I will accept that. I have heard that iPhone cameras are the best or among the best cell phone cameras but that always seemed like having a discussion about who's shit stinks the least.
On business trips to exotic places where I have a weekend free I bring my old film SLR and have been made fun of by coworkers who have cell phone cameras on a number of occasions at first. Afterwards when I get the pictured developed they are left realizing just how much better a proper camera is than a cell phone. When I can take a picture of the Dome of the Rock with a telephoto lens at a distance of about 2 miles, have it basically fill the entire frame, and when the picture is enlarged you can almost make out each stone in the exterior mosaics and clearly read the Arabic writing on it the difference between a cellphone camera and a proper camera becomes apparent quickly. In that instance my coworkers got to see one difference right away once I got my telephoto lens out and let them peer through it. I also got to show them another advantage of a proper camera with the ultra long exposure in a dark environment in the Stella Maris Monastery with the use of a bulb cable and tripod without a flash, that was an interesting adventure with that monastery with one of my coworkers.
That is likely not even close to what these people should be getting paid. Yes I am serious when I say that and I will attempt to prove it even using the reasoning given by big business.
First off business likes to claim that they can't find Americans to do these jobs. This would indicate that in a country of 300+ million people that the skill set they are looking for is truly exceptional and rare.
Second business like to claim that they can't afford the time to train someone to do these jobs. This would indicate that not only are these people super critical and that the company cannot function without them.
Third the H-1B program was to bring in temporary workers with highly specialized skill sets, not bring in people with general skills to work in entry level jobs.
So here we have a case where H-1B visa holders supposedly have a skill set that is exceptionally rare and is so critical to a company that they would be unable to continue to operate without them. To me this would indicate that an H-1B holder should be the person that has the highest total compensation (this includes base pay, bonuses, medical, dental, travel, housing allowance, relocation fees, stock options, etc) of anyone at the company they are performing work for or are employed by (highest of the 2) over the period they are doing the work. To help keep things a bit predictable take the average of the previous 5 years of highest compensation at the company and calculate it out as a weekly salary and then double it as this will help to prevent any funny business. It isn't like companies fail when a CEO leaves and they spend the next 6 moths looking for one so the work H-1Bs do must be even more critical to the ongoing operation of the business and thus should be compensated as much. Make this change first and I say we can have as many H-1B visa holders as businesses want. If business start bitching about a help desk technical all of a sudden getting paid $8 million a year well maybe that job isn't as special as they claimed it was. Same thing with entry level programmers, entry level DBAs, junior network admins, etc. who are brought in mass by body shops for projects. Some of those people are competent others are as effective as a corpse in a corner but a lot of them are just incompetent. I do however believe that there are some truly exceptional people out there who would benefit greatly from this who do actually have a highly specialized skill that only a few people in the world have and is needed now for a critical project. Those people deserve every cent they get.
While the above paints the Ds in a a bad light the Rs are just as bad on the H-!B issue it is just they lack the standout champion of expansion that is Senator Klobuchar. The last time I wrote Senator Amy Klobuchar on the H-1B issue I got a very patronizing response back, which is par for the course from here on the rare occasion I get a response, where she stated that it was the Republican's fault because they failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform that had her amendment to increase the number of H-1B visas.
the iPhone 7 Plus has a pair of 12MP cameras that are able to take SLR-quality images
Don't lie to me.
It has a tiny little sensor that assuming has perfect glass is just providing false magnification as the lens is a f/1.8 with a pixel edge size of about 1.2um (assuming the same size sensor as in the Apple iPhone 5S) but the diameter of the airy disk would be 3.7um. So the smallest item resolvable would fill about a 3x3 grid. Granted software can get rid of some of that but it isn't going to magically make it deliver results like a full frame SLR with good lenses.
While it is probably a better camera than most other cellphones (seriously these cameras are shit) don't say it holds a candle to an older full frame DSLR or even my 40+ year old film SLR that has some really nice lenses with good film.
The no dinner until X is done works wonders. The thing is you have to actually enforce it and then only let them eat the next morning. I only had to do that once and they know I am serious and will follow through. They still whine and bitch about how they hate having to pickup their toys, my response now is that I hate having to feed them. They both know that means they won't get dinner until the mess is picked up and will stop bitching about it.
Now unlike the trade schools the professor at the collages they for the most part have little to no real world work experience (out side of the ivy tower)
Depends on the school. The University I went to was not a research school and had a fair amount of professors who had worked in industry and encouraged professors to take sabbaticals for a year or two to go and work in industry as well as bringing in professors who had recently retired from industry to teach. My father-in-law did the latter after retiring from working in the semiconductor and taught several courses over the next 7 years doing it part time as did a number of others. There were some professors who did do research as well but even they were accessible to undergrads unlike the ones at a standard research university.
In all seriousness are community colleges basically the same thing as technical/vocational colleges in most places?
Where I live, Minnesota, we have both as separate entities under the MnSCU system, as well as non U of M universities. For example the 2 closest MnSCU schools to me are DCTC and Normandale with DCTC being a vocation school were you at most get an AAS degree but get those practical skills. Normandale being a stereotypical community college where you go to start a 4 year degree to be finished else where, prove that you can hack college, pay lower tuition for gen-ed courses, take college classes as a high school student, etc.
Well I know where I live there is Dunwoody, DCTC and Hennepin technical College. While Dunwoody is a private school, the other 2 are part of the MnSCU system, it was considered to be a good trade school and I would assume it still it. Then again it isn't run as a for profit business like a lot of the dodgy schools were.
Serious statement as a lot of people believe that you can write in whoever you want and it will be counted. This may not be the case as in Minnesota you have to register with the Secretary of State's office to have your write-in votes counted for a number of elected positions. It wouldn't surprise me if there were similar laws in other states as well.
Bombs, seriously why bomb something that just needs to be cut? Bomb making material is easy to track. Take an angle grinder to a few high voltage transmission towers. No one would bat an eye at someone buying an battery powered angle grinder and some cutting disks at Home Depot even if they were middle eastern. The clerk would probably think they were Mexican anyway. For fiber just use a shovel, again easy to get a hold of and not suspecious. Also the angle grinder and shovel can be used to take out cell towers as well.
Sounds not too dissimilar to my experience at MSU Mankato except the town had plenty of bars with hard alcohol. At the time it was a dry campus but every weekend you would see that the parking lot was paved with flattened beer cases that people would shove under the car next to theirs when smuggling things in. A couple of the more notable things that happened while I was there was the bathroom kegger, 6 stalls 6 kegs, and while not on campus the once a semester poker house party. During the spring finals week a few friends and I decided we needed to dispose of all the leftover booze in our closets, most of them had at most 1/2 a shot left and were 1.75L bottles and some were empty, so we had a movie night and ended up filling a 55 gallon recycling can full of empty glass bottles. Our RA knew exactly who had filled the can as there weren't many on the floor who were old enough to drink and rounded us up to have a talk about our alcohol problem. He actually thought we had drunk substantially more than we had that night and while we probably did have an alcohol problem, a 1L of Captain Morgan per person was standard for a poker night, that wasn't a night of hard drinking. The worst that ever happened was one of my friends got so drunk he shit himself.
You mean the phone that belonged to San Bernardino county that they forgot to install MDM software on it and then when the government tried to get the data from the automated backup (or was that reset the password) screwed that up too. As far as I know nothing has come of the data that the government got out of the phone using some undisclosed exploit. Turns out all that effort would have been better used if instead the FBI had tried pissingup a rope.
While I know it is bad form to respond to myself here is the article I referenced from before the Paris attacks. I was incorrect in that the quote that caught my attention was not from the head of the FBI or CIA but from Robert S. Litt, General Counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, who said:
it could turn in the event of a terrorist attack or criminal event where strong encryption can be shown to have hindered law enforcement.
To make it worse the article also has this little tidbit:
There is value, he said, in “keeping our options open for such a situation.”
The conversation we've been trying to have about this has dipped below public consciousness now, and that's fine,
It is them again pointing out what they are doing in plain sight and they even state what they are doing or planning on doing. It is like the FBI or CIA's comments that it would take a major terror attack where encryption was used to turn the people against it and then the Paris attacks happen and the narrative from the news media was all about how encryption helped/enabled these attacks. A little while later there was the San Bernardino attack and that fucking iPhone caper where government incompetence ran rampant from the start and again where encryption was painted as the problem instead of stupidity by the media.
Granted there is a lot that Comey said here that make me think he needs a big punch in the dick for, especially his patronizing statements, but that one statement is the stand out one for me.
No they show up with a warrant and want my crypto key they can go find the fucking thing if I had happened to write it down. If they can't find it because it is memorized, like the combination to a safe, they can ask me for it and I would be well within my rights to tell them to piss up a rope.
After all, there was no encryption back at the start of the country
Not sure if this is serious or not but at least one of the founding fathers was into crypto and it for the time it was one of the strongest ciphers with a version of it being used into WWII. Bonus points for also being the principal author of the Declaration of Independence.
I just assume that the numbers are cooked or wrong but that all manufacturers are wrong or cheat the same so it is good to use as a comparison between similar cars. I do take gas mileage into consideration as I do drive a lot and my current car gets about 30% greater mileage than my previous one but (went from about 26 mpg highway to about 37 mpg highway).
I was referring to the e39 535 which did have a 3.5l V8, but still the last 2 numbers do tell you the displacement even if it isn't clear if it is a big six or the v8 but that would be something that is specific to the body version. So while not old like the e28/e34 we aren't talking the current F10/F11 bodies either. Personally I have never driven one of BMW's big sixes but the little sixes are really nice engines and pretty damn durable and I would imagine that the big six would be as well just with more punch. I had an '85 e28 with the little six (2.8l) that unfortunately got plowed under by a guy who was higher than a kite and didn't see me stopped legally and rear ended me while going 55-60mph.
Sounds similar to the old BMW naming scheme. The first digit denoted the vehicle body type (3 series, 5 series, 7 series) the next 2 digits were for the engine typically the displacement or some close approximation there of (18=1.8l, 20-2.0l, 23=2.3l, 30=3.0l 40=4.4l) then there was a letter typically an i indicating fuel injection c for coupe, l for long wheel base (7 series only) or x for all wheel drive. So if I said I owned a 325i someone would know I had a 4 door 3 series with the 2.5 liter engine that was fuel injected or if I said I had a 740il you would know I had the really big 7 series with the fuel injected 4.4l engine. Granted there were some additional modifiers but they were logical such as M, ti, d, or Z which tell you specifics about the cars. Now they have gotten rid of a lot of the meaning of the last 2 digits when they started putting turbos in the engines so a 535i doesn't have the little 3.5 liter v8 that the older cars has.
It's just this CB like craze for quads that brought millions of newbees in.
This a thousand times. When there was some barrier to entry for minimum skill it tended to keep the really dumb ones out or at least have an expensive consequence. Now with how simple it is to operate a quad copter any idiot can get one and fly it. I had a few of the old style RC helicopters and those took a fair amount of practice to master. Then again I would go and fly them out in the park behind my house in the baseball field area as there really isn't anything for them to crash into there.
But the property never actually becomes yours unless a court awards it to you, so if the original owner comes looking for it can become nasty if you disposed of something valuable that they left on your property
Not entirely true. There are various abandon property laws where if it is left unattended for some span of time (several days to a few weeks typically) you would be free to claim it.
My experience is that the difference in the amount of kick from a.410 and a 20 gauge isn't much while there is a substantial difference between a 20 gauge and a 12 gauge.
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I will accept that. I have heard that iPhone cameras are the best or among the best cell phone cameras but that always seemed like having a discussion about who's shit stinks the least.
On business trips to exotic places where I have a weekend free I bring my old film SLR and have been made fun of by coworkers who have cell phone cameras on a number of occasions at first. Afterwards when I get the pictured developed they are left realizing just how much better a proper camera is than a cell phone. When I can take a picture of the Dome of the Rock with a telephoto lens at a distance of about 2 miles, have it basically fill the entire frame, and when the picture is enlarged you can almost make out each stone in the exterior mosaics and clearly read the Arabic writing on it the difference between a cellphone camera and a proper camera becomes apparent quickly. In that instance my coworkers got to see one difference right away once I got my telephoto lens out and let them peer through it. I also got to show them another advantage of a proper camera with the ultra long exposure in a dark environment in the Stella Maris Monastery with the use of a bulb cable and tripod without a flash, that was an interesting adventure with that monastery with one of my coworkers.
That is likely not even close to what these people should be getting paid. Yes I am serious when I say that and I will attempt to prove it even using the reasoning given by big business.
First off business likes to claim that they can't find Americans to do these jobs. This would indicate that in a country of 300+ million people that the skill set they are looking for is truly exceptional and rare.
Second business like to claim that they can't afford the time to train someone to do these jobs. This would indicate that not only are these people super critical and that the company cannot function without them.
Third the H-1B program was to bring in temporary workers with highly specialized skill sets, not bring in people with general skills to work in entry level jobs.
So here we have a case where H-1B visa holders supposedly have a skill set that is exceptionally rare and is so critical to a company that they would be unable to continue to operate without them. To me this would indicate that an H-1B holder should be the person that has the highest total compensation (this includes base pay, bonuses, medical, dental, travel, housing allowance, relocation fees, stock options, etc) of anyone at the company they are performing work for or are employed by (highest of the 2) over the period they are doing the work. To help keep things a bit predictable take the average of the previous 5 years of highest compensation at the company and calculate it out as a weekly salary and then double it as this will help to prevent any funny business. It isn't like companies fail when a CEO leaves and they spend the next 6 moths looking for one so the work H-1Bs do must be even more critical to the ongoing operation of the business and thus should be compensated as much. Make this change first and I say we can have as many H-1B visa holders as businesses want. If business start bitching about a help desk technical all of a sudden getting paid $8 million a year well maybe that job isn't as special as they claimed it was. Same thing with entry level programmers, entry level DBAs, junior network admins, etc. who are brought in mass by body shops for projects. Some of those people are competent others are as effective as a corpse in a corner but a lot of them are just incompetent. I do however believe that there are some truly exceptional people out there who would benefit greatly from this who do actually have a highly specialized skill that only a few people in the world have and is needed now for a critical project. Those people deserve every cent they get.
Don't worry the Democrats will protect us from those evil Republicans. /sarcasm
While the above paints the Ds in a a bad light the Rs are just as bad on the H-!B issue it is just they lack the standout champion of expansion that is Senator Klobuchar. The last time I wrote Senator Amy Klobuchar on the H-1B issue I got a very patronizing response back, which is par for the course from here on the rare occasion I get a response, where she stated that it was the Republican's fault because they failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform that had her amendment to increase the number of H-1B visas.
the iPhone 7 Plus has a pair of 12MP cameras that are able to take SLR-quality images
Don't lie to me.
It has a tiny little sensor that assuming has perfect glass is just providing false magnification as the lens is a f/1.8 with a pixel edge size of about 1.2um (assuming the same size sensor as in the Apple iPhone 5S) but the diameter of the airy disk would be 3.7um. So the smallest item resolvable would fill about a 3x3 grid. Granted software can get rid of some of that but it isn't going to magically make it deliver results like a full frame SLR with good lenses.
While it is probably a better camera than most other cellphones (seriously these cameras are shit) don't say it holds a candle to an older full frame DSLR or even my 40+ year old film SLR that has some really nice lenses with good film.
The no dinner until X is done works wonders. The thing is you have to actually enforce it and then only let them eat the next morning. I only had to do that once and they know I am serious and will follow through. They still whine and bitch about how they hate having to pickup their toys, my response now is that I hate having to feed them. They both know that means they won't get dinner until the mess is picked up and will stop bitching about it.
My guess..less than .000001%.
So that would be 3 pieces of terror related metadata in a 12 hour shift. Sounds about right although it may be an order of magnitude higher.
Now unlike the trade schools the professor at the collages they for the most part have little to no real world work experience (out side of the ivy tower)
Depends on the school. The University I went to was not a research school and had a fair amount of professors who had worked in industry and encouraged professors to take sabbaticals for a year or two to go and work in industry as well as bringing in professors who had recently retired from industry to teach. My father-in-law did the latter after retiring from working in the semiconductor and taught several courses over the next 7 years doing it part time as did a number of others. There were some professors who did do research as well but even they were accessible to undergrads unlike the ones at a standard research university.
In all seriousness are community colleges basically the same thing as technical/vocational colleges in most places?
Where I live, Minnesota, we have both as separate entities under the MnSCU system, as well as non U of M universities. For example the 2 closest MnSCU schools to me are DCTC and Normandale with DCTC being a vocation school were you at most get an AAS degree but get those practical skills. Normandale being a stereotypical community college where you go to start a 4 year degree to be finished else where, prove that you can hack college, pay lower tuition for gen-ed courses, take college classes as a high school student, etc.
Well I know where I live there is Dunwoody, DCTC and Hennepin technical College. While Dunwoody is a private school, the other 2 are part of the MnSCU system, it was considered to be a good trade school and I would assume it still it. Then again it isn't run as a for profit business like a lot of the dodgy schools were.
Serious statement as a lot of people believe that you can write in whoever you want and it will be counted. This may not be the case as in Minnesota you have to register with the Secretary of State's office to have your write-in votes counted for a number of elected positions. It wouldn't surprise me if there were similar laws in other states as well.
Bombs, seriously why bomb something that just needs to be cut? Bomb making material is easy to track. Take an angle grinder to a few high voltage transmission towers. No one would bat an eye at someone buying an battery powered angle grinder and some cutting disks at Home Depot even if they were middle eastern. The clerk would probably think they were Mexican anyway. For fiber just use a shovel, again easy to get a hold of and not suspecious. Also the angle grinder and shovel can be used to take out cell towers as well.
Sounds not too dissimilar to my experience at MSU Mankato except the town had plenty of bars with hard alcohol. At the time it was a dry campus but every weekend you would see that the parking lot was paved with flattened beer cases that people would shove under the car next to theirs when smuggling things in. A couple of the more notable things that happened while I was there was the bathroom kegger, 6 stalls 6 kegs, and while not on campus the once a semester poker house party. During the spring finals week a few friends and I decided we needed to dispose of all the leftover booze in our closets, most of them had at most 1/2 a shot left and were 1.75L bottles and some were empty, so we had a movie night and ended up filling a 55 gallon recycling can full of empty glass bottles. Our RA knew exactly who had filled the can as there weren't many on the floor who were old enough to drink and rounded us up to have a talk about our alcohol problem. He actually thought we had drunk substantially more than we had that night and while we probably did have an alcohol problem, a 1L of Captain Morgan per person was standard for a poker night, that wasn't a night of hard drinking. The worst that ever happened was one of my friends got so drunk he shit himself.
I thought lead also worked bu may require multiple treatments.
You mean the phone that belonged to San Bernardino county that they forgot to install MDM software on it and then when the government tried to get the data from the automated backup (or was that reset the password) screwed that up too. As far as I know nothing has come of the data that the government got out of the phone using some undisclosed exploit. Turns out all that effort would have been better used if instead the FBI had tried pissing up a rope.
I just put in the bogus e-mail I have always used bob@bob.com and that appears to have been breached 48 times and also has 48 pastes.
it could turn in the event of a terrorist attack or criminal event where strong encryption can be shown to have hindered law enforcement.
To make it worse the article also has this little tidbit:
There is value, he said, in “keeping our options open for such a situation.”
The conversation we've been trying to have about this has dipped below public consciousness now, and that's fine,
It is them again pointing out what they are doing in plain sight and they even state what they are doing or planning on doing. It is like the FBI or CIA's comments that it would take a major terror attack where encryption was used to turn the people against it and then the Paris attacks happen and the narrative from the news media was all about how encryption helped/enabled these attacks. A little while later there was the San Bernardino attack and that fucking iPhone caper where government incompetence ran rampant from the start and again where encryption was painted as the problem instead of stupidity by the media.
Granted there is a lot that Comey said here that make me think he needs a big punch in the dick for, especially his patronizing statements, but that one statement is the stand out one for me.
No they show up with a warrant and want my crypto key they can go find the fucking thing if I had happened to write it down. If they can't find it because it is memorized, like the combination to a safe, they can ask me for it and I would be well within my rights to tell them to piss up a rope.
After all, there was no encryption back at the start of the country
Not sure if this is serious or not but at least one of the founding fathers was into crypto and it for the time it was one of the strongest ciphers with a version of it being used into WWII. Bonus points for also being the principal author of the Declaration of Independence.
I just assume that the numbers are cooked or wrong but that all manufacturers are wrong or cheat the same so it is good to use as a comparison between similar cars. I do take gas mileage into consideration as I do drive a lot and my current car gets about 30% greater mileage than my previous one but (went from about 26 mpg highway to about 37 mpg highway).
I was referring to the e39 535 which did have a 3.5l V8, but still the last 2 numbers do tell you the displacement even if it isn't clear if it is a big six or the v8 but that would be something that is specific to the body version. So while not old like the e28/e34 we aren't talking the current F10/F11 bodies either. Personally I have never driven one of BMW's big sixes but the little sixes are really nice engines and pretty damn durable and I would imagine that the big six would be as well just with more punch. I had an '85 e28 with the little six (2.8l) that unfortunately got plowed under by a guy who was higher than a kite and didn't see me stopped legally and rear ended me while going 55-60mph.
Sounds similar to the old BMW naming scheme. The first digit denoted the vehicle body type (3 series, 5 series, 7 series) the next 2 digits were for the engine typically the displacement or some close approximation there of (18=1.8l, 20-2.0l, 23=2.3l, 30=3.0l 40=4.4l) then there was a letter typically an i indicating fuel injection c for coupe, l for long wheel base (7 series only) or x for all wheel drive. So if I said I owned a 325i someone would know I had a 4 door 3 series with the 2.5 liter engine that was fuel injected or if I said I had a 740il you would know I had the really big 7 series with the fuel injected 4.4l engine. Granted there were some additional modifiers but they were logical such as M, ti, d, or Z which tell you specifics about the cars. Now they have gotten rid of a lot of the meaning of the last 2 digits when they started putting turbos in the engines so a 535i doesn't have the little 3.5 liter v8 that the older cars has.
It's just this CB like craze for quads that brought millions of newbees in.
This a thousand times. When there was some barrier to entry for minimum skill it tended to keep the really dumb ones out or at least have an expensive consequence. Now with how simple it is to operate a quad copter any idiot can get one and fly it. I had a few of the old style RC helicopters and those took a fair amount of practice to master. Then again I would go and fly them out in the park behind my house in the baseball field area as there really isn't anything for them to crash into there.
But the property never actually becomes yours unless a court awards it to you, so if the original owner comes looking for it can become nasty if you disposed of something valuable that they left on your property
Not entirely true. There are various abandon property laws where if it is left unattended for some span of time (several days to a few weeks typically) you would be free to claim it.
My experience is that the difference in the amount of kick from a .410 and a 20 gauge isn't much while there is a substantial difference between a 20 gauge and a 12 gauge.