But.... but... but... where in your mythical Nogwegian system is there room for vote-hungry politicians to fry poor negro prisoners? Answer me that! Why should we have a prison system that doesn't support our hard-bribe-taking politicians and instead is concerned with things like lowering crime rates and improving society?
What sort of a country do you think America is anyway?
You'd need to pack a fully self sustainable colony.
not a problem - I've got one on a planet near here somewhere. Now where'd I put it... ah, got it... blow the dust off. Oh dear. It's looking a bit tarnished and is starting to run hot. I hope it's not broken.
as I work at the Solar Data Analysis Center, and most of the folks I work with have phds in solar physics, astronomy or similar, the excuse just doesn't work. (and my boss reads BOFH)
Could be worse.
Actually, that's likely to be a pretty good sign. If your boss reads and enjoys the Good Bastard, then it's likely that s/he has a functioning sense of humour. which is a good start.
Meanwhile... I haven't read any Bastard for weeks, and I feel the need...
(nowadays we need URLs so we use short company names which often make no sense; in those days we used long company names which likewise didn't make much sense but were at least grandiose)
Ah, slightly different to the legends I'd remembered. If I was a student of computing history, I'd sharpen the edge of my keyboard and commit seppuku. But I'm not. So I won't.
Without reading the articles... Kildall and CP/M were subsets of Digital Research of "DR-DOS", GEM and such things?
I've been watching the reports for something like 8 years now. It did seem a bit peculiar that such a high proportion of the organisms would be caught dividing in a rock type that seemed to be the product of more-or-less continuous deposition. But then again, if they're Thiomargarita-like nektonic protozoa in mid-division, mid-water... well that's pretty weird too.
But a fascinating report, again, from these significant fossils. The very fact that they repeatedly fail to fit into our understanding of life... just goes to show us that we don't (yet) really understand our world.
Slashdot's NSFW, Rule-34, boner and kiddie-p0rn jokes... what a lack of surprise.
What - direct intra-muscular injection of Valium into the perineum (underside of your ball bag, in plain English) doesn't work for you? Well, that make you pretty unusual - it works for most people.
Then again, the placebo treatment (approaching the engorged member with a big syringe filled with saline) has a pretty good success rate too.
With modern ROV technology, I doubt it'd be that much harder to survey the entire sea-bed than to survey the entire moon (it'd be slower because of the medium, and also because the earth is much bigger than the moon even if you only survey the underwater parts).
You wouldn't use ROV technology - or at least, I wouldn't use ROV technology.
Note : an ROV, as the term is conventionally used in the industry for which it was invented, is a mobile, self propelled platform capable of carrying both sensors (cameras, lights, sonar, ultrasonic distance finders...) AND actuators (grippers, cutters, turning devices, sometimes welding equipment) and moving them around in the sea, being powered and controlled controlled by people on the surface.
The actuators for a start are unnecessary for survey work - which halves the individual complexity of a machine. Much of the steering equipment is also unnecessary ; another substantial saving. Lights and cameras... produce pretty pictures, but only have depth-of-view of a few 10s of metres, limiting the spacing you can apply between machines.
I'd start from a different place : take an old, off the shelf seismic survey boat. Replace the 4-16 streamers of geophones, each up to 10s of km long, with an array of 10s-of-km long cables, each towing a relatively dumb side-scan sonar sonde with some side-to-side and up-and-down steering capabilities when under tow (this, so far, is an existing suite of technology ; it's used for surveying pipeline routes, existing submarine equipment, etc).
Side-scan sonar can have an effective range of up to a kilometre or so, depending on distance from seabed. For that, you need the up-down steering and some logic (on surface or in-water ; "meh"). To space the sondes laterally (compared to the route of tow) you need the lateral steerage ; you might also need to dedicate the most lateral strings of the boat to sondes that have GPS/ GLONASS/ whatever receivers above-water and positioning sounders under water (again - this technology already exists in the seismic industry) ; by triangulation form the sounders, you can have very-fine grained positioning of the side-scan sondes and position them where you want them.
I think that's about it. The technology to do (about) a 10km swathe at some 10knots, to nearly arbitrary depth (cable length, topography roughness being the main constraints), with better than 0.1m resolution and few-metre accuracy is more-or less off-the shelf.
Who's going to pay? That's the big question.
The next step up, if it was worth going there, would be to get rid of the towing/ data storage vessel by using autonomous vehicles. Unfortunately, that means that either you only measure where the currents take you, or you have to regularly retrieve and re-fuel (re-charge) your "autonomous" vehicles. Which renders the "autonomous" idea a bit moot.
I know people who do sea-bed surveying for a living. It's mostly horrendously tedious.
It's also not cheap.
Looking for "interesting stuff"... you can do coarsely from the surface, where "stuff>10m" might be a target, using a long-range, low resolution sonar combined with magnetometry (assuming that "ferruginous" = "interesting"), but again the days-at-sea are not cheap. And that's why it's only covered a relatively small part of the oceans.
You could, I guess, put a sonar sonde on a cable, and trail it behind an aircraft (with a magnetometer, why not?)... but flying hours are not cheap either. Though you may get larger area/ lower resolution surveying done faster. (Didn't the military do this when sub-hunting in the past?)
How does that old joke go? Resolution, coverage, low cost - choose any two.
Anyone who has the skills to write a BASIC interpreter will also be someone who thinks BASIC is a POS, and won't have any interest at all in doing such a thing without a handsome paycheck to compensate them for that time lost.
While you do have a point, there is at least one significant counterpoint data : the UberBorg Gates.
Accepting that it was a few years ago (before I started programming even!), but Gates did start his business by writing a BASIC interpreter - for Altairs, I think, but it may have been a more generic 6502-usable program - and selling sufficient to keep the food on the table and pay for at least one set of plane tickets to meet IBM. The rest, as they say, is history. And over the succeeding years, Gate's company kept on churning out variations on the theme of BASIC despite varying (and increasing) degrees of opprobrium at the time, until... well, I'd have to search to find out. I never used the piece(s)-of-shit BASICs included in various Office products (more than I absolutely had to), but they were there until I stopped having to fuck with the innards of broken Word documents in the mid-00s. That suggests that someone influential at M$ thought that BASIC was important. The Borg Himself is the most likely head to wear that hat.
Whether the Borg could actually write a BASIC interpreter himself these days, I neither know nor really care. But I wouldn't be surprised if he still could if he wanted to, onto bare metal ; and that he might think it a worthwhile idea. But it would always be more efficient use of his time to hire someone (several someone-s) to do the job for him. Spending $5M-worth of his time to do what he could get done by contractors for $0.2M would be an irrational use of resources (which few people have seriously accused him of deliberately doing).
(No, I'm not a Gates fan-boi. But I am realistic.)
probably the most embarrassing part of this whole fiasco for the Japanese government has been the fact that in February the whole site supposedly underwent an extensive safety evaluation by the government
I hadn't heard that before.
Why do you think it's unusual for a plant to pass a safety inspection shortly before undergoing catastrophic failure(s)? It's got to happen some times. The earthquake hadn't been predicted (with any credibility) before the event (there are no credible techniques for earthquake prediction better than "this is an earthquake-prone area"), and it wasn't in the habit of burning to the ground on a weekly basis, or throwing people to their deaths from the roof of the machine halls on alternate Fridays. So that would suggest that their routine safety procedures were within specification.
Whether there were problems with their "safety case", major emergency procedures etc is a much wider question. But the absence of a large body count in the workforce says they didn't do too badly on day-to-day safety.
Parallel case : not long after I started working, I flew out to a worksite passing over the Piper Alpha oil installation. A few days later, on 2nd July 1988, the Piper passed it's annual routine safety inspection ( I forget the inspector's name... Richard [something]... still in the business 6 years later). On 6th July, a gas leak (due to inadequate maintenance management) started to tear apart the platform. From my worksite, we could see the flames reflecting off the clouds as 167 of my colleagues burned to death (including a couple of friends). The safety inspection only covered whether the maintenance management system was working as designed (which it was), not whether the maintenance management system was fit for the tasks it was meant to perform (which weren't even clearly defined, and which it failed at, abysmally).
Safety management is a lot more complex when you get close to it than it appears from a distance. The Law of Unintended Consequences has killed many people over the years. Fortunately, it looks as if the additional body count from the Fukushima fuck up isn't going to be that large, compared to the earthquake.
That's a challenge - I'd have to find suitable stock paper, and steal one of the big printers at work... or would I? An A3 sheet should do the job (sorry) OK.
Find some nicer Satanist friends. My Satanist friends have given me presents in the past - a nice half-bottle of whisky from one, and a blowjob from the other. Though what she wanted to do with the semen, I never did ask.
likes to use Jewish and Christian wrapping paper for kicks?
Or for arse-wipes?
I know, I know ; it's not very absorbent, it doesn't separate conveniently into useful size sheets, and it tends to form sharp-edged creases which can be... irritating... after a week of eating and drinking too much and getting "over doing it diarrhoea". Better to stick to (ouch!) those packets of shit-wipe that get left in hotel rooms. At least they're in convenient rip-out packages. They're getting rarer though - does anyone know Mr Gideon? Ask him to re-stock?
Items like perpetual motion machines are automatically rejected as a category though.
I think that the patent system that applies here allows perpetual motion machines to be considered iff (if-and-only-if) they are accompanied by a working model. Which would be dangerous, since some designs for perpetual motion machines may involve positive feedback loops, which could turn them into weapons of mass destruction. Seriously mass destruction : more Big Bang than "Little Boy" or "Fat Man".
Prior to taking the action, they gave everyone fair warning with 'leaflets.'
And I wonder just how they produced those leaflets? With DTP software on a PC, source of obscenity?
So, they're using obscenity-producing machines to produce their warnings about obscenity. Which is getting perilously close to infinite loop territory, followed by letting out the "Magic Smoke".
Lets see if I can give it another push : some people would find the idea of destroying other people's property an obscenity. So they're using obscene machines to produce obscene documents denouncing the use of obscene machines to produce obscene documents denouncing the use of obscene
If you are concerned about slander charges, you can use a high-end cryptography like ROT13 so that only uberleet (sorry, "uber133t" ?) haxors can haz decode it. (Have I got the right decade of English?)
Behind such secure communication channels, the insecure hosting providers will have no way of knowing who is talking about them.
[/sarcasm]
As you're setting up your computer for your end-of-shift shut down (including if you're just going to leave it to go to screen saver), switch on the "Out of Orifice Auto Reply" with some appropriate comment.
It probably helps if you have a phone that doesn't do email. If your work supplies you with a phone that does do email and is set up for your works account... well, that's Work's equipment, and you'd no more think of taking it out of the building than you would think of taking your boots, hard hat, coveralls and gloves home with you.
And if your Boss wants to insist on you taking the phone home, then you can get his instructions in writing (to show to the security guard as proof that you've got authorisation to take this Work property off-site). Then ask Human Remains what the insurance situation is, telling them "I'm in the hobby of painting murals on the ceiling at home, standing on a unicycle above a floor strewn in bear-traps. They're artistically essential. If I fall off my unicycle answering a work-related email in my un-paid time off, is Work liable?" (It's a trick question : of course Work is liable, and you then get into a horrible mess about Work having to pay you something for modifying your home to suit their policies... which is a taxable benefit, so Payroll get involved... and HR will tell your Boss to fuck off. While you're trying to follow the rules to comply with your Boss.)
You can do an awful lot to follow the rules while not actually following the rules. In British English, it's sometimes called a "work to rule". Most rule sets are unrealistic.
but not the $80 per month plus minutes a smart phone would cost (and when my daughters call, they talk a long time).
So what if your daughter talk for a long time? It's their phone bill they're racking up, not yours. Let them.
But use a phone with a loudspeaker function, or use a bluetooth hands-free car device or something though, so you can get on with doing something while they're wittering on. (By implication, they talk a lot without actually saying anything worth listening to, otherwise you'd not be grudging the cost.)
... then s/he's either a fool, or is a liar who is taking you for a fool.
A politician (assuming that you live in some sort of representative democracy), would be able to vote for the passage of Bill X, but unless s/he is literally the man with the casting vote, s/he can't personally ensure the passage of any Bill.
The chamber's Speaker (or whoever has a casting vote in hung votes) may be an exception, but that puts immense power in the hands of one person.
Next up, a project to cool servers by having Norwegian Blue Parrots flapping their wings.
However, to keep the correct geometrical relationship between psittacine aerial manoeuvring devices (wings) and servers, it would be necessary to constrain the movement of the parrots from their optimal placements. This could well be achieved by impact-driven restraints passing through the podial support apparatus and into the underlying xylem rods.
Well, that would be my justification for nailing them to their perches anyway.
(This is, of course a joke. In any production implementation of this cooling technology, you'd use a restraint that could be released and re-set to allow for change-out of the dinosaur cooling units, if for example, they became tired after a long squawk, or shuffled off this mortal coil. Though why the perches would be helical, and how they'd shuffle with their feet nailed (or otherwise restrained) in place... escapes me.)
Slashdot Mirror
What sort of a country do you think America is anyway?
Nordic?
Foreign ! ?
not a problem - I've got one on a planet near here somewhere. Now where'd I put it ... ah, got it ... blow the dust off. Oh dear. It's looking a bit tarnished and is starting to run hot. I hope it's not broken.
I don't even need to invoke Rule 34 - it's that bloody obvious!
Could be worse.
Actually, that's likely to be a pretty good sign. If your boss reads and enjoys the Good Bastard, then it's likely that s/he has a functioning sense of humour. which is a good start.
Meanwhile ... I haven't read any Bastard for weeks, and I feel the need ...
Today "AMI" ; yesterday "American Megatrends Incorporated".
If I worked in the printing ink industry, I know which name I'd be more rather more favourably disposed towards.
No, seriously!
Without reading the articles ... Kildall and CP/M were subsets of Digital Research of "DR-DOS", GEM and such things?
I've been watching the reports for something like 8 years now. It did seem a bit peculiar that such a high proportion of the organisms would be caught dividing in a rock type that seemed to be the product of more-or-less continuous deposition. But then again, if they're Thiomargarita-like nektonic protozoa in mid-division, mid-water ... well that's pretty weird too.
But a fascinating report, again, from these significant fossils. The very fact that they repeatedly fail to fit into our understanding of life ... just goes to show us that we don't (yet) really understand our world.
Slashdot's NSFW, Rule-34, boner and kiddie-p0rn jokes ... what a lack of surprise.
What - direct intra-muscular injection of Valium into the perineum (underside of your ball bag, in plain English) doesn't work for you? Well, that make you pretty unusual - it works for most people.
Then again, the placebo treatment (approaching the engorged member with a big syringe filled with saline) has a pretty good success rate too.
You wouldn't use ROV technology - or at least, I wouldn't use ROV technology.
Note : an ROV, as the term is conventionally used in the industry for which it was invented, is a mobile, self propelled platform capable of carrying both sensors (cameras, lights, sonar, ultrasonic distance finders ...) AND actuators (grippers, cutters, turning devices, sometimes welding equipment) and moving them around in the sea, being powered and controlled controlled by people on the surface.
The actuators for a start are unnecessary for survey work - which halves the individual complexity of a machine. Much of the steering equipment is also unnecessary ; another substantial saving. Lights and cameras ... produce pretty pictures, but only have depth-of-view of a few 10s of metres, limiting the spacing you can apply between machines.
I'd start from a different place : take an old, off the shelf seismic survey boat. Replace the 4-16 streamers of geophones, each up to 10s of km long, with an array of 10s-of-km long cables, each towing a relatively dumb side-scan sonar sonde with some side-to-side and up-and-down steering capabilities when under tow (this, so far, is an existing suite of technology ; it's used for surveying pipeline routes, existing submarine equipment, etc).
Side-scan sonar can have an effective range of up to a kilometre or so, depending on distance from seabed. For that, you need the up-down steering and some logic (on surface or in-water ; "meh"). To space the sondes laterally (compared to the route of tow) you need the lateral steerage ; you might also need to dedicate the most lateral strings of the boat to sondes that have GPS/ GLONASS/ whatever receivers above-water and positioning sounders under water (again - this technology already exists in the seismic industry) ; by triangulation form the sounders, you can have very-fine grained positioning of the side-scan sondes and position them where you want them.
I think that's about it. The technology to do (about) a 10km swathe at some 10knots, to nearly arbitrary depth (cable length, topography roughness being the main constraints), with better than 0.1m resolution and few-metre accuracy is more-or less off-the shelf.
Who's going to pay? That's the big question.
The next step up, if it was worth going there, would be to get rid of the towing/ data storage vessel by using autonomous vehicles. Unfortunately, that means that either you only measure where the currents take you, or you have to regularly retrieve and re-fuel (re-charge) your "autonomous" vehicles. Which renders the "autonomous" idea a bit moot.
I know people who do sea-bed surveying for a living. It's mostly horrendously tedious.
It's also not cheap.
Looking for "interesting stuff" ... you can do coarsely from the surface, where "stuff>10m" might be a target, using a long-range, low resolution sonar combined with magnetometry (assuming that "ferruginous" = "interesting"), but again the days-at-sea are not cheap. And that's why it's only covered a relatively small part of the oceans.
You could, I guess, put a sonar sonde on a cable, and trail it behind an aircraft (with a magnetometer, why not?) ... but flying hours are not cheap either. Though you may get larger area/ lower resolution surveying done faster. (Didn't the military do this when sub-hunting in the past?)
How does that old joke go? Resolution, coverage, low cost - choose any two.
While you do have a point, there is at least one significant counterpoint data : the UberBorg Gates.
Accepting that it was a few years ago (before I started programming even!), but Gates did start his business by writing a BASIC interpreter - for Altairs, I think, but it may have been a more generic 6502-usable program - and selling sufficient to keep the food on the table and pay for at least one set of plane tickets to meet IBM. The rest, as they say, is history. And over the succeeding years, Gate's company kept on churning out variations on the theme of BASIC despite varying (and increasing) degrees of opprobrium at the time, until ... well, I'd have to search to find out. I never used the piece(s)-of-shit BASICs included in various Office products (more than I absolutely had to), but they were there until I stopped having to fuck with the innards of broken Word documents in the mid-00s. That suggests that someone influential at M$ thought that BASIC was important. The Borg Himself is the most likely head to wear that hat.
Whether the Borg could actually write a BASIC interpreter himself these days, I neither know nor really care. But I wouldn't be surprised if he still could if he wanted to, onto bare metal ; and that he might think it a worthwhile idea. But it would always be more efficient use of his time to hire someone (several someone-s) to do the job for him. Spending $5M-worth of his time to do what he could get done by contractors for $0.2M would be an irrational use of resources (which few people have seriously accused him of deliberately doing).
(No, I'm not a Gates fan-boi. But I am realistic.)
I hadn't heard that before.
Why do you think it's unusual for a plant to pass a safety inspection shortly before undergoing catastrophic failure(s)? It's got to happen some times. The earthquake hadn't been predicted (with any credibility) before the event (there are no credible techniques for earthquake prediction better than "this is an earthquake-prone area"), and it wasn't in the habit of burning to the ground on a weekly basis, or throwing people to their deaths from the roof of the machine halls on alternate Fridays. So that would suggest that their routine safety procedures were within specification.
Whether there were problems with their "safety case", major emergency procedures etc is a much wider question. But the absence of a large body count in the workforce says they didn't do too badly on day-to-day safety.
Parallel case : not long after I started working, I flew out to a worksite passing over the Piper Alpha oil installation. A few days later, on 2nd July 1988, the Piper passed it's annual routine safety inspection ( I forget the inspector's name ... Richard [something] ... still in the business 6 years later). On 6th July, a gas leak (due to inadequate maintenance management) started to tear apart the platform. From my worksite, we could see the flames reflecting off the clouds as 167 of my colleagues burned to death (including a couple of friends).
The safety inspection only covered whether the maintenance management system was working as designed (which it was), not whether the maintenance management system was fit for the tasks it was meant to perform (which weren't even clearly defined, and which it failed at, abysmally).
Safety management is a lot more complex when you get close to it than it appears from a distance. The Law of Unintended Consequences has killed many people over the years. Fortunately, it looks as if the additional body count from the Fukushima fuck up isn't going to be that large, compared to the earthquake.
Goatse wrapping paper (see upthread) with a strategically placed mound of spaghetti to ... umm ... enhance the appearance of the meat ... balls.
Yeuch.
I'll use it for sending presents to politicians. And priests.
Or perhaps "appreciate" would be a better word.
That's a challenge - I'd have to find suitable stock paper, and steal one of the big printers at work ... or would I? An A3 sheet should do the job (sorry) OK.
That is a challenge to work towards.
I'll ask Amazon.
Google doesn't admit to it's existence. Yet.
Find some nicer Satanist friends. My Satanist friends have given me presents in the past - a nice half-bottle of whisky from one, and a blowjob from the other. Though what she wanted to do with the semen, I never did ask.
Or for arse-wipes?
I know, I know ; it's not very absorbent, it doesn't separate conveniently into useful size sheets, and it tends to form sharp-edged creases which can be ... irritating ... after a week of eating and drinking too much and getting "over doing it diarrhoea". Better to stick to (ouch!) those packets of shit-wipe that get left in hotel rooms. At least they're in convenient rip-out packages. They're getting rarer though - does anyone know Mr Gideon? Ask him to re-stock?
I think that the patent system that applies here allows perpetual motion machines to be considered iff (if-and-only-if) they are accompanied by a working model. Which would be dangerous, since some designs for perpetual motion machines may involve positive feedback loops, which could turn them into weapons of mass destruction. Seriously mass destruction : more Big Bang than "Little Boy" or "Fat Man".
I don't know about your patent system though.
And I wonder just how they produced those leaflets? With DTP software on a PC, source of obscenity?
So, they're using obscenity-producing machines to produce their warnings about obscenity. Which is getting perilously close to infinite loop territory, followed by letting out the "Magic Smoke".
Lets see if I can give it another push : some people would find the idea of destroying other people's property an obscenity. So they're using obscene machines to produce obscene documents denouncing the use of obscene machines to produce obscene documents denouncing the use of obscene
"£!^$£%&%*&*(^ [CARRIER LOST]
If you are concerned about slander charges, you can use a high-end cryptography like ROT13 so that only uberleet (sorry, "uber133t" ?) haxors can haz decode it. (Have I got the right decade of English?)
Behind such secure communication channels, the insecure hosting providers will have no way of knowing who is talking about them. [/sarcasm]
It probably helps if you have a phone that doesn't do email. If your work supplies you with a phone that does do email and is set up for your works account ... well, that's Work's equipment, and you'd no more think of taking it out of the building than you would think of taking your boots, hard hat, coveralls and gloves home with you.
And if your Boss wants to insist on you taking the phone home, then you can get his instructions in writing (to show to the security guard as proof that you've got authorisation to take this Work property off-site). Then ask Human Remains what the insurance situation is, telling them "I'm in the hobby of painting murals on the ceiling at home, standing on a unicycle above a floor strewn in bear-traps. They're artistically essential. If I fall off my unicycle answering a work-related email in my un-paid time off, is Work liable?" (It's a trick question : of course Work is liable, and you then get into a horrible mess about Work having to pay you something for modifying your home to suit their policies ... which is a taxable benefit, so Payroll get involved ... and HR will tell your Boss to fuck off. While you're trying to follow the rules to comply with your Boss.)
You can do an awful lot to follow the rules while not actually following the rules. In British English, it's sometimes called a "work to rule". Most rule sets are unrealistic.
So what if your daughter talk for a long time? It's their phone bill they're racking up, not yours. Let them.
But use a phone with a loudspeaker function, or use a bluetooth hands-free car device or something though, so you can get on with doing something while they're wittering on. (By implication, they talk a lot without actually saying anything worth listening to, otherwise you'd not be grudging the cost.)
... then s/he's either a fool, or is a liar who is taking you for a fool.
A politician (assuming that you live in some sort of representative democracy), would be able to vote for the passage of Bill X, but unless s/he is literally the man with the casting vote, s/he can't personally ensure the passage of any Bill.
The chamber's Speaker (or whoever has a casting vote in hung votes) may be an exception, but that puts immense power in the hands of one person.
However, to keep the correct geometrical relationship between psittacine aerial manoeuvring devices (wings) and servers, it would be necessary to constrain the movement of the parrots from their optimal placements. This could well be achieved by impact-driven restraints passing through the podial support apparatus and into the underlying xylem rods.
Well, that would be my justification for nailing them to their perches anyway.
(This is, of course a joke. In any production implementation of this cooling technology, you'd use a restraint that could be released and re-set to allow for change-out of the dinosaur cooling units, if for example, they became tired after a long squawk, or shuffled off this mortal coil. Though why the perches would be helical, and how they'd shuffle with their feet nailed (or otherwise restrained) in place ... escapes me.)
Most men don't. The penis gets in the way, and anything that does get learned is rapidly corroded away by testosterone.
But unlike SB-C, the Koreans aren't joking.