Some search engine software engineer testing a new search algorithm somehow starts finding information in search results that contradicts the dates information was actually known. Engineer thinks its a bug in his algorithm, but can't find the bug and starts investigating the anomalous results and using them as a starting point discovers time travelers/time travel conspiracy/aliens/whatever.
We have a non-technical project manager. We work as basically subcontracted labor for a major vendor. There's a lot of paperwork and reporting associated with the projects we do that has to be done in tight deadlines for us to get paid and we never have to do it or see it, which has a certain value because I'm pretty sure if we did have to do we would be expected to do it outside of normal work hours. It lets us focus on the technical work and not on the bureaucracy.
The downside is that project planning, even for projects highly similar to what we have done several times before, is a tedious session of overly detailed task descriptions. If the PM had better technical knowledge these planning sessions would be a hell of lot shorter as the PM would have a more detailed idea of what needs to be done and the more optimal order of tasks and the time involved -- the plans would be 90% prepared instead of 20% prepared, often with wildly inaccurate schedules. The PM would also be able to grasp the existing customer environment details better which would greatly help planning; too often you end up blind planning because the PM can offer no insight or you have to have extra meetings with the customer who often feels a little exasperated at having to provide the same info the PM didn't grasp before.
In our case, the PM is more of a "coordinator" and less of a "manager", which has some value but makes the management side of project planning too time-consuming and tedious.
Probably, but I would imagine PETA wants the kind of we-can-identify-this-guy-in-detail kind of resolution.
I don't shoot geese myself, but my general understanding is that good goose guns and loads are good out to about 80 yards. I don't think even 1080p is going to give you enough identity resolution at a distance beyond the reach of the gun, especially considering the straight-line distance at elevations of 80+ yards to see more than a straight-down view will be even greater.
Well, a shotgun isn't an antiaircraft gun and there are obviously some limits, but then again there are limits to the cameras they're trying to use on these that make the functional ceiling lower than the aircraft's service ceiling.
Is it stuck in the ice "forever"? Or will the Antarctic "summer" experience enough of a breakup in the ice pack to get an icebreaker in to free it?
If it is stuck for the long term, is it any environmental risk of a hull breech from the ice causing leaks, etc, or is the hull strong enough that it won't get crushed, it'll just sit there until the hull rusts out?
A larger gauge shotgun isn't the answer. If you used skeet loads (which I doubt they make for 10 ga., anyway) all you'd get is more pellets.
There are two common shotgun loads used in skeet shooting. The cheapest and most common are generic "target loads" which are low power and use #7.5 shot. They are OK for all-around target shooting but I prefer #9 skeet loads when actually shooting skeet specifically -- more pellets make for a bigger shot string and improve my chances for breaking the target. #7.5 target loads are better sporting clays and trap where the targets fly farther away. The slightly heavier shot has more oomph at those target distances.
But neither of them is any good for hitting anything outside target distances -- they have "reduced power" charges and even the 7.5 is pretty light shot.
Shot for geese or ducks or even pheasants would be ideal. These birds are shot on the wing and the loads have much more power behind them and the bigger pellet size retains more energy.
I still subscribe because the coverage and writing is so much better than the 5th grade level journalism in the local paper, but I agree that the news journalism of the NY Times has become pretty ideological in recent years.
The fawning over Obama has abated a little, but there is still too much cheerleading for Democratic policy generally and over specific issues like gun control there is not even a glimmer of objectivity, it's outright page 1-A advocacy reporting.
What bugs me almost as much as the ideological cheerleading is how there's no real alternative at the national level. Nobody is claiming the mantle of objectivity, it's all so incredibly partisan.
Some of the wonky monthlies aren't bad, but they're too essay-ish to count as news. I like the Economist but it's too expensive and often too business focused.
But as soon as they pop the trunk of my rental car, they'll just outright confiscate my guns (which are all locked down and packed per TSA standards) and then whatever they decide to trump up will include "..while in possession of a firearm."
I'm sure there's all kinds of environmental protection provided by spacesuits that's not needed and just adds weight and bulk, like radiation shielding and even cooling systems.
I live in Minnesota where it gets cold (current temp, -4F, projected high Monday, -14F) and in my experience conventional snowmobile suit combined with snow boots with the right clothing layers underneath does a pretty good job of keeping you warm.
I would think that a snowmobile suit with some kind of internal heating system would be all the space suit tech you would need for your body. You can get electric warming for ski boots, but I think it's too much of a PITA for skiing but for Antarctica might be good and less of a headache. They make chemical heat packs with adhesive you can stick on your toes and this works for me down to -5F and that's about as cold as I'm willing to ski, but electrical heat would be better and I think a snow boot implementation would be less hassle.
The "space suit" component that would be nice would be the helmet, but not the hard helmet like a space suit, more like the helmets used in fire suits, the soft kind with the extensions that come over your shoulder. You would want some kind of moisture venting inside to keep the face shield from fogging, but in my experience keeping your face warm, especially if you wear glasses, is the hardest part.
...or does this include the fairly common mandatory checkpoints operated by the Border Patrol inside the border and fairly common in the Southwest?
I driven through several of the latter without more than a couple of minor questions but I always hate being forced to stop like this.
I have a friend in Bisbee, Arizona and you literally can't drive into greater Arizona from Bisbee without stopping at one in either Sierra Vista or Tombstone but I haven't heard any stories from him about searches or more intensive questioning.
Apparently quite when you run into it with a train, but for some reason I would have thought that crude oil was ultimately flammable with high enough ignition temperatures or in the presence of an accelerant capable of burning alongside it but generally difficult to ignite.
I would think that it would be hard to get it to ignite, especially in the winter when the temperature of the crude would be pretty close to the ambient air temperature. The low temperature for three days prior to the accident in nearby Fargo was between -12F and -19F and the highest temperature two days prior was 2F.
In a town that size, who, exactly, is going to be keeping track of what runs on the tracks through town? I would wager that the entire fire department is a volunteer operation.
There's some chance that the chief is a full-time employee (Devil's Lake, where my wife is from, has a paid chief and a couple of salaried employees, but they're also a town of nearly 8,000 people), but I would bet they are all-volunteer and rely on nearby Fargo for anything beyond a car fire or grandma burning a batch of cookies.
Even if they somehow had the resources to keep track of everything remotely hazardous on every train, what are they going to do for the labor and equipment to deal with it should they need to? It's not like they have a budget capable of supplying them with millions of dollars worth of equipment and trained personnel at ready 24/7.
I would bet that there's more than just official pressure using the tools of national security law. Given the secrecy involved, it wouldn't surprise me if individuals weren't being pressured the old-fashioned way via personal blackmail.
Even with the "you must do this, stay quiet or go to jail" laws, you run the risk of exposure should someone decide to take a principled stand and go to the press like Snowden.
Far more secretive would be to squeeze key individuals personally -- expose their drug use, their adultery, their homosexuality, tax evasion, any of their personal weaknesses. Even if it means inventing them by entrapping them in set-up situations involving sex, drugs, statutory rape, planted drugs, and then use that against them.
All of this could be done false-flag, too, to make them think the ones catching them are the bad guys and that the NSA guys who intervene on their behalf are trying to help them.
"You may be surprised, but we know you hold a key job at Apple and part of the NSA's mission in protecting national security is to make sure you are not targeted by foreign agents, so we keep tabs on people in your position. These [fake] local cops want to bust you for fucking that teenage girl/boy, but we can make that go away and tell them that this involves a national security investigation. But we need a little help..."
And how many are truly immune to outright bribery?
I'm always surprised when I run into the contrary examples of women dating men who are by most measures less attractive than they are.
The two examples that come to the top of my head are both good friends of my wife and I.
One woman is in top physical shape (runs like 25 miles a week), high end corporate job (director of a hospital) and her husband is an easy 75 pounds overweight and some kind of rank-and-file finance guy. In three major respects, looks, earnings, and "job status" he's at a lower level than she is, yet they get along great.
The other one is less of a mismatch in terms of jobs (he's a realtor, she works as an assistant to him on real estate), but she is very, very attractive -- very pretty. Without being too crude, a really amazing figure in all respects, even more so amazing in terms of the fact she's 40+ with two kids. Her husband is paunchy and not nearly as good looking as she is.
This happens often enough that I figure that simple "looks" is far less important to women than it is to men, and that many women are either willing to overlook some aspects of appearance or simply don't care.
Going on ANY ocean voyage before the 20th century was risky in a whole bunch of ways. The food might kill you. The weather might kill you. The ship might kill you. Someone else you run across on the water might kill you. The crew might kill you. Whatever you run into wherever you go might kill you, be it people, animals, or geography.
Why the hell would we hold launching a rocket across the solar system to another planet to elementary school safety standards? Of course you could be killed. Climbing into a metal tube filled with 7 million pounds of rocket fuel and lighting it is inherently dangerous, even more so when you plan to travel across 40 million miles of space.
If we wait until it's as safe as riding an elevator we'll never get there. Exploration should never wait until it's proven safe.
Employee makes dumb video about money-grubbing corporate behavior, money-grubbing corporate executives ignore video, a few dozen people see video and have a chuckle at their expense. Whole thing forgotten in a week.
Same situation, except money-grubbing executives foam at the mouth and demand "consequences" from employee about to get canned anyway. Mass media catches wind, hundreds of thousands of people see video, even more see news story. Safeway looks like typical corporate bully to everyone who catches wind of it, executives look like feckless, humorless idiots, PR types run in circles reinforcing fecklessness that everyone believed to begin with but now they really believe it.
I've always thought the standard iPad size was a little on the small size, and that ideally it would match the size of a large magazine (Vanity Fair-size).
This would allow a lot more content to be viewed at "actual size" and cut a lot of scaling, panning and zooming.
Is it trapped forever? Will the ice crush it and cause a nasty little fuel spill? Or is the ship's hull strong enough that it will just be frozen in place either forever or until it can be salvaged?
That's a great question. From what I've read about the Minneapolis light rail system, fares cover about a third of the operating cost. I'm not sure what the fare collection costs are (machines, enforcement, etc) but its hard to see them being more than 10% of the fare revenue, especially when you consider that a lot of the collection costs are upfront (buying, installing machines, etc) and basically one-time costs.
You do wonder what would happen if they just made riding it free. It might mean more ridership which would enhance some of the secondary economic value of the system which seems to be a major selling point (reduced traffic, development on the line, etc).
I've heard from a Target insider that they do believe it involved an insider.
What I don't understand is even if it was, don't PCI standards, Sarbannes-Oxley, internal financial controls and the sheer IT scale of company of Target's size mean that any random insider would not have broad enough administrative access to compromise enough systems to pull this off?
In other words, someone with high level data network access (network engineer) wouldn't have access to databases, applications, and operating systems, and the same being true for administrative access to any one of these items preventing access to any of these other items.
The only thing that would seem to enable this would be a malware plant on IT admin desktops that enabled someone to collect enough credentials to provide broad access, but that seems tougher to pull off, especially if you factor in password changes or a password system that forces daily password changes -- I saw a system like this in use in a managed datacenter. Users had passwords that changed daily across all systems they had access to and an RSA token login was required to gain access to their accounts on the password management system to retrieve that day's password.
AFAIK, the Chinese fear a Korean war less for the conflict than for the effects on Chinese internal stability due to expected influx of millions of North Koreans.
The UNIX news client rn I believed introduced the concept of killfiles for blocking and that client dates way back before the advent of the mass Internet when presumably it was still dominated by academics and high tech professionals.
I can only surmise that in spite of this more public and presumably professional space, that flaming and the desire to ignore zealots was as real then as is now.
I'd argue that the problem with comments isn't anonymity, it's that the tools we have to browse them suck so hard there's no reasonable way to filter them with the clumsy "tools" provided on 99% of web sites, especially news sites and others not specifically designed as web forums. Web forums tend to have blocking capability.
Why not use the "excess" power for hydrogen production or desalination or both?
I can't imagine that Hawaii has "too much" fresh water or too much natural gas. As long as the energy is available, it seems like it makes sense to make it do useful work, regardless of whether the useful work is turning on the lights in my house, producing a useful product like fresh water or storing the energy in another form (methane derived from hydrogen).
It always seems strange to me that the only accepted place renewables can go is direct end-user consumption.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes it feels like Government by the Glory Hole.
...for a movie or a novel.
Some search engine software engineer testing a new search algorithm somehow starts finding information in search results that contradicts the dates information was actually known. Engineer thinks its a bug in his algorithm, but can't find the bug and starts investigating the anomalous results and using them as a starting point discovers time travelers/time travel conspiracy/aliens/whatever.
...less valuable for actual project planning.
We have a non-technical project manager. We work as basically subcontracted labor for a major vendor. There's a lot of paperwork and reporting associated with the projects we do that has to be done in tight deadlines for us to get paid and we never have to do it or see it, which has a certain value because I'm pretty sure if we did have to do we would be expected to do it outside of normal work hours. It lets us focus on the technical work and not on the bureaucracy.
The downside is that project planning, even for projects highly similar to what we have done several times before, is a tedious session of overly detailed task descriptions. If the PM had better technical knowledge these planning sessions would be a hell of lot shorter as the PM would have a more detailed idea of what needs to be done and the more optimal order of tasks and the time involved -- the plans would be 90% prepared instead of 20% prepared, often with wildly inaccurate schedules. The PM would also be able to grasp the existing customer environment details better which would greatly help planning; too often you end up blind planning because the PM can offer no insight or you have to have extra meetings with the customer who often feels a little exasperated at having to provide the same info the PM didn't grasp before.
In our case, the PM is more of a "coordinator" and less of a "manager", which has some value but makes the management side of project planning too time-consuming and tedious.
Probably, but I would imagine PETA wants the kind of we-can-identify-this-guy-in-detail kind of resolution.
I don't shoot geese myself, but my general understanding is that good goose guns and loads are good out to about 80 yards. I don't think even 1080p is going to give you enough identity resolution at a distance beyond the reach of the gun, especially considering the straight-line distance at elevations of 80+ yards to see more than a straight-down view will be even greater.
Well, a shotgun isn't an antiaircraft gun and there are obviously some limits, but then again there are limits to the cameras they're trying to use on these that make the functional ceiling lower than the aircraft's service ceiling.
Is it stuck in the ice "forever"? Or will the Antarctic "summer" experience enough of a breakup in the ice pack to get an icebreaker in to free it?
If it is stuck for the long term, is it any environmental risk of a hull breech from the ice causing leaks, etc, or is the hull strong enough that it won't get crushed, it'll just sit there until the hull rusts out?
A larger gauge shotgun isn't the answer. If you used skeet loads (which I doubt they make for 10 ga., anyway) all you'd get is more pellets.
There are two common shotgun loads used in skeet shooting. The cheapest and most common are generic "target loads" which are low power and use #7.5 shot. They are OK for all-around target shooting but I prefer #9 skeet loads when actually shooting skeet specifically -- more pellets make for a bigger shot string and improve my chances for breaking the target. #7.5 target loads are better sporting clays and trap where the targets fly farther away. The slightly heavier shot has more oomph at those target distances.
But neither of them is any good for hitting anything outside target distances -- they have "reduced power" charges and even the 7.5 is pretty light shot.
Shot for geese or ducks or even pheasants would be ideal. These birds are shot on the wing and the loads have much more power behind them and the bigger pellet size retains more energy.
I still subscribe because the coverage and writing is so much better than the 5th grade level journalism in the local paper, but I agree that the news journalism of the NY Times has become pretty ideological in recent years.
The fawning over Obama has abated a little, but there is still too much cheerleading for Democratic policy generally and over specific issues like gun control there is not even a glimmer of objectivity, it's outright page 1-A advocacy reporting.
What bugs me almost as much as the ideological cheerleading is how there's no real alternative at the national level. Nobody is claiming the mantle of objectivity, it's all so incredibly partisan.
Some of the wonky monthlies aren't bad, but they're too essay-ish to count as news. I like the Economist but it's too expensive and often too business focused.
Skeet loads are too light. You'd want something more typical for geese or ducks to make up for the height/distance.
I'd like to do that, really.
But as soon as they pop the trunk of my rental car, they'll just outright confiscate my guns (which are all locked down and packed per TSA standards) and then whatever they decide to trump up will include "..while in possession of a firearm."
I'm sure there's all kinds of environmental protection provided by spacesuits that's not needed and just adds weight and bulk, like radiation shielding and even cooling systems.
I live in Minnesota where it gets cold (current temp, -4F, projected high Monday, -14F) and in my experience conventional snowmobile suit combined with snow boots with the right clothing layers underneath does a pretty good job of keeping you warm.
I would think that a snowmobile suit with some kind of internal heating system would be all the space suit tech you would need for your body. You can get electric warming for ski boots, but I think it's too much of a PITA for skiing but for Antarctica might be good and less of a headache. They make chemical heat packs with adhesive you can stick on your toes and this works for me down to -5F and that's about as cold as I'm willing to ski, but electrical heat would be better and I think a snow boot implementation would be less hassle.
The "space suit" component that would be nice would be the helmet, but not the hard helmet like a space suit, more like the helmets used in fire suits, the soft kind with the extensions that come over your shoulder. You would want some kind of moisture venting inside to keep the face shield from fogging, but in my experience keeping your face warm, especially if you wear glasses, is the hardest part.
...or does this include the fairly common mandatory checkpoints operated by the Border Patrol inside the border and fairly common in the Southwest?
I driven through several of the latter without more than a couple of minor questions but I always hate being forced to stop like this.
I have a friend in Bisbee, Arizona and you literally can't drive into greater Arizona from Bisbee without stopping at one in either Sierra Vista or Tombstone but I haven't heard any stories from him about searches or more intensive questioning.
Apparently quite when you run into it with a train, but for some reason I would have thought that crude oil was ultimately flammable with high enough ignition temperatures or in the presence of an accelerant capable of burning alongside it but generally difficult to ignite.
I would think that it would be hard to get it to ignite, especially in the winter when the temperature of the crude would be pretty close to the ambient air temperature. The low temperature for three days prior to the accident in nearby Fargo was between -12F and -19F and the highest temperature two days prior was 2F.
The population of Casselton, ND is 2500.
In a town that size, who, exactly, is going to be keeping track of what runs on the tracks through town? I would wager that the entire fire department is a volunteer operation.
There's some chance that the chief is a full-time employee (Devil's Lake, where my wife is from, has a paid chief and a couple of salaried employees, but they're also a town of nearly 8,000 people), but I would bet they are all-volunteer and rely on nearby Fargo for anything beyond a car fire or grandma burning a batch of cookies.
Even if they somehow had the resources to keep track of everything remotely hazardous on every train, what are they going to do for the labor and equipment to deal with it should they need to? It's not like they have a budget capable of supplying them with millions of dollars worth of equipment and trained personnel at ready 24/7.
I would bet that there's more than just official pressure using the tools of national security law. Given the secrecy involved, it wouldn't surprise me if individuals weren't being pressured the old-fashioned way via personal blackmail.
Even with the "you must do this, stay quiet or go to jail" laws, you run the risk of exposure should someone decide to take a principled stand and go to the press like Snowden.
Far more secretive would be to squeeze key individuals personally -- expose their drug use, their adultery, their homosexuality, tax evasion, any of their personal weaknesses. Even if it means inventing them by entrapping them in set-up situations involving sex, drugs, statutory rape, planted drugs, and then use that against them.
All of this could be done false-flag, too, to make them think the ones catching them are the bad guys and that the NSA guys who intervene on their behalf are trying to help them.
"You may be surprised, but we know you hold a key job at Apple and part of the NSA's mission in protecting national security is to make sure you are not targeted by foreign agents, so we keep tabs on people in your position. These [fake] local cops want to bust you for fucking that teenage girl/boy, but we can make that go away and tell them that this involves a national security investigation. But we need a little help..."
And how many are truly immune to outright bribery?
I'm always surprised when I run into the contrary examples of women dating men who are by most measures less attractive than they are.
The two examples that come to the top of my head are both good friends of my wife and I.
One woman is in top physical shape (runs like 25 miles a week), high end corporate job (director of a hospital) and her husband is an easy 75 pounds overweight and some kind of rank-and-file finance guy. In three major respects, looks, earnings, and "job status" he's at a lower level than she is, yet they get along great.
The other one is less of a mismatch in terms of jobs (he's a realtor, she works as an assistant to him on real estate), but she is very, very attractive -- very pretty. Without being too crude, a really amazing figure in all respects, even more so amazing in terms of the fact she's 40+ with two kids. Her husband is paunchy and not nearly as good looking as she is.
This happens often enough that I figure that simple "looks" is far less important to women than it is to men, and that many women are either willing to overlook some aspects of appearance or simply don't care.
Going on ANY ocean voyage before the 20th century was risky in a whole bunch of ways. The food might kill you. The weather might kill you. The ship might kill you. Someone else you run across on the water might kill you. The crew might kill you. Whatever you run into wherever you go might kill you, be it people, animals, or geography.
Why the hell would we hold launching a rocket across the solar system to another planet to elementary school safety standards? Of course you could be killed. Climbing into a metal tube filled with 7 million pounds of rocket fuel and lighting it is inherently dangerous, even more so when you plan to travel across 40 million miles of space.
If we wait until it's as safe as riding an elevator we'll never get there. Exploration should never wait until it's proven safe.
Just negative PR.
Employee makes dumb video about money-grubbing corporate behavior, money-grubbing corporate executives ignore video, a few dozen people see video and have a chuckle at their expense. Whole thing forgotten in a week.
Same situation, except money-grubbing executives foam at the mouth and demand "consequences" from employee about to get canned anyway. Mass media catches wind, hundreds of thousands of people see video, even more see news story. Safeway looks like typical corporate bully to everyone who catches wind of it, executives look like feckless, humorless idiots, PR types run in circles reinforcing fecklessness that everyone believed to begin with but now they really believe it.
So much simpler to ignore it.
I'd buy one even larger if they came out.
I've always thought the standard iPad size was a little on the small size, and that ideally it would match the size of a large magazine (Vanity Fair-size).
This would allow a lot more content to be viewed at "actual size" and cut a lot of scaling, panning and zooming.
Is it trapped forever? Will the ice crush it and cause a nasty little fuel spill? Or is the ship's hull strong enough that it will just be frozen in place either forever or until it can be salvaged?
That's a great question. From what I've read about the Minneapolis light rail system, fares cover about a third of the operating cost. I'm not sure what the fare collection costs are (machines, enforcement, etc) but its hard to see them being more than 10% of the fare revenue, especially when you consider that a lot of the collection costs are upfront (buying, installing machines, etc) and basically one-time costs.
You do wonder what would happen if they just made riding it free. It might mean more ridership which would enhance some of the secondary economic value of the system which seems to be a major selling point (reduced traffic, development on the line, etc).
I've heard from a Target insider that they do believe it involved an insider.
What I don't understand is even if it was, don't PCI standards, Sarbannes-Oxley, internal financial controls and the sheer IT scale of company of Target's size mean that any random insider would not have broad enough administrative access to compromise enough systems to pull this off?
In other words, someone with high level data network access (network engineer) wouldn't have access to databases, applications, and operating systems, and the same being true for administrative access to any one of these items preventing access to any of these other items.
The only thing that would seem to enable this would be a malware plant on IT admin desktops that enabled someone to collect enough credentials to provide broad access, but that seems tougher to pull off, especially if you factor in password changes or a password system that forces daily password changes -- I saw a system like this in use in a managed datacenter. Users had passwords that changed daily across all systems they had access to and an RSA token login was required to gain access to their accounts on the password management system to retrieve that day's password.
AFAIK, the Chinese fear a Korean war less for the conflict than for the effects on Chinese internal stability due to expected influx of millions of North Koreans.
Killfiles, anyone?
The UNIX news client rn I believed introduced the concept of killfiles for blocking and that client dates way back before the advent of the mass Internet when presumably it was still dominated by academics and high tech professionals.
I can only surmise that in spite of this more public and presumably professional space, that flaming and the desire to ignore zealots was as real then as is now.
I'd argue that the problem with comments isn't anonymity, it's that the tools we have to browse them suck so hard there's no reasonable way to filter them with the clumsy "tools" provided on 99% of web sites, especially news sites and others not specifically designed as web forums. Web forums tend to have blocking capability.
Why not use the "excess" power for hydrogen production or desalination or both?
I can't imagine that Hawaii has "too much" fresh water or too much natural gas. As long as the energy is available, it seems like it makes sense to make it do useful work, regardless of whether the useful work is turning on the lights in my house, producing a useful product like fresh water or storing the energy in another form (methane derived from hydrogen).
It always seems strange to me that the only accepted place renewables can go is direct end-user consumption.