I'm not sure whether you're referring to cars or car transitions. Because I'm pedantic and this is a pet peeve, I'll explain.

Saving is what happens when one takes an action to reduce consumption or increase rate of accumulation. For example, if I spend two dollars a week on coffee, and then cut back to one dollar, I save one dollar per week.

It is impossible to "save" by consuming, only by *changing consumption*. How much money did I save by renting a movie on iTunes? None -- I *spent* $2. How much did I save by renting instead of going to the theater? Now we're getting somewhere -- I saved, say, $9. A new urinal at work has a sticker on it, advertising that it saves 88% more water than other urinals. Wrong! It bothers me every time I see it. Other urinals don't save water; they just use it. This urinal uses less water than they do, so it does save water relative to them. It just doesn't save 88% more than they do because they don't save any at all. Likewise cars don't save fuel; they just use more or less than other cars. The savings is all in the transition to a different car.

You just did!

Does anyone remember playing the game "The PITS" on CompuServe? Or, even better, know if thesource survived?

http://games.wwco.com/pits/

It depends what programming languages area interests you. Carnegie Mellon and Cornell are good candidates. But be careful -- faculty at CMU, for example, are heavily into functional programming but find object-oriented programming completely irrelevant. Choose wisely...

You'll end up in a job you don't like, and have a miserable time in grad school, too. Think about the classes you've taken so far. Which were the most interesting/fun? Spend your time in grad school focusing on those areas. If there aren't any that you think are worth another year of your life, maybe it'd be better to defer grad school for a year or two until you figure it out.

Computer science is not about programming. If your CS education taught you mostly programming, then it's a failure. Programming languages change all the time, but the underlying concepts do not. You should know how to design algorithms and prove them correct; create robust, scalable systems; know algorithmic approaches to many common problems; design and implement programming languages; etc. If you want a software engineering job, you should be able to learn whatever language you need there.

Dan,

I agree with your basic conclusion: the heat one feels when using a cell phone or handheld transceiver is due to the fact that much of the energy being consumed isn't being converted into RF. It's hard to make a transmitter that converts more than 30-40% of the energy consumed into RF, and efficiencies as poor as 10% or so aren't unusual.

But I did want to make a gentle technical correction. Your message suggests that there's very little absorption in the 2M (144-148 MHz) band used by your HT; this is actually incorrect.

Heating from RF is can be quantified by the specific absorption rate (SAR) of the body being heated when exposed to RF. As the name suggests, it's the amount of RF that gets absorbed by tissue in the body (which results in heating). It's usually measured in watts per kilogram.

It actually takes LESS power at VHF frequencies (like 2 meters) to reach a given SAR than it does at UHF, microwave, or HF. It's a result of resonance effects as the wavelength approaches the size of the human body.

Take a look at the FCC's OET Bulletin 65, which specifies the power levels at which you have to undertake an RF safety review of your amateur station. These power levels are derived from the amount of energy at a given frequency required to achieve a specific SAR. Note that for VHF, just 50 watts is enough to trigger the requirement. At HF frequencies, the levels are often much higher (500 watts for the 40M band, for example). In the 13cm band (2.4 GHz), you need to be operating at 250 watts or above before the FCC feels you need to do a routine evaluation for RF safety.

Greg Lapin, N9GL, has written about this fairly extensively on the ARRL Web site if you (or anyone else) are interested in learning more.

Once again, I'm not challenging your conclusion that most of the heat from holding a phone or radio transmitter is simply waste heat. And I'm certainly not asserting that there's any danger in using a cell phone or HT. But I thought you might be interested to know that the body actually is heated MORE by a given power level in the VHF range than it is by the frequencies used by cell phones.

Phil

when viewing Windows Vista? Seems like that might have similar effects.

Let's remember that Lisa Nowak is a human being, even though she acted abnormally. I am not defending her wrong actions, but I would just like to say: people, don't be too harsh on her. She has family, friends, and a future (however it may be) just like the rest of us.

Imagine one of your friends or family member did something like she did. You can't really imagine it, right? That's what her friends and family now face, because she has done something so incredibly unbelievable.

It's a great sadness and tragedy to her family and friends, NASA, the world space program, and most of all, Lisa Nowak herself.

Let's hope she and NASA will learn from this lesson and wish that she will still have some hope for her future.