What the fuck would I need cooling for? Do you think I choose to live in one of those places which are excessively hot? I work in those places, sure ; if you pay me well enough to put up with that sort of shit.
or refrigerator breaks,
Fridges are so cheap as to not be worth repairing. And I've never in my life seen one stop working. (If you live in hot climates and have such problems, well that's just another reason for not living in such shitholes.)
you should fix it yourself, and not call a trained professional.
Professionals are available. Next week. At high cost. They're only to be resorted to if you can't diagnose the problem yourself, get the necessary parts, and do the work for less. (Which for some things, particularly mains gas, you can't do without being a certified worker and presenting your certificates as you buy the parts. That really does go beyond the cost-benefit curve.)
And when your car breaks, grab a book and a wrench and get busy.
No, fuckwit, you don't "grab a wrench and get busy". You examine the symptoms, work out what the problem is, and get busy if your time is cheaper than getting a spanner jockey (as you seem proud to be) to spanner it. Which for some tasks works out one way, and for other tasks works out the other way. And of course, it depends on whether you're on leave or on standby pay.
And hope if you fall off the roof, you can remain conscious so you can operate on yourself.
If you're dumbfuck enough to go up onto a roof to work without the skills to protect yourself against falling, then you should not be in anyone's gene pool and particularly not mine. Collect your Darwin Award on the way down.
Fact is that no one person can be skilled in every field.
Indisputably.
And if you've not got sufficient skills to negotiate a field, then you shouldn't fucking get into it. So, if you've not got the skills to use a computer safely on the Internet, don't fucking do it. Or use a bootable-CD distribution and keep all your data in "the cloud" with your access credentials written in a diary. In big letters.
So, guess you are a geek with one skill, sort of like a trained seal blowing on a horn or balancing a ball on your nose. A one trick pony.
What makes you think that I'm a geek? I didn't get to make significant use of a computer until I was in the last year of my degree. I've learned various skills on computers, while also learning how to build instrumentation control panels, gas detection and analysis systems, install power and signal wiring to Lloyds and ABS's differing requirements in Zones 0, 1, and 2 (according to their slightly differing definitions), as well as enough mechanicals to install the sensors themselves onto whatever machinery is used at this location, how to survey sites to plan the installation of the equipment. And that is before I actually start to do my day-job.
But then again, that's probably why I get paid enough that it is a genuine calculation as to whether it is worth my time to do a particular piece of work, or whether to get a professional bodger to come in and do it while I do something more profitable.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be hunted down in the way armed forces are targeting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda."
What - getting into interesting bedtime situations with several Swedish women? That's how Osama bin Assange is being hunted?
I could handle some of that hunting - and I hope that my person-handling skills are better than Assange's to lead to a more satisfactory outcome. For the three of us.
Make [...] an easy, as in click and install, thing
Consider it as evolution in action : those who don't have the gumption as adults to have a reasonable understanding of their important services and how to manage them, get thrown to the wolves. I mean, "thrown to the advertisers."
Which makes sense if you are on the outskirts of the blast radius because the flying debris is more dangerous than anything else at that moment.
Having grown up in the outer parts of the blast radius for a megaton strike on one foreign missile base, and well within the comparable blast radius for another foreign missile base, we always expected (still do expect, when I visit the family) that if we registered our flash-shadow being burned into the wall in front of us, then we'd got a couple of seconds before the next bomb went off in front of us, and that we were about to see what evaporating concrete looks like. In either case, we'd be dead from the radiation, but just waiting to drop.
These days I only really have to worry about a blast from one direction. Unfortunately that blast will be trying to dig out a military station that was built into a 30m deep granite quarry, then roofed over. That's going to be a big one.
Nuclear war doesn't worry me - it's not going to hurt much or take very long to die.
that thick crust of ice on Europa. Yes, it'll be a pretty long time before that happens, but I'll be waiting nonetheless. I find it very hard to believe that there isn't life there.
While I agree with the general sentiment, unfortunately I have to point out that we have no evidence of any form of life anywhere in the universe other than on Earth. So while SF (and not-so-science-Fiction) is good entertainment, in our day-to-day lives we have to work on the assumption that we are the only life-bearing planet in the observable universe, and that our species as the most influential one on the planet bears responsibility if we destroy that.
but not enough to explain why BP has so many more violations than the others. Certainly that doesn't explain why BP has an unusually high rate of documented accidents.
Speaking as someone inside the industry, I'd say that is probably more due to them wasting less effort on covering up incidents and generating obfuscating statistics.
Yes, BP do have significant numbers of incidents. But at least amongst the BP personnel and contractors I've worked with over the decades, they're not considered remarkably bad ; not bad enough to refuse to go to work for them at least. And no-one with any experience in the industry ever believed that the statistics are representative of reality. You say it yourself : "documented accidents" (my emphasis).
TransOcean have spent the last 6 months on an intense programme of generating safety compliance reports from their global workforce. If you don't produce your one report per day, then you're in danger of getting the sack, or being NRB'd (Not Required Back) if you're a contractor. It's almost as if TransOcean can sense that their "safety culture" is going to come under scrutiny in the near future. TransOcean owned (and more importantly, serviced and maintained) one of the critical pieces of equipment that failed in late February 2010. Hmmm.
I wonder what is happening in the MMO (if that's the name of the agency)? You know : the civil servants who agreed to allow BP and TransOcean to continue the last 6 weeks of operations on the well with that vital safety equipment unable to function to any better than 65% of it's minimum capability. [Sorry if I've got the name of the agency wrong - it's all the business of foreigners and yet another government and their regulatory authority. I always have a sinking feeling of doom when I'm "reassured" by a toolpusher that "we're going to run this operation as tightly as we would do back at home in the States". Because I value my job, I bite my tongue ; but I feel the temptation to say "you mean that you intend to continue to allow an average of one person a week to be killed in your jurisdiction." It's not encouraging.]
On the subject of "not encouraging", the fire drill completed the platform's non-essential personnel muster in 9 minutes, but we then spent another 30 minutes in the horizontal snow drilling in loading lifeboats (because in drills only 10 people at a time are allowed into a boat). Drills are important, even at the risk of hypothermia.
And now - all flights cancelled. So it's time to shoot some aliens.
to stay away from the mindless consumerism that defines today's society.
My immediate family and I don't buy presents for any of the "holiday seasons". We offer ourselves things of no merchant value, such as
Pinko Commie subversive prevrets. Y'all should hang. Not hang your heads in shame, just hang from the Strange Fruit tree, with the rest of the "fruits".
[/sarcasm]
Note here that most experts are say8ing BP was closer to turning up a bottle of jack while doing 90 in a school zone than they were to the foam rubber and creeping end of the spectrum.
I'd like to see the definition of "most" that you're using. Do you mean "a numerical majority of professionals with recent practical experience in HTHP and/ or deep-water drilling", or do you mean "a numerical majority of self-proclaimed experts mouthing off on talk-radio and the morning TV news, not having actually used their self-proclaimed expertise to earn an honest dime for decades"?
Most of the people that I've talked with on the last couple of HTHP wells where I've been recruited have found the DWH disaster disturbing precisely because they don't see any simple thing that BP did which was drastically wrong. There is much puzzlement over how the people on the rig could have so misinterpreted the results of the inflow tests. But since the relevant people are dead, there's little chance of enlightenment.
Oh dear - it's fire drill time!
"What is the number of your life insurance policy?"
"Before I treat you, please confirm you are not openly gay."
You are not supposed to ask that.
Those rules only apply to humans. A robot can ask perfectly well, since it's hardly going to be called to the witless stand, is it? Any more than a piece of cloth is going to be arrested for participating in waterboarding.
When I read the headline in my mailbox, I thought it said that "Tanenbaum Attempts To Patent Open Source Code". Which might be an amusing twist in the non-existent Minix-Linux Wars.
wittness the recent media beat up over his "mysoginistic remarks".
I didn't notice that (but then, I treat most of the "Celeb Nooz" parts of the gutter press with the contempt it deserves ; I wouldn't wipe the shit out of my crack with them, not out of respect for their finer feelings but because their rags use cheap paper that your fingers go through) ; but unless Fry's public sex life has changed drastically (see parenthetic comment above), then as a celibate he can be blunt about women's unpleasantly drippy, bleedy bits without facing charges of hypocrisy due to nonetheless wishing to shove his pissy spurty bits into the drippy, bleedy bits.
Isn't it "misogyny" etc? Yeah. Greek "gynos-" = about women.
Fry owes a lot to his father, who ran a company that made electronic controls from a factory in the grounds of their house in Norfolk. Fry's father was still writing code, the last I heard.
Mind you, there's not much else to do in Norfolk.
Even less now that the prime turkey bother-er has has gone to that great factory farm in the firey depths, to be "attended to" by turkey-demons. (Bernard Matthews died yesterday. "Bootiful!")
Computer literacy runs in the family.
Instead of noses? (he says, typing whil;e wearing finger-mitts and a wooly hat)
(to mis-quote Jasper Carrot, slightly out of context)
to prevent children gaining access to pornography, a Conservative MP has said. Claire Perry wants
... to have their eyeballs scooped out with red-hot tea spoons. "We believe that this is likely to be effective in protecting them from accidentally viewing pornography as they surf the internet in the privacy of their darkened bedrooms. As parents, we don't want to be bothered with the tantrums of requiring them to use the internet connected machine in the public areas of the house, nor do we wish to be distracted from our own porn-surfing and mutual masturbation by the demands of looking after our children. Since it is so difficult to get reliable maids these days to work for slave wages and speak the Queens English, we believe that this is the responsible thing to do."
Chess is one way to go, but not the only way to Go. Many people arrive at Go directly without passing through Chess, or only making a tangential contact with chess.
And, of course, Chess has been solved by computers (for practicable meanings of "solved") ; Go hasn't (for comparable meanings of "solved", on boards bigger than 5x5). So given a few years study, it's credible for you to get to be able to beat the best of present-day Go programmes, but not the best of human players.
In the nearly 30 years that I've been playing Go, the best of the computer systems have advanced by around 15 grades of strength. If they continue to advance at that rate, then by around 2020, then the best of amateur players will struggle against the computers. The best professionals will succumb in around the 2030s.
You want to see photos of nerds? You're crazy! Better leave them uu or base64 encoded.
Or that thing which was making UseNet unusable a few years back... what did they call it? [30 seconds brain-strain] yEnc.
Disappeared. Without. A. Trace.
However if you want to blow a plane up for force it to crash all you need to do is to break the windows out in forward of the engines and throw something heavy inside. you know like fire extinguishers,
Could you throw a fire extinguisher through a window, far enough and accurately enough to get it into the inboard engine on the ground? I doubt you'd even make the range on the ground, because you're throwing at "waist height", or from a sitting position.
Then there's the accuracy question.
Then there's the question of just where you're going to practice this against a 100 mile-per-hour side wind.(Most commercial planes stall at around 100 miles-per-hour airspeed)
Way to go, inconspicuous!
or clothing from bags.
It's rare (but not unknown) for a civilian aircraft to suffer an engine failure from bird strike. Those engines are more robust than you seem to think. (Military engines are a slightly different matter in many different ways.)
All my comments about throwing the fire extinguisher apply, more so, to the clothing.
I can just imagine Jamie, Adam and a picked tosser for some football (sensu Americana) team trying this out on their tame Wisconsin airport with their tame 747 to provide the cross-wind.
It'll raise a flag, but they won't take your pants for it.
They wouldn't need to.
If you're implying that you've turned your jeans into gun cotton (nitro-cellulose), then they'd have fallen apart quite early in the process. But before then, the dyes would have bleached out, so you're there in white jeans, which are falling apart. By the minute.
Better to dress as a rather strung-out Tony Manero going home on Sunday morning. But that wouldn't explain the nitrates. Unless you "accidentally" fall into a cess pit of pigshit.
Slashdot Mirror
By that logic then, when your heating,
[breaks]
Of course I get down and fix it.
cooling
What the fuck would I need cooling for? Do you think I choose to live in one of those places which are excessively hot? I work in those places, sure ; if you pay me well enough to put up with that sort of shit.
or refrigerator breaks,
Fridges are so cheap as to not be worth repairing. And I've never in my life seen one stop working. (If you live in hot climates and have such problems, well that's just another reason for not living in such shitholes.)
you should fix it yourself, and not call a trained professional.
Professionals are available. Next week. At high cost. They're only to be resorted to if you can't diagnose the problem yourself, get the necessary parts, and do the work for less. (Which for some things, particularly mains gas, you can't do without being a certified worker and presenting your certificates as you buy the parts. That really does go beyond the cost-benefit curve.)
And when your car breaks, grab a book and a wrench and get busy.
No, fuckwit, you don't "grab a wrench and get busy". You examine the symptoms, work out what the problem is, and get busy if your time is cheaper than getting a spanner jockey (as you seem proud to be) to spanner it. Which for some tasks works out one way, and for other tasks works out the other way. And of course, it depends on whether you're on leave or on standby pay.
And hope if you fall off the roof, you can remain conscious so you can operate on yourself.
If you're dumbfuck enough to go up onto a roof to work without the skills to protect yourself against falling, then you should not be in anyone's gene pool and particularly not mine. Collect your Darwin Award on the way down.
Fact is that no one person can be skilled in every field.
Indisputably.
And if you've not got sufficient skills to negotiate a field, then you shouldn't fucking get into it. So, if you've not got the skills to use a computer safely on the Internet, don't fucking do it. Or use a bootable-CD distribution and keep all your data in "the cloud" with your access credentials written in a diary. In big letters.
So, guess you are a geek with one skill, sort of like a trained seal blowing on a horn or balancing a ball on your nose. A one trick pony.
What makes you think that I'm a geek? I didn't get to make significant use of a computer until I was in the last year of my degree. I've learned various skills on computers, while also learning how to build instrumentation control panels, gas detection and analysis systems, install power and signal wiring to Lloyds and ABS's differing requirements in Zones 0, 1, and 2 (according to their slightly differing definitions), as well as enough mechanicals to install the sensors themselves onto whatever machinery is used at this location, how to survey sites to plan the installation of the equipment. And that is before I actually start to do my day-job. But then again, that's probably why I get paid enough that it is a genuine calculation as to whether it is worth my time to do a particular piece of work, or whether to get a professional bodger to come in and do it while I do something more profitable.
I didn't understand your response until I expanded it and read the quote. Well done.
My wife has already forbidden sexy time pics though...sorry.
And this prevents you from having such pictures?
Hand in your geek card.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be hunted down in the way armed forces are targeting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda."
What - getting into interesting bedtime situations with several Swedish women? That's how Osama bin Assange is being hunted?
I could handle some of that hunting - and I hope that my person-handling skills are better than Assange's to lead to a more satisfactory outcome. For the three of us.
Make [...] an easy, as in click and install, thing
Consider it as evolution in action : those who don't have the gumption as adults to have a reasonable understanding of their important services and how to manage them, get thrown to the wolves. I mean, "thrown to the advertisers."
Which makes sense if you are on the outskirts of the blast radius because the flying debris is more dangerous than anything else at that moment.
Having grown up in the outer parts of the blast radius for a megaton strike on one foreign missile base, and well within the comparable blast radius for another foreign missile base, we always expected (still do expect, when I visit the family) that if we registered our flash-shadow being burned into the wall in front of us, then we'd got a couple of seconds before the next bomb went off in front of us, and that we were about to see what evaporating concrete looks like. In either case, we'd be dead from the radiation, but just waiting to drop.
These days I only really have to worry about a blast from one direction. Unfortunately that blast will be trying to dig out a military station that was built into a 30m deep granite quarry, then roofed over. That's going to be a big one.
Nuclear war doesn't worry me - it's not going to hurt much or take very long to die.
The FBI has said in the past that the rising theft of the metal is threatening the critical infrastructure
That's terrorist action then. Off to Gitmo, sentence is death under torture. Bring the bodies back and display them in their home areas in a gibbet.
that thick crust of ice on Europa. Yes, it'll be a pretty long time before that happens, but I'll be waiting nonetheless. I find it very hard to believe that there isn't life there.
While I agree with the general sentiment, unfortunately I have to point out that we have no evidence of any form of life anywhere in the universe other than on Earth. So while SF (and not-so-science-Fiction) is good entertainment, in our day-to-day lives we have to work on the assumption that we are the only life-bearing planet in the observable universe, and that our species as the most influential one on the planet bears responsibility if we destroy that.
but not enough to explain why BP has so many more violations than the others. Certainly that doesn't explain why BP has an unusually high rate of documented accidents.
Speaking as someone inside the industry, I'd say that is probably more due to them wasting less effort on covering up incidents and generating obfuscating statistics.
Yes, BP do have significant numbers of incidents. But at least amongst the BP personnel and contractors I've worked with over the decades, they're not considered remarkably bad ; not bad enough to refuse to go to work for them at least. And no-one with any experience in the industry ever believed that the statistics are representative of reality. You say it yourself : "documented accidents" (my emphasis).
TransOcean have spent the last 6 months on an intense programme of generating safety compliance reports from their global workforce. If you don't produce your one report per day, then you're in danger of getting the sack, or being NRB'd (Not Required Back) if you're a contractor. It's almost as if TransOcean can sense that their "safety culture" is going to come under scrutiny in the near future. TransOcean owned (and more importantly, serviced and maintained) one of the critical pieces of equipment that failed in late February 2010. Hmmm.
I wonder what is happening in the MMO (if that's the name of the agency)? You know : the civil servants who agreed to allow BP and TransOcean to continue the last 6 weeks of operations on the well with that vital safety equipment unable to function to any better than 65% of it's minimum capability. [Sorry if I've got the name of the agency wrong - it's all the business of foreigners and yet another government and their regulatory authority. I always have a sinking feeling of doom when I'm "reassured" by a toolpusher that "we're going to run this operation as tightly as we would do back at home in the States". Because I value my job, I bite my tongue ; but I feel the temptation to say "you mean that you intend to continue to allow an average of one person a week to be killed in your jurisdiction." It's not encouraging.]
On the subject of "not encouraging", the fire drill completed the platform's non-essential personnel muster in 9 minutes, but we then spent another 30 minutes in the horizontal snow drilling in loading lifeboats (because in drills only 10 people at a time are allowed into a boat). Drills are important, even at the risk of hypothermia.
And now - all flights cancelled. So it's time to shoot some aliens.
to stay away from the mindless consumerism that defines today's society.
My immediate family and I don't buy presents for any of the "holiday seasons". We offer ourselves things of no merchant value, such as
Pinko Commie subversive prevrets. Y'all should hang. Not hang your heads in shame, just hang from the Strange Fruit tree, with the rest of the "fruits". [/sarcasm]
Note here that most experts are say8ing BP was closer to turning up a bottle of jack while doing 90 in a school zone than they were to the foam rubber and creeping end of the spectrum.
I'd like to see the definition of "most" that you're using. Do you mean "a numerical majority of professionals with recent practical experience in HTHP and/ or deep-water drilling", or do you mean "a numerical majority of self-proclaimed experts mouthing off on talk-radio and the morning TV news, not having actually used their self-proclaimed expertise to earn an honest dime for decades"? Most of the people that I've talked with on the last couple of HTHP wells where I've been recruited have found the DWH disaster disturbing precisely because they don't see any simple thing that BP did which was drastically wrong. There is much puzzlement over how the people on the rig could have so misinterpreted the results of the inflow tests. But since the relevant people are dead, there's little chance of enlightenment. Oh dear - it's fire drill time!
If you do that then the soldiers might start asking
Stop right there, soldier. You're not supposed to ask ; you're supposed to DO!
Now get down and give me twenty!
No, no, push-ups! Are you angling for a discharge? Or a job in the TSA?
"What is the number of your life insurance policy?"
"Before I treat you, please confirm you are not openly gay."
You are not supposed to ask that.
Those rules only apply to humans. A robot can ask perfectly well, since it's hardly going to be called to the witless stand, is it? Any more than a piece of cloth is going to be arrested for participating in waterboarding.
When I read the headline in my mailbox, I thought it said that "Tanenbaum Attempts To Patent Open Source Code". Which might be an amusing twist in the non-existent Minix-Linux Wars.
"Write" is a strong word. How about "published posthumously as part of a larger collection of writings?"
Are you saying that Adams published his own work posthumously? Neat trick.
Of course he did. He's only spent the last decade dead for tax reasons.
(You set 'em up ; I'll knock 'em in!)
wittness the recent media beat up over his "mysoginistic remarks".
I didn't notice that (but then, I treat most of the "Celeb Nooz" parts of the gutter press with the contempt it deserves ; I wouldn't wipe the shit out of my crack with them, not out of respect for their finer feelings but because their rags use cheap paper that your fingers go through) ; but unless Fry's public sex life has changed drastically (see parenthetic comment above), then as a celibate he can be blunt about women's unpleasantly drippy, bleedy bits without facing charges of hypocrisy due to nonetheless wishing to shove his pissy spurty bits into the drippy, bleedy bits.
Isn't it "misogyny" etc? Yeah. Greek "gynos-" = about women.
Fry owes a lot to his father, who ran a company that made electronic controls from a factory in the grounds of their house in Norfolk. Fry's father was still writing code, the last I heard.
Mind you, there's not much else to do in Norfolk.
Even less now that the prime turkey bother-er has has gone to that great factory farm in the firey depths, to be "attended to" by turkey-demons.
(Bernard Matthews died yesterday. "Bootiful!")
Computer literacy runs in the family.
Instead of noses? (he says, typing whil;e wearing finger-mitts and a wooly hat)
Where are the big releases on Russia, Venezuela, and other corrupt governments? Sounds like a wimp to me.
In a queue alternating with Abu Dhabi, Israel, South Korea [list continues for a long, long way]?
I have this image of a bacterium on the witness stand. Naaah, Larson has probably done it already.
to prevent children gaining access to pornography, a Conservative MP has said. Claire Perry wants
Chess is the way to go.
Chess is one way to go, but not the only way to Go. Many people arrive at Go directly without passing through Chess, or only making a tangential contact with chess.
And, of course, Chess has been solved by computers (for practicable meanings of "solved") ; Go hasn't (for comparable meanings of "solved", on boards bigger than 5x5). So given a few years study, it's credible for you to get to be able to beat the best of present-day Go programmes, but not the best of human players.
In the nearly 30 years that I've been playing Go, the best of the computer systems have advanced by around 15 grades of strength. If they continue to advance at that rate, then by around 2020, then the best of amateur players will struggle against the computers. The best professionals will succumb in around the 2030s.
Most spoken languages are not detailed tho, there is lots of ambiguity. If you want it to be short and informative, you should use Math.
0
1
You don't get miracles in the first version.
I'll remember that next time the Creationists on SlashDot crawl out form under their logs.
[edited after 30 seconds thinking. I must be new here]
I hope that I'll remember that next time the Creationists on SlashDot crawl out from under their logs.
You want to see photos of nerds? You're crazy! Better leave them uu or base64 encoded.
Or that thing which was making UseNet unusable a few years back ... what did they call it? [30 seconds brain-strain] yEnc.
Disappeared. Without. A. Trace.
Or is it that I just stopped using UseNet?
However if you want to blow a plane up for force it to crash all you need to do is to break the windows out in forward of the engines and throw something heavy inside. you know like fire extinguishers,
Could you throw a fire extinguisher through a window, far enough and accurately enough to get it into the inboard engine on the ground? I doubt you'd even make the range on the ground, because you're throwing at "waist height", or from a sitting position.
Then there's the accuracy question.
Then there's the question of just where you're going to practice this against a 100 mile-per-hour side wind.(Most commercial planes stall at around 100 miles-per-hour airspeed)
Way to go, inconspicuous!
or clothing from bags.
It's rare (but not unknown) for a civilian aircraft to suffer an engine failure from bird strike. Those engines are more robust than you seem to think. (Military engines are a slightly different matter in many different ways.)
All my comments about throwing the fire extinguisher apply, more so, to the clothing.
I can just imagine Jamie, Adam and a picked tosser for some football (sensu Americana) team trying this out on their tame Wisconsin airport with their tame 747 to provide the cross-wind.
I'd go for a Myth Busted!
It'll raise a flag, but they won't take your pants for it.
They wouldn't need to.
If you're implying that you've turned your jeans into gun cotton (nitro-cellulose), then they'd have fallen apart quite early in the process. But before then, the dyes would have bleached out, so you're there in white jeans, which are falling apart. By the minute.
Better to dress as a rather strung-out Tony Manero going home on Sunday morning. But that wouldn't explain the nitrates. Unless you "accidentally" fall into a cess pit of pigshit.
Way to go, inconspicuous!