Saw a (BBC?) documentary about people living around in the Chernobyl Zone and research done on the food that can be grown there without risk and apparently there are ways to avoid much of contamination if one knows which plants and plant parts to eat and which not. Having luck I suppose plays also a role as there are places there where contrary to what some claim radioactivity killed almost all life. Bottom line is you do not have to die directly of radiation (of the type we talk about here). The atomic man however was exposed and suffered a lot because of that. He died of something that had no direct relationship to the accident, this much is true but I would not like to have to lead his life.

How independent is this 'independent' US government agency?

judging on the '-1' score neither group has sense of humor

any policy can be judged on its costs and benefits. Direct costs and indirect costs of this policy are dire. Damage to US reputation and to Western citizens relationship with their states and their agencies that so creatively together with NSA misinterpreted laws and regulations is huge. There is also this little item of lost business due to NSA machinations.

The question is: was it worth it?

if these were hookers then he would be guilty of paying for sex which is a crime in this great country. these were just callgirls that you know are to show you the city etc

vibrators?

yes - huge grid smooths local shortages but as far as I know we do not have such a thing like Europe/Asia/Africa grid, we may have some in Europe and possibly in some areas of Asia and Africa but calling it continental grids is an overstatement already. What we have in Europe may be _almost continental_ that is quite some zillions of investment and few 'manmonths' of work are needed. Meanwhile in Germany some offshore wind parks cannot be connected to the grid and their owners seem to be on the way to be paid for energy that they could have otherwise produced - the costs of this payment for energy that has not been consumed cover suckers like me. This little example is to illustrate not the impossibility of the task but that instead of talking about a continental grid maybe we should be fixing big local grids.

That is OT but funny how it relates to my QA assignments - I keep on hearing about products being almost ready and how future releases will bring the glory but lowly and not important 9in10 install fails are not worthwhile investigating. eh humans...

you forgot the endless bitching on /. about dumbass half brain of a scientist while at the same time not being able to explain the exact mechanics of the banjo effect.

I am half burnt now but I still remember times at school when this sort of explanations provided me with joy at learning stuff like physics and math instead of listening to explanation of a teacher that has no f. clue what he is talking about and what role his 'knowledge' has in my and my fellow students reality, combined with explanations in another subject ended with 'it is just so'. I am not sure we have to shoot things into orbit just to find out that parking lot without trees is hotter than one with them but I like when there are formulas at hand when one asks for them.

and we slashdotted the bloody attorney site or is it just me not being able to click properly???

germans love to be abused obviously.

So instead of the current mess in nuclear free Ukraine we would have the same mess only with nuclear armed Ukraine. That is indeed appealing idea.

I do not thin that legit ads are a problem but neither you nor I can distinguish legit ads from malicious ones which devise needs where there is none and doing some other stuff nobody wants except their authors or police department that now can detect that you rolled a conical object and now a sweet smelling cloud is being dispersed by air condition - augment this with automatic sentencing or even better preemptive sentencing as after all system will know you wanted to commit a terrible crime even before you do. I think there is huge potential there!

first works, the other other does not.

It is really a pleasure to watch a civic society at its best, exchanging reasonable and well thought trough arguments, going beyond the easy to spell out but not really working 'silver bullet' solutions, taking into account side effects of proposed solutions and weighing their benefits and costs independently of who was the author and doing this all with respect to other members of society. One can be surprised that such law point for any civic society (as NSA and secret courts etc really were) allows to show this great nation from its best side. Good summary and good fruitful discussion that follows are a sign that the republic and democracy are in good shape.

if you are good enough.

This said I think every prospective engineer should consider carefully the reasons to become one. It is advised to do something on top too - like applied business practice or Business Economics as they call it. Seems to be a common practice in Germany these days and I find the idea appealing. Then again I am not sure whether any engineering title will guarantee you a job in the future. I saw today the stats for education in Germany and the number of people finishing off the courses at universities has increased over the years. What has not increased is number of people going secondary paths of education and ending up in industry 'lower' positions. Gosh when I look around in my settlement - there are only few houses where owners are engineers. There is one where there is a civil servant and another one university teacher and 4 households with engineers including mine. The rest of the settlement is owned by technicians doing intelligent work for others sometimes even supervising the floor in small industrial companies. Quite frankly I find them more worthy than those engineers with a title that I have to work with but that is another story.

So if one takes property ownership as a proxy for well done career choices then being an engineer does not mean much. But hell it makes fun if you can assemble things and see them work. There is certain great positivist joy in doing that! The question is: do you need to become an engineer to do these things today? I wonder if that is really true.

Original question was about digital and analogue being put as opposites - tell me then whether doing this stuff is analogue or digital? Surely lots of silicon is being used and a little processed into an actual product. As surely as a lots of digital processing used to control completly automated factory producing those things.

The statistics I meantioned briefly before makes me also think about history. There were times where engineer was a sign of high intelligence and skill. The I got a degree..... And then all these people I work got degrees too..... Now it seems to me the value the engineers before had in society is now attributed to scientists but not even them are at the level an engineer like this was before. This guy had an impact on societies he lived in. Do YOU think that your input is anywhere around this level? Why do we talk about glory then?