Comment Timing for swim events (Score 1) 255
When acting as a timing judge for swim team events, we have always been told to watch for the strobe flash from the start signal. It is supposed to be much more consistent.
When acting as a timing judge for swim team events, we have always been told to watch for the strobe flash from the start signal. It is supposed to be much more consistent.
So what are they supposed to do, make a law against using this technology? Yeah, that will work --NOT!
The Baltimore Sun is known to be a left leaning newspaper even in the significantly left-leaning state of Maryland.
The case was later dropped after the plaintiffs failed to meet a 120 day deadline for filing. And by the way AC, all you had to plug in to Google was O'keefe acorn maryland and you'd have seen results.
This varies state by state in the US. Some states are one party consent states, others are two party consent states. For example, Maryland is a Two Party consent state. Often this law is used against those who film others who break the law. Recent examples include James O'Keefe when he did some undercover video of some very unflattering behavior by ACORN. The state of Maryland went after O'Keefe for obtaining video without permission, while they left ACORN alone.
In general, one party recording consent works better.
As for the instructions from Chief Lanier, it's a good start. She is one of the more level headed police chiefs in this country. I hope others follow her example.
People often walk around with some very bad assumptions about how resilient the Internet or a Cloud must be.
You may have a very good internet presence with lots of bandwidth, but it may be all housed in the same building where the same sprinkler system can bring it all down. You may think that ISPs can reroute lots of traffic to other places because it is possible. Yet, there are common failure modes there too.
Cloud computing is often hailed as a very resilient method for infrastructure. Yet, there is a disturbing tendency to focus all the servers in one big glass room of everything. You may get the dynamic pay per clock-cycle performance, but it may all come back to one substation. A single fire in that substation could bring everything down.
This is the problem with SLA deals: You don't know what kind of planning they may use for such infrastructure. Remember, the Internet itself may be resilient, but your cloud and your ISP may not be.
First, Low Earth Orbit speeds are about 17000 MPH. Launching a sub-orbital spacecraft toward a destination is actually just as fat and also orders of magnitude less expensive to build. The technology to do that is much more within reach than a vacuum tube train and it requires far less infrastructure.
Second, who says the tube that has the train car has to be a vacuum? If the train car were shaped like a dart, one could accelerate it with a rocket motor to get it to speed, and then as it breaks through a membrane to get in to the tunnel, it would compress a mixture of natural gas and air where the tunnel meets the edge of the dart. The burn of this fuel would then accelerate the car/dart further in to the tunnel. This is roughly the method that the SHARP gun used to accelerate projectiles to 3 km/sec. I'm not exactly sure how one could keep the acceleration to something that wouldn't turn everyone in to goo, but I am certain that a bit of propellant selection might make this practical.
It does. There is precedent for this memo, as much as I detest it. That precedent goes all the way back to WW II at least. Back then, ham radio operator ceased operations, and often surrendered their equipment for use in the war effort. Aircraft were grounded, some by cutting propellers. Commerce was on a war footing. The president had vast powers to direct the war effort and few questioned his authority.
This is not a new concept. It has been there for generations.
Note: I am not a fan of this president. I am right of center conservative. As much as this stuff turns my stomach, there appears to be a strong precedent for it, though I wonder why he would stir this hornet's nest of an issue...
http://blog.aopa.org/blog/?p=3729
Effectively this is a storm with nearly hurricane force winds but no rotation. I'm a weather Nerd too.
I live in central Maryland. There is more to this than just a Derecho. We get every two to three years. They're not unheard of.
We had a mild winter and a cool spring. The winter did not have any significant snow or ice. So weak tree limbs didn't come down. There weren't many significant thunderstorms in the spring either, so no significant dead wood fell because of that. Here we are in early summer, and we get the first major storm of the season and all that weak and dying wood that hasn't been cleared out of the trees comes down at once. In many cases it takes the whole damned tree down. This wouldn't have been a big deal if it had been spread over a few storms here and there, but instead it happened all at once.
In so many ways, this was a perfect storm...
So this guy was writing, what, approximately nine or ten papers a year on average? Was anyone paying attention? Didn't anyone notice something strange about his "discoveries?"
What does that say about the field of academic medical research?
I'd mod you up if I had points.
Why should they fear for their jobs? Who ever heard of good British Cafeteria food?
Anyone in sales learns early on that they should dress well. They need to look attractive. The concept of a Booth Babe is to look attractive and successful. But the question we should all ask is "To Whom?"
A typical Slashdot nerd wants answers, not pretty looks. Most are indifferent to Booth Babes. In other words, when selling to a technical crowd, Booth Babes don't help much. If anything, they can intimidate an asexual nerd from visiting (I have worked with people like this). Most nerds would be more impressed with large kinetic displays.
I disagree with the notion that Engineers and IT have a culture that encourages Booth Babes. The Booth Babes are selling to Managers, not Engineers. The question we all should ask is why Management of technical fields like this are falling for this kind of stuff.
In fairness to those who practice the law: I've seen first hand what happens to those who stop practicing the technical arts. Those skills atrophy pretty quickly. My own brother has a Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering and really was a true "Rocket Scientist" in the 1980s and early 1990s. He's now a patent attorney. Much of what he knew as an engineer is long forgotten.
Likewise, I have little doubt that those who stop practicing the law quickly lose track of all the handy exceptions, loopholes, and interpretive subtleties of the law.
There is no shame in admitting that one does not understand the subtleties of surveying, and determining flood plains. What is shameful is when someone with only a meager background goes off and tries to write legislation with little input from those who would be bound by such legislation.
Let the Engineers explain the proposal, and let the lawyers enshrine it in to law. We all have to read and understand this stuff, or the law will be of no use to society. Without comprehensible and reasonable legislation, we would then have a very jaundiced view of the very fabric that is supposed to keep our society fair and productive.
An Engineer is obligated to build a reliable, workable design. If the state tells the profession that the Earth is flat, they'll still design around a spherical Earth. They'll find some other sophistry to justify it.
At the end of the day, who is going to sue an engineer for suggesting a slightly more resilient design? I see estimates of 100 year floodplains that I know from visiting the site are utter nonsense. Careful review of flood-plane location is always a good idea during the initial site survey. It is almost never a good idea to simply take someone's word for it.
I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"
