the consent of the governed
Right! And it is with that consent that a president is hired for four years, and trusted to do his or her job. Part of that job includes dealing with things that absolutely, positively should not be talked about in open court. Who said anything about open court? The government could file any state secrets under seal, meaning the court and the involved parties are the only people with access.
There should be basically nothing the government does that is so secret that filing it under seal in a case is completely unthinkable. And in those few cases, the government is not likely to get sued in the first place. If it does, then it will lose, simple as that.
If someone doesn't care whether they live or die they could be successful.
Falcon I won't disagree with that. I've always thought it would realistically be all to easy for a suicidal assassin to take out the president, despite the best efforts of the Secret Service. I even considered mentioning this in my post, but decided against it. My post sounded dark enough without it.
More accurate might be that with UAC, the 'admin' accounts are no longer effectively root, but are members of the wheel group (or equivalent in your preferred distro) which allow the use of sudo to run any command without any password. (The windows normal user prompt though is more like "su -c" as it prompts the user for an admin username and password, where a configured sudo would allow some commands with only the user's own password, or if configured no password at all.
Actually, that is the very point. Under the only clear, obvious, and resonable interpretation of the 1st ammendment, that is entirely legal. Please notice that that is only a threat in specific contexts. It may be unlawful to use those words in such a context. However, there is a surprising number of people who would currently support the sentiment that "George W. Bush should be taken out back and shot" (but Cheney goes first). Do you see the phrase you mentioned right there? I do. Yet clearly this is no threat. At the present there does not seem to be anybody willing to actually try that, and it seems highly unlikely that anybody will be willing to try that. Coupled with the fact that such a person is quite likely to fail, it is clear that the above statement is absolutely no threat the the current President of the United States.
Just recently I attended an invitation only Verizon seminar where they did indeed mention this exact system. Couple of notes for you with questions:
1) Security - It isn't the name that is important, the carriers will authenticate the message via IP address.
2) When there is an alert, the message will be sent out by georgraphic region. No matter the carrier or type of device in the area, if the device is able to receive text messages it will receive the alert.
3) This type of message won't necessarily lag the system as the government will be on the white list of all carriers. This will allow them to bypass the text message spam filters and go directly to the pipe. That makes it perfectly clear that verizon would be sending out the messages using the CDMA equivalent of GSM's SMS broadcast messages. That is logical. Nobody could possibly be charged for those text messages, as they would need to be "system" text messages, which are always free, not to mention the fact that due to the broadcast nature of the message it would be physically impossible to track who received the message. The downside is that it is technically impossible to opt out of GSM SMS broadcast messages (and I assume that would be the same with the CDMA equivlent) but software on the device could filter messages out. The problem is that existing phone software lacks a 'filter out EAS/Amber-alert GSM SMS broadcast message' option, and many existing phones will never receive a firmware update to implement such an option.
The problem is that it is entirely possible that the MMR shot did caue the problem in this case. However trying to generalize from a single or even a small number of examples is often highly problematic. The law of Big Numbers does apply here. I mean lets say the vaccine itself was fine. It may be that this was a one in ten million freak case. People find it hard to believe that any specific instance is that 1 in 10 million chance, but keep in mind that for those odds for every 100 million vaccines, we would expect about 10 of them to have that effect. Of course, it also seems entirely reasonable that once again, just due to the odds, she was extremely succeptable to developing autism, and that the vaccine just happened to trigger it. However, in such a case, it is hard to be very confident that something else could have triggered instead if the vaccine had not. Those are just possibilities of course. It may also be that thimerisol was the culprit after all. The point is that it is basically impossible to generalize from one or even a small number of personal anecdotes. Also keep in mind that it is basically guaranteed that every person will experience several extremely unlikely events over the course of their life, some may be so small you would never even notice them. Some may be wonderful, some may be awful. That's the way life is.
Under the US system anyway, the idea is supposed to be that one is free to express any sentiment at all. In other words one is free to speak one's mind. However attempting to use speech maliciously to cause harm to other people is not tolerated. That seems reasonable.
In theory I could say "[insert name here] should be taken out back and shot" and that is fine, unless I am saying that attempting to get a mob to do just that. In the latter case that is a real problem. Unfortunately, sometimes it is a bit too hard to tell the difference. especially since the exact words said do not always contain all the information needed to determine if something was acceptable. Bob saying something in passing to a friend, and Joe (leader of a cult) saying the exact same thing in an address to the cult members, is a good example. The first case is almost certainly acceptable (there a a few exceptions such as the case that Bob's friend is part of the Mob and is known for acting on offhand comments), but Joe saying the exact same thing could very well be a crime.
Now some hate speech laws are drafted such that they overstep the bounds, and prohibit things that should be acceptable. There are also other such cases where free speech is impinged upon, but it is important to note that the concept of free speech is not truely incompatible with the concepts of some of these laws, but rather with the implementation or interpretation thereof.
It seems like it would work well as a complement to cameras, so that you didn't need to have as many cameras to keep track of things, and that you could spend less time worrying about the cameras, as you could use the motion tracking to key into interesting time periods in the camera footage. Based on the video link in the first post (unlike the seemingly broken link in the submission), it seems that it is intended to be used in conjunction with cameras. It is of course not terribly useful for real time security, but take the example of something stolen from a person's office. Given the time frame the object must have been stolen during, one could check for any motion entering the office and then leaving it. Then continuous motion can be tracked until it passes one of the cameras. Then queue up the camera video for that timestamp, and you will hopefully see a frame with relatively few people in it, narrowing your investigation significantly, with much less cost or privacy invasion of CC cameras in the offices, or in every hallway. (In case it was unclear, I believe I am agreeing with you, but providing more data/thoughts).
I've read above that this guy was paid "just" £30,000 for his work.
Now, even if that's adjust for inflation and he was paid less than that, I still wouldn't feel sorry for him. If the only thing you put on your resume for the rest of your life is "Designed Storm Troopers Costume", then your career is made!
I'm sure he's been reaping the benefits of his work indirectly ever since. Sure, it's not as much as Lucas himself, but he's gotten his share of the pie. He shouldn't be allowed to sell something that's not his, and when he sold the design to Lucas, it stopped being his, end-of-story. Technically, he was not an employee, nor did he have any contract. The whole thing hinges on verbal agreements made so long ago neither could possibly remember the details. Under the circumstances any sane court would need to assume no assignment was made in the verbal agreement, but bar the counter-suit under latches. Lucas may well have a valid trademark case though, as the storm-trooper design may be subsumed into to overall storm-trooper visual trademark, but base design itself it almost certainly not owned by Lucas. A possible end result may be that neither may produce merchandise featuring the storm-trooper design without each others consent from this point forward. The obvious solution toi that would be cross-licensing the design rights for the rights to produce the storm trooper outfits.
You could just drop out of high school, go to community college, and apply to university as a transfer student. Can't you? Perhaps, but only if the community college allows you to cintinue to attend if you have dropped out of high school. I do know that it is possible to have a degree from a community college before graduating high school. (at which point if it is not already the ed of your senior year, it would seem to be pointless to continue, no?
Re:Assholes calling cops
on
The DIY Tank
·
· Score: 1
I'm pretty sure you are correct. Tanks generally lack rubberized tracks because in theory they spend most of their time on surfaces other than paved roads, so the rubber would not help significantly, and is thus not work the cost, and the slight risk of something nasty getting embedded into the rubber (like shrapnel) make it not worth it. But show tanks, or urban warfare tanks probably should have rubberized tracks.
Hmm... That makes me wonder, are bulldozer and cranes using rubberized tracks? Hmm... the answer appears to be that some are, but not all.
That said, rubberized tracks are perfectly safe for paved roads, and are even found on some slow moving road maintenance vehicles
Did I say they are the only ones worth attending? No. I said the "best" colleges, which most people consider to be the high end private colleges. The degrees from those colleges are generally better respected than even the best University of [Statename] degrees, despite the fact that the degrees from the latter may be every bit as difficult, and may in fact indicate a better standard of work than the top private colleges. Its just the way the system works.
The community college system works, except there are two potential problems. Any university worth attending will not allow any college courses taken to replace high-school requirements to count. Thus only high-school electives taken at a community college could count. The best universities will not count any college course used for any high school credit including electives.
You have a few excellent points here. The issue with windows is that it is very easy to be an incompetent admin, and there are some problems that even a competent admin really cannot handle, such as a corrupted registry. The simple truth is that there are very few tools for dealing with a corrupted registry, so the vast majority of the time the 3 R's is the only reasonable way to go. It is much more rare to have anything go so wrong on a GNU/Linux setup that the only reasonable choice is the 3 R's. The only hypothetical situation I can think of off the top of my head is too many drives dying at once in a RAID setup and backups are not available (perhaps this was the server that held the backups, so it is unlikely to have a backup of itself, and even if it did, you cant access it).
Support? Seems obvious when you point it out. I always laugh at this. The "support" even big companies get from software vendors still takes lots of work testing on the customer's end, so this portion of the TCO is effectively equal. Often, it takes longer for a proprietary vendor to provide a fix than it takes the FOSS community.
Visual Studio w/.net,... [is] genuinely better than anything OSS can come up Really?.NET? I'll stick with g++ over VC++ thank you.
Well.NET is a pretty decent class library as far as those go. Microsoft has never denied that it was strongly influenced by java's class library, but it is still rather difficult to design a good class library at all, let alone one usable in multiple languages, and a common run-time system. For what.NET it does it fairly well.
As for Visual Studio, it is a damn good IDE, and is arguably slightly nicer than even the best FOSS IDE, Eclipse. (Though it is also lacking some of Eclipse's nicer features). The truth is though that the FOSS community does not use IDE's very much, so having one that is excellent is really not a top concern.
As far as quality of the compiler itself, the GCC compiler family is unquestionably superior to Microsoft's compilers.
Well considering that the Global Defense Initiative was originally a UN organization (UNGDI), before Tiberium became such a problem that the existing world governmental system failed (by Tiberian Sun a fair amount of earths population had been relocated into colonies run by the GDI, and by Tiberian Wars all remaining civilization lived in GDI administered Colonies in the "Blue Zones"), leaving only Kane's Brotherhood of Nod, and the Global Defense Initiative as government-like organizations, it seems reasonable to conclude that the GDI should not be considered terrorists. Consider that the United States must approve anything the UN does (as must the rest of the security council) and it seems extremely unlikely that the UN could create something that could truly be considered a terrorist organization.
The awesomebar has one huge advantage over URL autocomplete: URL autocomplete is very poor for quickly finding one of multiple pages at the same site.
For example, I spend a lot of time in Bugzilla. With the awesomebar I can type "bug 1234" and the awesomebar will find the bug I want if I've visited it before. I can even type "bug image crash" and get a list of bugs with those words in the title that I've visited before.
I think the awesomebar is one of those things that will take people time to get used to, but then they won't be able to live without. Would not just a properly constructed quick search bookmark be more useful? I used to have a quick search bookmark such that "bug 87945" would load the bug. It is really easy to create such a bookmark, or an even better one. For the rest I'll assume you are talking about the bugzilla at bugzilla.mozilla.org, although the same procedujre should work for most bugzillas. Step one, create a bookmark of bugzilla.mozilla.org. Then edit its location to be "https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=%s". Then add the word "bug" to the keyword field. Now typing "bug 789456" will load that bug even if you have never been there. Further typing "bug image crash" will do a quick search for "image crash". That latter part is admittedly not quite as useful the so-called awsomebar as it does not limit you to only the bugs you have been to, but it is also not mutually exclusive with it either. Typing that phrase but not hitting enter will let awsomebar show you the bug you have been to. If you cant find the bug you want, just hit enter, and bugzilla will search for the bug for you.
Also, you should be able to "tag" your bookmarks with "keystrings". I should be able to make a bookmark for slashdot, and set a keystring of "sla" to it. If I ever type sla into the addressbar, my bookmark absolutely should be the first pick, bar none, because I have a 100% match. . Well, if you add the keyword "sla" to a slashdot bookmark, then typing "sla" and hitting enter will load slashdot. I would agree though that if a bookmark has a keyword that is an exact match to the current text in the URL bar, it should be at the top of the list, perhaps even visibly separated by a line.
I just plug in my Shure in ear phones...open up the laptop, and usually play my Zeppelin DVD or a bootleg Stones DVD I got...and jam with that. Pretty much eliminates talking to anyone. I only pause or stop to order drinks. You listen to music stored on DVD? DVD-audio never took-off, so I'm bit surprised.
I'm concerned about your ordering there. All good engineering is math heavy. But the types of math differ wildly. I know for example that Chem Es often have more (and more nasty) differential equations to deal with than EE. Real C.S. is actually concerned with new and unusual types of mathematics. Take the reasonably complex concept of Compiler Theory. All of compiler theory is basically abstract mathematics, although admittedly slightly more practical than some abstract mathematics. I have no idea what civil/mech or Aero E's do, but I know they involve math, although my understanding is that civil/mech has a bit less wading though pages of equations, than say Chem E or EE. The real oddball is "Computer Engineering" which is really in most places somewhat of a cross between the EE systems sub-circulum, and the CS curriculum. My understanding is that that has the least math of all, but quite a bit of abstract thinking.
Bah, teacher can stop grading on a curve when they figure out what is worth teaching and how to test it. I was lucky and got to go to co-ops all through my chemical engineer degree. I realized pretty quickly that we were being taught a load of worthless garbage that we would never use.
The vast majority of engineering examines are really tests of rote memory, your differential equations skills, and how quickly you can rush through some silly problem. On the other hand, most professional engineers will never ever do differential equations by hand, will be smart enough to look something up if they don't know the answer off the top of their head, and never toss an arbitrary hour long time limit onto doing critical calculations. College engineering, especially BS degrees, teach you about an hour's worth of useful knowledge for every 100 hours you of your life you burn away trying to stuff seven differential equations into each other.
Unfortunately, that is all too accurate, except in so far as introductory courses do teach you important concepts. The circuits analysis class at the beginning of an EE's curriculum has relatively little differential equations. The important skill learned is how to approach the analysis of linear circuits, and a handful of formulas needed by them. Good professors should be more concerned with the equations derived from the circuit being correct, rather than the solution.
However, that is one class where some idiot profs out there get it wrong. Sometimes that class can have a really low class average. Then the idiot prof curves the grading scale, since he knows something is wrong with his tests or grading policy, but does not know what. I'm fortunate that my prof was not such an idiot, but I others are.
I suspect that in general for most engineering classes, a smart prof will weigh the theory component (generally, ending up with the right set of equations) far more heavily. I also know that the standard EE curriculum is better than the Chem. E. situation you describe, as while a fair amount of time is spent messing with equations that in the real world a would be solved by a computer, a fair amount of time is also spent teaching important concepts.
Acid3 has been in the works since before IE8 passed Acid2, and is still not finalized. Really? Looking at http://www.webstandards.org/press/releases/20080303/ I see "The Web Standards Project (WaSP) today announced the release of Acid3, the latest in a line of tests designed to expose flaws in the implementation of mature Web standards in Web browsers." That implies to me that it is intended to be final. Hixie will surely fix any test in Acid3 that turns out to be broken, assuming of course any of the tests are broken. Otherwise, the test will probably not be changing from this point forward.
its the one of the main reasons Tesla's wireless power transmission never got serious funding and interest by investors.
It couldn't have been because broadcast power was a crackpot idea even when it came from the mind of a Tesla.
How much power would have had to be pumped into these towers to supply a relatively compact suburban population of five or six thousand households?
Wireless power transmission via ionosphere wave guiding and earth return could work. There is nothing unsound about that part. It is quite possible he was more successful in his limited demonstrations than people give him credit for. The problem is that obviously no more power could be exacted from the system than is supplied into it, so it is no free lunch. Further, there would be transmission losses, due to a large variety of reasons (anything that happens to absorb the frequency used for example, as well as the small amount of waves escaping the planet. And then consider the fact that is would mean sending extremely high amplitude radio waves around the world. There is evidence from his existing research that this can have undesired side effects including atmospheric side effects. We have no idea what if any impact such high amplitude waves would have on the human body.
Also consider the impact that microwaves have on unshielded electronics (they tend to fry), it is not implausible that this could have a similar effect.
So it is unrealistic, unworkable, and probably undesirable due to side effects.
Honestly though, it sounds to me like CPLD's or FPGAs may be the proper solution. They are real-time by definition, running what amounts to a large number of processes in true parallel. An FPGA with a built in RISC microprocessor honestly sounds like it would be an easier and cheaper system to develop on than many RTOS's. Obviously one implements the real-time components in the FPGA, but runs the parts that are easier to code for a traditional processor on the embedded processor.
That honestly sounds like a saner solution. IT also usually has minimal current draw, and generally needs only one DC voltage. My question is why is this approach so rare? It seems like far fewer people use this approach than its benefits seem to imply. Am I missing some drawback?
Slashdot Mirror
The L and R buttons on the classic Controller are analogue. You think Nintendo would deliberately take a step back on their latest controller?
If someone doesn't care whether they live or die they could be successful.
Falcon I won't disagree with that. I've always thought it would realistically be all to easy for a suicidal assassin to take out the president, despite the best efforts of the Secret Service. I even considered mentioning this in my post, but decided against it. My post sounded dark enough without it.More accurate might be that with UAC, the 'admin' accounts are no longer effectively root, but are members of the wheel group (or equivalent in your preferred distro) which allow the use of sudo to run any command without any password. (The windows normal user prompt though is more like "su -c" as it prompts the user for an admin username and password, where a configured sudo would allow some commands with only the user's own password, or if configured no password at all.
Actually, that is the very point. Under the only clear, obvious, and resonable interpretation of the 1st ammendment, that is entirely legal. Please notice that that is only a threat in specific contexts. It may be unlawful to use those words in such a context. However, there is a surprising number of people who would currently support the sentiment that "George W. Bush should be taken out back and shot" (but Cheney goes first). Do you see the phrase you mentioned right there? I do. Yet clearly this is no threat. At the present there does not seem to be anybody willing to actually try that, and it seems highly unlikely that anybody will be willing to try that. Coupled with the fact that such a person is quite likely to fail, it is clear that the above statement is absolutely no threat the the current President of the United States.
The problem is that it is entirely possible that the MMR shot did caue the problem in this case. However trying to generalize from a single or even a small number of examples is often highly problematic. The law of Big Numbers does apply here. I mean lets say the vaccine itself was fine. It may be that this was a one in ten million freak case. People find it hard to believe that any specific instance is that 1 in 10 million chance, but keep in mind that for those odds for every 100 million vaccines, we would expect about 10 of them to have that effect. Of course, it also seems entirely reasonable that once again, just due to the odds, she was extremely succeptable to developing autism, and that the vaccine just happened to trigger it. However, in such a case, it is hard to be very confident that something else could have triggered instead if the vaccine had not. Those are just possibilities of course. It may also be that thimerisol was the culprit after all. The point is that it is basically impossible to generalize from one or even a small number of personal anecdotes. Also keep in mind that it is basically guaranteed that every person will experience several extremely unlikely events over the course of their life, some may be so small you would never even notice them. Some may be wonderful, some may be awful. That's the way life is.
Under the US system anyway, the idea is supposed to be that one is free to express any sentiment at all. In other words one is free to speak one's mind. However attempting to use speech maliciously to cause harm to other people is not tolerated. That seems reasonable.
In theory I could say "[insert name here] should be taken out back and shot" and that is fine, unless I am saying that attempting to get a mob to do just that. In the latter case that is a real problem. Unfortunately, sometimes it is a bit too hard to tell the difference. especially since the exact words said do not always contain all the information needed to determine if something was acceptable. Bob saying something in passing to a friend, and Joe (leader of a cult) saying the exact same thing in an address to the cult members, is a good example. The first case is almost certainly acceptable (there a a few exceptions such as the case that Bob's friend is part of the Mob and is known for acting on offhand comments), but Joe saying the exact same thing could very well be a crime.
Now some hate speech laws are drafted such that they overstep the bounds, and prohibit things that should be acceptable. There are also other such cases where free speech is impinged upon, but it is important to note that the concept of free speech is not truely incompatible with the concepts of some of these laws, but rather with the implementation or interpretation thereof.
I'm pretty sure you are correct. Tanks generally lack rubberized tracks because in theory they spend most of their time on surfaces other than paved roads, so the rubber would not help significantly, and is thus not work the cost, and the slight risk of something nasty getting embedded into the rubber (like shrapnel) make it not worth it. But show tanks, or urban warfare tanks probably should have rubberized tracks.
Hmm... That makes me wonder, are bulldozer and cranes using rubberized tracks? Hmm... the answer appears to be that some are, but not all.
That said, rubberized tracks are perfectly safe for paved roads, and are even found on some slow moving road maintenance vehicles
Did I say they are the only ones worth attending? No. I said the "best" colleges, which most people consider to be the high end private colleges. The degrees from those colleges are generally better respected than even the best University of [Statename] degrees, despite the fact that the degrees from the latter may be every bit as difficult, and may in fact indicate a better standard of work than the top private colleges. Its just the way the system works.
The community college system works, except there are two potential problems. Any university worth attending will not allow any college courses taken to replace high-school requirements to count. Thus only high-school electives taken at a community college could count. The best universities will not count any college course used for any high school credit including electives.
You have a few excellent points here. The issue with windows is that it is very easy to be an incompetent admin, and there are some problems that even a competent admin really cannot handle, such as a corrupted registry. The simple truth is that there are very few tools for dealing with a corrupted registry, so the vast majority of the time the 3 R's is the only reasonable way to go. It is much more rare to have anything go so wrong on a GNU/Linux setup that the only reasonable choice is the 3 R's. The only hypothetical situation I can think of off the top of my head is too many drives dying at once in a RAID setup and backups are not available (perhaps this was the server that held the backups, so it is unlikely to have a backup of itself, and even if it did, you cant access it).
Well .NET is a pretty decent class library as far as those go. Microsoft has never denied that it was strongly influenced by java's class library, but it is still rather difficult to design a good class library at all, let alone one usable in multiple languages, and a common run-time system. For what .NET it does it fairly well.
As for Visual Studio, it is a damn good IDE, and is arguably slightly nicer than even the best FOSS IDE, Eclipse. (Though it is also lacking some of Eclipse's nicer features). The truth is though that the FOSS community does not use IDE's very much, so having one that is excellent is really not a top concern.
As far as quality of the compiler itself, the GCC compiler family is unquestionably superior to Microsoft's compilers.
Well considering that the Global Defense Initiative was originally a UN organization (UNGDI), before Tiberium became such a problem that the existing world governmental system failed (by Tiberian Sun a fair amount of earths population had been relocated into colonies run by the GDI, and by Tiberian Wars all remaining civilization lived in GDI administered Colonies in the "Blue Zones"), leaving only Kane's Brotherhood of Nod, and the Global Defense Initiative as government-like organizations, it seems reasonable to conclude that the GDI should not be considered terrorists. Consider that the United States must approve anything the UN does (as must the rest of the security council) and it seems extremely unlikely that the UN could create something that could truly be considered a terrorist organization.
For example, I spend a lot of time in Bugzilla. With the awesomebar I can type "bug 1234" and the awesomebar will find the bug I want if I've visited it before. I can even type "bug image crash" and get a list of bugs with those words in the title that I've visited before.
I think the awesomebar is one of those things that will take people time to get used to, but then they won't be able to live without. Would not just a properly constructed quick search bookmark be more useful? I used to have a quick search bookmark such that "bug 87945" would load the bug. It is really easy to create such a bookmark, or an even better one. For the rest I'll assume you are talking about the bugzilla at bugzilla.mozilla.org, although the same procedujre should work for most bugzillas. Step one, create a bookmark of bugzilla.mozilla.org. Then edit its location to be "https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=%s". Then add the word "bug" to the keyword field. Now typing "bug 789456" will load that bug even if you have never been there. Further typing "bug image crash" will do a quick search for "image crash". That latter part is admittedly not quite as useful the so-called awsomebar as it does not limit you to only the bugs you have been to, but it is also not mutually exclusive with it either. Typing that phrase but not hitting enter will let awsomebar show you the bug you have been to. If you cant find the bug you want, just hit enter, and bugzilla will search for the bug for you.
I'm concerned about your ordering there. All good engineering is math heavy. But the types of math differ wildly. I know for example that Chem Es often have more (and more nasty) differential equations to deal with than EE. Real C.S. is actually concerned with new and unusual types of mathematics. Take the reasonably complex concept of Compiler Theory. All of compiler theory is basically abstract mathematics, although admittedly slightly more practical than some abstract mathematics. I have no idea what civil/mech or Aero E's do, but I know they involve math, although my understanding is that civil/mech has a bit less wading though pages of equations, than say Chem E or EE. The real oddball is "Computer Engineering" which is really in most places somewhat of a cross between the EE systems sub-circulum, and the CS curriculum. My understanding is that that has the least math of all, but quite a bit of abstract thinking.
The vast majority of engineering examines are really tests of rote memory, your differential equations skills, and how quickly you can rush through some silly problem. On the other hand, most professional engineers will never ever do differential equations by hand, will be smart enough to look something up if they don't know the answer off the top of their head, and never toss an arbitrary hour long time limit onto doing critical calculations. College engineering, especially BS degrees, teach you about an hour's worth of useful knowledge for every 100 hours you of your life you burn away trying to stuff seven differential equations into each other.
Unfortunately, that is all too accurate, except in so far as introductory courses do teach you important concepts. The circuits analysis class at the beginning of an EE's curriculum has relatively little differential equations. The important skill learned is how to approach the analysis of linear circuits, and a handful of formulas needed by them. Good professors should be more concerned with the equations derived from the circuit being correct, rather than the solution.
However, that is one class where some idiot profs out there get it wrong. Sometimes that class can have a really low class average. Then the idiot prof curves the grading scale, since he knows something is wrong with his tests or grading policy, but does not know what. I'm fortunate that my prof was not such an idiot, but I others are.
I suspect that in general for most engineering classes, a smart prof will weigh the theory component (generally, ending up with the right set of equations) far more heavily. I also know that the standard EE curriculum is better than the Chem. E. situation you describe, as while a fair amount of time is spent messing with equations that in the real world a would be solved by a computer, a fair amount of time is also spent teaching important concepts.
It couldn't have been because broadcast power was a crackpot idea even when it came from the mind of a Tesla.
How much power would have had to be pumped into these towers to supply a relatively compact suburban population of five or six thousand households?
Wireless power transmission via ionosphere wave guiding and earth return could work. There is nothing unsound about that part. It is quite possible he was more successful in his limited demonstrations than people give him credit for. The problem is that obviously no more power could be exacted from the system than is supplied into it, so it is no free lunch. Further, there would be transmission losses, due to a large variety of reasons (anything that happens to absorb the frequency used for example, as well as the small amount of waves escaping the planet. And then consider the fact that is would mean sending extremely high amplitude radio waves around the world. There is evidence from his existing research that this can have undesired side effects including atmospheric side effects. We have no idea what if any impact such high amplitude waves would have on the human body. Also consider the impact that microwaves have on unshielded electronics (they tend to fry), it is not implausible that this could have a similar effect. So it is unrealistic, unworkable, and probably undesirable due to side effects.Honestly though, it sounds to me like CPLD's or FPGAs may be the proper solution. They are real-time by definition, running what amounts to a large number of processes in true parallel. An FPGA with a built in RISC microprocessor honestly sounds like it would be an easier and cheaper system to develop on than many RTOS's. Obviously one implements the real-time components in the FPGA, but runs the parts that are easier to code for a traditional processor on the embedded processor. That honestly sounds like a saner solution. IT also usually has minimal current draw, and generally needs only one DC voltage. My question is why is this approach so rare? It seems like far fewer people use this approach than its benefits seem to imply. Am I missing some drawback?