I'll back this. I bought some Eneloop batteries close to a year ago, and just popped into my camera a couple fresh out of the pack. They had enough charge for me to go through several hundred pictures, including a few dozen requiring the flash.
Changing the length of a second will end up changing almost everything in our lives. It would be an enormous undertaking, redefining, among many other things, electromagnetic wavelengths and the speed of light. Speed limits would change, computers would have to handle travel time calculations differently, and the length of the workday would change slightly.
It was hard enough to get the world to change to the metric system (with notable holdouts still remaining). Changing the very definition of one of the six core SI units would be nearly impossible.
Allegations are not (necessarily?) subject to perjury, so they're free on that point. If the take-down notices are being sent by attorneys, who are officers of the court, they may be subject to sanctions if the notices were knowingly improperly sent. Proving that to be the case would likely be difficult, though, as the attorneys could simply say that they misjudged the level of use, and believed it to be outside of fair use exception. Lacking some written documentation -- and attorney-client privilege would probably block airing of that -- it would never stand.
Legal insurance runs about $12 a month where I work, and they handle all of that contract review work. Salary surveys for the area are cheap, and usually no more than a quarter out of date.
And I really don't want some of the people around me making the same wages as everyone else, because they don't pull nearly the same load.
Here's one more thing an IT union would be able to do. It could help define best practices. As in "Nope, that software is not union-spec. If you want our guys to use it you're going to have to pay for their training."
IT moves a lot faster than carpentry or steam fitting. With the pace that some unions move, we'd still be standardized on Windows 2000 and Debian 3.0. It would prevent us from coming up with the kind of innovative solutions that help define our industry.
As for best practices, all I can see is an IT union standardizing on something like ITIL. We're going through this implementation where I work, and it's a major Charlie-Foxtrot. The layers of bureaucracy that have come into effect rival those of the two ISO shops where I've worked (both in the medical industry) but have far less logic. The only good side that I can see coming out of that mess is forcing ITIL to stop calling change requests RFCs (Requests for Change) since it overlaps with the much more integrated RFC (Request for Comment). I've had people get confused when I say that a change request (I refuse to call them RFCs) won't work because the RFC doesn't allow something to work that way.
Years ago, I saw my first direct evidence of how nit-picky union locations could get. I was helping to organize logistics for a convention where my employer would have a booth set up. I was looking over a contract while waiting for someone to come see me (just idle reading, I had nothing to do with signing or approving contracts), and I found a section that had to do with trash removal. Essentially, if at any time our booth staff were found to be removing trash from the booth, the company would be fined $500, payable directly to the convention site. I asked about this, and was told that it was because the convention site was a union shop, and only people in the proper union could take out the trash, no matter how much had stacked up.
My father was in aerospace for the better part of 20 years, working for McDonnell-Douglas and then Boeing, and he complained about these same things. People that had others clock in for them so they wouldn't be found to be late (not that those that were ever got punished to any great extent), the same raises for people who had to redo their work two and three times on a regular basis, and a huge level of nepotism were but a few of the problems that he had. Things got better when he was transferred to the KC-10 and C-17 lines, as union credentials meant far less there than the ability to get it done right the first time, but he still had to deal with the other union issues.
Some unions do good things. Others just are full of themselves. Considering the egos present in IT, I fully expect that an IT union would be very much the latter.
I wonder if it will be visible from the Los Angeles area. I've seen rockets from Vandenberg in the sky, but they were night launches, so very easily seen.
I still guzzle V8 when I have it around. I can go through half-gallon bottle in a day easily, so I usually don't buy it because it's expensive to drink $4 worth of beverage in a day. (Milk and unsweetened iced tea make up the vast majority of what I drink.)
Ah. I haven't used WebKit browsers to any significant length yet. Safari is installed, but I've never done much more than tinker with it. I have Konquerer on my Linux systems, but I prefer Firefox over it so I never use it all that much.
Well, it's live now. In fact, I'm entering this on it.
It's simple, elegant, and blazingly fast. That said, I miss several of my add-ons on Firefox.
Hmm... I think this is unique to Chrome. I can resize the text box in which I'm typing. I don't see that on Firefox, so I presume that it's application-specific. Neat.
The original plan was to bring it back on a future shuttle mission for inclusion in the Smithsonian (hence the lack of a de-orbit thruster on the Hubble). While return of a satellite has been completed successfully, I think it was only done once or twice, and was ruled out for the Hubble years ago.
What good is a perfected worded book that is four or more years old, and irrelevant compared to internet resources, as the summary informs?
For high school classes, printed books of that age are just fine. How much have Windows, Mac, and even Linux changed in the last four years? Not enough to wipe away the basics. Look at the established reference for TCP/IP: it's nearly 15 years old. If they're teaching programming, a four-year-old textbook would be new enough for the basics of C, C++, Java, PHP, Perl, HTML, and a long list of other languages.
Relevance does not require the absolute latest version of everything, especially when preparing for the business world, where the version in use of a given program or language is often 3+ years old.
A hundred dollars for a trip that short (other than the whole underwater tunnel part) wouldn't work in the US. I'd pay $100 for Vegas or Phoenix from SoCal, but I'm not paying $100 to go to San Diego.
Not necessarily. If I can fly there and rent a car for less than it costs to take the train with my car, there will be no substantial market for it. This also presumes that the time difference is not significant. If it takes 12 hours to get there by train, but I can do whatever for those 12 hours, then it might compare to a one-stop cross-country flight, wherein flight time, layover, and airport entry and exit may reach 10+ hours. If it's 18+ hours, there has to be a significant discount over renting locally.
What is the average cargo rate on rail? I've found mention of a rate around $1300 to $1500 per standard shipping container, but I can't find anything more than that. There are certainly cases where I'd like to be able to take my car across the country, and even a shipping cost of $400 or so might be worth it, but I'm thinking that the cost would have to be more than that.
Right and wrong, in a very abstract sense, are those things that either advance or harm a society, respectively. What is perceived as an advance or harm will differ, sometimes greatly, from one society to the next. Some societies find all degrees of homicide as harm, whereas others make exceptions, ranging from self-defense to assassination to genocide. Similarly, some societies believe that it is wrong to treat a woman as anything other than private property, while others believe that it is wrong to grant a woman anything less than freedom equal to that of men, and still other societies even provide more rights and powers to women than to men.
I'm not sure that there are any truly universal definitions of right and wrong, but that does not stop me from seeing right and wrong based on my own sense of the words.
I really don't want NASA any more involved in the independent programs than absolutely necessary. These things tend to balloon to meet political objectives. "Project A gets $15 million in additional funding if it builds the engines in Backwater, WY." NASA assigns program managers, the PMs get staff, the staff needs support...
I'm happy to leave the commercial groups to their own means, even if it takes a little longer, to keep government out of it to the extent possible.
The shuttle is only one way of boosting the orbit. The ISS has thrusters on one of the modules that can do it (eats into the station's fuel supply, though). The Progress resupply vessels can also do it, and the ESA's new supply ship is built to do it, though I don't think they did it with the first one.
Most of them aren't young. I'm 33, and the majority are about my age or older. With one exception, the youngest is 30.
Even when I was 'having my fun,' I was smart enough not to talk about it out loud at work. Keys were sometimes passed along quietly, but that usually happened when walking between buildings. Bursting into a room announcing that you've found a download site for the movie being released this weekend is bad form, but it's happened a few times this year alone.
That's not quite true. She's a staunch Republican, but even so, she bucked the party on several issues, including helping kill the Bridge to Nowhere, boosting taxes on the oil industry, and vetoing a measure that would have prevented Alaska providing benefits to the partners of gay state employees. She also managed to defeat the incumbent Republican governor while much of the party actively fought her, pulling in 51% of the primary vote against two other opponents, something hard to do in US politics. She also managed to get the state's Republican Party head to resign when she reported him for working on party issues while on public time. She's apparently not willing to kowtow to the Party at the cost of her ethics.
Now, whether she's willing to cross ethical boundaries for other reasons is under investigation. McCain is in serious trouble if the independent prosecutor finds that she really did fire the state Commissioner of Public Safety for refusing to fire her brother-in-law during a contentious custody battle between him and her sister. If that ends up without a finding against her, though, she at least is unlikely to hurt him.
It looks to me like the VP candidates are balanced in terms of negatives (excepting perhaps the experience side), each with a possible black mark against them but mostly clean. I respect and admire Biden, but I'm interested to find out what Palin is like in more detail -- something I'm sure we'll be soon learning.
This is one of the things that I love about proxy firewalls. I have colleagues that try to run connections over port 80, and then get stopped because it's not HTTP. They come complain to me, and find a very unsympathetic ear.
I am bothered by the poor ethics of those around me. They think nothing of talking in the aisles about which BitTorrent sites get them the best movies, or how they only watch screeners or play cracked games because only stupid people pay for entertainment. They get frustrated when they run into refusals when trying to get the discs or keys for Microsoft software for which they have no clear need, and try to talk me or the other two people who do have access to them into giving it to them. I tell them that if they need it cheaply that bad they should get a TechNet subscription. They usually just wander off at that point, or sometimes storm off, as if they were somehow entitled to it.
I used to grab everything that I could off of various sites, pulling things down over Kazaa or eDonkey at the time, but I've left that in the past. I've got a job that pays well, and I know they're not underpaid.
I think that ethics in IT have slid dramatically downhill, so that the norm seems to be that people don't want to get caught, rather than not wanting to break the ethics guidelines in the first place. I'm not sure what exactly to do about it, other than try to set a good example. But even then, I've heard some suggesting quietly to others that I'm just hiding my own sins (hint to those people: make sure I'm not in the cubicle next to you when you talk about me). I'm at a loss at that point.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll back this. I bought some Eneloop batteries close to a year ago, and just popped into my camera a couple fresh out of the pack. They had enough charge for me to go through several hundred pictures, including a few dozen requiring the flash.
Changing the length of a second will end up changing almost everything in our lives. It would be an enormous undertaking, redefining, among many other things, electromagnetic wavelengths and the speed of light. Speed limits would change, computers would have to handle travel time calculations differently, and the length of the workday would change slightly.
It was hard enough to get the world to change to the metric system (with notable holdouts still remaining). Changing the very definition of one of the six core SI units would be nearly impossible.
Allegations are not (necessarily?) subject to perjury, so they're free on that point. If the take-down notices are being sent by attorneys, who are officers of the court, they may be subject to sanctions if the notices were knowingly improperly sent. Proving that to be the case would likely be difficult, though, as the attorneys could simply say that they misjudged the level of use, and believed it to be outside of fair use exception. Lacking some written documentation -- and attorney-client privilege would probably block airing of that -- it would never stand.
Legal insurance runs about $12 a month where I work, and they handle all of that contract review work. Salary surveys for the area are cheap, and usually no more than a quarter out of date.
And I really don't want some of the people around me making the same wages as everyone else, because they don't pull nearly the same load.
Here's one more thing an IT union would be able to do. It could help define best practices. As in "Nope, that software is not union-spec. If you want our guys to use it you're going to have to pay for their training."
IT moves a lot faster than carpentry or steam fitting. With the pace that some unions move, we'd still be standardized on Windows 2000 and Debian 3.0. It would prevent us from coming up with the kind of innovative solutions that help define our industry.
As for best practices, all I can see is an IT union standardizing on something like ITIL. We're going through this implementation where I work, and it's a major Charlie-Foxtrot. The layers of bureaucracy that have come into effect rival those of the two ISO shops where I've worked (both in the medical industry) but have far less logic. The only good side that I can see coming out of that mess is forcing ITIL to stop calling change requests RFCs (Requests for Change) since it overlaps with the much more integrated RFC (Request for Comment). I've had people get confused when I say that a change request (I refuse to call them RFCs) won't work because the RFC doesn't allow something to work that way.
Years ago, I saw my first direct evidence of how nit-picky union locations could get. I was helping to organize logistics for a convention where my employer would have a booth set up. I was looking over a contract while waiting for someone to come see me (just idle reading, I had nothing to do with signing or approving contracts), and I found a section that had to do with trash removal. Essentially, if at any time our booth staff were found to be removing trash from the booth, the company would be fined $500, payable directly to the convention site. I asked about this, and was told that it was because the convention site was a union shop, and only people in the proper union could take out the trash, no matter how much had stacked up.
It still strikes me as stupid.
My father was in aerospace for the better part of 20 years, working for McDonnell-Douglas and then Boeing, and he complained about these same things. People that had others clock in for them so they wouldn't be found to be late (not that those that were ever got punished to any great extent), the same raises for people who had to redo their work two and three times on a regular basis, and a huge level of nepotism were but a few of the problems that he had. Things got better when he was transferred to the KC-10 and C-17 lines, as union credentials meant far less there than the ability to get it done right the first time, but he still had to deal with the other union issues.
Some unions do good things. Others just are full of themselves. Considering the egos present in IT, I fully expect that an IT union would be very much the latter.
Actually, it's a 0.2.149.27 pre-release alpha.
I wonder if it will be visible from the Los Angeles area. I've seen rockets from Vandenberg in the sky, but they were night launches, so very easily seen.
Tomato soup doesn't have nearly as much salt.
I still guzzle V8 when I have it around. I can go through half-gallon bottle in a day easily, so I usually don't buy it because it's expensive to drink $4 worth of beverage in a day. (Milk and unsweetened iced tea make up the vast majority of what I drink.)
Ah. I haven't used WebKit browsers to any significant length yet. Safari is installed, but I've never done much more than tinker with it. I have Konquerer on my Linux systems, but I prefer Firefox over it so I never use it all that much.
Still cool.
Well, it's live now. In fact, I'm entering this on it.
It's simple, elegant, and blazingly fast. That said, I miss several of my add-ons on Firefox.
Hmm... I think this is unique to Chrome. I can resize the text box in which I'm typing. I don't see that on Firefox, so I presume that it's application-specific. Neat.
I dunno... A day or two with a Sawzall and it might fit again. :)
The original plan was to bring it back on a future shuttle mission for inclusion in the Smithsonian (hence the lack of a de-orbit thruster on the Hubble). While return of a satellite has been completed successfully, I think it was only done once or twice, and was ruled out for the Hubble years ago.
What good is a perfected worded book that is four or more years old, and irrelevant compared to internet resources, as the summary informs?
For high school classes, printed books of that age are just fine. How much have Windows, Mac, and even Linux changed in the last four years? Not enough to wipe away the basics. Look at the established reference for TCP/IP: it's nearly 15 years old. If they're teaching programming, a four-year-old textbook would be new enough for the basics of C, C++, Java, PHP, Perl, HTML, and a long list of other languages.
Relevance does not require the absolute latest version of everything, especially when preparing for the business world, where the version in use of a given program or language is often 3+ years old.
A hundred dollars for a trip that short (other than the whole underwater tunnel part) wouldn't work in the US. I'd pay $100 for Vegas or Phoenix from SoCal, but I'm not paying $100 to go to San Diego.
Not necessarily. If I can fly there and rent a car for less than it costs to take the train with my car, there will be no substantial market for it. This also presumes that the time difference is not significant. If it takes 12 hours to get there by train, but I can do whatever for those 12 hours, then it might compare to a one-stop cross-country flight, wherein flight time, layover, and airport entry and exit may reach 10+ hours. If it's 18+ hours, there has to be a significant discount over renting locally.
What is the average cargo rate on rail? I've found mention of a rate around $1300 to $1500 per standard shipping container, but I can't find anything more than that. There are certainly cases where I'd like to be able to take my car across the country, and even a shipping cost of $400 or so might be worth it, but I'm thinking that the cost would have to be more than that.
Right and wrong, in a very abstract sense, are those things that either advance or harm a society, respectively. What is perceived as an advance or harm will differ, sometimes greatly, from one society to the next. Some societies find all degrees of homicide as harm, whereas others make exceptions, ranging from self-defense to assassination to genocide. Similarly, some societies believe that it is wrong to treat a woman as anything other than private property, while others believe that it is wrong to grant a woman anything less than freedom equal to that of men, and still other societies even provide more rights and powers to women than to men.
I'm not sure that there are any truly universal definitions of right and wrong, but that does not stop me from seeing right and wrong based on my own sense of the words.
I really don't want NASA any more involved in the independent programs than absolutely necessary. These things tend to balloon to meet political objectives. "Project A gets $15 million in additional funding if it builds the engines in Backwater, WY." NASA assigns program managers, the PMs get staff, the staff needs support...
I'm happy to leave the commercial groups to their own means, even if it takes a little longer, to keep government out of it to the extent possible.
The shuttle is only one way of boosting the orbit. The ISS has thrusters on one of the modules that can do it (eats into the station's fuel supply, though). The Progress resupply vessels can also do it, and the ESA's new supply ship is built to do it, though I don't think they did it with the first one.
Most of them aren't young. I'm 33, and the majority are about my age or older. With one exception, the youngest is 30.
Even when I was 'having my fun,' I was smart enough not to talk about it out loud at work. Keys were sometimes passed along quietly, but that usually happened when walking between buildings. Bursting into a room announcing that you've found a download site for the movie being released this weekend is bad form, but it's happened a few times this year alone.
TFGH
It opens up many more keys for the ring and little fingers to utilize.
I actually use TFVH, with G as a quick-action key, but everyone I know things I'm insane to do so.
Nary a rebellious thought in her head.
That's not quite true. She's a staunch Republican, but even so, she bucked the party on several issues, including helping kill the Bridge to Nowhere, boosting taxes on the oil industry, and vetoing a measure that would have prevented Alaska providing benefits to the partners of gay state employees. She also managed to defeat the incumbent Republican governor while much of the party actively fought her, pulling in 51% of the primary vote against two other opponents, something hard to do in US politics. She also managed to get the state's Republican Party head to resign when she reported him for working on party issues while on public time. She's apparently not willing to kowtow to the Party at the cost of her ethics.
Now, whether she's willing to cross ethical boundaries for other reasons is under investigation. McCain is in serious trouble if the independent prosecutor finds that she really did fire the state Commissioner of Public Safety for refusing to fire her brother-in-law during a contentious custody battle between him and her sister. If that ends up without a finding against her, though, she at least is unlikely to hurt him.
It looks to me like the VP candidates are balanced in terms of negatives (excepting perhaps the experience side), each with a possible black mark against them but mostly clean. I respect and admire Biden, but I'm interested to find out what Palin is like in more detail -- something I'm sure we'll be soon learning.
This is one of the things that I love about proxy firewalls. I have colleagues that try to run connections over port 80, and then get stopped because it's not HTTP. They come complain to me, and find a very unsympathetic ear.
I am bothered by the poor ethics of those around me. They think nothing of talking in the aisles about which BitTorrent sites get them the best movies, or how they only watch screeners or play cracked games because only stupid people pay for entertainment. They get frustrated when they run into refusals when trying to get the discs or keys for Microsoft software for which they have no clear need, and try to talk me or the other two people who do have access to them into giving it to them. I tell them that if they need it cheaply that bad they should get a TechNet subscription. They usually just wander off at that point, or sometimes storm off, as if they were somehow entitled to it.
I used to grab everything that I could off of various sites, pulling things down over Kazaa or eDonkey at the time, but I've left that in the past. I've got a job that pays well, and I know they're not underpaid.
I think that ethics in IT have slid dramatically downhill, so that the norm seems to be that people don't want to get caught, rather than not wanting to break the ethics guidelines in the first place. I'm not sure what exactly to do about it, other than try to set a good example. But even then, I've heard some suggesting quietly to others that I'm just hiding my own sins (hint to those people: make sure I'm not in the cubicle next to you when you talk about me). I'm at a loss at that point.