First of all, the taxes aren't just to pay for the music players, they are for a number of measures.
gg:define:pork barrel
Secondly, the story doesn't specifiy it'll be ipods, just a digital audio player. Given the more reasonably-priced audio players around, they'd be idiots to pick Apple's trendy but pricey players.
Apple = Education
I haven't yet attended or worked in a school that hasn't been cut a deal by Apple so Apple could get their products in the system.
I think digital audio players could be very useful in an educational context, but current copyright law will probably render them useless. You need to be able to put useful content on these devices. This could end up being very expensive.
And I think the minority will use them for the educators' intended purpose. Call my cynical. Everyone else will get a free toy.
As a former resident of Michigan, I left because I saw this place being flushed down the toilet. At the time I was involved in flight training and very few places were left operating when I left. Pay was, and still is dreadful. I couldn't afford perks like $2.50 a gallon gasoline on an annual income of $11,000. I had to live over 40 miles away from work just to find affordable housing in a safe neighborhood. And I drove a reasonably fuel-efficient car at 40+ MPG. I had to sell my car and find a new job somewhere else. I came a few states south and found that business was exploding. I only go back to see family now.
Regarding one of the earlier posts, the gasoline tax was 33.33 cents per gallon when I left, it sounds like that will be increased to over $0.40 / gallon over the next few years.
It's already well established that terrorists are willing to die for their cause. The rest of us infidels, we're not into the dying thing so much.
This system may prevent another 9/11-style attack, but that's about it. It's not likely to save any lives. The aircraft can still be extracted from the sky conventionally from within the cabin by a sufficiently motivated and prepared threat.
What I see here is that this system allows the terrorists to reduce the total number of operatives on the aircraft. This reduces their exposure and they can concentrate on higher value targets, such as the remote command/control systems. Or even devising their own system of control.
Auto(land/brakes/throttle) is/are fantastic systems, but they are not found in all aircraft. I expect there will be an amusing article about this in an upcoming Crypto-Gram.
Perhaps the pitch of the props had been reversed on the plane -- completely possible for most prop planes -- because it was already trying to slow down and not crash.
The scene in the movie was completely absurd.
Since the aircraft was a Cessna 172, I'm not sure what you mean by "..pitch of the props had been reversed.."
For this aircraft, you could physically remove the propeller, rotate it about its longitudinal axis by 180 degrees and remount it (I've seen this done for preflight inspection tests). However, changing the pitch in midflight would not be possible without a constant speed propeller system (which is likely not mounted on that particular aircraft--not a trivial thing to do). Besides, I am not aware of any systems for piston aircraft that allow you to bring a propeller into the reverse range.
Turbine aircraft on the other hand are a different story. But here again however, putting the props into reverse in flight will only DRAMATICALLY increase a descent rate. The best way to reduce a descent rate is to use full power (assuming the engine is working properly), or feather the propeller (for those that can), or bring the propeller to the highest pitch (most coarse) setting available.
Yeah, that first flying mission in GTA:SA was much, much harder than it needed to be. It took me several days just to get through it--I almost gave up. I fly for a living. I thought the computer couldn't be _that_ hard.
Then again, flying that stupid dodo in GTA3 was/is like flying at minimum controllable airspeed in the real thing. Just ridiculous.
Why replace what works? In fact, why do employers always want to replace me with someone younger and cheaper and not necessarily more gifted?
Check out the aviation industry. There's always someone willing to come along and do my job for drastically less money. The bad employers only care about the bottom line, not quality, safety, etc. The good employers that actually give a $#!& have ridiculously low attrition rates.
I worked for a company that used (actually, they still use it) COBOL. Their MO was to scour the state universities for bright kids, bring them back and teach them COBOL. (As a sidenote, we also used OS/2 extensively in the development area.) Well, anyway, these kids were typically coming out of college (about 1996/7) making 45K per year, and by the third year, they had moved on from being burned out.
Huh, I'd say it is the other way around. Apple is delivering UNIX to the masses, not Linux.
Sorry, my original comment was based on personal experience from my employer. We are solidly Apple-based. And when we switched to OS X on some computers, I was thrilled--finally, something I can understand. However, the boss didn't care what was under the hood, as long as it was (is) Apple software. He's not interested in change, just compatibility. It was a bad reference, my apologies.
Since I started messing around with Linux in 1997, the quality and ease of installation has improved exponentially. There is no comparison between installing Red Hat 5 point (whatever it was) and the Ubuntu ISO I could download today.
I know what you are saying about the drivers, applications, configuration, etc. I think the problem here is vendor support and lack of standardization (both of which are improving, slowly at times, but they are improving).
That sort of plan is a 10 year plan at the very least, and requires educating people at school about basic computer security, and the dangers of being a computer idiot. No amount of tweaking will make a good secure OS an easy one.
This is where I really disagree. Educating users about computers is an idealistic panacea. Lay persons are not going to magically be as savvy as they will need to be for the available technology in 10 years, 15, 20, etc. As the years go on, technology will always be several steps ahead of the mainstream market.
It's an unfortunate tradeoff. Do we make the product bulletproof? Or do we make is usable? In order for it to have mass appeal, it has to have the human interface well designed to work the way the vast majority of humans think it should. Not the way a vast majority of technologically savvy programmers think it should.
Not a great analogy, but look at the state of modern music. Full of talentless hacks. But these people are millionaires because they have mass appeal and outstanding marketing. So, it's not so much about the product and how technically superior it is. It's really about the product's marketability. I think Linux just isn't mass marketable (on the same scale as OS X and Win*) because it can't break out of that idea that it's a niche product.
A little good PR to get lay persons interested in Linux could go a long way. Get people talking about in a positive way, get them interested. In my world, Linux has been around about 10 years (I know it was 1991, but I said my world). I talk to people about Linux now and more people are aware of it, but they are still afraid of it. And for those that are entrenched in their current OS, they are terrified to change. Particularly those Apple guys:-)
Take a pc apart, put it in a box, see if they can get it together again.
This is exactly what they would do at the university's computer repair shop where I used to work. An applicant was given a box of parts and told to make a computer. Clones were easy, Macs were a huge pain in the a$$--I hated those cases!
The only reason I'm keeping Cingular (in the short term) is because of the Rollover minutes and pretty much everyone I call is on Cingular. Hence, no charge to call those people.
I can relate to the problems on I-65. I drive from southern Indiana into Louisville, KY and just north of the Kennedy bridge the signal drops probably 95% of the time. When I get on I-64 and head East, the signal drops 100% of the time after passing through the tunnel. Strange that it doesn't drop in the tunnel, it fails about a mile or so past the tunnel. I know Verizon and Sprint don't have that problem around here. I had Nextel previously, and aside from the extreme expense (and inability to get my bill correct just once in two years) in owning a Nextel phone, I had few service problems.
I couldn't help but laugh when Cingular started the "fewest dropped calls" bovine excrement, because I've never had more dropped calls will all my previous carriers combined. Cingular is by far the worst when it comes to dropped calls.
The answer will probably consist of the plan that makes him the most money.
Oddly enough, all of my doctors share my passionate repulsion of insurance providers. I was just at the doctor's office the other day whining about how my coverage has gone down and my pre-tax costs have more than tripled in the last ten years (man, I wish my pay would keep up with that rate!). The doc admitted that if insurance weren't involved in the process, he could probably get rid of more than half his staff--as they are devoted the paperwork involved in claims. There is no singular specific problem to insurance. Personally, I think the insurance industry is worse than the mafia.
On an analogous note, when I worked in a repair department (aviation industry) that performed a lot of warranty work, we would actually lose money on those claims. It was all that d@mn paperwork. I estimate that we would spend at least $2 for each $1 we made when it came to warranty work.
Also, many doctors are willing to work with you if you don't have insurance (not that I'm recommending dropping insurance altogether). When I didn't have insurance, my family doctor would charge about $40 for office visits. Now that I have insurance, the statements show my insurance is paying about $120 for the same visits. It's insane!
The doctor wants to make money just like you and I do. But, the less he/she has to spend to make it, the happier he/she will be. Talk to your doctor about insurance, I seriously doubt they're going to recommend the plan the most expensive plan.
What would it be worth to find out that the Challenger mission was going to end badly (that was one of his examples)?
It would be useless information if we could not act on it.
No offense to the poster, but Cramer's example seems to scream crackpot to me. If we could send a message back in time to let us know the mission went bad, then we probably fixed it. So, if we fixed it in the past, how did we know in the future that things went bad and that it needed fixing? My thinking is obviously too linear.
There are numerous guides online that describe how to do this and the low cost of wireless networking equipment means that most HDB or condominium blocks have unprotected networks users can log on to.
A particularly interesting guide that, if accurate, makes me wonder why people still bother with wireless security at all. Note that it is in excess of 3 years old--the info. may not apply today.
Said Mr Cheo: 'People assume, wrongly, that since it is there, it is okay to use it.'
So, when I go to an airport to sit for 8 hours--even though there is no sign noting "FREE WIRELESS"--I should probably beg the proprietor for written consent? Fortunately, I don't go to Singapore, I could be in a lot of trouble.:)
I do hope that you have at least worked with Windows since 97 or use it from time to time. Windows from 1997 Win95/Win98 is quite different from the NT based model of XP and Vista.
Obviously, I'm not the OP. However, this is what convinced me to switch sometime around 1998:
dd if=/dev/somedevice of=somefile.iso
I haven't seen anything work quite so eloquently in Windows since 95/98 et al. I am posting from an XP box, version 5.1.2600 (2600? is that some sort of inside joke?) It tells me 'dd' is not recognized...
Windows is OK for a few things. I only really use it anymore for my logbook and recipe catalog, oh yeah, and Excel.
I own several ANC/ENC headsets for use in aircraft. They are abso-friggin-lutely fantastic! The first time I tried one on I was completely sold on it. I was sitting next to a humming Coke machine, flipped the ANC switch, and... silence! My ears have thanked me ever since.
My best headset has a Noise Reduction Rating (passive) of 23 dB, and an active NRR of 20 dB, totalling about 43 dB of noise reduction. To say that you are still being pounded with 90dB of energy sounds implausable given that waves 180 degress out of phase with each other would completely destroy each other--drop two pebbles in the water and watch where the waves interfere with each other, the water will be still. Also, here's a bit of a sales pitch about ANR/ENC technology.
And just in case anyone is wondering, the Federal Government can (and does) codify by regulation that some people "must...be of good moral character". Pedophilia is really an issue of morality. So, while pedophilia is not explicitly prohibited by law, it is explicitly not protected from discrimination.
Anyway, that's just my take on the CFRs. I am not a liar^H^H^Hawyer.
I sit between two PT6A-60A turboshaft engines. The gas generator (N1 turbine) has a maximum RPM of 39,000 RPM. Doing the math, these micro-turbine-thingies are only about 30.7 times faster. For the relatively mass of the smaller turbines, 1.2 million RPMs seems a bit trivial. I'm curious to know what kind of heat will be generated by the small turbines, and could the heat/exhaust air be harnessed for anyhing? (say, to drive an air cycle machine to cool a CPU?)
Re:Unfounded Criticism
on
iPods at War
·
· Score: 1
You left out 'consuming enormous amounts of alcohol'.
I tried something like this on a small home network many years ago when VMWare was relatively new. While it was functional, I couldn't tolerate the poor performance. "Near native" it wasn't.
Every so often I get the urge to try it again, but I'm not impressed. The VMs are all reasonably good, but they suck up too much CPU for me. I do like my spreadsheets and flight simulators:-)
Slashdot Mirror
A $100k job in New York City is the same as a $25k job in Kansas- that's how different the prices really are.
Based on incredibly rough guesstimation using HomeFair's Salary Calculator, that $100K job would be about $81,708 in Kansas. That's Wichita.
For $81K, I'd move to Wichita. You can buy a lot of BBQ with that.
First of all, the taxes aren't just to pay for the music players, they are for a number of measures.
gg:define:pork barrel
Secondly, the story doesn't specifiy it'll be ipods, just a digital audio player. Given the more reasonably-priced audio players around, they'd be idiots to pick Apple's trendy but pricey players.
Apple = Education
I haven't yet attended or worked in a school that hasn't been cut a deal by Apple so Apple could get their products in the system.
I think digital audio players could be very useful in an educational context, but current copyright law will probably render them useless. You need to be able to put useful content on these devices. This could end up being very expensive.
And I think the minority will use them for the educators' intended purpose. Call my cynical. Everyone else will get a free toy.
As a former resident of Michigan, I left because I saw this place being flushed down the toilet. At the time I was involved in flight training and very few places were left operating when I left. Pay was, and still is dreadful. I couldn't afford perks like $2.50 a gallon gasoline on an annual income of $11,000. I had to live over 40 miles away from work just to find affordable housing in a safe neighborhood. And I drove a reasonably fuel-efficient car at 40+ MPG. I had to sell my car and find a new job somewhere else. I came a few states south and found that business was exploding. I only go back to see family now.
Regarding one of the earlier posts, the gasoline tax was 33.33 cents per gallon when I left, it sounds like that will be increased to over $0.40 / gallon over the next few years.
It's already well established that terrorists are willing to die for their cause. The rest of us infidels, we're not into the dying thing so much.
This system may prevent another 9/11-style attack, but that's about it. It's not likely to save any lives. The aircraft can still be extracted from the sky conventionally from within the cabin by a sufficiently motivated and prepared threat.
What I see here is that this system allows the terrorists to reduce the total number of operatives on the aircraft. This reduces their exposure and they can concentrate on higher value targets, such as the remote command/control systems. Or even devising their own system of control.
Auto(land/brakes/throttle) is/are fantastic systems, but they are not found in all aircraft. I expect there will be an amusing article about this in an upcoming Crypto-Gram.
Perhaps the pitch of the props had been reversed on the plane -- completely possible for most prop planes -- because it was already trying to slow down and not crash.
The scene in the movie was completely absurd.
Since the aircraft was a Cessna 172, I'm not sure what you mean by "..pitch of the props had been reversed.."
For this aircraft, you could physically remove the propeller, rotate it about its longitudinal axis by 180 degrees and remount it (I've seen this done for preflight inspection tests). However, changing the pitch in midflight would not be possible without a constant speed propeller system (which is likely not mounted on that particular aircraft--not a trivial thing to do). Besides, I am not aware of any systems for piston aircraft that allow you to bring a propeller into the reverse range.
Turbine aircraft on the other hand are a different story. But here again however, putting the props into reverse in flight will only DRAMATICALLY increase a descent rate. The best way to reduce a descent rate is to use full power (assuming the engine is working properly), or feather the propeller (for those that can), or bring the propeller to the highest pitch (most coarse) setting available.
Dude, hello - this is Slashdot? People "knowledgeably" comment on science here all the time without benefit of actually understanding the subject.
Should the site be renamed?
Wikidot?
Slashpedia?
'[we] don't make that kind of information available for free.'
These laws are definitely crazy. It makes it hard for me to earn a living when there are no donors.
I fly human organs for transplant.
Yeah, that first flying mission in GTA:SA was much, much harder than it needed to be. It took me several days just to get through it--I almost gave up. I fly for a living. I thought the computer couldn't be _that_ hard.
Then again, flying that stupid dodo in GTA3 was/is like flying at minimum controllable airspeed in the real thing. Just ridiculous.
Why replace what works? In fact, why do employers always want to replace me with someone younger and cheaper and not necessarily more gifted?
Check out the aviation industry. There's always someone willing to come along and do my job for drastically less money. The bad employers only care about the bottom line, not quality, safety, etc. The good employers that actually give a $#!& have ridiculously low attrition rates.
I worked for a company that used (actually, they still use it) COBOL. Their MO was to scour the state universities for bright kids, bring them back and teach them COBOL. (As a sidenote, we also used OS/2 extensively in the development area.) Well, anyway, these kids were typically coming out of college (about 1996/7) making 45K per year, and by the third year, they had moved on from being burned out.
Huh, I'd say it is the other way around. Apple is delivering UNIX to the masses, not Linux.
Sorry, my original comment was based on personal experience from my employer. We are solidly Apple-based. And when we switched to OS X on some computers, I was thrilled--finally, something I can understand. However, the boss didn't care what was under the hood, as long as it was (is) Apple software. He's not interested in change, just compatibility. It was a bad reference, my apologies.
Since I started messing around with Linux in 1997, the quality and ease of installation has improved exponentially. There is no comparison between installing Red Hat 5 point (whatever it was) and the Ubuntu ISO I could download today.
:-)
I know what you are saying about the drivers, applications, configuration, etc. I think the problem here is vendor support and lack of standardization (both of which are improving, slowly at times, but they are improving).
That sort of plan is a 10 year plan at the very least, and requires educating people at school about basic computer security, and the dangers of being a computer idiot. No amount of tweaking will make a good secure OS an easy one.
This is where I really disagree. Educating users about computers is an idealistic panacea. Lay persons are not going to magically be as savvy as they will need to be for the available technology in 10 years, 15, 20, etc. As the years go on, technology will always be several steps ahead of the mainstream market.
It's an unfortunate tradeoff. Do we make the product bulletproof? Or do we make is usable? In order for it to have mass appeal, it has to have the human interface well designed to work the way the vast majority of humans think it should. Not the way a vast majority of technologically savvy programmers think it should.
Not a great analogy, but look at the state of modern music. Full of talentless hacks. But these people are millionaires because they have mass appeal and outstanding marketing. So, it's not so much about the product and how technically superior it is. It's really about the product's marketability. I think Linux just isn't mass marketable (on the same scale as OS X and Win*) because it can't break out of that idea that it's a niche product.
A little good PR to get lay persons interested in Linux could go a long way. Get people talking about in a positive way, get them interested. In my world, Linux has been around about 10 years (I know it was 1991, but I said my world). I talk to people about Linux now and more people are aware of it, but they are still afraid of it. And for those that are entrenched in their current OS, they are terrified to change. Particularly those Apple guys
It is hard to see why anyone would want to access the information on the chip.
If no one would want to access that information, then why is it on the chip? Why even bother with the chip? Why even bother with the information?
Take a pc apart, put it in a box, see if they can get it together again.
This is exactly what they would do at the university's computer repair shop where I used to work. An applicant was given a box of parts and told to make a computer. Clones were easy, Macs were a huge pain in the a$$--I hated those cases!
The only reason I'm keeping Cingular (in the short term) is because of the Rollover minutes and pretty much everyone I call is on Cingular. Hence, no charge to call those people.
I can relate to the problems on I-65. I drive from southern Indiana into Louisville, KY and just north of the Kennedy bridge the signal drops probably 95% of the time. When I get on I-64 and head East, the signal drops 100% of the time after passing through the tunnel. Strange that it doesn't drop in the tunnel, it fails about a mile or so past the tunnel. I know Verizon and Sprint don't have that problem around here. I had Nextel previously, and aside from the extreme expense (and inability to get my bill correct just once in two years) in owning a Nextel phone, I had few service problems.
I couldn't help but laugh when Cingular started the "fewest dropped calls" bovine excrement, because I've never had more dropped calls will all my previous carriers combined. Cingular is by far the worst when it comes to dropped calls.
The answer will probably consist of the plan that makes him the most money.
Oddly enough, all of my doctors share my passionate repulsion of insurance providers. I was just at the doctor's office the other day whining about how my coverage has gone down and my pre-tax costs have more than tripled in the last ten years (man, I wish my pay would keep up with that rate!). The doc admitted that if insurance weren't involved in the process, he could probably get rid of more than half his staff--as they are devoted the paperwork involved in claims. There is no singular specific problem to insurance. Personally, I think the insurance industry is worse than the mafia.
On an analogous note, when I worked in a repair department (aviation industry) that performed a lot of warranty work, we would actually lose money on those claims. It was all that d@mn paperwork. I estimate that we would spend at least $2 for each $1 we made when it came to warranty work.
Also, many doctors are willing to work with you if you don't have insurance (not that I'm recommending dropping insurance altogether). When I didn't have insurance, my family doctor would charge about $40 for office visits. Now that I have insurance, the statements show my insurance is paying about $120 for the same visits. It's insane!
The doctor wants to make money just like you and I do. But, the less he/she has to spend to make it, the happier he/she will be. Talk to your doctor about insurance, I seriously doubt they're going to recommend the plan the most expensive plan.
It would be useless information if we could not act on it.
No offense to the poster, but Cramer's example seems to scream crackpot to me. If we could send a message back in time to let us know the mission went bad, then we probably fixed it. So, if we fixed it in the past, how did we know in the future that things went bad and that it needed fixing? My thinking is obviously too linear.
There are numerous guides online that describe how to do this and the low cost of wireless networking equipment means that most HDB or condominium blocks have unprotected networks users can log on to.
:)
A particularly interesting guide that, if accurate, makes me wonder why people still bother with wireless security at all. Note that it is in excess of 3 years old--the info. may not apply today.
Said Mr Cheo: 'People assume, wrongly, that since it is there, it is okay to use it.'
So, when I go to an airport to sit for 8 hours--even though there is no sign noting "FREE WIRELESS"--I should probably beg the proprietor for written consent? Fortunately, I don't go to Singapore, I could be in a lot of trouble.
I do hope that you have at least worked with Windows since 97 or use it from time to time. Windows from 1997 Win95/Win98 is quite different from the NT based model of XP and Vista.
Obviously, I'm not the OP. However, this is what convinced me to switch sometime around 1998:
dd if=/dev/somedevice of=somefile.iso
I haven't seen anything work quite so eloquently in Windows since 95/98 et al. I am posting from an XP box, version 5.1.2600 (2600? is that some sort of inside joke?) It tells me 'dd' is not recognized...
Windows is OK for a few things. I only really use it anymore for my logbook and recipe catalog, oh yeah, and Excel.
I own several ANC/ENC headsets for use in aircraft. They are abso-friggin-lutely fantastic! The first time I tried one on I was completely sold on it. I was sitting next to a humming Coke machine, flipped the ANC switch, and... silence! My ears have thanked me ever since.
My best headset has a Noise Reduction Rating (passive) of 23 dB, and an active NRR of 20 dB, totalling about 43 dB of noise reduction. To say that you are still being pounded with 90dB of energy sounds implausable given that waves 180 degress out of phase with each other would completely destroy each other--drop two pebbles in the water and watch where the waves interfere with each other, the water will be still. Also, here's a bit of a sales pitch about ANR/ENC technology.
And just in case anyone is wondering, the Federal Government can (and does) codify by regulation that some people "must...be of good moral character". Pedophilia is really an issue of morality. So, while pedophilia is not explicitly prohibited by law, it is explicitly not protected from discrimination.
Anyway, that's just my take on the CFRs. I am not a liar^H^H^Hawyer.
Pedophilia may not be a crime. However, as a potential employer, it would not violate the law to discriminate against a pedophile.
I sit between two PT6A-60A turboshaft engines. The gas generator (N1 turbine) has a maximum RPM of 39,000 RPM. Doing the math, these micro-turbine-thingies are only about 30.7 times faster. For the relatively mass of the smaller turbines, 1.2 million RPMs seems a bit trivial. I'm curious to know what kind of heat will be generated by the small turbines, and could the heat/exhaust air be harnessed for anyhing? (say, to drive an air cycle machine to cool a CPU?)
You left out 'consuming enormous amounts of alcohol'.
I tried something like this on a small home network many years ago when VMWare was relatively new. While it was functional, I couldn't tolerate the poor performance. "Near native" it wasn't.
:-)
Every so often I get the urge to try it again, but I'm not impressed. The VMs are all reasonably good, but they suck up too much CPU for me. I do like my spreadsheets and flight simulators
Umm, didn't C= 64's BASIC come from Microsoft? Don't know about the others.