could use them all. I can't afford to patent a single one of them, and even if I could I couldn't expect to make any money from them without far more resources. Without a patent, I can't even tell anyone about them without giving up the rights. (Companies seldom will sign an NDA to see an individual's idea, and even if they did, how could I afford to enforce it if they broke the agreement?)
Companies don't hire inventors much - they want engineers. Inventors think up stuff, which is easy and fun for the inventor but risky for the employer; making it work is difficult and tedious for the engineer and indispensable for the employer. I'm just an inventive technician, not a top engineer who can not only invent but can get the resources or make the invention work all by himself if need be. So, basically, I'm screwed under the current legal and employment situation.
Some of these ideas could make a company with the right resources a lot of money; some already have. I wasn't the first to think of reconfigurable computing in the early '90s or maybe even the 4-bit lookup table as a "supergate", but I certainly did so before these things came on the market. Ultrasonic beat-wave sound projection, same thing. As an 11 year-old kid in 1983 I came up with an idea for a notebook computer design with two hinged flat panel touchscreens that I think is still better for some purposes than what is on the market now. In 1994/5 I invented a tree browser history which I still wish I could get in Firefox or IE. I have a whole class of interface ideas combining the control of the command line with the discoverability of a menu system. I've got all sorts of optic, acousto-optic, superconductor, magnetic, electrostatic, electronic, power-producing, energy saving, inflatable, legal, corporate, psychological, interface and social applications ideas - and unless something changes, no one will get any use out of them. I don't see any jobs out there for some one like me who doesn't want to sell his soul for a salary.
From my inexplicably rejected story submitted hours ago:
The New Scientist reports: On Thursday a new planet-sized object was found orbiting the Sun at a distance of between 35-51 AU (at different points in its orbit) and an inclination of 28 degrees to the plane of the inner planets. By comparison Pluto orbits at an average distance of 39 AU and an inclination if 17 degrees. (1 Astronomical Unit = the distance between the earth and the sun) If the object has a reflectivity similar to that of other Kuiper-belt bodies, it is approximately twice the size of Pluto. Jose-Luis Ortiz and his colleagues at Spain's Sierra Nevada Observatory discovered the object while reviewing data from 2003. The International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center (MPC) in Cambridge, Massachusetts verified the obsevations and designated the object 2003 EL61.
During a dark period in my life I worked at a Circuit City in the mall. I recall one apparently normal woman who wanted to know if she could get cable on one of the handheld LCD TVs - IN HER CAR. The really scary thing is I could not make her understand why this would not work. She literally could not understand the idea that a cable would have to run from the TV to the wall. She could accept on faith that cable required hooking something to the TV, and that the cable came from the wall jack - the it was the idea of continuity itself that eluded her. She could not understand that it had to be the SAME cable hooking up BOTH ends. Eventually her minder showed up and led her away.
I had never before realized that it was possible to be that stupid and still be able to breathe, let alone carry on a conversation.
The judge pretty much had to grant the temporary order given the plain language of the employment contract. The real issues of the reasonableness of the time and place restrictions on working for competitors remain to be decided.
The harm is not the "not seeing" but the infringement of the liberty to choose whether or not to cover specific parts of the body. At a time still in human memory - albeit just barely - it was considered indecent in American society to display the adult female ankle. Would you argue that this was a reasonable restriction at the time? If social mores were to change to regard facial hair as obscene, would public display of a moustache be legitimate grounds for a public indecency arrest?
When public opinion is in conflict with facts, then so much the worse for public opinion. Many cultures including ancient Greece have shown that nudity is not harmful. When demonstrably false collective morality conflicts with individual liberty, even if only one person disagrees with society's strictures, that one person is in the right, and everyone else is in the wrong.
Government exists for the sole proper purpose of preserving individual liberty by defending it against all groups, no matter how large and powerful, no matter how pervasive or impassioned in their views. Government has no business enforcing any refuted moral which conflicts with individual liberty.
The space program has paid for itself many times over.
Jim Mills quoting Robert A. Heinlein's testimony:
"...there are countless numbers of our citizens who are alive today thanks to this technology. Ironically, some of these people and even sometimes their doctors who use the tools made possible by this technology do not realize it has all been made possible due to research for the space program. Think about this: Anything that is microminiaturized, whether you find it at a hospital or a hardware store or your local Radio Shack, had its initial development as part of our space program before it made its way into public use.
Examples: minicomputers, miniaturized long-life power sources, highly reliable microswitches, remotely-controlled manipulators, image enhancers, plus robotics and cybernetics. There are hundreds of spinoffs from space program technology, and many times there are 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generations of spinoffs off of the original spinoffs-- it branches out like a tree. Here are a few examples NOT listed in the original brochure put out by NASA (circa 1979): Image enhancer- This device runs an x-ray or fluoroscope picture through a special computer and puts the image on a screen. It can sharpen the image, take out the 'noise,' remove part of the picture that gets in the way, and much more. This is the same tool that took the weak digital code signals and turned them into those beautiful, sharp, true-color photographs from the surface of Mars in the Viking program and also brought us the Voyager photographs of Jupiter and its moons. Portable kidney machines- Before miniaturization allowed the development of these machines, the suicide rate for victims of kidney failure was very high. The prospect of having to 'go on the machine' every three days or so or die from the toxins produced by their own bodies was a grim fate. Now patients are able to live fairly normal lives, even travel, while their blood is steadily cleaned. The suicide rate has dropped as life is again worth living. CAT scan (computerized-axial topography)- An image of the brain made from many x-rays of 'slices' of the brain. It can show physicians a 3-dimensional view in fine detail, a layer at a time.
Spinoff technology from the space program: Doppler Ultrasound Stethoscope- This device is enormously more sensitive than an acoustic stethoscope. I think we have all seen the pictures of unborn babies-- a noninvasive way for physicians to monitor and make sure mother and child are both well. And since it uses ultrasound rather than x-rays to provide the image, there is no risk to the patients.
Telemetered Remote Monitoring- This device can give physicians and nurses readings of EKG, blood pres- sure, respiration, temperature, brain waves, and much more. Because of microminiaturized sensors de- veloped to monitor astronauts in space, the patients are not wired to the machine; and these readings can be transmitted to more than one terminal for display and monitoring.
The above text and examples are a synopsis of the testimony given by Robert Heinlein at a July 19,1979 joint session of the House Select Committee on Aging and the House Committee on Science and Technology-- subject: Applications of Space Technology for the Elderly and the Handicapped. Here are some direct quotes from his later comments on the subject:
"No, to most citizens of the United States the entire space program plus all its spinoffs is not worth even 5 cents per day..." (Mr. Heilein is referring to the entire cost of the Apollo program. It works out to 5 cents per day per citizen for the entire 10 year program.) "They will still think of it as 'all that money' being 'wasted' on a 'few rocks.' It is easy to prove that the space program paid for itself many times over in terms of increased gross national product... and in new tech- nology... and in saved lives. But they won't believe any of that, either."
Concerning the elderly, shut-ins, and disabled: "For many of them, the television screen is their only window on the w
Slashdot Mirror
...the power cables which have a HUGE influence on the EM-noise ...
/. then you aren't going to be doing radio sniffing anyway.
If you can't rig a Sallen-Key 60Hz notch filter in less time than it takes to post on
You think that's bad - when I worked at BellSouth, for 2.5 years they left the default password on NavisCore, which controlled all their ATM switches.
Actually, it expands considerably on the HGG's local coverage, which consisted of: "Mostly harmless".
It was $16,595. (About $33,000 in today's money.) The Digibarn has some good info and screenshots.
I still have a Lisa II which hasn't been used since the external 10MB HDD crashed. The Lisa would run any Mac SW that did not use sound, and I don't recall the display looking funny when using MacPaint or MacWrite. Running the Ferrari sim with its engine sounds would crash it, though. I think we bought this Lisa used in 1985 or early '86 from Michael Dell, strangely enough, who had started a mail-order catalog business. What ever happenened to him, anyway?
The HV power supply may have dust in it, which would explain the smell.
I agree with your point about parents needing to spend more time on their kids than on their careers. That, however, does not give Google or any other company a free pass to abuse anybody, let alone a pregnant woman. Protecting pregnant women and infants is the primary reason for having human society at all.
Ordinarily pregnncy wouldn't have been a problem in a Google sales executive job- by chance, though, she found herself in the high-risk position of carrying quadruplets. Rather than obey the law, her jerk of a boss harassed her unmercifuly. That was where the stress came from, not the job per se.
Other studies have shown that moderate amounts of pot actually makes drivers slightly safer because they become more cautious and focused on the road and other cars. (i.e. freaking paranoid)
Yes, let's go to the proton mass or C12 as the mass standard, the absolute number of particles instead of the mole, the electron charge instead of the ampere, and for that matter, what the hell is the candela doing on the list at all? Or perhaps we could get rid of the second, meter and kelvin as fundamental units and use frequency and speed directly instead?
Dude, your gas is definitely not ideal.
Nice stuff. The initial pictures don't show off the marquetry enough, though. Using solid hardwoods everywhere like that, you can't be making a big profit. If I weren't so broke, I'd offer to swap my HP 3562A for some of your gear.
On the DSP side, I've always wanted an automatic equalizer that would take a mic input, compare it with the test signal the equalizer is feeding into the stereo and automatically correct the frequency response. There are that do this, but the design seems like overkill, using lots of powerful DSPs to implement 74 hybrid IIR/FIR filters. Is there any reason not to do a FFT and multiply the frequency components by the correponding part of the desired response curve? Does this have some uncorrectable bad effect? Latency could be an issue for live music, but should be OK for a stereo. Seems to me like it should work, and give much finer frequency control.
Dammit, Jim! I'm an inventor, not a miracle-worker!
How about an automatic search for identical links plus having the person who approves the article select keywords from the article which are used in a search which pulls up the first few lines of each of the most similar stories posted during, say, the last two months? And if it is a dupe, give some negative reinforcement to the person who approved the article - something like 10 seconds of flashing goatse, or whatever lesser punishment the Geneva conventions allow.
More evil from Google:
Google sued for firing executive pregnant with quadruplets
News.com is running the story Google hit with job discrimination lawsuit, which describes how
"Christina Elwell, who was promoted to national sales director in late 2003, alleges her supervisor began discriminating against her in May 2004, a month after informing him of her pregnancy and the medical complications she was encountering, according to the lawsuit filed July 17 in a U.S. District Court in New York."
In May 2004, after she became pregnant with quadruplets and during the same month that she lost two of the unborn children, her superior told her that her job as VP of national sales had been eliminated and requested that she take a job in Google's operations division, a position for which she had no experience. Google refused to allow her to take the lower position of East Coast regional sales director, instead firing her and hiring someone with no Internet sales experience.
In mid-June, another Google executive offered to place Christina in the operations job she had already rejected, while in the same email accused Christina's husband of "acting under false pretenses by telling Google that Elwell was having a health crisis".
After Google's director of HR confirmed that Christina had been terminated improperly, she accepted the lower ranking position offered, but then lost a third unborn child and within two days of returning to work on July 19, her doctors ordered her to cease her work because the stress that Google and her supervisor were putting her under created an even higher risk of losing her remaining unborn child.
After she returned from disability leave, rather than allow her to work in sales, Google fired her.
And even so you would be underpaid if you really are the kind of engineer who can make new markets, or even new kinds of products. The average income for the top 1% of earners nationwide is over $700,000.
You're so right. Tech jobs, like jobs in general, have always been almost entirely about getting the right cogs for the corporate machine. Sure, if you do anything creative, they'll demand to own it, but even the richest corporations can't afford to actually develop or explore more than one idea in a hundred, and perhaps one in a hundred of those will actually make it to market. The problem is not coming up with good ideas, but getting the political and financial resources to develop them.
For every one of these "top engineers" there are ten others just as smart and more inventive who, for whatever reason, have never become known to the handful of people making high-level recruiting decisions. I know a guy, Quinn Tyler Jackson who developed the theory of adaptive, context-sensitive grammars and built a fast parser that could handle any language with no ad-hoc cruft. It can naturally parse ambiguous things like "time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana". Ten years ago, it parsed the Gospel of Mark starting with just a single noun in its tiny dictionary and only a couple of pages of rules. Is Google or Microsoft or Yahoo! knocking on his door? No, of course not. He doesn't already have a top spot in a top firm, so how good can he be, they figure... if they figure.
I have dozens of patentable inventions lying around. They are in various areas - no one company could use them all. I can't afford to patent a single one of them, and even if I could I couldn't expect to make any money from them without far more resources. Without a patent, I can't even tell anyone about them without giving up the rights. (Companies seldom will sign an NDA to see an individual's idea, and even if they did, how could I afford to enforce it if they broke the agreement?)
Companies don't hire inventors much - they want engineers. Inventors think up stuff, which is easy and fun for the inventor but risky for the employer; making it work is difficult and tedious for the engineer and indispensable for the employer. I'm just an inventive technician, not a top engineer who can not only invent but can get the resources or make the invention work all by himself if need be. So, basically, I'm screwed under the current legal and employment situation.
Some of these ideas could make a company with the right resources a lot of money; some already have. I wasn't the first to think of reconfigurable computing in the early '90s or maybe even the 4-bit lookup table as a "supergate", but I certainly did so before these things came on the market. Ultrasonic beat-wave sound projection, same thing. As an 11 year-old kid in 1983 I came up with an idea for a notebook computer design with two hinged flat panel touchscreens that I think is still better for some purposes than what is on the market now. In 1994/5 I invented a tree browser history which I still wish I could get in Firefox or IE. I have a whole class of interface ideas combining the control of the command line with the discoverability of a menu system. I've got all sorts of optic, acousto-optic, superconductor, magnetic, electrostatic, electronic, power-producing, energy saving, inflatable, legal, corporate, psychological, interface and social applications ideas - and unless something changes, no one will get any use out of them. I don't see any jobs out there for some one like me who doesn't want to sell his soul for a salary.
That is incorrect. Sedna was discovered last year. This a new discovery which has not yet been named.
From my inexplicably rejected story submitted hours ago:
The New Scientist reports:
On Thursday a new planet-sized object was found orbiting the Sun at a distance of between 35-51 AU (at different points in its orbit) and an inclination of 28 degrees to the plane of the inner planets. By comparison Pluto orbits at an average distance of 39 AU and an inclination if 17 degrees. (1 Astronomical Unit = the distance between the earth and the sun) If the object has a reflectivity similar to that of other Kuiper-belt bodies, it is approximately twice the size of Pluto. Jose-Luis Ortiz and his colleagues at Spain's Sierra Nevada Observatory discovered the object while reviewing data from 2003. The International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center (MPC) in Cambridge, Massachusetts verified the obsevations and designated the object 2003 EL61.
During a dark period in my life I worked at a Circuit City in the mall. I recall one apparently normal woman who wanted to know if she could get cable on one of the handheld LCD TVs - IN HER CAR. The really scary thing is I could not make her understand why this would not work. She literally could not understand the idea that a cable would have to run from the TV to the wall. She could accept on faith that cable required hooking something to the TV, and that the cable came from the wall jack - the it was the idea of continuity itself that eluded her. She could not understand that it had to be the SAME cable hooking up BOTH ends. Eventually her minder showed up and led her away.
I had never before realized that it was possible to be that stupid and still be able to breathe, let alone carry on a conversation.
The judge pretty much had to grant the temporary order given the plain language of the employment contract. The real issues of the reasonableness of the time and place restrictions on working for competitors remain to be decided.
This matches my own observations in Texas and Georgia.
Amen, sister. But it seems ironic that your self-description has the typo: "I hate sexiest men..." ;)
You reply is a logical fallacy, shifting the burden of proof. See:d en.html
http://www2.sjsu.edu/depts/itl/graphics/adhom/bur
I'll bite anyway.
The harm is not the "not seeing" but the infringement of the liberty to choose whether or not to cover specific parts of the body. At a time still in human memory - albeit just barely - it was considered indecent in American society to display the adult female ankle. Would you argue that this was a reasonable restriction at the time? If social mores were to change to regard facial hair as obscene, would public display of a moustache be legitimate grounds for a public indecency arrest?
When public opinion is in conflict with facts, then so much the worse for public opinion. Many cultures including ancient Greece have shown that nudity is not harmful. When demonstrably false collective morality conflicts with individual liberty, even if only one person disagrees with society's strictures, that one person is in the right, and everyone else is in the wrong.
Government exists for the sole proper purpose of preserving individual liberty by defending it against all groups, no matter how large and powerful, no matter how pervasive or impassioned in their views. Government has no business enforcing any refuted moral which conflicts with individual liberty.
The space program has paid for itself many times over.
Jim Mills quoting Robert A. Heinlein's testimony:
"...there are countless numbers of our citizens who are alive today thanks to this technology. Ironically, some of these people and even sometimes their doctors who use the tools made possible by this technology do not realize it has all been made possible due to research for the space program. Think about this: Anything that is microminiaturized, whether you find it at a hospital or a hardware store or your local Radio Shack, had its initial development as part of our space program before it made its way into public use.
Examples: minicomputers, miniaturized long-life power sources, highly reliable microswitches, remotely-controlled manipulators, image enhancers, plus robotics and cybernetics. There are hundreds of spinoffs from space program technology, and many times there are 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generations of spinoffs off of the original spinoffs-- it branches out like a tree. Here are a few examples NOT listed in the original brochure put out by NASA (circa 1979): Image enhancer- This device runs an x-ray or fluoroscope picture through a special computer and puts the image on a screen. It can sharpen the image, take out the 'noise,' remove part of the picture that gets in the way, and much more. This is the same tool that took the weak digital code signals and turned them into those beautiful, sharp, true-color photographs from the surface of Mars in the Viking program and also brought us the Voyager photographs of Jupiter and its moons. Portable kidney machines- Before miniaturization allowed the development of these machines, the suicide rate for victims of kidney failure was very high. The prospect of having to 'go on the machine' every three days or so or die from the toxins produced by their own bodies was a grim fate. Now patients are able to live fairly normal lives, even travel, while their blood is steadily cleaned. The suicide rate has dropped as life is again worth living. CAT scan (computerized-axial topography)- An image of the brain made from many x-rays of 'slices' of the brain. It can show physicians a 3-dimensional view in fine detail, a layer at a time.
Spinoff technology from the space program:
Doppler Ultrasound Stethoscope- This device is enormously more sensitive than an acoustic stethoscope. I think we have all seen the pictures of unborn babies-- a noninvasive way for physicians to monitor and make sure mother and child are both well. And since it uses ultrasound rather than x-rays to provide the image, there is no risk to the patients.
Telemetered Remote Monitoring- This device can give physicians and nurses readings of EKG, blood pres- sure, respiration, temperature, brain waves, and much more. Because of microminiaturized sensors de- veloped to monitor astronauts in space, the patients are not wired to the machine; and these readings can be transmitted to more than one terminal for display and monitoring.
The above text and examples are a synopsis of the testimony given by Robert Heinlein at a July 19,1979 joint session of the House Select Committee on Aging and the House Committee on Science and Technology-- subject: Applications of Space Technology for the Elderly and the Handicapped. Here are some direct quotes from his later comments on the subject:
"No, to most citizens of the United States the entire space program plus all its spinoffs is not worth even 5 cents per day..." (Mr. Heilein is referring to the entire cost of the Apollo program. It works out to 5 cents per day per citizen for the entire 10 year program.) "They will still think of it as 'all that money' being 'wasted' on a 'few rocks.' It is easy to prove that the space program paid for itself many times over in terms of increased gross national product... and in new tech- nology... and in saved lives. But they won't believe any of that, either."
Concerning the elderly, shut-ins, and disabled: "For many of them, the television screen is their only window on the w
This is relevant to what the parent post said how?