Every time we were done sending and wanted to start receiving, we had to climb a ladder to the top of the building -- which was an 80 story skyscraper, mind you
Oh yeah? Well, back in MY day we didn't HAVE 80-story skyscrapers. What WE did was climp up a ONE-story skyscraper 80 TIMES! And we didn't have half-duplex! We had one wire! One wire pigtailed to earth and in order to send a byte, you had to send 8 times using a bit shift register to move the bit that got onto the wire over one slot each time. All the other bits wound up on the floor, in your hair, everywhere! Oh did I mention that we used carrier pigeons for bits?
It's funny that you mention that. When I deploy overseas I write up a list of websites with usernames/passwords and that goes in a tamper-evident envelope for my parents. It's stuff like banking and stocks that my parents would need to access if I died or something. So anyways, each time this happens I invariably find at least one or two that I need to go change before I write up the list in order to make it 'parent-friendly' and make me seem like a fine upstanding citizen instead of a darkly cynical asshole.
Oh look honey, his password at etrade was 1L0v3puPp13z! I'm so proud of our dead son!
I was getting ready to post about dual factor systems in response to your post and then I read your last lines. I guess I'll just second what you said; despite the tin-hatters objections about physical security, an access card with 1 (one) password for nearly everything is far more secure- both physically AND bitwise- than my folded-up post-it that contained all seventeen UN/passwords that I needed in order to do my job. I'm now down to 7 or 8 passwords, but they are used infrequently. In fact, some of them are used so infrequently that I need to reauthenticate the account via email when I do need it, so I don't know why I even write the passwords down.
Anyways, my point to the paranoid among you: -You will not need to write down your 7-10 digit numerical password if that is the only one you use, and you use it often -If you lose your card, it is useless without the password -You cannot brute-force the military CAC card login; it has a 3-strikes policy* -etc.
*I should mention that the 3-strikes wrong password policy is a great way to get back at the assholes who leave their WinXP workstations logged in with their CAC still in the card reader ("this workstation can only be logged out by user Stupid.Ass or an administrator"). Remove card, insert card. Type nonsense, press enter. Repeat two more times. Instant 15-minute support call to get access back.
There is a common saying wrt management/bureaucracy/gov't jobs:
"In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence"
And the corollary:
"In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out his duties; work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence"
This is known as the Peter Principle. It is a deviously simple concept with far-ranging consequences: Every employee will eventually be promoted to a position ONE level above their competency. And they will stay there instead of being demoted or fired; that's just the way it works.
I have worked for the state and fed gov't for the past 7 years and I can attest to the profound accuracy of the Peter Principle. What you need to remember when dealing with superiors is that the higher people get promoted, the greater the chance that you are dealing with someone who is genuinely incompetent. They may not be a bad person, but they are no longer qualified to hold their job. So don't take things too personally when you are ordered shut down the company's most profitable center or paint cartoon bulldogs on fighter jets.
Stay in school and eat lots of fiber and someday you, too, will be promoted one level above your competence.
And that is what has fueled christianity's spread throughout widely-ranging and disparate areas of the globe among people with absolutely nothing else in common.
Christianity is among the easiest religions to matriculate to, and also seemingly the most missionary. I wouldn't argue either way about christianity's rights or wrongs, but you have to admit that it is a pretty fascinating case study in sociology. And deciding whether christianity's means and success is due to luck, design, or intelligent design is a mystery we may never solve.
>>Once LEDs become widely available, we'll all be throwing out the compacts, and replacing them with LEDs that give off light that we like
Er... I don't know anyone who threw out perfectly working incandescent bulbs just to install CFLs. That would be a ridiculous waste of a good bulb. The people who hate CFLs enough that they would throw out a working CFL bulb in order to buy a very expensive LED light would, I assume, either be insane or else they simply wouldn't have bought the CFLs in the first place.
I mean, look at the initial cost + operating cost for these things. CFL- $3.50 + power cost, let's say... $100 over the (long) life of the bulb LED- $120 + power cost, let's say... $50 to be very generous.
Even if the power cost for the LEDs was zero, they still cost more than CFLs unless you use them for decades. I myself have been replacing bulbs on an attrition basis and will continue doing that in 10 years when my CFLs burn out, break, or I decide to move into a van down by the river.
It depends on your personal opinion of what 'useful' is. I would think that the best use for a commodity would be the use that produced the greatest economic gain. So in my utilitarian view of gasoline consumption, the racer that uses 500 gallons of gas to earn $500,000 is more efficient than 10 people using 50 gallons of gas to make $10,000-$20,000. The racer created wealth out of gas and spectacle. This is not a zero-sum game. Racing increases our gdp more than office work.
An idealistic viewpoint like yours has a place in the argument, but I see both sides as having equal merit.
>>the Bible as a guideline to live a good life, and quite frankly, it is a good book as such.
If you can pick out the 'good' parts of the bible, then you're already a good person. The bible is full of good (don't steal) and bad (stone your daughter for being impertinent) things and if you can cherry pick out the good stuff on your own, you don't need it in the first place. You could save time by just buying chicken soup for the skeptical scientist's soul or something.
I could say that the great gatsby is a good book for guiding your wholesome life if I only picked out certain verses.
>>a concealed carrry license doesn't require any safety training or demonstration of competence,
I'd like to point out that in my state (mn), you are required to attend a spendy and long course on safety, gun law, tactics, etc. before you can even go to the sheriff for a permit. Part of the reason that I don't have a permit is that I haven't had 2 days to to spare; that, and I moved out of the bad part of town and don't need it anymore.
Long guns, of course, can be bought on site without a permit as long as you don't have a felony. That seems fair. Handguns require a permit to purchase, but no class. It is frankly a pain in the ass to buy a gun and criminals will never go to a store and fill out the paperwork in the first place.
A gun is a large investment, and I've yet to know of anyone who is clueless about guns going out and buying one. Much like using linux requires an informed and conscious decision to carry out, guns are not something that you go out and randomly decide to spend $500 on. It is something that you want and/or need, and you can't really want/need something that expensive without having a pretty clear idea of what you're getting yourself into.
Cue the 'lusers spend that much on computers...' responses now. If computers killed you for pressing the wrong button, sales would go down.
Maybe you should call yourself a libertist. The most appropriate word that relates to the latin 'liber' would probably be liberal, but that's taken. So is liberian. Maybe liberarian?
I worked as tech support for a small local isp a few years back, and this kind of thing happened to a guy who was hired with me. When we were all sitting in the conference room getting the legal brief, one of the stipulations was something like, "You cannot work here if you've ever been convicted of a computer hacking-related crime" or something to that effect.
The lady said it with that haha-I-know-no-one-in-this-room-is-that-smart kind of way, but the guy sitting next to me got real quiet and asked if he could talk to her outside. Turns out he cracked into a bunch of university computers down in georgia or someplace and it was a pretty big deal, and he had used this local isp as his springboard. It was iffy for a while but they gave him the job anyways, since he did the crime when he was a young teenager.
Reubens, if you're reading this, feel free to correct me if my details were wrong.
>>When you've got a billion dollars flying around at very high speeds, with some nuclear weapons on-board, and a couple of highly-trained pilots
I hate to nit-pick, but the b-2 doens't fly very fast. Its maximum speed is always somewhere below mach 1, putting it on par with or slower than commercial jet liners.
If you're curious why this is, consider the effect of a sonic boom wrt the aircraft's stealth.
There is much, much more to stealth than just radar cross-section.
-heat signature: the engines are tucked deep within the airframe and the exhaust is vented over a large surface area that is baffled from the ground's POV. This drastically reduces the chances of being picked up or hit by heat-seaking weapons
-noise: Again, the engines are tucked deep in the airframe; the intakes follow a tortuous path that minimizes both radar sig and noise; the aircraft never flies at supersonic speeds to avoid sonic boom
-EM: missions are conducted in radio silence; no lights; all sources of rf are shielded; passive radar and sensing
-predictability: flightpath hugs terrain; flightpath does not follow a straight line or constant altitude; etc.
Many people know about the b-2's radar-related features, and of course there are other features that I've left out. The fact that the brits or our own troops can detect the b-2 every now and then means nothing; when the b-2 is on a mission you will not find it. Just go ahead and trust me on this.
Your ideas are all well and good right up until war is not based on tactical ground actions any more. I am in the air force and I agree that our role is ridiculously inflated, but we do play a role. I do not see, however, what would be gained by rolling the air force into the army or vice versa. The AF has lots of ground troops and frankly I don't see them ever because I work on jets. If we were in the same branch, you wouln't ever see me because when I'm in Iraq, I spend most of my time working in the HAS's on our jets or sleeping. If the army took over our c-130 assets, they would belong to an 'army aeronautical division' or something and functionally would very closely resemble the current situation.
Unless your idea is that 11 bravos would fix, fuel, load, and direct their own aircraft. That's not much different from the air force saying that IT ought to just have a private army of its own that understood the strengths and limitations of air power, etc. We do aircraft and airfield security, you guys go outside the wire. That's just the way it is. Aircraft maintainers don't go outside the wire- it's not a place where we're useful. You could train us to be ground troops but that completely negates the advantages of division of skilled labor where you get really good at shooting people and I get really good at keeping jets from falling out of the sky.
And btw the A-10 is not retired. If you can track down a copy of the july-august Airman magazine, A-10s in afghanistan are the cover story. I personally work on f-16s and my base is one of only a few with some very advanced targetting systems and the pilot training to match. I would put our 16s against vanilla a-10s any day for recon and bomb drops. For close-in ground support the army DOES have its own aircraft, they're called ah-64 gunships and they're everywhere in iraq. Those things will end a party like no one's business and that's why YOU HAVE THEM. And so if you want to get mad that your close-in air support sucks, talk to your apache pilots.
Maybe we'll run into each other over there- I'll buy you a NA beer.
>>I doubt anyone would want a call center job unless they were masochistic or desperate beyond measure.
I have to say that there are in fact many people who would want a call center job. I worked in one when I was about 16; I worked at another one doing tech support when I was 17-18. These were relatively good-paying jobs that a teenager could reasonably expect to get along with other entry-level jobs like dishwashing, hotel room cleaning, retail POS, grocery bagging, etc.
When you picture the average american, you must be picturing a 30-year-old with a degree. The real average american would be happy to have a call center job at least as a backup option. These low- to medium-paying unskilled jobs are the glue that keeps our economy together. Teenagers need to work, too. So do middle-aged people who find themselves in the red due to divorce, layoff, etc. Having had several of these kinds of jobs, I can tell you that very, very few people quit because they thought they were better than the work they were doing.
It can carry 40 tons of cargo but only enough fuel to travel 200 miles? I can see this being useful for heavy construction, but c'mon- it can't be too hard to sacrifice a little bit of cargo space in order to extend the range dramatically. What am I missing?
Slashdot Mirror
You had alligator clips? We had to use Choristodera clips!
-b
Every time we were done sending and wanted to start receiving, we had to climb a ladder to the top of the building -- which was an 80 story skyscraper, mind you
Oh yeah? Well, back in MY day we didn't HAVE 80-story skyscrapers. What WE did was climp up a ONE-story skyscraper 80 TIMES! And we didn't have half-duplex! We had one wire! One wire pigtailed to earth and in order to send a byte, you had to send 8 times using a bit shift register to move the bit that got onto the wire over one slot each time. All the other bits wound up on the floor, in your hair, everywhere! Oh did I mention that we used carrier pigeons for bits?
-b
Trees are dark and thus decrease earth's albedo, and this warms the planet.
What we need are white parking lots.
-b
Here's a question:
Is it ethical for our course correction to cause the asteroid to collide with another planet?
Are we comfortable with causing catastrophic damage to another planet that may harbor unknown forms of life or even just remains of life?
How would we choose, if we had to, which planet to deposit our asteroid?
This is of course hypothetical, but it doesn't seem entirely ethical to destroy another planet, especially the inner rocky ones.
-b
It's funny that you mention that. When I deploy overseas I write up a list of websites with usernames/passwords and that goes in a tamper-evident envelope for my parents. It's stuff like banking and stocks that my parents would need to access if I died or something. So anyways, each time this happens I invariably find at least one or two that I need to go change before I write up the list in order to make it 'parent-friendly' and make me seem like a fine upstanding citizen instead of a darkly cynical asshole.
Oh look honey, his password at etrade was 1L0v3puPp13z! I'm so proud of our dead son!
-b
I was getting ready to post about dual factor systems in response to your post and then I read your last lines. I guess I'll just second what you said; despite the tin-hatters objections about physical security, an access card with 1 (one) password for nearly everything is far more secure- both physically AND bitwise- than my folded-up post-it that contained all seventeen UN/passwords that I needed in order to do my job. I'm now down to 7 or 8 passwords, but they are used infrequently. In fact, some of them are used so infrequently that I need to reauthenticate the account via email when I do need it, so I don't know why I even write the passwords down.
Anyways, my point to the paranoid among you:
-You will not need to write down your 7-10 digit numerical password if that is the only one you use, and you use it often
-If you lose your card, it is useless without the password
-You cannot brute-force the military CAC card login; it has a 3-strikes policy*
-etc.
*I should mention that the 3-strikes wrong password policy is a great way to get back at the assholes who leave their WinXP workstations logged in with their CAC still in the card reader ("this workstation can only be logged out by user Stupid.Ass or an administrator"). Remove card, insert card. Type nonsense, press enter. Repeat two more times. Instant 15-minute support call to get access back.
>>bureaucracy is ruled mostly by idiots
There is a common saying wrt management/bureaucracy/gov't jobs:
"In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence"
And the corollary:
"In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out his duties; work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence"
This is known as the Peter Principle. It is a deviously simple concept with far-ranging consequences: Every employee will eventually be promoted to a position ONE level above their competency. And they will stay there instead of being demoted or fired; that's just the way it works.
I have worked for the state and fed gov't for the past 7 years and I can attest to the profound accuracy of the Peter Principle. What you need to remember when dealing with superiors is that the higher people get promoted, the greater the chance that you are dealing with someone who is genuinely incompetent. They may not be a bad person, but they are no longer qualified to hold their job. So don't take things too personally when you are ordered shut down the company's most profitable center or paint cartoon bulldogs on fighter jets.
Stay in school and eat lots of fiber and someday you, too, will be promoted one level above your competence.
-b
unless they buy music from amazon, which is cheaper, higher-quality, and drm-free...
I'm just saying that there are other options out there that don't require subscription or passwords.
-b
>>Sure is funny weather we're having this Winter...
I think you meant Wintre.
-b
And that is what has fueled christianity's spread throughout widely-ranging and disparate areas of the globe among people with absolutely nothing else in common.
Christianity is among the easiest religions to matriculate to, and also seemingly the most missionary. I wouldn't argue either way about christianity's rights or wrongs, but you have to admit that it is a pretty fascinating case study in sociology. And deciding whether christianity's means and success is due to luck, design, or intelligent design is a mystery we may never solve.
-b
>>Once LEDs become widely available, we'll all be throwing out the compacts, and replacing them with LEDs that give off light that we like
Er... I don't know anyone who threw out perfectly working incandescent bulbs just to install CFLs. That would be a ridiculous waste of a good bulb. The people who hate CFLs enough that they would throw out a working CFL bulb in order to buy a very expensive LED light would, I assume, either be insane or else they simply wouldn't have bought the CFLs in the first place.
I mean, look at the initial cost + operating cost for these things.
CFL- $3.50 + power cost, let's say... $100 over the (long) life of the bulb
LED- $120 + power cost, let's say... $50 to be very generous.
Even if the power cost for the LEDs was zero, they still cost more than CFLs unless you use them for decades. I myself have been replacing bulbs on an attrition basis and will continue doing that in 10 years when my CFLs burn out, break, or I decide to move into a van down by the river.
-b
>>OS X is the 'tough love' that Linux needs.
If you could install OS X on non-apple hardware, then I'd agree. As it stands, OS X and *nix serve opposite ends of the consumer OS market.
-b
It depends on your personal opinion of what 'useful' is. I would think that the best use for a commodity would be the use that produced the greatest economic gain. So in my utilitarian view of gasoline consumption, the racer that uses 500 gallons of gas to earn $500,000 is more efficient than 10 people using 50 gallons of gas to make $10,000-$20,000. The racer created wealth out of gas and spectacle. This is not a zero-sum game. Racing increases our gdp more than office work.
An idealistic viewpoint like yours has a place in the argument, but I see both sides as having equal merit.
-b
Oh crap, I forgot that HR and management browse slashdot for anecdotes about teenaged hackers in order to fine-tune their hiring!
I'm sorry for all the horrible true stories I've told about Bill, Steve, Bob, Rachel, and Harry!
I will go shoot myself now!
Oh that's right, criminal records show up in any normal background check anyways. Nevermind about the shooting.
-b
>>the Bible as a guideline to live a good life, and quite frankly, it is a good book as such.
If you can pick out the 'good' parts of the bible, then you're already a good person. The bible is full of good (don't steal) and bad (stone your daughter for being impertinent) things and if you can cherry pick out the good stuff on your own, you don't need it in the first place. You could save time by just buying chicken soup for the skeptical scientist's soul or something.
I could say that the great gatsby is a good book for guiding your wholesome life if I only picked out certain verses.
-b
>>a concealed carrry license doesn't require any safety training or demonstration of competence,
I'd like to point out that in my state (mn), you are required to attend a spendy and long course on safety, gun law, tactics, etc. before you can even go to the sheriff for a permit. Part of the reason that I don't have a permit is that I haven't had 2 days to to spare; that, and I moved out of the bad part of town and don't need it anymore.
Long guns, of course, can be bought on site without a permit as long as you don't have a felony. That seems fair. Handguns require a permit to purchase, but no class. It is frankly a pain in the ass to buy a gun and criminals will never go to a store and fill out the paperwork in the first place.
A gun is a large investment, and I've yet to know of anyone who is clueless about guns going out and buying one. Much like using linux requires an informed and conscious decision to carry out, guns are not something that you go out and randomly decide to spend $500 on. It is something that you want and/or need, and you can't really want/need something that expensive without having a pretty clear idea of what you're getting yourself into.
Cue the 'lusers spend that much on computers...' responses now. If computers killed you for pressing the wrong button, sales would go down.
-b
Maybe you should call yourself a libertist. The most appropriate word that relates to the latin 'liber' would probably be liberal, but that's taken. So is liberian. Maybe liberarian?
Just trying to help.
-b
I worked as tech support for a small local isp a few years back, and this kind of thing happened to a guy who was hired with me. When we were all sitting in the conference room getting the legal brief, one of the stipulations was something like, "You cannot work here if you've ever been convicted of a computer hacking-related crime" or something to that effect.
The lady said it with that haha-I-know-no-one-in-this-room-is-that-smart kind of way, but the guy sitting next to me got real quiet and asked if he could talk to her outside. Turns out he cracked into a bunch of university computers down in georgia or someplace and it was a pretty big deal, and he had used this local isp as his springboard. It was iffy for a while but they gave him the job anyways, since he did the crime when he was a young teenager.
Reubens, if you're reading this, feel free to correct me if my details were wrong.
-b
>>When you've got a billion dollars flying around at very high speeds, with some nuclear weapons on-board, and a couple of highly-trained pilots
I hate to nit-pick, but the b-2 doens't fly very fast. Its maximum speed is always somewhere below mach 1, putting it on par with or slower than commercial jet liners.
If you're curious why this is, consider the effect of a sonic boom wrt the aircraft's stealth.
-b
-No, I wouldn't
-No, I wouldn't
-No, it isn't
-No, we don't
-b
There is much, much more to stealth than just radar cross-section.
-heat signature: the engines are tucked deep within the airframe and the exhaust is vented over a large surface area that is baffled from the ground's POV. This drastically reduces the chances of being picked up or hit by heat-seaking weapons
-noise: Again, the engines are tucked deep in the airframe; the intakes follow a tortuous path that minimizes both radar sig and noise; the aircraft never flies at supersonic speeds to avoid sonic boom
-EM: missions are conducted in radio silence; no lights; all sources of rf are shielded; passive radar and sensing
-predictability: flightpath hugs terrain; flightpath does not follow a straight line or constant altitude; etc.
Many people know about the b-2's radar-related features, and of course there are other features that I've left out. The fact that the brits or our own troops can detect the b-2 every now and then means nothing; when the b-2 is on a mission you will not find it. Just go ahead and trust me on this.
-b
Your ideas are all well and good right up until war is not based on tactical ground actions any more. I am in the air force and I agree that our role is ridiculously inflated, but we do play a role. I do not see, however, what would be gained by rolling the air force into the army or vice versa. The AF has lots of ground troops and frankly I don't see them ever because I work on jets. If we were in the same branch, you wouln't ever see me because when I'm in Iraq, I spend most of my time working in the HAS's on our jets or sleeping. If the army took over our c-130 assets, they would belong to an 'army aeronautical division' or something and functionally would very closely resemble the current situation.
Unless your idea is that 11 bravos would fix, fuel, load, and direct their own aircraft. That's not much different from the air force saying that IT ought to just have a private army of its own that understood the strengths and limitations of air power, etc. We do aircraft and airfield security, you guys go outside the wire. That's just the way it is. Aircraft maintainers don't go outside the wire- it's not a place where we're useful. You could train us to be ground troops but that completely negates the advantages of division of skilled labor where you get really good at shooting people and I get really good at keeping jets from falling out of the sky.
And btw the A-10 is not retired. If you can track down a copy of the july-august Airman magazine, A-10s in afghanistan are the cover story. I personally work on f-16s and my base is one of only a few with some very advanced targetting systems and the pilot training to match. I would put our 16s against vanilla a-10s any day for recon and bomb drops. For close-in ground support the army DOES have its own aircraft, they're called ah-64 gunships and they're everywhere in iraq. Those things will end a party like no one's business and that's why YOU HAVE THEM. And so if you want to get mad that your close-in air support sucks, talk to your apache pilots.
Maybe we'll run into each other over there- I'll buy you a NA beer.
-b
Yeah but did you ever try it on the iphone, on the internet, while you're highhhhh man?
-b
>>I doubt anyone would want a call center job unless they were masochistic or desperate beyond measure.
I have to say that there are in fact many people who would want a call center job. I worked in one when I was about 16; I worked at another one doing tech support when I was 17-18. These were relatively good-paying jobs that a teenager could reasonably expect to get along with other entry-level jobs like dishwashing, hotel room cleaning, retail POS, grocery bagging, etc.
When you picture the average american, you must be picturing a 30-year-old with a degree. The real average american would be happy to have a call center job at least as a backup option. These low- to medium-paying unskilled jobs are the glue that keeps our economy together. Teenagers need to work, too. So do middle-aged people who find themselves in the red due to divorce, layoff, etc. Having had several of these kinds of jobs, I can tell you that very, very few people quit because they thought they were better than the work they were doing.
-b
It can carry 40 tons of cargo but only enough fuel to travel 200 miles? I can see this being useful for heavy construction, but c'mon- it can't be too hard to sacrifice a little bit of cargo space in order to extend the range dramatically. What am I missing?
-b