To be fair, the parent is probably some furriner who watched all of the Great John Wayne's movies. He should be praised for this and the ignorance he has acquired should be rewarded. It's the American way.

Your having been to space is no guarantee that you're not crap-on-the-floor looney.

I would have thought that we've learned better than to pay too much attention to former astronauts. They might well be right about the asteroids, but I still think we should go ahead and get a second opinion on this.

If ever there was a moment to say, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it does," this was it.

Reading and comprehending posts isn't your thing is it? You just like to skim and then jump to conclusions to try and support your narrow world view.

I noted that my sister has no trouble, she has a generous grant (a scholarship if you like, but it works a little different) and her expenses are handled. However I have a full understanding of what those expenses are, and that they not paid for all students.

So maybe more reading, less jumping to conclusions.

ecosystem

You use words the way hillbillies use corn cobs.

zmodem was several generations newer.
kermit -> xmodem -> ymodem -> zmodem

I still use uucp, by the way. For communicating with faraway sites where the connection depends on a shaky cell phone connection that may or may not be up, it's a pretty good way of moving e-mail and logs.

Are you certain that you know what's happening in Ukraine and why?

n this case it failed when there was a celebration in progress. The ground floor level was crammed with dancing people and the crowd had overflowed onto the skywalks. Pogo dancing was current at the time, and apparently the failure occurred when people on the bridges, synchronized by the live music, were jumping up and down in unison. (It's the inverse of the way soldiers are required NOT to march in step when crossing a bridge.)

Thus you can expect such structures to go when there are a lot of people around to get hurt.

(Interestingly, a crowd of people is MUCH more of a load, even without synchronized jumping, than vehicular traffic. San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge was reported to have had its greatest load ever during its anneversary, a few years back. The bridge was closed to vehicular traffic and the public invited to hike over it. Normally the bridge span has a substantial arc. This stretched the springy cables and broght the span down until it was flat.

During the planning the load on the bridge had been anticipated and computed to be safe. But there were plenty of boats standing by to try to save people if the deck DID collapse, and the people had been warned of the possibility and asked not to dance or walk in step.

I recall the biggest food challenge for me at the university was that food was so expensive at the university and around it. I had cheap food at home but didn't often have time to pack a lunch. And with the 30 minute shuttlebus to get to main campus from the cheap parking lot, anything I ate would have to be walking distance or carried with me the entire day. I pined for NYC bodegas where you can get a roll for $0.50 or something cheap just to tide you over until you get home. I went hungry many long days, but thanks to both subsidized and unsubsidized loans and a little bit of income, I wasn't starving.

You sure? The fourth largest army (North Korea, active personnel) wouldn't last more than two days against the fifth largest? Not to mention that NK's is by far the largest in the world in terms of reservists.

Re-learn the lesson that was the "Russian Steamroller" in WW2. Even an extremely large army that is poorly equipped will fare badly in battle. To play that game, you have to be willing to toss your people into the fire like coal and simply outlast the offensives until some other factor kicks in. That didn't go so well in the first half of WW2 for Russia, and the Germans knew how it worked and very nearly completed their push. When you're taking losses above 10:1 it's difficult to physically get that many bullet-stoppers up to the front line fast enough to slow down the offensive, regardless of the size of your army. Logistics were the Germans' downfall - resupply and weather. Russia had to flood the line with bullet-stoppers until they caught a break. And in today's wars, and especially considering the proximity here, that won't be an issue.

Lack of any significant airforce would be another issue, but that really is irrelevent because NK simply hasn't got much in the way of substantial millitary targets to take out.

If Russia were to decide to "step over the border" into NK (like they're doing elsewhere currently...) I seriously doubt it would come to war. It would probably end up like more of a "ok you little snot-nosed kid, you've had your fun but we've grown tired of it. Time for us to straighten out this disaster." Kim would find himself on a plane to Moscow shortly thereafter. But fixing NK would be such an enormous headache / liability, would they really want to take on that burdonsome of a projecct?

Thing is, even with the best of intentions, NK is an incredible mess. Even if some well-meaning power had the ability to just step in and be handed the reigns to fix it, it'd be a tremendous undertaking. There's way too much wrong to try to tackle it all at once, it would have to be handled in stages. I can't imagine the borders opening up anywhere inside five years, regardless of who was at the helm. Right now the majority of people in NK have been brainwashed into believing their leader is a god, the entire world wants to eat their babies, and their military could conquer every army on earth. When most of your populace honestly believes this, you take on the very difficult job of saving someone that doesn't want to be saved. We saw that in Japan at the end of WW2, entire villagaes in the outlying islands committing suicide because of what the millitary told them the US troops would do when they got there. NK is exactly the same that way. We could drive a red cross truck loaded with food into a starving village over there and they'd come out of their huts with pitchforks, kill all the aid workers, and burn the truck, food and all, thinking it was poisoned. It takes quite a long time to fix that.

What I completely fail to understand is how on Earth can a 22-year-old graduate –as you say– with US$150K in loans. That is just insane. And sick.

If one borrows as much as they can and doesn't focus on their studies, that's not insane or sick, likely just a sign of questionable judgement.

For example, in California the estimated annual costs for a student living off campus attending a UC school is $29,200 including tuition, fees, books, supplies, room, board, transportation, and personal expenses (some of these of course will vary depending on which campus the student is attending). About half of this ($14,700) is for educational related expenses while the rest is for ordinary living expenses that one would incur even if not attending school.

For a fulltime, four year course of study, this amounts to about $120,000 - assuming no grants or scholarships. So, graduating with $150K of debt in California suggests the student is attending an excessively expensive school, fails to work part time to at least cover summer expenses, spends excessively, and/or didn't complete in four years.

The UC system is well respected, and some campuses are very well regarded (Berkeley for example). However, the Cal State system also offers "real" degrees and costs even less.

As well, in some cases, a clever student will likely be able to figure out how to fulfill some general ed requirements at their local Community College reducing costs yet further.

Of course, $150K would be nothing for advanced degrees/training such as Med School (but, only a fool would build up such debt if the career wouldn't allow them to pay the debt off from earnings fairly quickly and, from a life long viewpoint, result in net earnings greater than not pursuing an advanced degree unless it is their desire to donate their education/life to a particular interest or education is a hobby for them).

despite the virtual extinction of several crippling and deadly childhood diseases due to immunization,

well, hell yeah, the astronaut who didn't even get a C- in astrophysics should be divining our space program's anti-asteroid strat3gy.

Kermet was just a terminal emulator. Before FTP we used Zmodem.

THIS. Students that have problem learning from lectures most likely are treating the lecture as a movie (as the article alluded to), they expected to be passively entertained (a.k.a. spoon fed), instead of making an effort to learn actively. Then they wonder why they didn't learn anything and complained the lectures are too boring (i.e. not entertaining).

Most engineering graduates aren't PEs - you don't need the credential to work as an engineer. It indicates a certain level of professionalism, so people can choose to hire a PE. Of course in some life-safety situations there might be a regulation saying you can't do X (build a highway bridge) until a PE signs off the design.

It's not like a union where it's illegal to hire people that have identical qualifications. It pretty much just defines the label "Professional Engineer" to mean someone who has passed the test etc. to show they are qualified. If you want to hire an untested engineer, you're free to do so, and most people do exactly that.

* I'm not currently a PE, nor an expert in the field, so I may be mistaken about something in this post and I welcome any corrections.

Ah, in that case, don't worry.

They'll be back the day after tomorrow, when tor has returned results...

There, corrected it for you. 20 years ago, most people in college have had no problem paying attention to lectures. YMMV.

That's your prejudice showing. All the great teachers in college in the past century had no problem doing their great teaching with lectures (among other means).

If you have trouble paying attention to lectures and learning from it, have you considered that, perhaps, you shouldn't be in college to begin with?

N/T

...at least according to the summary, wasn't this a little histrionic?

"Without the tuned mass damper, LeMessurier calculated that a storm powerful enough to take out the building hit New York every 16 years." In other words, for every year Citicorp Center was standing, there was about a 1-in-16 chance that it would collapse."

No, the "lack of a tuned mass damper" was already presupposing that the POWER was out. The power doesn't go out in NYC all that often, and even if it did...Would it have been impossible to have, I dunno, 5 backup diesel generators tested in rotation every day to provide emergency power to the tuned mass damper in the event of a coincidental power outage AND storm?

Except that from 1970 to 2008 (years for which data is available), per capita GDP of the Dominican Republic went from 50% of Cuba's to 87% of Cuba's. The HDI has improved more as well.

And by consequence you must have endured many instances where this 'isolating of the subject by minimal depth of field' was intended to be part of the scene.

Not entirely true. I wrote a search engine of sorts once that in stage one ran DNS queries on dictionary words, and in stage two attempted to fetch / from ports 80 and 443. The results were indexed and searchable.
Of course, the yield was pretty low, but still...

Our rights are violated all the time. The TSA, the Patriot Act, the NSA surveillance, free speech zones, DUI checkpoints, stop-and-frisk, unfettered border searches, constitution-free zones, draconian copyright laws, the drug war, etc., all show that. What's your point, other than to state the obvious fact that the government is full of evil thugs who do not care about freedom? It seems that's the way you want it.

You might be okay with that, but I'm not.

You don't know what it means to be free. Using your logic, people from China or North Korea have just as much free speech as people in the US; sure, if they say the wrong thing, the government might severely punish them, but they're still technically free to speak.

Hint: If free speech didn't mean being free from government thugs punishing you for your speech, the first amendment would be pointless, and the world would be far more unpleasant than it is now. You people are the ones who don't understand what it means to be free.

Now, if by "consequences," you mean normal people forming opinions of you and perhaps criticizing you, then you're right; your speech can have such consequences. However, if you meant government interference, then you're wrong. Free speech is completely different from the mere ability to speak.

One brewery does not make a movement. We have some very old small breweries in Canada too.

Before the 1980's in both Canada and the US most of the beer was produced by the big breweries. There were small breweries here and there but not many. In the 80's there was an explosion of new small breweries on both sides of the border. It looks like it happened pretty much at the same time. I stand corrected.

Tell her to transfer to Austria if money is that big an issue.

This is all a nice story, but the boat had already sailed before Wickard. Wickard was just the place where federal power effectively was freed from all reasonable limits. To find the real source of the issue in this thread, you'd have to back up 4 or 5 years, to the "switch in time that saved nine," i.e., the place where FDR was fed up with the Supremes saying that expansions of federal power were unconstitutional (as they pretty much did for the first 150 years or so of the Constitution's existence). So, FDR threatened to enlarge the court by packing it with his cronies (since the size of the Supreme Court isn't actually mentioned in the Constitution).

Magically, the Supreme Court then started approving of expansions of federal power.

So, in Wickard, it was more like: "The meaning of the Constitution changed a few years ago, because otherwise the Executive Branch was threatening to take over the Judicial Branch, so this thing is now legal... and we discovered that we could reinterpret words in the Constitution so that the enumerated powers clause now has no meaning."

We are not a purely common law system -- there is a Constitution that sets limits on the direction that legal precedent can take. But that system broke in the 1930s (though it had broken down in various places before then too, the late 30s ruling culminating Wickard was the largest shift).

I called the Texas licensing board asking how this is supposed to work and the person who answered pretty much said "yeah, you're screwed, unless you've been working as some other type of engineer".

I'd really like to talk to you about just how you went about getting licensed, and under what conditions you'd sign off on someone else. If you're nearby, maybe I can buy you lunch sometime. I can be reached at deepmagicbeginshere AT gmail.

How do those culpable enough to consummate such a transaction afford it after giving all that money to the Nigerian Prince?

Potatoes and cottage cheese actually make wonderful dinners. And rice and beans go splendid together, if you find some kind of grease to glue them you're golden.

And if you're contrary to expectations still hungry after that Lucullan crapulency, you can always dissolve some stale bread in a cup of water. You can actually kinda bake that if you like, gives it a nice toast-y touch.

FBI and the Sheriff? You have no real insight in how law enforcement works here in the US of A, do you?

There are dozens(!) of different police forces, and they seldom cooperate on anything, but try to not step on each others' toes. A sheriff is county police and would not be involved in any international or interstate crime sting. Speeding tickets, serving divorce notices, arresting the busker in front of the strip mall, signing reports of items stolen, sit in cars at local road work - that's the sheriff's department. Investigative work to catch internet facilitated high crime is not going to involve the sheriff.

Isn't that kinda how the Internet works. If your don't know the exact URL for a site and no one has posted a link to it on another site your do know, you're not going to reach it. It's only thanks to searching the indexing systems people can find stuff any other way.