Ben Jonson said, "Oratio iamgo animi - language most shows a man." This is even more true in a medium where the audience can neither see you nor hear your voice. Spelling, grammar and syntax the harbingers of clarity in written communication, and act as the lighting and focus the parent mentioned. They are a way of showing your substance and intelligence to the the audience, that you are qualified and that you care what shows up on the front page of a zillion-page-per-day website. Sure we understand that you meant "too" instead of "to," but you look smarter and conscientious in your duties as an editor.
Some random person walks out onto a road, licks his finger and sticks it in the air then says "the speed limit for this bit of road is X km/h. That's how arbitrary choosing speed limits typically is.
Now, there *are* scientific methods of choosing speed limits, but they're typically only applied so the posted limit is set a bit lower, so as to maximise revenue intake.
This is before we even get to the simple fact that driving X+Y km/h is not inherently dangerous and that fining somehow after they've done it is a textbook example of closing the barn door long after the horse has bolted.
No, it isn't arbirtary. Speed limits are set based on a balance between traffic volume for the road in question and a design speed figured from average tire friction, road curvature, distance away an obect can be detected and an average human reaction time. That's why we have Departments of Transportation - with lots of staff engineers wielding calculators and big traffic simulators - to figure out the safest and most efficient flow regimes. Woe be unto the podunk town that decides to screw with speed limits.
The only way speed limits can generate revenue is by a municipality's decision to vigorously enforce the limit. That only works for so long before the word gets out and the township government's cash flow dries up.
The cameras at a stop light are another traffic management tool. Encouraging motorists to stop at the light allows the cycle to proceed towards an optimized throughput. Consider that one last ass that has to turn left in front of you while your light is green for straight. That driver needs to learn to stop next time so the cycle can work as designed. Mostly for stoplight cameras, they send a ticket for a fine to the registration holder of the license plate. They can't know who was driving the vehicle, so no points to the license.
Based on stopping sight distance due to hills and pavement construction, driving X+Ykm/h may indeed be inherently dangerous, and fining the driver after the fact is an attempt at deterring such future unsafe behavior. This is no different than a OSHA fine for safety violations.
The infrastructure in the US is very much built out and there is not much new construction going on.
Wow, that's incorrect. The infrastructure in the US, as graded by the American Society of Civil Engineers (who might know a thing or two about the subject), is pretty miserable. Just look. The levee failure in New Orleans was a single tragic example of infrastructure failure. The next one could be an Amtrak commuter line going through a bridge into the Hudson River or a refinery blast spewing a zillion gallons of crude into the Delaware. The US needs engineers to repair the infrastructure.
Drive through the suburbs and look at all the new housing developments springing up. Drive through New York City and Philadelphia and Boston and Washington and look at the forest of tower cranes and new high rises. Look at all the pedestrian protection lining the sidewalks. Construction is growing and, according to the Engineering News-Record, civil engineering departments can't keep up.
Going to CoD2 from CoD:UO, I was disappointed to see that the gains of UO were reversed. One theory some friends and I kicked around is that the extra goodies added in UO are Grey Matter's turf, and Infinity Ward wasn't allowed to put them in. Whether there's some sort of intellectual property dispute or licensing fees or whatever, we didn't decide on.
Another theory we discussed is that there was a planned expansion pack to add the extra stuff and charge more money. CoD2:UO, I guess.
I really want Punkbuster, and whatever it takes to get Activision and Infinity Ward to put it in is OK by me - brick through the window, closed servers, bill board, whatever.
The parent is right. MechE and CivE students come out of college with little or no formal programming classes under their belt - unless it is a hobby. There are courses in using CAD (which have replaced mechanical drafting courses) and usually some courses complementary to finite element method software and matrix structural analysis. There, the focus is on figuring out what the software does (ie. building and decomposing degree-of-freedom matrices) rather than how the software does what it does. In order to pack in mechanics, materials and the host of various disciplines while teaching to the Fundamentals of Engineering exam, software suffers. Thus, you don't get many people who can analyze swidesway-inhibited multistory structures and can make code to give it a good user interface.
Still, as others have mentioned, Autodesk's products are ubiquitous. AutoCAD interfaces with several popular structural analysis and FEA packages, the number of FOSS add-ons is pretty immense and you can send a release-14 file, readable by just about anybody. If you want to customize it by interfacing with CAM or analysis, it comes with a version of LISP. Try to save cash somewhere else and pony up the $2.5K for AutoCAD. I think AutoCAD is like Excel - open source is going to take a long time to catch up.
You might find some real niche programs that somebody wrote for the problem at hand and take elements from it for what you need. I think if you collect enough stuff, organize it and put it on Sourceforge, you might get something useful back.
There are different facets here. The doctor's project wants to repair itself, he's just making it easier. The problem is an enormous law suit if he makes self-repair more difficult, or appears to do so. The building doesn't want to build itself, but there are several layers of review between the engineer's beer napkin and the first guy to set up an office in the building's top floor: Other engineers, code officials, building inspectors, the architect, the owner, the construction manager, the shop detailers and the tradesmen doing the work. The chances of catching an error is much larger, but the building is not interested in remaining standing without significant work. Failure of a building results in an enormous lawsuit aimed at all the people who had a chance to catch the problem. The doctor is a single target, while the engineer is one of many targets.
Still, you are correct. The chance of a lawsuit against an engineer for building failure is much lower than the chance of a lawsuit against a doctor for malpractice. That's why malpractice insurance is many times more expensive than errors and omissions insurance. Also, doctors are perceived to be wealthy, so they get to be a target for suits whether they have merit or not.
Also, the higher risk-higher return equation isn't exactly the correct one. An engineer gets a professional degree, and shortly after receiving a bachelor's degree, can begin practicing in a firm in an engineer-in-training program, a fairly well-paid apprenticeship. When that's over, the engineer gets a PE and a big raise.. The doctor's bachelor's isn't a professional degree. He goes on to a medical school and racks up big tuition bills. Then he does a low-paid apprenticeship, sometimes as long as the initial schooling, and THEN he gets to use his prfessional degree and the big raise. The path from high-school to the big raise is much longer and results in bigger debt for the doctor. That's the main reason they get the higher return.
Finally, I've never met anybody who fainted at the sight of rebar or drywall, but there are a large number of people who pass out at the sight of blood. That's worth something in the salary department, dontcha think?
Even though massive amounts of filth to meet any perversion are available free on the internet, I still get a hardcopy subscription to Playboy for three reasons. I think enough people have similar reasoning and will continue to appreciate the glossy pages.
The first is that I really don't want a laptop while I'm sitting on the throne. I don't want an accident to happen to my laptop. Also, I don't want to use a laptop while it is actually on my lap too difficult to get comfortable. While PDA's and laptops are getting more and more portable, they'll never be quite right for the bathroom or the hammock in the yard.
The second is the articles, especially the fiction. I don't like reading for fun on a monitor. As the parent poster pointed out, the print edition also has special women, not available on the electronic version of the magazine.
The final reason is the collection. Can a teenage boy really browse your porn archive CD's in the basement? No. The wonderful stacks of Playboy with their (exactly) three pictorials are a treasure trove for a young man. I won't deny that to my son(s) when the time comes.
As an aside, what's with all the colons in game titles these days? GTA:SA, 50 Cent: Bulletproof, Hellgate: London, Rome: Total War, Call of Duty: United Offensive, ad nauseam. At least it is Half-life 2, not Half-life: Gordon remains mute.
Thermite is commercially available at some welding supply outfits. In setting rebar for reinforced concrete, sometimes a welded splice is called for to produce long continuous bars. Instead of sending a welding machine and welder to the site, you can get some prepared thermite with the brand name Cad Weld. You get a little crucible, lap the rebar in the chamber, add the thermite and use the ignition stuff in the package. It isn't as fast as a welder and a big Lincoln Electric or as pretty, but it works well in a remote location.
Thermite is a bad choice for indoor (say on a hard disk drive) use because it is a self-contained oxidation-reduction reaction. There is no external oxygen supply required and thus no easy way to snuff it.
There's gotta be a way to rig some sort of electronic solution that would work far better than burning the house down with a thermite charge.
Rebuilding it any other way than how it was is going to be very difficult. The worst problem I think is that New Orleans and a segment of the population at large is going to demand that the fundamental character of the city remain unchanged. NO wants it to remain because it makes money, with Mardi Gras and Superbowls and the like. People at large like it because it has these things. Plus, some of it, such as the historic register buildings, can't be changed, ene if they are built in the worst possible location.
Not only can we not changed the fundamental character of the city, by custom and law, we won't have funds to do it. FEMA and insurance aren't designed, by and large, to upgrade after a disaster, they are designed to return the status quo. If newer methods and technologies, like better impermeable earth cores and geotextiles in the levees are incorporated, that's a fringe benefit. The money won't be there to put in deep foundations (though they might be required in new building codes) and bigger levees. There certainly won't be enough money to create a change from a below-sea-level city to an above-sea-level city. We'll get back almost exactly what we have.
The only thing I think we can get done in this aftermath is to restore NO to its pre-storm state (and hope the bath scrubbed out some of the nastier stains) and augment the existing flood control methods as allowed within the existing funds. We aren't going to get a New Venice, We're going to get New Orleans v1.01.
If true improvements are to come, they'll be from the ACoE and their funds, but those upgrades are going to be tacked on after the restoration. Before the storm, the Old River Control System and Atchafalaya system were on the list first, but since this happened, NO will get the focus. The ORCS is the real lynch pin, because if that fails, the Mighty Muddy Mississippi goes through the Big Easy, easily. It'll make Katrina look as harmful as a girl with beads on a Bourbon Street Balcony.
If you're interested in some of the workings of the local Army Corps of Engineers and the Atchafalaya and Mississippi interaction, look up John McPhee's book The Control Of Nature.
My wife is an elementary school teacher. My mother is, too. They'll tell you otherwise.
To an extent, it is babysitting, and even worse, parenting. In some cases, the critical question isn't whether the kid did his homework last weekend, but whether the kid ate last weekend. A significant portion of the day is devoted to classroom behavioral management and minimizing disruptions among the remaining kids after the kid who slept in his mom's boyfriend's car threw a desk. When half the class didn't get a ritalin refill or whatever the drug du jour is, even the simplest tasks, like filing the kids down the hall to the library, require the efforts of a border collie on speed. Keeping them on the task at hand is as time consuming as teaching the material, if not more so. And then, when the one kid's behavior monopolizes the teacher's time, at the expense of the other twenty-some kids, and the parent gets a phonecall or a letter home, the process becomes babysitting the parent instead.
So, yeah, you're right about the dedication and training and amount of work, but school is babysitting as much as it is instruction.
Oh, and there are just as many PHB's and idiots in teaching as there are in any other field. And they've got a union.
Slashdot Mirror
Ben Jonson said, "Oratio iamgo animi - language most shows a man." This is even more true in a medium where the audience can neither see you nor hear your voice. Spelling, grammar and syntax the harbingers of clarity in written communication, and act as the lighting and focus the parent mentioned. They are a way of showing your substance and intelligence to the the audience, that you are qualified and that you care what shows up on the front page of a zillion-page-per-day website. Sure we understand that you meant "too" instead of "to," but you look smarter and conscientious in your duties as an editor.
No, it isn't arbirtary. Speed limits are set based on a balance between traffic volume for the road in question and a design speed figured from average tire friction, road curvature, distance away an obect can be detected and an average human reaction time. That's why we have Departments of Transportation - with lots of staff engineers wielding calculators and big traffic simulators - to figure out the safest and most efficient flow regimes. Woe be unto the podunk town that decides to screw with speed limits.
The only way speed limits can generate revenue is by a municipality's decision to vigorously enforce the limit. That only works for so long before the word gets out and the township government's cash flow dries up.
The cameras at a stop light are another traffic management tool. Encouraging motorists to stop at the light allows the cycle to proceed towards an optimized throughput. Consider that one last ass that has to turn left in front of you while your light is green for straight. That driver needs to learn to stop next time so the cycle can work as designed. Mostly for stoplight cameras, they send a ticket for a fine to the registration holder of the license plate. They can't know who was driving the vehicle, so no points to the license.
Based on stopping sight distance due to hills and pavement construction, driving X+Ykm/h may indeed be inherently dangerous, and fining the driver after the fact is an attempt at deterring such future unsafe behavior. This is no different than a OSHA fine for safety violations.
Wow, that's incorrect. The infrastructure in the US, as graded by the American Society of Civil Engineers (who might know a thing or two about the subject), is pretty miserable. Just look. The levee failure in New Orleans was a single tragic example of infrastructure failure. The next one could be an Amtrak commuter line going through a bridge into the Hudson River or a refinery blast spewing a zillion gallons of crude into the Delaware. The US needs engineers to repair the infrastructure.
Drive through the suburbs and look at all the new housing developments springing up. Drive through New York City and Philadelphia and Boston and Washington and look at the forest of tower cranes and new high rises. Look at all the pedestrian protection lining the sidewalks. Construction is growing and, according to the Engineering News-Record, civil engineering departments can't keep up.
So, in a word, "no."
CoD2 DOESN'T have Punkbuster.
Going to CoD2 from CoD:UO, I was disappointed to see that the gains of UO were reversed. One theory some friends and I kicked around is that the extra goodies added in UO are Grey Matter's turf, and Infinity Ward wasn't allowed to put them in. Whether there's some sort of intellectual property dispute or licensing fees or whatever, we didn't decide on.
Another theory we discussed is that there was a planned expansion pack to add the extra stuff and charge more money. CoD2:UO, I guess.
I really want Punkbuster, and whatever it takes to get Activision and Infinity Ward to put it in is OK by me - brick through the window, closed servers, bill board, whatever.
The parent is right. MechE and CivE students come out of college with little or no formal programming classes under their belt - unless it is a hobby. There are courses in using CAD (which have replaced mechanical drafting courses) and usually some courses complementary to finite element method software and matrix structural analysis. There, the focus is on figuring out what the software does (ie. building and decomposing degree-of-freedom matrices) rather than how the software does what it does. In order to pack in mechanics, materials and the host of various disciplines while teaching to the Fundamentals of Engineering exam, software suffers. Thus, you don't get many people who can analyze swidesway-inhibited multistory structures and can make code to give it a good user interface.
Still, as others have mentioned, Autodesk's products are ubiquitous. AutoCAD interfaces with several popular structural analysis and FEA packages, the number of FOSS add-ons is pretty immense and you can send a release-14 file, readable by just about anybody. If you want to customize it by interfacing with CAM or analysis, it comes with a version of LISP. Try to save cash somewhere else and pony up the $2.5K for AutoCAD. I think AutoCAD is like Excel - open source is going to take a long time to catch up.
You might find some real niche programs that somebody wrote for the problem at hand and take elements from it for what you need. I think if you collect enough stuff, organize it and put it on Sourceforge, you might get something useful back.
There are different facets here. The doctor's project wants to repair itself, he's just making it easier. The problem is an enormous law suit if he makes self-repair more difficult, or appears to do so. The building doesn't want to build itself, but there are several layers of review between the engineer's beer napkin and the first guy to set up an office in the building's top floor: Other engineers, code officials, building inspectors, the architect, the owner, the construction manager, the shop detailers and the tradesmen doing the work. The chances of catching an error is much larger, but the building is not interested in remaining standing without significant work. Failure of a building results in an enormous lawsuit aimed at all the people who had a chance to catch the problem. The doctor is a single target, while the engineer is one of many targets.
Still, you are correct. The chance of a lawsuit against an engineer for building failure is much lower than the chance of a lawsuit against a doctor for malpractice. That's why malpractice insurance is many times more expensive than errors and omissions insurance. Also, doctors are perceived to be wealthy, so they get to be a target for suits whether they have merit or not.
Also, the higher risk-higher return equation isn't exactly the correct one. An engineer gets a professional degree, and shortly after receiving a bachelor's degree, can begin practicing in a firm in an engineer-in-training program, a fairly well-paid apprenticeship. When that's over, the engineer gets a PE and a big raise.. The doctor's bachelor's isn't a professional degree. He goes on to a medical school and racks up big tuition bills. Then he does a low-paid apprenticeship, sometimes as long as the initial schooling, and THEN he gets to use his prfessional degree and the big raise. The path from high-school to the big raise is much longer and results in bigger debt for the doctor. That's the main reason they get the higher return.
Finally, I've never met anybody who fainted at the sight of rebar or drywall, but there are a large number of people who pass out at the sight of blood. That's worth something in the salary department, dontcha think?
Even though massive amounts of filth to meet any perversion are available free on the internet, I still get a hardcopy subscription to Playboy for three reasons. I think enough people have similar reasoning and will continue to appreciate the glossy pages.
The first is that I really don't want a laptop while I'm sitting on the throne. I don't want an accident to happen to my laptop. Also, I don't want to use a laptop while it is actually on my lap too difficult to get comfortable. While PDA's and laptops are getting more and more portable, they'll never be quite right for the bathroom or the hammock in the yard.
The second is the articles, especially the fiction. I don't like reading for fun on a monitor. As the parent poster pointed out, the print edition also has special women, not available on the electronic version of the magazine.
The final reason is the collection. Can a teenage boy really browse your porn archive CD's in the basement? No. The wonderful stacks of Playboy with their (exactly) three pictorials are a treasure trove for a young man. I won't deny that to my son(s) when the time comes.
As an aside, what's with all the colons in game titles these days? GTA:SA, 50 Cent: Bulletproof, Hellgate: London, Rome: Total War, Call of Duty: United Offensive, ad nauseam. At least it is Half-life 2, not Half-life: Gordon remains mute.
Thermite is commercially available at some welding supply outfits. In setting rebar for reinforced concrete, sometimes a welded splice is called for to produce long continuous bars. Instead of sending a welding machine and welder to the site, you can get some prepared thermite with the brand name Cad Weld. You get a little crucible, lap the rebar in the chamber, add the thermite and use the ignition stuff in the package. It isn't as fast as a welder and a big Lincoln Electric or as pretty, but it works well in a remote location.
Thermite is a bad choice for indoor (say on a hard disk drive) use because it is a self-contained oxidation-reduction reaction. There is no external oxygen supply required and thus no easy way to snuff it.
There's gotta be a way to rig some sort of electronic solution that would work far better than burning the house down with a thermite charge.
Rebuilding it any other way than how it was is going to be very difficult. The worst problem I think is that New Orleans and a segment of the population at large is going to demand that the fundamental character of the city remain unchanged. NO wants it to remain because it makes money, with Mardi Gras and Superbowls and the like. People at large like it because it has these things. Plus, some of it, such as the historic register buildings, can't be changed, ene if they are built in the worst possible location.
Not only can we not changed the fundamental character of the city, by custom and law, we won't have funds to do it. FEMA and insurance aren't designed, by and large, to upgrade after a disaster, they are designed to return the status quo. If newer methods and technologies, like better impermeable earth cores and geotextiles in the levees are incorporated, that's a fringe benefit. The money won't be there to put in deep foundations (though they might be required in new building codes) and bigger levees. There certainly won't be enough money to create a change from a below-sea-level city to an above-sea-level city. We'll get back almost exactly what we have.
The only thing I think we can get done in this aftermath is to restore NO to its pre-storm state (and hope the bath scrubbed out some of the nastier stains) and augment the existing flood control methods as allowed within the existing funds. We aren't going to get a New Venice, We're going to get New Orleans v1.01.
If true improvements are to come, they'll be from the ACoE and their funds, but those upgrades are going to be tacked on after the restoration. Before the storm, the Old River Control System and Atchafalaya system were on the list first, but since this happened, NO will get the focus. The ORCS is the real lynch pin, because if that fails, the Mighty Muddy Mississippi goes through the Big Easy, easily. It'll make Katrina look as harmful as a girl with beads on a Bourbon Street Balcony.
If you're interested in some of the workings of the local Army Corps of Engineers and the Atchafalaya and Mississippi interaction, look up John McPhee's book The Control Of Nature.
Who the hell says interweb?
Cliff Yablonski does.
My wife is an elementary school teacher. My mother is, too. They'll tell you otherwise.
To an extent, it is babysitting, and even worse, parenting. In some cases, the critical question isn't whether the kid did his homework last weekend, but whether the kid ate last weekend. A significant portion of the day is devoted to classroom behavioral management and minimizing disruptions among the remaining kids after the kid who slept in his mom's boyfriend's car threw a desk. When half the class didn't get a ritalin refill or whatever the drug du jour is, even the simplest tasks, like filing the kids down the hall to the library, require the efforts of a border collie on speed. Keeping them on the task at hand is as time consuming as teaching the material, if not more so. And then, when the one kid's behavior monopolizes the teacher's time, at the expense of the other twenty-some kids, and the parent gets a phonecall or a letter home, the process becomes babysitting the parent instead.
So, yeah, you're right about the dedication and training and amount of work, but school is babysitting as much as it is instruction.
Oh, and there are just as many PHB's and idiots in teaching as there are in any other field. And they've got a union.