He was being sarcastic - doh!

While at Apple in the early 90's, I suggested this concept to the person in charge of developing what became the General Magic handheld product. My concept was exactly what Bump is today. General Magic mutated it a bit, calling it "Kiss and Tell".

If I had a nickel for every conceived invention....

Here's a perfect example of the "extracting the most wealth" principle you articulate. I quote from the last page of the latest issue of IEEE Spectrum

"In May 2010, iPad and iPhone manufacturer Foxconn famously installed nets at its Chinese plant in Shenzen to stem the rash of overworked factory employees jumping to their deaths. Foxconn has since embarked on plans to replace 500 000 Chinese workers with one million factory robots."

Don't you feel much better knowing that there will be a half-million Chinese workers that no longer have to deal with being overworked?

Well, maybe the factory that manufactures the robots will have to put up nets as well...

While that may be true, have you ever tried looking through the eyes of the rich sumbitch? What you would see is a gathering of "poor souls" orbiting your life like sharks around a bleeding victim -- constantly testing to see if the opportunity to feed is at hand.

Am I rich? Hardly. But I've worked for really rich people and I've seen just how paranoid they become about people approaching them. In their eyes, you are a shark until proven otherwise. They weren't born with this point of view - they developed it from hard experience.

By the way, I would offer that these rich men with whom I've interacted did give me a break. They gave me the chance to perform a service for them, and compensated me appropriately.

And if you think about it, is that so different from poor people hiring other poor people?

I count myself lucky that my skills were noticed and sufficiently valued to make my services worthwhile. That should be the objective of all. Make yourself worthwhile and seize opportunity when it presents itself. I can't believe that my relative good fortune is strictly a matter of luck (or skin color, or even education,since I never got a degree and out-earn many PhDs...).

But of course, YMMV...

Don't be so uick to try that stunt, you ueer! I won't go down uietly!

??? Hey! Who did that?

With the recent change to U.S. patent law (i.e. first to file now, vs. first to invent previously), is there still such a concept as prior art? If "first to file" rules, then doesn't that mean that one could patent an invention which had been around for decades, in common use, but for which nobody ever thought to file a patent?

Thank you. You took the words right out of my mouth. That statement (about 15 KHz sine, square, sawtooth) perfectly summed up how poorly the poster understands digital signal theory.

But it's just the director and his subordinate managers.

I've come to appreciate the pros and cons:

Pros:

I'm not the only group leader with "challenges"
The two days a week that we don't meet are SO MUCH MORE PRODUCTIVE!

Cons:

The other 3 days of the week...

On a more serious note:

The managers talk throughout the day and the individual contributors do the same. Those who have ANY REASON to need to know about others' daily activities are ALREADY collaborating with them on a moment-by-moment basis. Think of it this way: If someone in the team didn't bother to inform you of something that affected you UNTIL the daily meeting, how would you feel? You know my email. You know my phone. You know my face. WTH makes you feel you need to wait until we're STANDING UP to communicate with me?

Bah! I'm too old for this shit....

Score 5: Interesting.

Quoting Blade Runner is a score 5?

The magnitude of the losses would have been such that the FDIC fund would have been sucked dry in a heartbeat. Then it would be up to the U.S. Government to make up the shortfall, piling the new government debt on to the national debt pile. Haven't we been doing enough to "pile on" already?

Also, there's a lot of "interconnected-ness" in the banking industry. If one large bank fails, it will drag another handful with it. They will drag others with them, etc. Only "smallish" banks can fail and have the system absorb the impact without massive "domino effect" collapse. "Too big to fail" is a sobering thought...

Timing tolerances of +/- 100 microseconds?

At 100 miles/hr (160 km/hr) that would be a distance of 0.176 inches (4.44mm).

I think you meant "milliseconds" which is 0.001, not 0.0001. Still, multiply the above by ten and you get:

1.76 inches or 44.4 mm

That's a pretty awesome "photo finish."

And for that matter, what about relativistic effects?

I know this has a scalability problem (i.e. the cost of equipment goes up linearly with the number of contestants) but you could build a self-contained GPS device that tracks a car's position throughout the event. Have it record position information to flash as often as possible (Sparkfun has a GPS receiver that will update position 10 times/sec for US $61). At the end of the event, everyone turns in their GPS device and their position recordings are uploaded into a computer.

Now one may argue that GPS position error could be enough to make the winner ambiguous (i.e. "photo finish"). But position errors due to RF propagation are "systemic", in that they would affect all receivers in the same vicinity pretty much equally. Further, with a large number of position samples and high update rate, post-processing could be done to calculate trajectory of the possible winners as they approach the finish line. It simply isn't possible to accelerate or decelerate so quickly that you can't interpolate position and velocity in the vicinity of the finish line.

For the "systemic position errors", a single reference GPS receiver at a stationary location next to the finish line can be used to determine position "wander" due to RF, ephemeris, selective availability (even though it's off these days) and use this to subtract out this systemic error from everyones' position data.

Would be fun to build :-)

In 1992 I was at an IEEE 802.11 meeting (that's WiFi, if you didn't know it by that name). My company was presenting a "pre-standard" wireless LAN design that we were developing, to be considered as a contribution to the standard.

Someone asked "Why does your design have so much error correction coding? Are you expecting the RF environment to be that bad?"

I replied, "Well, I haven't seen any 'Listen Before Cook' microwave ovens out there!"

This got a few chuckles and we moved along.

Many years later, I was doing some patent searches, and I came upon Patent number 6,346,692, titled "Adaptive Microwave Oven"

I'll be damned! Somebody actually patented the "Listen Before Cook microwave oven!"

So now we have WiFi devices detecting microwave ovens. That seems obvious to me. But I'm still waiting for a commercially available microwave oven that will avoid stomping on my WiFi signal :-)

FWIW, The 802.11 Media Access Control (MAC) protocol effectively avoids microwave ovens most of the time, because the magnetrons in consumer microwave ovens only operate on a "half wave" basis. This means they're off at least half the time. A microwave oven during its "on" time looks indistinguishable from another WiFi transmitter, and so your WiFi device simply waits until the microwave oven turns off before transmitting the next packet. This results in slower throughput, but isn't a show stopper.

The bigger problem is that since the microwave oven doesn't listen before turning on its magnetron, it tends to "stomp on" your WiFi signal occasionally. This, combined with the fact that the majority of IP based communications is TCP (and TCP sees every packet loss as congestion, causing it to slow down for the next few-to-tens of seconds), results in more throughput loss than is strictly related to the number of packets "stomped upon."

Since we pay about 4% or less on all government debt, our debt is much akin to a person making $100,000 per year, having a $250,000 mortgage.

For reference, our 2011 burn rate is about $3.8T with revenues of $2.6T, we have a deficit of $1.4T. GDP is $15.3T (Source: 2011 Budget, GPO)

The problem with your analogy is that our "mortgage" is 100% upside down (no equity and none to be had), interest only, and our creditors (crazy loons that they are) keep giving us substantial home equity loans - on a property with no equity! (well, unless you consider taxes as the equity - I once heard a talking head assert that the US. Govt's credit rating was in no danger whatsoever because it has the power to tax. For my part, this works to a point, beyond which the taxation has a negative consequence, as people can no longer afford anything else but the taxes, demand goes down because people can't afford to buy things with what's left after their taxes are paid, resulting in rising unemployment, resulting in lower tax revenues, resulting in higher debt, ....)

We are basically paying a mortgage on which the interest burden (and principal) goes up steadily. At times it's unavoidable (due to circumstances). But our politicians have a difficult time discerning the difference between unavoidable and convenient. The credit rating agencies are trying to caution us to be more discerning, lest our interest rates kick up (due to lower ratings). We're currently paying about $400 billion a year in interest. I believe that could double in 6 months to a year (and has the potential to be even higher) if ratings go down (and more directly, if confidence in US Treasury debt declines, regardless of ratings).

So, back to your 4% number: I take it that you meant the interest on the debt is 4% of GDP? I prefer to think of it this way: 28.5% of our current deficit is interest on previous deficits.

Hardly skunkworks. PCM chips are in Micron's (Numonyx) catalog. I considered using one in a design last year, but they were too expensive, mainly because I only needed a wee bit of non-volatile storage and these chips only come in 128 Mbit density.

You can buy them from Digikey at $4.57 each. But you have to buy them a tray at a time (576 parts per tray).