westbywest

While any keyword filtering regime can be exploited, as apparent by the SEO cottage industry enabled by Google Pagerank, et al, I still find the underlying question unresolved of whether such filtering is ultimately useful to would-be employers.

That is, are employers wanting appropriately skilled candidates, or are they wanting individuals who happen to exceptionally savvy to the flavor of 'SEO' used by headhunters? One can't assume these groups will always overlap.

The capital outlay required for pretty much any hardware product is enormous (compared to software-based products). Besides needing to sustain development effort to comply with emissions/safety/etc standards dictated by the regulatory environment, you also need to fund months to years of Q/A testing to ensure your physical widget can be reliably mass-produced. And all this has be done before you have anything to sell for revenue.

Respinning a hardware prototype is generally slow and expensive (i.e. can't just recompile), with degree of slowness/cost increasing as you tread further down your development path.

"To put the technology into practical use, the electric power needs to be increased by 100 times. But the group said that the parts needed for it are relatively cheap and that there is no major problem."

I have to admit some skepticism about this claim. 2-3 orders of magnitude increase in output power delivered may very well expose non-trivial problems. I.e. making the effort of scaling this technology up more than just linear.

A cell phone can indeed be the one and only relatively high-tech possession for a poor family in an impoverish region. Used cell phones and/or low-end handsets subsidized by the carrier help them proliferate.

Vaguely tangential, a UCLA professor developed a microscope attachment for a cell phone camera, to permit remote phlebotomy and other telemedicine in areas lacking facilities otherwise. http://www.engineer.ucla.edu/newsroom/featured-news/archive/...

A good overview of this style of tech innovation is the Smithsonian Institute's "Design for the Other 90%." http://archive.cooperhewitt.org/other90/other90.cooperhewitt...

But the increased restrictions on operating a motor vehicle come from the assumption driving one is a privilege, to be earned upon demonstration of appropriate competence (incl. liability insurance). Likewise, the usual consequences of a abusing a motor vehicle far more disastrous than abusing a bike, prompting a greater required performance to avert such consequences.

Or worse, since the supplies' outputs will not be precisely identical or vary over their tolerance range in in sync with each, one supply could end up injecting current into another and cause damage. Such power supplies are generally designed for a specific load impedance, and connecting the supply outputs in parallel can effect a smaller load impedance than tolerable.

The sheer size of the core memory, e.g. measured in millimeters, will prevent it from having access times in comparable orders of magnitude as silicon-based DRAMs, whose dimensions are measured in micrometers.

They very likely have contract stipulations with suppliers / distributors / fulfillment service preventing Raspberry from committing to product availability at certain datetime, before said suppliers are indeed ready to go.

They did also put out a call for mirrors recently for their OS image download. Possibly part of that effort went to distributing load for the shopping cart app. http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/683

Blame for the inability to afford any viable healthcare coverage can't be pinned exclusively on the individual.

Sorry for typo. "Signal antenna" = single antenna.

There are a couple TVWS (TV White Space) equipment designers now that I know of, from following discussions among the Wireless Internet Service Provider Association (WISPA) trade group in the US: http://www.carlsonwireless.com http://www.ktswireless.com/ http://spectrumbridge.com/

I believe the fastest airspeed I've seen claimed is 16 - 20Mbit/s using these devices. Although, this is using pretty basic 802.11-style signaling, and with a signal antenna. Multiples of this airspeed via dual adjacent channel modes, comparable to HT modes in 802.11n are technical possible, although likely unfeasible due to the licensing situation. Fortunately, the spatial multiplexing done right now with the fancier 802.11n radios is quite possible with TVWS, with the non-negligible drawback of then having to deploy 2 or 4 identical antennas at critical spacing b/w each other. (And these antennas are comparable in size to old UHF TV aerials.)

That said, deploying TVWS in an urban area doesn't make much sense right now. 10 to 20ml of range is quite nice, but the tradeoff is that you will either have to severely limit your subscriber density, or severely reduce the bandwidth allotted to each subscriber.

As per the small handful of photos included in the blog. Recent Sao Paulo photos on Flickr would suggest otherwise. http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=S%C3%A3o+Paulo&s=rec

Scanning ancient documents can be anything but trivial, and frequently more involved than simply placing paper/ parchment/ vellum/ etc on a glass plate. They usually need to be handled very carefully with mesh gloves, not compressed or folded , and likely not exposed to overly bright light to avoid fading the ink. The USA founding documents, which are over 100 years newer by comparison, are encased in inert gas and hidden from bright lights for preservation.

Newton's written notes may have required even greater care, which one could possibly argue would constitute unique intellectual effort.

Agreed, but that would likely cost more than $2Billion in terms of legislators' time elapsed and hot air expelled. Although I do believe the supply of hot air is near infinite.

I'm really only seeing damage control as Paypal's motivation behind this statement on their blog.

I wonder how many other folks have had the same problems with Paypal's inconsistent application of their policy (when not just outright obstruction), who don't have the same resources to make noise as the woman running Regresty. And whether they will get similar resolution.

I would think having the ability to raise 18mo of funds to deposit in a bank already puts one in a small (and quite fortunate) group. True, this ability can come from diligence and careful financial planning, but there will always be external factors that could preclude this ability to save up in the first place.

Besides that, the more reckless half of myself is reminded of this Oscar Wilde quip: "Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination."

Agreed about the overriding concern of sovereign invasion, and the motivations for a potential invader are myriad: claimed "humanitarian" intervention, desire to repatriate lost citizens, trade disputes. The fact a seasteading vessel will have to trade with conventional nation states exposes it to the risk of invasion, since eventually one nation state may decide that benefits to invasions are not outweighed by its counter-arguments (international UN-style law, ethics, etc).

Perhaps a comparison may be drawn to China's ongoing desire to repatriate Taiwan.

The article seems to suggest that yes, the vans will be driven around randomly.

"American Science & Engineering ... has sold U.S. and foreign government agencies more than 500 backscatter x-ray scanners mounted in vans that can be driven past neighboring vehicles to see their contents, ...."

Likewise the image on the 2nd page of the article of an SUV with the driver still inside.

Further counterpoints to the 2 points of criticism you raise. 1) Exploitation of immigrant workers (especially undocumented) is already common place within this country's borders, tho primarily for low-skilled jobs. I don't see any inherent economic incentive to worker exploitation on boat, above what unscrupulous employees already take advantage of on-shore. 2) Should legislation like the Startup Visa actually come to pass, the population on this boat could then simply move on-shore, and probably enjoy cheaper operating expenses. That population would already be rather unmoored, so to speak, so relocating shouldn't be too much of a hurdle.

12miles off shore is not terribly far. Telecommute would be quite possible, assuming this ship would have fast wireless Internet service via some terrestrial band. (100Mbps+ is quite possible with off-the-shelf unlicensed equipment in the 5.8GHz band over that distance, faster for licensed.)

I wonder if employees fortunate enough to be granted a visa could then move to the SF area an then actually commute via high-speed shuttle boat. Telecommute would suggest that such employees' actual commute need not be daily.

Indeed, there are several examples of museum janitors from present day removing a portion of (or the whole) art thought to be trash. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3604278.stm http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/11/swept-away.php

I've had remarkably less than optimal experience using USB wifi dongles with rt3572 and rt2870 chipsets (IIRC) with Ubuntu kernels 2.6.28 thru 2.6.38 or so, even with the modules downloaded from Ralink directly. Inconsistent thruput, inability to change channels, and random disassociation from the AP. Plus, their modules vomit lots of pointless debug info to syslog, with no options to disable it.

I'd recommend Atheros arl9170 instead.

My recollection from previous queries about this was that PoE was considered too fringe to merit the additional effort. It would complicate the PS design, since you have to convert from 48VDC or 24VDC.

Lots of wasted time (and $$) on behalf of Google defending itself from frivolous demands, and worse even more wasted time by members of Congress.

While this shows admirable courtesy, I do feel that extreme prejudice against crapware toolbars is perfectly justified. So, I prefer to take the "shoot first, ask questions later" approach here.

I was explaining to a friend my understanding that the emitter and receiver for these neutrino experiments basically needed to be synchronized to a single, fictional (superluminal, etc.) frame of reference. I'm positive there are many factors going into how this is done.

Their relationship with Facebook probably influenced (compelled?) them to sign onto this.

Indeed, one could imagine a potential copyright infringement complaint leveled at Zygna by Paramount, claiming that "Mafia Wars" borrows too heavily from the "Godfather" films. Completely frivolous, indeed, but possibly threatening enough to Zygna's daily operations for them to heed warnings about these bills.

From my limited recollection, Australia has tended to implement such restrictions even more aggressively than the US legislation/policies they took inspiration from. So the 2nd-order trickle down effect could be worse in Australia, and presumably other countries.

Likewise, what requirement would DNS provides outside the USA have to cooperate with any blacklisting? I would image most would refuse, citing the additional effort required, lack of jurisdiction, and general inanity.

Thus, affected folks who are savvy enough can switch to DNS servers outside the US, which presumably also includes the group of genuine copyright infringers whom these bills are trying to target in the 1st place. Which also renders these bills ineffective at their intended purpose too?