OT:Shooting Ourselves in the Foot

I don't think you ever will need to - Indian engineers predominantly 'choose' to speak in English. However, the same cant be said for whether they 'think' in English. I do, though :-)

No.

It was simply what I heard or read as being the reason why the first breakfast available at hotels was so limited.

about EU.

that a war.

many

suggest that the terrain was absolutely *perfect* to

but I guess the TD was shy on explosives so

familiar with the geography and situation there. Were the

seem to have been a brilliantly conceived and

I thought something sounded fishy about that "war."

Possibly some posters are unaware that English is an official Indian language. Indeed, along with Hindi those 2 are the only Indian languages that aren't regional.

Graham

Someone was pulling your leg.

Graham

By that standard, my wife is "moderately wasted". And she's healthier than I am, and even more beautiful.

John

Like I always said: psychopathic narcissist.

Hey, whatever works.

John

Being thin doesn't mean a kid is starving to death. It just means they're skinny. Both my wife and I were very skinny as kids; luckily, she still is.

The US has an ethnic mix very different from Europe's. Native Americans and Pacific islanders tend to get fat on Western diets. Southeast asians and filipinos tend to be small and thin. The distribution will still be close to normal (you can't avoid the central limit theorem) but will be wider than in an ethnically uniform population.

But if the below-2-sigma part of a population is defined as malnourished, then all populations have equal proportion of malnourished.

The children who die of malnutrition in the USA are overwhelmingly victims of profound illness, generally birth defects. One rarely reads, say, of a lunatic parent who allows a child to die from lack of care. We have AFDC, food stamps, free meal centers, charities, and child protective agencies that look out for kids. Far more dangerous is being killed by trauma, overwhelmingly likely to be inflicted by a step-parent or other non-blood-relative.

But what is this obsession with US juvenile nutrition? It's a weird, recurrent theme.

John

I have come to the conclusion that I'll just have to live with it as long as I can still take care of myself without outside help. The one thing I really miss is reading real books. I have to put a book on my flatbed scanner, then blow it up on my computer screen to read it without getting a headache. I have read as many as 10 paperback books in a single day when I was younger. I was an avid Sci-Fi fan when I was in my teens and early 20s and read just about anything I could get my hands on.

Like Art Linkletter once said, "Old age isn't for sissies!" :)

Slow-man is running out of things to harp about and is now grasping at straws.

...Jim Thompson

You first have to learn and remember what all the silly things mean :-(

There are devices that have a camera mounted vertically with a monitor overtop, used for people who have poor vision, but they cost several thousands of dollars (small market) if you can't get a subsidy on them. I wonder if you could do the same thing with a decent camera and an inexpensive monitor. It's got to be better to just move the book around under the camera than waiting while the scanner whines and grinds its way through each frame.

There are also dedicated reading machines such as the Xerox "Reading Edge" which will read books aloud with fair success (you have to get used to the text-to-speech 'accent' they have).

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

The ironic part is that I used to service those vision enhancement systems back in the '80s, and about 10 years ago I let someone talk me into selling him my last "C" mount close-up lens. I have a pile of used monochrome NTSC video cameras and monitors, both B&W and Color, but I have not been able to locate a good lens that I can afford. The only Veterans I know that got any help from the VA with the vision enhancement systems all had macular degeneration and the VA sent someone to pick the equipment up whenever one of them died. I had a link to a small CCD close-up camera that you could slide across a page and plug into the video input of a color monitor, or a TV with video input, but the link no longer works. It was $200 to $250, US. I saw the same camera being sold a t a flea market, but they wanted $800 for it, and didn't want to well it without the "Matching" $500 color monitor. $1300 for maybe $350 worth of electronics. All they did was sick a couple cheesy labels over the OEM labels and mark it up almost a grand. Sam's Club even had the camera available, but it didn't turn up with their sorry storefront search engine.

Hello Michael,

Yes, I've got one of those. Just have to find it :-) I use the Aristo for that stuff as well.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Chris,

So who would that be on the California board?

Sorry, but I seriously doubt that. Medical ultrasound is such a small field. If you try to find an analog engineer in that field the number of really useful resumes coming back is typically zero. Tried it. People who have never designed an ultrasound scanner know next to nothing about that technology. It's not taught in enough detail anywhere.

Just look at the question on those exams.

Well, not in the US.

I disagree 100%.

Regards, Joerg

In article , Joerg writes

No idea why would I. I was explaining how the UK system works. You apear to be just splitting hairs for the sake of it.

So you are a genius in your field and no one else can judge you. I bet I can find a few people who know about that filed though :-)

which exams?

No yet anyway but it will happen in the US as there tends to be more litigation. I have said for years that this will be driven more by the Insurance companies than the engineers.

That is would work in this industry or that it works well in all the others.

It is proven to work in all the other professions so what is your evidence that it won't work in embedded engineering?

Hello Chris,

Maybe in the UK but not in the US. This is not about splitting hair. It's about the fact that such a regulatory system is wrong. Just my humble opinion. I know we may differ in opinion here.

I am not a genius. All I said is that there isn't likely anyone on a license board that could assess a candidate in my field of work. The chance of finding a license holder that could do that instead is pretty much zero as well. I would know them because this world is very small. Non-licensed peers (which is pretty much all of them in my case) are typically not allowed to vouch for an applicant. Maybe that's different in the UK, but it is that way here.

The ones that you have to take to obtain a license, of course. If they have the inclination to let you sit for the test, that is.

That's another dead end and here is why: When you have a license in the US you usually are forced to take out liability insurance. When you work in medical you will, in most states, not find a single carrier who will underwrite you. Which means you might have just shot yourself out of business by getting a license.

Engineering licensure exists since many decades. There is no proof that it has improved public safety or anything else. I had a nwespaper article where even a state license board admitted that. And no, I can't tell you where it was. I threw it out because it was irrelevant for someone working in industry because we are exempt.

We are talking about engineering here, not medical. But even in medical there have been lots of cases where incompetence was proven yet these guys had a long-standing license to practice. Of course, in nearly all the local cases that been reported in our daily paper the license was then revoked. But what good does that do the patient who had been harmed or died?

Regards, Joerg

Hello Ray,

Which leave out anyone with a degree from a foreign school. 20+ years ago government bodies told students it would be good to gain overseas experience and even study there. So, what do we tell them now? That they shot themselves in the foot and shouldn't have listened?

Never met a single one. In 20 years.

If remembering correctly NSPE requires at least EIT status to join. Neither I nor any of my peers have that.

California doesn't if you only provide services to industry. We have an industry exemption.

Other states don't, and I sure won't ever live there.

They can only do that if you have knowingly pretended to be a PE but don't have a license. Anything else would get them inundated in litigation.

I have never encountered that. We live by standards such as UL2601, FDA regulations and so on.

None of them I was involved in had one. And I did ask. The only person I found in that direction (and that was one lone case in 20 years) had passed the FE test a long time ago and was thus an EIT. She never took the final test for PE because there really wasn't a need for it.

As I replied to Chris before a PE license can oblige you to mandatory PL coverage. Just for the fun go out and try to find an underwriter. I did, until I had blisters from dialing. Zilch. Nada.

That's why I do not offer services to the public ;-)

Heck, I have met a whole lot of power engineers working for utilities. They certainly provide direct services to the public. None of them was a PE.

Regards, Joerg