I actually got very bored by the Covenant series, but found the Gap series quite good. While both are harsh stories, the Gap doesn't feel as derivative. (yes, I realize the literary reasons that Covenant was written the way it was, but it didn't work for me as a good read)
I've been at my job 10 years now, and if I interviewed for it or a similar one now would expect (and do well at) a detailed technical interview. But it is in a very different area than what I studied in school- when I was being interviewed, we all knew that what the interviewers needed to discover was whether I could learn what I needed quickly and then apply it to designing new things. They already knew I didn't know it yet. I didn't even know Verilog (I do the digital side of mixed signal chips).
The best question was a quick lesson in how one of the main building blocks of many of our systems works, followed by questions about implications and what would happen if various broad changes were made with the architecture.
But the puzzle questions (usually requiring broad math and science knowledge, no one asked me elephant in the fridge type questions) were a good way to get at whether I had a broad knowledge base and could apply it to new things.
So they have their place, probably more for people crossing fields than those doing something they are experienced with.
For some reason I have gotten a lot of mod points these last few weeks, after a very long dry period. The system appears to be modal- either it wants to give you a lot or none. My karma has been excellent for a long time, so it's not a (visible) karma change.
It depends a lot on the state you live in. In some states, there need not be an employment contract and both workers and companies have the right to end the relationship at any point for most any reason. In those situations, the company may be able to change the terms of employment a considerable amount the the employees only recourse to leave. Other states have laws that would still require overtime pay for most IT positions anyway. Some states do tend to have contracts, and getting rid of workers or changing the terms of employment is more difficult.
Generally, if you have an actual employment contract, it can give you rights beyond the guaranteed minimums of the law.
IANAL, but I do live on a state where the situation is much like my first paragraph. I am a salaried employee with no overtime, but make more than most hourly employees who do get paid overtime.
My employer historically has hired lots of PhDs; we design mixed signal chips. My own PhD has basically nothing to do with my job, but the sort of person who can make it through the PhD process in a hard (science or engineering) field has tended to do well here. That high % of PhD folks is changing a bit as we have been growing way too fast lately to not hire a larger % of MS, but when your bread and butter is to do chips that are "hard" enough to get decent margins rather than being commodity priced the ability to go figure things out that everyone doesn't already know is quite useful. Actually FINISHING the PhD is a lot better predictor than STARTING a PhD BTW.
As someone who has avoided Facebook and is trying out Google+, part of it is trust.
I don't trust Facebook to honor what I tell them in my controls; I think they will neither provide adequate technical protections, or believe they will act in good faith whenever they can make a buck. I also don't like their lock-in.
I think Google will do a better job on these fronts. The non-lock-in approach is an excellent show of good faith. I've used other Google products, and with the exception of some honest mistakes with Buzz they have AFAIK done a good job of walking the line of only using info they have access to ethically.
Of course due to personal web pages I have had in the past (accessible forever via the wayback machine), and various publications, there's already plenty of info about me out there- combined with what Google already knows from my gmail account, they already know more than they would learn from mining what I've put in Google+.
And there are things (i.e. pictures of parties) that I won't be putting online in any form, because I'm only willing to bet so much on my assessment:).
"Music" CD-Rs have a tag on them that allows certain equipment to accept them that doesn't allow data CD-Rs. They are otherwise the same.
Why is this? Well, early on the content folks had the idea of getting a chunk of money from all the music CD-Rs, so they tried to get the people making stuff for recording sound agree to only accept CD-Rs on which the 'content tax' had been paid.
So, if you have a belief that it is immoral to copy content that you haven't paid for, buy the "music" CD-Rs and put the stuff you didn't otherwise pay for on them.
I make no claims about whether you will be able to successfully defend yourself in court if you get sued anyway. IANAL.
So does Parliment not have the equivalent of a quorum call? Many institutions require at least half the voting members to be present to pass something, if any of the voting members present asks for a quorum check.
What sort of screwed up system would prevent discussion of something because it was amoung "issues currently up for debate"? Isn't the whole point of a debate to supposed to be to discuss something?
If certain forms of Cap & Trade (like the ones the US Govt is considering) are implemented, the carbon market will be a multi-billion dollar industry. Trading firms stand to make plenty, not just from Enron-like shit, but from the same sort of stuff that makes them money on stock and commodities markets. It opens up a whole new field for speculation, with an available market of stuff to trade drawfing most real commodities and looking more like the scale of the housing market whose excesses contributed to our current economic mess.
In addition, there is plenty of room for fraud and plenty of players standing to make a pretty penny out of the carbon offsets market.
This is why, if we do something about carbon, something like a carbon emissions tax may be ultimately less destructive to the economy. Not that that wouldn't suck in it's own ways.
To make fertilizer, you want fixed N (that is, N that is connected to carbon). Doing that is a big part of the energy cost in the fertilizer. (this doesn't mean you can't come up with an algae good at fixing N; but there's plenty of N around anyway, N2 is most of our atmosphere. Such would be a good starting point for using algae to make fertilizer. My point is what we're really trying to get out of the algae is energy, which making fertilizer also requires).
That product, if done right (anti-bacterial stuff in the goo to get the keys actually clean, right consistency to not leave bits between keys) would actually be pretty useful in some environments.
For those who didn't RTFA, it's a keyboard cleaner via goo like substance that you push on and pull off and it takes the ick with it.
It depends on whether it is the long zip or the short zip. The short zip is 5 digits, and that's what most people use when sending personal letters and such; the shorter zip adds additional digits and narrows things considerably.
Some quick back of the envelope says that 5 digits has 100,000 combinations, meaning that you only have thousands of people (~3k) per zip (some zips more, some less, they assigned them before some population movement). With 366 possible birth days across a number of years (I'm assuming year is specified), even the 5 digit narrows things down uniquely for lots of people.
If they released the long zip, which they compute to speed their mailing based on your address, then it gets real easy to narrow things. The extra zip has another 4 digits!
If he had patents, they should not be "locked away somewhere to this day"- the point of the patent system is that after the set time they become public. And they are supposed to explain how to do things well enough so that one skilled in the art can reproduce it. This is one part of the patent system that generally works- the patent duration has not been increased to the insane degree of copyright lengths, and it's common in the tech industry for a bunch of people to suddenly all start doing something at once when the patent times out.
If someone breaks into your ISP, it's not just your information they get. Say the ISP has the data for N people. If more than 1/N people of loose morals are capable of breaking into the ISP, your odds of having your data exposed are larger this way than your odds of having your data exposed by someone breaking into your house. Making simplifying assumptions like people being equally interested in breaking into houses and ISPs, and one person per house etc of course.
My gut feeling (which may be wrong, gut feelings often are when it comes to security) is that your correspondence is much much safer in your house, unless there is a particular reason someone wants your particular information rather than information to fish through. Furthermore, most people are STILL vulnerable to the house break-in, as there is sufficient information there to fool the ISP through a social engineering vector. Also, the people who broke into your house probably didn't care about your information, from your description they were likely just after the tangible properly.
Finally, the ISP may simply sell the information anyway.
Yes. Or the point is that they only applied the method to one particular program in this case.
There is plenty of good software made using formal methods, but it is much more expensive to develop formally proven software, and not all software is formally provable as correct or incorrect. One has to be careful with the specifications and implementation (for reasons including the halting problem) for the problem to be tractable or economically reasonable. Most software using formal methods is for things were something going wrong is very very bad. There is a lot of interesting work going on in trying to set up a good formal chain- I was reading an article on a formally proven compiler for a subset of the C language the other day. As some others have pointed out, if you can't trust your compiler, it doesn't matter if your spec and source code are equivalent. Likewise, if you can't trust you OS, which is what is nice about having even a little kernal proved is helpful for as a building block.
Most commercial software operates on the principle that it only has to be good enough to convince the customer to pay for it. In that sense, the degree to which a given piece of software sucks is very much the customer's fault, as unfair as that may sound. We vote with our wallets.
The halting problem basically says you can't write something that will take in every arbitrary program and prove that each will halt. It does NOT say that there exist no programs that can be proven to halt. All the research shows is that a particular program adheres to a particular specification. Note that the halting problem basically means that when analyzing an arbitrary program, one possibility is that the analysis fails to be conclusive in bounded time.
Add appropriate definition of 'halt' if pendantic, I'm just trying to get across the idea.
Interestingly, attempting to load that link crashes my version of firefox - whether due to bad site design or a nasty advertisment, I don't know. But I can see why the submitter would have avoided that link if they had a similar problem with the site.
As I said, it's not just power factor, it's the harmonics, which are not fixed by compensating passively. Tacking on an inductor (or capacitor) to adjust PF doesn't fix the harmonics issue, and neither does using an appliance that tends to shift the power factor the other way.
That's not to say there are no ways it can be fixed. It's theoretically possible to put a converter in each bulb that deals with this. Just that it isn't, to my knowledge, available en masse. So if you buy a CFL now, you're not saving energy to the degree claimed.
They also add to issues with getting stable voltage. CFLs have nasty characteristics as loads- one engineer who works in power management told me that they basically cost the power company 5x the amount that they are labeled as. Most non-industrial customers have meters where they are charged for power as rated, but big industrial companies actually pay extra if they have non-unity power factors. It's not just power factors though with CFLs, they induce harmonics with traditional power factor correction doesn't fix for you.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually got very bored by the Covenant series, but found the Gap series quite good. While both are harsh stories, the Gap doesn't feel as derivative. (yes, I realize the literary reasons that Covenant was written the way it was, but it didn't work for me as a good read)
My employer already knows. We have beer (and wine) every friday afternoon starting at 4pm.
I've been at my job 10 years now, and if I interviewed for it or a similar one now would expect (and do well at) a detailed technical interview. But it is in a very different area than what I studied in school- when I was being interviewed, we all knew that what the interviewers needed to discover was whether I could learn what I needed quickly and then apply it to designing new things. They already knew I didn't know it yet. I didn't even know Verilog (I do the digital side of mixed signal chips).
The best question was a quick lesson in how one of the main building blocks of many of our systems works, followed by questions about implications and what would happen if various broad changes were made with the architecture.
But the puzzle questions (usually requiring broad math and science knowledge, no one asked me elephant in the fridge type questions) were a good way to get at whether I had a broad knowledge base and could apply it to new things.
So they have their place, probably more for people crossing fields than those doing something they are experienced with.
For some reason I have gotten a lot of mod points these last few weeks, after a very long dry period. The system appears to be modal- either it wants to give you a lot or none. My karma has been excellent for a long time, so it's not a (visible) karma change.
It depends a lot on the state you live in. In some states, there need not be an employment contract and both workers and companies have the right to end the relationship at any point for most any reason. In those situations, the company may be able to change the terms of employment a considerable amount the the employees only recourse to leave.
Other states have laws that would still require overtime pay for most IT positions anyway.
Some states do tend to have contracts, and getting rid of workers or changing the terms of employment is more difficult.
Generally, if you have an actual employment contract, it can give you rights beyond the guaranteed minimums of the law.
IANAL, but I do live on a state where the situation is much like my first paragraph. I am a salaried employee with no overtime, but make more than most hourly employees who do get paid overtime.
My employer historically has hired lots of PhDs; we design mixed signal chips. My own PhD has basically nothing to do with my job, but the sort of person who can make it through the PhD process in a hard (science or engineering) field has tended to do well here. That high % of PhD folks is changing a bit as we have been growing way too fast lately to not hire a larger % of MS, but when your bread and butter is to do chips that are "hard" enough to get decent margins rather than being commodity priced the ability to go figure things out that everyone doesn't already know is quite useful. Actually FINISHING the PhD is a lot better predictor than STARTING a PhD BTW.
As someone who has avoided Facebook and is trying out Google+, part of it is trust.
I don't trust Facebook to honor what I tell them in my controls; I think they will neither provide adequate technical protections, or believe they will act in good faith whenever they can make a buck. I also don't like their lock-in.
I think Google will do a better job on these fronts. The non-lock-in approach is an excellent show of good faith. I've used other Google products, and with the exception of some honest mistakes with Buzz they have AFAIK done a good job of walking the line of only using info they have access to ethically.
Of course due to personal web pages I have had in the past (accessible forever via the wayback machine), and various publications, there's already plenty of info about me out there- combined with what Google already knows from my gmail account, they already know more than they would learn from mining what I've put in Google+.
And there are things (i.e. pictures of parties) that I won't be putting online in any form, because I'm only willing to bet so much on my assessment:).
There are also liquid crystal phases. Basically, ordered liquids.
I suspect the FBI knew it was "removed" because the guy posted pictures of it on the net.
No, it's more like Phizer informing a grocery store that they can't have a parking lot, because a lot of drug deals are taking place there at night.
"Music" CD-Rs have a tag on them that allows certain equipment to accept them that doesn't allow data CD-Rs. They are otherwise the same.
Why is this? Well, early on the content folks had the idea of getting a chunk of money from all the music CD-Rs, so they tried to get the people making stuff for recording sound agree to only accept CD-Rs on which the 'content tax' had been paid.
So, if you have a belief that it is immoral to copy content that you haven't paid for, buy the "music" CD-Rs and put the stuff you didn't otherwise pay for on them.
I make no claims about whether you will be able to successfully defend yourself in court if you get sued anyway. IANAL.
So does Parliment not have the equivalent of a quorum call? Many institutions require at least half the voting members to be present to pass something, if any of the voting members present asks for a quorum check.
What sort of screwed up system would prevent discussion of something because it was amoung "issues currently up for debate"? Isn't the whole point of a debate to supposed to be to discuss something?
If certain forms of Cap & Trade (like the ones the US Govt is considering) are implemented, the carbon market will be a multi-billion dollar industry. Trading firms stand to make plenty, not just from Enron-like shit, but from the same sort of stuff that makes them money on stock and commodities markets. It opens up a whole new field for speculation, with an available market of stuff to trade drawfing most real commodities and looking more like the scale of the housing market whose excesses contributed to our current economic mess.
In addition, there is plenty of room for fraud and plenty of players standing to make a pretty penny out of the carbon offsets market.
This is why, if we do something about carbon, something like a carbon emissions tax may be ultimately less destructive to the economy. Not that that wouldn't suck in it's own ways.
To make fertilizer, you want fixed N (that is, N that is connected to carbon). Doing that is a big part of the energy cost in the fertilizer.
(this doesn't mean you can't come up with an algae good at fixing N; but there's plenty of N around anyway, N2 is most of our atmosphere. Such would be a good starting point for using algae to make fertilizer. My point is what we're really trying to get out of the algae is energy, which making fertilizer also requires).
That product, if done right (anti-bacterial stuff in the goo to get the keys actually clean, right consistency to not leave bits between keys) would actually be pretty useful in some environments.
For those who didn't RTFA, it's a keyboard cleaner via goo like substance that you push on and pull off and it takes the ick with it.
It depends on whether it is the long zip or the short zip. The short zip is 5 digits, and that's what most people use when sending personal letters and such; the shorter zip adds additional digits and narrows things considerably.
Some quick back of the envelope says that 5 digits has 100,000 combinations, meaning that you only have thousands of people (~3k) per zip (some zips more, some less, they assigned them before some population movement). With 366 possible birth days across a number of years (I'm assuming year is specified), even the 5 digit narrows things down uniquely for lots of people.
If they released the long zip, which they compute to speed their mailing based on your address, then it gets real easy to narrow things. The extra zip has another 4 digits!
If he had patents, they should not be "locked away somewhere to this day"- the point of the patent system is that after the set time they become public. And they are supposed to explain how to do things well enough so that one skilled in the art can reproduce it. This is one part of the patent system that generally works- the patent duration has not been increased to the insane degree of copyright lengths, and it's common in the tech industry for a bunch of people to suddenly all start doing something at once when the patent times out.
If someone breaks into your ISP, it's not just your information they get. Say the ISP has the data for N people. If more than 1/N people of loose morals are capable of breaking into the ISP, your odds of having your data exposed are larger this way than your odds of having your data exposed by someone breaking into your house. Making simplifying assumptions like people being equally interested in breaking into houses and ISPs, and one person per house etc of course.
My gut feeling (which may be wrong, gut feelings often are when it comes to security) is that your correspondence is much much safer in your house, unless there is a particular reason someone wants your particular information rather than information to fish through. Furthermore, most people are STILL vulnerable to the house break-in, as there is sufficient information there to fool the ISP through a social engineering vector. Also, the people who broke into your house probably didn't care about your information, from your description they were likely just after the tangible properly.
Finally, the ISP may simply sell the information anyway.
Yes. Or the point is that they only applied the method to one particular program in this case.
There is plenty of good software made using formal methods, but it is much more expensive to develop formally proven software, and not all software is formally provable as correct or incorrect. One has to be careful with the specifications and implementation (for reasons including the halting problem) for the problem to be tractable or economically reasonable. Most software using formal methods is for things were something going wrong is very very bad. There is a lot of interesting work going on in trying to set up a good formal chain- I was reading an article on a formally proven compiler for a subset of the C language the other day. As some others have pointed out, if you can't trust your compiler, it doesn't matter if your spec and source code are equivalent. Likewise, if you can't trust you OS, which is what is nice about having even a little kernal proved is helpful for as a building block.
Most commercial software operates on the principle that it only has to be good enough to convince the customer to pay for it. In that sense, the degree to which a given piece of software sucks is very much the customer's fault, as unfair as that may sound. We vote with our wallets.
The halting problem basically says you can't write something that will take in every arbitrary program and prove that each will halt. It does NOT say that there exist no programs that can be proven to halt. All the research shows is that a particular program adheres to a particular specification.
Note that the halting problem basically means that when analyzing an arbitrary program, one possibility is that the analysis fails to be conclusive in bounded time.
Add appropriate definition of 'halt' if pendantic, I'm just trying to get across the idea.
Interestingly, attempting to load that link crashes my version of firefox - whether due to bad site design or a nasty advertisment, I don't know. But I can see why the submitter would have avoided that link if they had a similar problem with the site.
When it comes to "fair and right", the UN is usually a massive fail.
As I said, it's not just power factor, it's the harmonics, which are not fixed by compensating passively. Tacking on an inductor (or capacitor) to adjust PF doesn't fix the harmonics issue, and neither does using an appliance that tends to shift the power factor the other way.
That's not to say there are no ways it can be fixed. It's theoretically possible to put a converter in each bulb that deals with this. Just that it isn't, to my knowledge, available en masse. So if you buy a CFL now, you're not saving energy to the degree claimed.
They also add to issues with getting stable voltage. CFLs have nasty characteristics as loads- one engineer who works in power management told me that they basically cost the power company 5x the amount that they are labeled as. Most non-industrial customers have meters where they are charged for power as rated, but big industrial companies actually pay extra if they have non-unity power factors. It's not just power factors though with CFLs, they induce harmonics with traditional power factor correction doesn't fix for you.