Or you may be overestimating how much your students will retain and recall in 2-3 years. :)

BTW: "they have to used mods to decrypt"? What is "mods" in this context? Perl modules? Modulus maths? Bored London teenagers dropping amphetamines and racing scooters from cafe to cafe?

Title asks "Ask Slashdot: What Portion of Developers Are Bad At What They Do?"

Title actually means "Ask Slashdot: What Portion of Developers Are Bad At What I Do?"

If a functional understanding of a fairly specialized technological area is what you have in mind, don't assume it's widespread.

That's like getting bent out of shape if the local mechanic (fully trained and certified, even) doesn't know the detailed intricacies of ECM programming.

If you want a broadly expert Renaissance Engineer, I hope you're prepared to pay more than the usual one-trick-monkey pay. You're not talking about an engineer, there. Something more like Chief Engineer or Chief Scientist.

Considerably greater OTH range? Plus completely killer direct-fire kinetic energies, which is actually applicable to another kind of target: anti-air.

And no gunpower or other chemical propellants, which means your warship's warload is all projectile, no propellant (higher fraction of carried mass on-target).

But other than those, yeah, no advantage whatsoever.

Replying to myself because I couldn't be troubled to read my google search returns before hitting "Submit" on my last comment.

The Distribution Center is toast.

I still have fond memories of the Radio-Shack-that-was, and that place is a part of them. "4 cubic feet of random parts for $25? I'll take 4!"

Brand new TEAC FD-55 360k floppy disk drives (originally intended for Tandy 1000 family systems)? Worked great with my TRS-80 and my old CP/M system, and a steal at $20 each.

Radio Shack used to have a huge distribution center and "outlet store" in the Hagerstown, MD area where I was living about 20 years ago. I'd pick up all kinds of out-of-date stuff they must have gathered from back store rooms of Radio Shacks across the country.

I guess the distribution center is still there. I wonder if they'll turn it into the Mother of All Clearance Centers?

I dunno. They don't like hiring induhviduals. And who can blame them? But that means that most slashdotters wouldn't make the grade.

OTOH, we long-time members of DNRC are shoo-ins.

When I saw this snippet in TFS:

It's possible some of those former GTAT employees might help construct the new command center.

I actually thought "just like a conquering nation making their new prisoners build their own prisons."

News Flash: ESA and NASA fly similar Earth-observation missions ALL THE TIME.

Odds are good, if NASA is doing it, so is ESA. And they collaborate on mission plans, and share data.

Earth observation is one area of very good international cooperation. Since, after all, it's just one Earth.

No such luck. There are some things so vile that not even a grue would eat them. Comcast is #1 on that list.

We can hope they fall into a pit.

"Any not explicitly forbidden by law is permitted" is a keystone of freedom.

Are you saying freedom is bad because bad people abuse it? Why do you hate freedom so much?

Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical.
"once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.

--Tom Lehrer, "Wernher von Braun"

For the purposes of environmental remote sensing, there's no difference between cameras and antennas (radiometers); they just image different parts of the EM spectrum. We've had microwave "cameras" on climate and weather satellites since 1972

It's a snowclone.

"If you install linux, the X win!"

"X" is the bogeyman of the day. Historical examples include Communists, kiddy porn users, Terrorists, Anarchists, Freemasons, Jacobites, and immigrants.

The last I looked, the state of remote-sensing algorithms for limb profiling (i.e., looking through the layer of the Earth's atmosphere over the limb of the planet from your orbital position) is something between bad and "are you kidding?".

I wonder what kind of secret sauce these Young Turks have that NASA and NOAA doesn't?

Or, if you're using a Pentium, 19.95 year ago. Or 20.03. Something like that.

Close enough.