Lot of places in America have laws against pay toilets,
Now that does astonish me. How on earth can the proponents of (probably) the most rabid capitalism on the planet defend closing down a market that turns shit into money? Oh, hang on, "lots of places". So it's probably just some batch of outdated laws in a few backwoods where pi is also equal to (int)3, and "brother" is genetically indistinguishable from "son".
The closest thing you can do is try to limit your facilities to paying customers (assuming you're a business) but obviously this doesn't fly if you're a city.
Turn off the lights and the water. Turn them on (from switches at the till/ cash register) when your suspect customer makes a purchase. The same switch might also reel-in the chain on the starving jaguar and turn on the steps. Or, if you've got a multi-floor premises, the escalator/ lift which you've got to have to allow wheelchair/ child buggy access. Of course, most places also have the toilets right at the back, where they're not immediately obvious from the street. By the time the toilet-user has spent 5 minutes looking for them, you've got enough CCTV footage to justify calling the police for "suspicious behaviour, like they're planning a shop lift or a burglary". Most of the time, a simple sign ("toilets are for paying customers only") is sufficient to promote compliance. And I can't recall having had the use of the toilets ever refused to me if I've asked, customer or no (but not all places have toilets, of course ; often it's an "arrangement" with a neighbouring house or shop which is detailed in the lease).
"Sand", as a geological term meaning somewhat resistant mineral grains with sizes between 3mm and 1/128mm (1/256mm if you take some definitions) ? Or is this concerns about the fine-grained dust produced by sand-blasting (cleaning technique), sandstone cutting (masonry shop or building repair and construction), and blasting. The latter has a wide range of well-known associated problems such as "white lung", pneumoconiosis, etc etc. You might be happy to pooh-pooh such things. But I'll bet that you'll put on a dust mask when you're grinding bricks to fit the drive way, or whatever.
It really depresses me when I see workmen in the street, cutting kerb stones etc. No safety goggles (I've had metal splinters in my eye before. It hurts. I use goggles.) ; no hearing protection (which reminds me - one of my ear defenders broke last week. Off to the hearing shop some time this week.) ; no dust masks (see above discussion) ; no gloves (see above discussion about eye injuries. Also, do some Googling on "vibration white finger".) But, over the years, I've learned that people don't take kindly to advice intended for their own benefit.
Did nobody make a rough scale model of a skyscraper, comparatively more fragile than the wtc 1 2 or 7, imbibe it in fuel, light it up and see what happens? Scale matters but as I said making it more fragile should compensate.
You can scale the dimensions and strengths of your model to account for the differing stiffness -to- weight-per-unit-length and weight-per-unit-area of the models materials. That would allow you to model loadings like (for example) if the top of the two towers were linked by a cable, and the cable tensioned, how much would the towers pull together (not that that could ever have happened (by the way, the film is very good, if you like talking with people with the "thousand yard stare")). Unfortunately, for modelling the fires, and the spread of fire, you have a number of additional things which you've got to scale correctly and simultaneously - the thermal responses of the materials, the heat-release-per-unit-volume-per-unit-time, and probably most difficultly, the changes in viscosity and density of the air with temperature. A broadly comparable disaster that I'm familiar with used physical 1:4 modelling to understand the destruction of the gas compression module on the Piper Alpha. But they didn't try modelling the spread of the fire similarly, nor the step-wise collapse by heat-buckling of the platform structure. Which is probably because the experiment would have been very expensive and wouldn't have yielded much new information ("Don't set fire to oil rigs with hundreds or thousands of tonnes of hydrocarbons on board" was a well known lesson before 1998-07-06.). It's a lot faster (particularly when you take into account construction time) to do a stimulation than to build a model. And you can always burn your simulation down again tomorrow. And again. And again.
Of course - sooner or later they are probably making a mistake that leads to their downfall, but by creating a offbeat pattern they can lead investigators down several blind alleys.
How do you know that they (serial killers) will "probably" make a mistake. Sure, the ones who get caught have generally made a mistake. What about the ones who haven't made a mistake, and/ or haven't been caught? Is it not at least possible that they're in the majority. [ Hmmm, some murders can be cleared up easily (spouse/ parent/ child/ cow-orker/ insurance beneficiary did it) ; some are done in the knowledge of the law if not necessarily where people can be charged and not in a conventional serial killer scenario ("Yeah, officer, it woz a Montague wit put a cap in de ass o' dat Capulet, but hey man I can't tell you who did it my ass wud be ded as dat Capulet but messier") ; of the rest... how many are recognised as the work of serial killers and how many are (perhaps mistakenly) considered as "sporadic" ? If a serial killer was to become "security chief" for a Crank gang, and pursue his job effectively, would he even be recognised as a serial killer? If he got his kicks from getting other soldiers to do the killing for him... there's a book plot in there.]
That's Funny/Insightful, but it also raises the point that forwarding confidential company emails to a "timestamper" or a Gmail account may be sufficient grounds to fire you.
It certainly should be, if there's any mention of confidentiality in the relevant contract of employment. It would get slightly more defensible if you were to (BC-)copy mail to a lawyer with whom you had a pre-existing contractual relationship. But that's already presupposing such a dangerous state of relationships between employer and employee that you'd be job-hunting already.
Wouldn't BCC-ing leave a paper trail at the mail server? Which is most likely in the control of the company you're in dispute with. Hmmm, if I ever find myself running my own company's mail server, then there's some extra logic going in there - whenever a message is BCC'd anywhere, it also gets BCC'd to some internal security account.
1. The US government tries to dictate how a US company behave in another country in accordance to the acceptable standard. What is not acceptable is if the US government tries to dictate how a foreign government behave (dictate, no; influence, yes).
Wrong. Foreign companies who wish to do business either in or with the US must abide by US law within US territories. By the same token, Yahoo must abide by Chinese law within Chinese territory.
Actually even this seemingly reasonable criterion isn't how things actually work. My employer entirely legitimately works with Iran (and we've been dealing with Lybia for in excess of 15 years, and I'm still trying to get that North Korean project off the ground). We also have pretty minor dealings with the United States. The people who deal with the States, operating outside the United under the laws of another (i.e. non-US) country, have to abide by US embargos by not having anything to do with those of us working with US-embargoed nations, while working outside US laws and outside US territory. I keep telling the Boss, it's not worth the shit of dealing with the States. After all, it's not an important market - too low tech, too fragmented, too parochial - for us, compared with others. Oh well, he'll learn. Probably when his laptop gets legally stolen by the border police. Which, if it's got any evidence of our perfectly legal involvements with the countries mentioned above, is going to leave him in an awkward position.
Tell me something. Why do Brits put up with this crap?
what are we going to do? Cut the head off another king? (Big-Ears might deserve an application of the wake-up-stick, but nothing more) Laugh at anyone we meet socially who's a copper, and ask them what they did with their life? Not vote for dumb fuck politicians who lie about what they're going to do in power and are then get interpreted by dumbfuck policemen?
When I was 20 I had some hope that the controversy surrounding Israel would be resolved within my lifetime, now, about 2 decades later I highly doubt it will be settled in the next 150 years.
[SIGH] Depressingly, I have to agree with you. One of my colleagues got sent to work in one of the few Israeli hydrocarbon explorations a few years ago. The advice was (pre-2001/09/11) that he should get a new passport on return, or get the Israeli visa on a removable leaf of his standing passport, or something similar (I forget what the final outcome was. I'm sure I'll have to find out one day) because he (and I) routinely work in Arab countries in the area. Both sides have a "if you're not with us, you're against us" attitude, which leaves little room for a "I don't give a shit about your local problems, I just want to do my job and then go home" attitude.
My SO entered bogus info when she signed up for [...SNIP...] It's all well and good to be paranoid and enter bogus info when you sign up for a free website, but you might want to consider that if you don't store a record of it, you might get locked out of your own account forever.
What you need is something which you've got reasonable confidence in the security of, in which you store your passwords and related information. This is not of course, your general computing device. It's not something that does connect to any network (preferably, it's something that CAN'T connect to a network). Of preference, it's old and ugly and unattractive to thieves. If it performs some other functions of use, this is beneficial too. (Mine is a damned good alarm clock, and allows me to calculate surveys and wellbore trajectory corrections in real time on the rig floor.) Don't forget backup hardware and backup copies of the important files. Which reminds me - this is Sunday, so this is Psion backup day.
Is it more interesting than CIV (for DOS)? I've not really bothered wasting time on more modern games. Oh, sometimes a bit of F19 - the stealth bomber game, but that gets unplayable unless you can choke your processor back to below 200MHz. And I'm really quite annoyed about having to move up from a 4MB graphics card for the wife's dictionary update.
The ditch on that corner he failed to negotiate was only going zero miles per hour. The total variance was probably in excess of 70mph.
Same for that 2mph pedestrian he killed last week.
Wait, are you implying that a variance of 68mph is nearly as dangerous as a variance of 70mph ? That can't be right. He should have accelerated before hitting the pedestrian, to make sure that s/he/it was as dead as the ditch.
But he still should have got a ticket for inefficient driving. He should have hit the pedestrian INTO the ditch, then buried her/him/it with the car.
If you use encryption in the UK without giving your private key to the authorities, then you're already breaking the law.
Not quite... if I understand the law correctly (and I hope I do, it affects me), failure to provide the authorities with effective keys to encrypted data when they request the keys, without lawful excuse, is a crime, with jail time for contempt of court being an option. That's immediate jail time. I'm not aware that it's been tested in court yet ; the meaning of "lawful excuse" hasn't been tested (let alone appealed), the proportionality of detention hasn't been tested (that, for starters, can go to Europe). IANAL, but I can see holes in it. Not that I would like to be on the receiving end.
You don't have to give your keys before you start using encryption, only on receipt of a lawful request for them from a legally authorised person. Oh, there are two more undefined terms.
We man got smarts by cooking meats you vegan bitches!
This would only be true if the vegans you're caricaturing were also raw-food fanatics. While there may well be some people who fit into both groups, most of the vegans who I've cooked for and with have been conscientious and knowledgeable about the need to cook their foods to make nutrients more available. As a chemically-aware scientist running the animal rights group, I simply didn't let woolly-minded organic-tree-huggery bunny loving go past without being challenged and corrected. The moral arguments are more than capable of standing up by themselves, without needing pseudo-science to prop them up.
The system packs in two features aimed at graphic artists and photographers which are fairly unique to a laptop: a built in Wacom digitizer just to the right of the trackpad,
Ah, designing it so that only a retarded and unimportant portion of the population can use it. That's a really good move. Good luck to them. More seriously, having acquired a fucked-up wrist over the last week because the retard who prepares our offshore kits took a sudden liking to "right-handed" mice... this is an excellent example where if you can't make things ambidextrous, make them flexible. Or, in this case, use an external USB tablet and let the user decide how to arrange their desktop. What - this is intended for the market of people who push pixels with their laptop propped on their lap on the subway home. Wow, that's a big market. I bet you wouldn't want to lose 1/3 of them. And all those super-secret designs being manipulated on the train... I can almost envisage the commendation which the pixel-pushing over-worker will get when the design leaks. The commendation's name begins with "P-45".
(for non-Brits - a "P-45" is the form you get sent to the tax office when your employment is ended. Translate to your local equivalent.)
Bottom line of page 5 : "planed" instead of "planned". Oh, sorry, a basic spelling checker wouldn't have caught that. He'd need one that can distinguish contexts between "carpentry" and "legalese". Unfortunately, since this works machine doesn't have Firefox's spelling checker (in any language!), I'm bound to have shot myself in the foot.
The names are all regions of the sea/oceans around the British Isles. Living about as far inland as is possible in Britain, it's all irrelevant to me, but I could probably still name most of them, probably in order, just from hearing them on the radio.
Me too, probably. But to my shame, here I am out somewhere "West of Shetland" (actually, the last land we saw was the Orkenys, but "whatever") and I don't actually know which sea area we're in. Checking the Met Office, we're near the border of Fair Isle and Faroes. And BTW, I grew up pretty close to the least marine part of Britain too, but here I am bobbing around in the North Atlantic.
"There", in the general case, is not like "here". For the large majority of cases of "there" and "here". Your next comment is illuminating about your misunderstanding, I think:
they can take pictures of anything they can see from the legal road all that they want and I won't mind a bit but they'll never actually make it here.)
This certainly sounds like you live in an area where there is considerable distance, or at least opaque screening, between a public right of way and anywhere that you can see from inside your residence (or work, or both). Since few people choose to live in a building with steel plates just outside the windows, then I'll bet that you're actually thinking about being tens of metres, if not hundreds of metres, or whole kilometres from a public right of way. Which is fine, well and good, in a country with sufficient space for living in such conditions. I hope you enjoy walking to the shops when the oil runs out (though the well that I've just drilled might stave that off for an hour or two). The article is about people living in high density areas. I don't know how high "high density" is in the parts of Japan that are being talked about, but when I take the helicopter home, I can normally see if the lawn has been mowed before we land (weather permitting), and as the taxi turns the corner into the street I can see my wife in the kitchen, and if I get home after dusk I can tell if the TV is on, if my daughter is in her bedroom... and the taxi hasn't even stopped yet. The taxi never leaves the public highway. That may not be a lifestyle to your liking, but I drill my client's oil wells without caring about the results because I can walk to the shops and this country knows how to ration petrol.
There, like here,
"There" is not generally like "here".
On the other hand, you could live in a box in town, without windows. Enjoy.
But it does seem to me that any expectation of privacy in any communication medium here in the USA went out the window with the news of the NSA telco backdoors.
That begs the question, and not just for the USA or relating to NSA backdoors (is that the funny all-body underpants you see in Klondiker comedys?), just when, and why, did "any expectation of privacy" come in the window? Particularly in respect of any electronic communications?
IANAA however it is my understanding that an object is categorized a meteor or asteroid based on its size and not its presence within our atmosphere. Lets check out what Wikipedia has to say on the matter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor
Larger than a meteoroid, the object is an asteroid; smaller than that, it is interplanetary dust.
Good homework, as far as it goes. Unfortunately, you missed the bit at the top of the page that said
"Meteor" redirects here [...] A meteoroid is a small sand to boulder-sized particle of debris in the Solar system. The visible path of a meteoroid that enters Earth's (or another body's) atmosphere is a meteor,.
So, you're right that the article has terminological inexactitudes, but you don't get full marks because you don't work out the terminology properly. It's a 4-way potential division, on criteria of size versus being in, or approaching, Earth's atmosphere. Large and small which are in Earth's atmosphere are meteors (there hasn't been a "large" one, greater than 0.1km, in the history of comprehensive scientific observation, with the very arguable case of Tunguska). Large, outside Earth's atmosphere is an asteroid ; small outside Earth's atmosphere is a meteoroid. The classification as described isn't perfect. Just what would we call a Ceres-scale object that's going to hit Earth next year (it's not impossible) - meteoroid, asteroid, meteor-to-be, or just simply "Many GigaDeaths"? What would we call the next comet that follows Shoemaker-Levy-9, but does a series of aerobraking manouvers through Jupiter's atmosphere before finally crashing? It can't be a meteor, because it's not in Earth's atmosphere, but it's sure as blazes leaving long streaks of light and ionisation through AN atmosphere. FWIW, my understanding of the term "meteoroid" included a criterion that it had reasonable potential to come into contact with Earth.
Not one of Wikipedia's better articles. I guess I'd better have a poke at it when I get off shift. (Wednesday, it looks like.)
Antarctica is not included in the study for NG or oil in those studies. Why? Lets fucking drill there too.
Considering that Antarctica is a pretty big place, might I humbly ask you where in Antarctica? West Antarctic Peninsula? East Antarctica? Marie Byrd Land, or Dronning Maud? This is not a rhetorical question - I spent 2 days of my life (plus £450 of my Boss's money) looking for answers to this (and related) questions at the recent South Atlantic Petroleum Systems conference. So I'd like your two -cents worth to add to the state of debate.
All you need is an ethane source and you have hydrocarbons and plastics. Oil isn't the only way.
Given ethane, and energy, and catalysts (which do degrade, and frequently involve expensive and rare materials themselves), you get one range of hydrocarbons, out of many types available from natural oil. You'd know that if you knew any chemistry. But if you knew anything about chemistry, you'd know that chemists have been saying "oil is too good to burn" since the 1930s.
what sort of a factory was this, do they use guinea pigs to drive the assembly line?
As I said earlier, a hospital, not a factory. To be more precise, in the tuberculosis-testing "production line" which takes in bottles of phlegm at one end, adds guinea pigs, food, and 3 weeks culture time, and outputs a dead guinea pig, a pathology report, and a diagnosis of "TB or not-TB" in answer to the question "TB?". Just because it doesn't involve welders and angle grinders, doesn't mean that it's not a production line. Actually, the infection and cross-contamination control procedures dictate one-way transit through the system, recirculation of jigs from end of the line to start of the line, etc. (The cages get autoclaved in a separate building after sacrifice, and then go back to the Incoming Stores room.)
I suppose I should use the past tense : the buildings became a housing complex over a decade ago, and I've no idea how my last TB test was processed.
I never said working in a factory was at all pleasant, just that the work itself is easy to do from what I understand.
Did I say that it was unpleasant? No, I didn't. What I said was that it's not easy. Going back through my list, you've got all the fun of implementing sterile procedures when you're cleaning out the Guinea pig shit (oh, just how do hospitals manage to use them for infection testing without them cross infecting each other? Answer : because lots of minimum-wage factory workers are beavering away looking after the furry bastards with medium- or high-grade sterility procedures. Read the manual - it's several hundred pages thick - as good as a good programming language reference, and unlike most programming, if YOU get it wrong, someone may die through mis-diagnosis. Easy work?) ; changing oil on 40 gear boxes sounds easy, but there are 10 different types of gear box randomly distributed through the room, each with drain and filler plugs hidden under inches of pulp, so you've got to get up there, find the appropriate plugs, do the work and get back down. In six minutes per vat. Easy ? Greasing the inside of the machinery - as much of an intellectual challenge as navigating through a boulder collapse in a cave (great fun!). Easy is arguable (are you claustrophobic? I don't know. But I do know that you're forever looking for an easier way form point A to point B, and the machines aren't any more designed for humans than boulder collapses are). What was the other one ?... oh yes, cleaning the crown-block sensors. I whistle Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" as I do it. Great fun. But freezing, frightening and really hard work. 2/3 of our trainees refuse to go above 20ft above the deck, and I can't blame them. But I do insist that they try, at least once, so that we (and they) know whether they are capable of the job.
I get that factory work is absolute shit.
Compared to being stuck in an office 8.5 hours per day with a bunch of back-stabbing cunts... well different people have different ideas of what hell is. I find hell anywhere more than 28 deg C ; but I'll work at 52 deg C (note the implicit "I get paid for this" in "I'll work"). Of preferance I'll work at -30 deg C. Other people have other "comfort zones".
Seriously - try some industrial work. You might hate it, in which case you've got some real motivation ; you might love it, in which case you've just widened your career choice. But don't dismiss it as being "easy" until you've done it. If it were easy, then robots or slave-wage humans would do it.
Here's pause for thought : a motivated, competent domestic plumber in the UK can make £50,000 per year. I don't know what that is in your currency, but it's damned good money. It's not very fashionable work though, is it? Neither is drilling oil wells or scraping shit, but they're all equally necessary.
So, going back to the original topic, if Apple staff are being treated like slaves, then the work that they're doing must be easy, and they're liable to be replaced by a robot if they complain. If the work they're doing is not easy, then they're not in imminent fear of replacement by robots, and they can complain. You've almost always got the option of telling your Boss "I'm not going to do that". Though you do have to be mindful of the consequences. So does your Boss - he may have to pay the costs of recruitment, training and retention of your replacement, if he can find one. (I know that people do sometime put a gun to your head and say "Arbeit macht Frei", but it's not common. Lesser extortions can be survived until you get a chance to break out.)
Slashdot Mirror
My friend is a telephone sanitizer as well, care to share the name of the holiday agency?
No point : all the travel agents are on the first colony ship.
Now that does astonish me. How on earth can the proponents of (probably) the most rabid capitalism on the planet defend closing down a market that turns shit into money? Oh, hang on, "lots of places". So it's probably just some batch of outdated laws in a few backwoods where pi is also equal to (int)3, and "brother" is genetically indistinguishable from "son".
Turn off the lights and the water. Turn them on (from switches at the till/ cash register) when your suspect customer makes a purchase. The same switch might also reel-in the chain on the starving jaguar and turn on the steps. Or, if you've got a multi-floor premises, the escalator/ lift which you've got to have to allow wheelchair/ child buggy access.
Of course, most places also have the toilets right at the back, where they're not immediately obvious from the street. By the time the toilet-user has spent 5 minutes looking for them, you've got enough CCTV footage to justify calling the police for "suspicious behaviour, like they're planning a shop lift or a burglary".
Most of the time, a simple sign ("toilets are for paying customers only") is sufficient to promote compliance. And I can't recall having had the use of the toilets ever refused to me if I've asked, customer or no (but not all places have toilets, of course ; often it's an "arrangement" with a neighbouring house or shop which is detailed in the lease).
"Sand", as a geological term meaning somewhat resistant mineral grains with sizes between 3mm and 1/128mm (1/256mm if you take some definitions) ? Or is this concerns about the fine-grained dust produced by sand-blasting (cleaning technique), sandstone cutting (masonry shop or building repair and construction), and blasting. The latter has a wide range of well-known associated problems such as "white lung", pneumoconiosis, etc etc.
You might be happy to pooh-pooh such things. But I'll bet that you'll put on a dust mask when you're grinding bricks to fit the drive way, or whatever.
It really depresses me when I see workmen in the street, cutting kerb stones etc. No safety goggles (I've had metal splinters in my eye before. It hurts. I use goggles.) ; no hearing protection (which reminds me - one of my ear defenders broke last week. Off to the hearing shop some time this week.) ; no dust masks (see above discussion) ; no gloves (see above discussion about eye injuries. Also, do some Googling on "vibration white finger".) But, over the years, I've learned that people don't take kindly to advice intended for their own benefit.
You can scale the dimensions and strengths of your model to account for the differing stiffness -to- weight-per-unit-length and weight-per-unit-area of the models materials. That would allow you to model loadings like (for example) if the top of the two towers were linked by a cable, and the cable tensioned, how much would the towers pull together (not that that could ever have happened (by the way, the film is very good, if you like talking with people with the "thousand yard stare")).
Unfortunately, for modelling the fires, and the spread of fire, you have a number of additional things which you've got to scale correctly and simultaneously - the thermal responses of the materials, the heat-release-per-unit-volume-per-unit-time, and probably most difficultly, the changes in viscosity and density of the air with temperature.
A broadly comparable disaster that I'm familiar with used physical 1:4 modelling to understand the destruction of the gas compression module on the Piper Alpha. But they didn't try modelling the spread of the fire similarly, nor the step-wise collapse by heat-buckling of the platform structure. Which is probably because the experiment would have been very expensive and wouldn't have yielded much new information ("Don't set fire to oil rigs with hundreds or thousands of tonnes of hydrocarbons on board" was a well known lesson before 1998-07-06.). It's a lot faster (particularly when you take into account construction time) to do a stimulation than to build a model. And you can always burn your simulation down again tomorrow. And again. And again.
How do you know that they (serial killers) will "probably" make a mistake. Sure, the ones who get caught have generally made a mistake. What about the ones who haven't made a mistake, and/ or haven't been caught? Is it not at least possible that they're in the majority. ... how many are recognised as the work of serial killers and how many are (perhaps mistakenly) considered as "sporadic" ? ... there's a book plot in there.]
[ Hmmm, some murders can be cleared up easily (spouse/ parent/ child/ cow-orker/ insurance beneficiary did it) ; some are done in the knowledge of the law if not necessarily where people can be charged and not in a conventional serial killer scenario ("Yeah, officer, it woz a Montague wit put a cap in de ass o' dat Capulet, but hey man I can't tell you who did it my ass wud be ded as dat Capulet but messier") ; of the rest
If a serial killer was to become "security chief" for a Crank gang, and pursue his job effectively, would he even be recognised as a serial killer? If he got his kicks from getting other soldiers to do the killing for him
It certainly should be, if there's any mention of confidentiality in the relevant contract of employment.
It would get slightly more defensible if you were to (BC-)copy mail to a lawyer with whom you had a pre-existing contractual relationship. But that's already presupposing such a dangerous state of relationships between employer and employee that you'd be job-hunting already.
Wouldn't BCC-ing leave a paper trail at the mail server? Which is most likely in the control of the company you're in dispute with. Hmmm, if I ever find myself running my own company's mail server, then there's some extra logic going in there - whenever a message is BCC'd anywhere, it also gets BCC'd to some internal security account.
Actually even this seemingly reasonable criterion isn't how things actually work. My employer entirely legitimately works with Iran (and we've been dealing with Lybia for in excess of 15 years, and I'm still trying to get that North Korean project off the ground). We also have pretty minor dealings with the United States. The people who deal with the States, operating outside the United under the laws of another (i.e. non-US) country, have to abide by US embargos by not having anything to do with those of us working with US-embargoed nations, while working outside US laws and outside US territory.
I keep telling the Boss, it's not worth the shit of dealing with the States. After all, it's not an important market - too low tech, too fragmented, too parochial - for us, compared with others. Oh well, he'll learn. Probably when his laptop gets legally stolen by the border police. Which, if it's got any evidence of our perfectly legal involvements with the countries mentioned above, is going to leave him in an awkward position.
what are we going to do? Cut the head off another king? (Big-Ears might deserve an application of the wake-up-stick, but nothing more) Laugh at anyone we meet socially who's a copper, and ask them what they did with their life? Not vote for dumb fuck politicians who lie about what they're going to do in power and are then get interpreted by dumbfuck policemen?
Satire is probably the most effective response.
[SIGH] Depressingly, I have to agree with you. One of my colleagues got sent to work in one of the few Israeli hydrocarbon explorations a few years ago. The advice was (pre-2001/09/11) that he should get a new passport on return, or get the Israeli visa on a removable leaf of his standing passport, or something similar (I forget what the final outcome was. I'm sure I'll have to find out one day) because he (and I) routinely work in Arab countries in the area. Both sides have a "if you're not with us, you're against us" attitude, which leaves little room for a "I don't give a shit about your local problems, I just want to do my job and then go home" attitude.
What you need is something which you've got reasonable confidence in the security of, in which you store your passwords and related information. This is not of course, your general computing device. It's not something that does connect to any network (preferably, it's something that CAN'T connect to a network). Of preference, it's old and ugly and unattractive to thieves. If it performs some other functions of use, this is beneficial too. (Mine is a damned good alarm clock, and allows me to calculate surveys and wellbore trajectory corrections in real time on the rig floor.)
Don't forget backup hardware and backup copies of the important files.
Which reminds me - this is Sunday, so this is Psion backup day.
Is it more interesting than CIV (for DOS)? I've not really bothered wasting time on more modern games. Oh, sometimes a bit of F19 - the stealth bomber game, but that gets unplayable unless you can choke your processor back to below 200MHz. And I'm really quite annoyed about having to move up from a 4MB graphics card for the wife's dictionary update.
I've never played Carmageddon, nor even (TTBOMK) seen it being played. Which is worrying.
Wait, are you implying that a variance of 68mph is nearly as dangerous as a variance of 70mph ? That can't be right. He should have accelerated before hitting the pedestrian, to make sure that s/he/it was as dead as the ditch.
But he still should have got a ticket for inefficient driving. He should have hit the pedestrian INTO the ditch, then buried her/him/it with the car.
Not quite ... if I understand the law correctly (and I hope I do, it affects me), failure to provide the authorities with effective keys to encrypted data when they request the keys, without lawful excuse, is a crime, with jail time for contempt of court being an option. That's immediate jail time.
I'm not aware that it's been tested in court yet ; the meaning of "lawful excuse" hasn't been tested (let alone appealed), the proportionality of detention hasn't been tested (that, for starters, can go to Europe). IANAL, but I can see holes in it. Not that I would like to be on the receiving end.
You don't have to give your keys before you start using encryption, only on receipt of a lawful request for them from a legally authorised person. Oh, there are two more undefined terms.
This would only be true if the vegans you're caricaturing were also raw-food fanatics. While there may well be some people who fit into both groups, most of the vegans who I've cooked for and with have been conscientious and knowledgeable about the need to cook their foods to make nutrients more available. As a chemically-aware scientist running the animal rights group, I simply didn't let woolly-minded organic-tree-huggery bunny loving go past without being challenged and corrected. The moral arguments are more than capable of standing up by themselves, without needing pseudo-science to prop them up.
Ah, designing it so that only a retarded and unimportant portion of the population can use it. That's a really good move. Good luck to them. ... this is an excellent example where if you can't make things ambidextrous, make them flexible. Or, in this case, use an external USB tablet and let the user decide how to arrange their desktop. ... I can almost envisage the commendation which the pixel-pushing over-worker will get when the design leaks. The commendation's name begins with "P-45".
More seriously, having acquired a fucked-up wrist over the last week because the retard who prepares our offshore kits took a sudden liking to "right-handed" mice
What - this is intended for the market of people who push pixels with their laptop propped on their lap on the subway home. Wow, that's a big market. I bet you wouldn't want to lose 1/3 of them. And all those super-secret designs being manipulated on the train
(for non-Brits - a "P-45" is the form you get sent to the tax office when your employment is ended. Translate to your local equivalent.)
Bottom line of page 5 : "planed" instead of "planned".
Oh, sorry, a basic spelling checker wouldn't have caught that. He'd need one that can distinguish contexts between "carpentry" and "legalese".
Unfortunately, since this works machine doesn't have Firefox's spelling checker (in any language!), I'm bound to have shot myself in the foot.
Me too, probably. But to my shame, here I am out somewhere "West of Shetland" (actually, the last land we saw was the Orkenys, but "whatever") and I don't actually know which sea area we're in. Checking the Met Office, we're near the border of Fair Isle and Faroes.
And BTW, I grew up pretty close to the least marine part of Britain too, but here I am bobbing around in the North Atlantic.
"There", in the general case, is not like "here". For the large majority of cases of "there" and "here". Your next comment is illuminating about your misunderstanding, I think :
This certainly sounds like you live in an area where there is considerable distance, or at least opaque screening, between a public right of way and anywhere that you can see from inside your residence (or work, or both). Since few people choose to live in a building with steel plates just outside the windows, then I'll bet that you're actually thinking about being tens of metres, if not hundreds of metres, or whole kilometres from a public right of way. Which is fine, well and good, in a country with sufficient space for living in such conditions. I hope you enjoy walking to the shops when the oil runs out (though the well that I've just drilled might stave that off for an hour or two). ... and the taxi hasn't even stopped yet. The taxi never leaves the public highway.
The article is about people living in high density areas. I don't know how high "high density" is in the parts of Japan that are being talked about, but when I take the helicopter home, I can normally see if the lawn has been mowed before we land (weather permitting), and as the taxi turns the corner into the street I can see my wife in the kitchen, and if I get home after dusk I can tell if the TV is on, if my daughter is in her bedroom
That may not be a lifestyle to your liking, but I drill my client's oil wells without caring about the results because I can walk to the shops and this country knows how to ration petrol.
"There" is not generally like "here".
On the other hand, you could live in a box in town, without windows. Enjoy.
That begs the question, and not just for the USA or relating to NSA backdoors (is that the funny all-body underpants you see in Klondiker comedys?), just when, and why, did "any expectation of privacy" come in the window? Particularly in respect of any electronic communications?
Good homework, as far as it goes. Unfortunately, you missed the bit at the top of the page that said
So, you're right that the article has terminological inexactitudes, but you don't get full marks because you don't work out the terminology properly.
It's a 4-way potential division, on criteria of size versus being in, or approaching, Earth's atmosphere. Large and small which are in Earth's atmosphere are meteors (there hasn't been a "large" one, greater than 0.1km, in the history of comprehensive scientific observation, with the very arguable case of Tunguska). Large, outside Earth's atmosphere is an asteroid ; small outside Earth's atmosphere is a meteoroid.
The classification as described isn't perfect. Just what would we call a Ceres-scale object that's going to hit Earth next year (it's not impossible) - meteoroid, asteroid, meteor-to-be, or just simply "Many GigaDeaths"? What would we call the next comet that follows Shoemaker-Levy-9, but does a series of aerobraking manouvers through Jupiter's atmosphere before finally crashing? It can't be a meteor, because it's not in Earth's atmosphere, but it's sure as blazes leaving long streaks of light and ionisation through AN atmosphere.
FWIW, my understanding of the term "meteoroid" included a criterion that it had reasonable potential to come into contact with Earth.
Not one of Wikipedia's better articles. I guess I'd better have a poke at it when I get off shift. (Wednesday, it looks like.)
Considering that Antarctica is a pretty big place, might I humbly ask you where in Antarctica? West Antarctic Peninsula? East Antarctica? Marie Byrd Land, or Dronning Maud?
This is not a rhetorical question - I spent 2 days of my life (plus £450 of my Boss's money) looking for answers to this (and related) questions at the recent South Atlantic Petroleum Systems conference. So I'd like your two -cents worth to add to the state of debate.
Given ethane, and energy, and catalysts (which do degrade, and frequently involve expensive and rare materials themselves), you get one range of hydrocarbons, out of many types available from natural oil. You'd know that if you knew any chemistry. But if you knew anything about chemistry, you'd know that chemists have been saying "oil is too good to burn" since the 1930s.
As I said earlier, a hospital, not a factory. To be more precise, in the tuberculosis-testing "production line" which takes in bottles of phlegm at one end, adds guinea pigs, food, and 3 weeks culture time, and outputs a dead guinea pig, a pathology report, and a diagnosis of "TB or not-TB" in answer to the question "TB?".
Just because it doesn't involve welders and angle grinders, doesn't mean that it's not a production line. Actually, the infection and cross-contamination control procedures dictate one-way transit through the system, recirculation of jigs from end of the line to start of the line, etc. (The cages get autoclaved in a separate building after sacrifice, and then go back to the Incoming Stores room.)
I suppose I should use the past tense : the buildings became a housing complex over a decade ago, and I've no idea how my last TB test was processed.
Yes.
Did I say that it was unpleasant? No, I didn't. What I said was that it's not easy. Going back through my list, you've got all the fun of implementing sterile procedures when you're cleaning out the Guinea pig shit (oh, just how do hospitals manage to use them for infection testing without them cross infecting each other? Answer : because lots of minimum-wage factory workers are beavering away looking after the furry bastards with medium- or high-grade sterility procedures. Read the manual - it's several hundred pages thick - as good as a good programming language reference, and unlike most programming, if YOU get it wrong, someone may die through mis-diagnosis. Easy work?) ; changing oil on 40 gear boxes sounds easy, but there are 10 different types of gear box randomly distributed through the room, each with drain and filler plugs hidden under inches of pulp, so you've got to get up there, find the appropriate plugs, do the work and get back down. In six minutes per vat. Easy ? Greasing the inside of the machinery - as much of an intellectual challenge as navigating through a boulder collapse in a cave (great fun!). Easy is arguable (are you claustrophobic? I don't know. But I do know that you're forever looking for an easier way form point A to point B, and the machines aren't any more designed for humans than boulder collapses are). What was the other one ? ... oh yes, cleaning the crown-block sensors. I whistle Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" as I do it. Great fun. But freezing, frightening and really hard work. 2/3 of our trainees refuse to go above 20ft above the deck, and I can't blame them. But I do insist that they try, at least once, so that we (and they) know whether they are capable of the job.
Compared to being stuck in an office 8.5 hours per day with a bunch of back-stabbing cunts ... well different people have different ideas of what hell is. I find hell anywhere more than 28 deg C ; but I'll work at 52 deg C (note the implicit "I get paid for this" in "I'll work"). Of preferance I'll work at -30 deg C. Other people have other "comfort zones".
Seriously - try some industrial work. You might hate it, in which case you've got some real motivation ; you might love it, in which case you've just widened your career choice. But don't dismiss it as being "easy" until you've done it.
If it were easy, then robots or slave-wage humans would do it.
Here's pause for thought : a motivated, competent domestic plumber in the UK can make £50,000 per year. I don't know what that is in your currency, but it's damned good money. It's not very fashionable work though, is it? Neither is drilling oil wells or scraping shit, but they're all equally necessary.
So, going back to the original topic, if Apple staff are being treated like slaves, then the work that they're doing must be easy, and they're liable to be replaced by a robot if they complain. If the work they're doing is not easy, then they're not in imminent fear of replacement by robots, and they can complain. You've almost always got the option of telling your Boss "I'm not going to do that". Though you do have to be mindful of the consequences. So does your Boss - he may have to pay the costs of recruitment, training and retention of your replacement, if he can find one. (I know that people do sometime put a gun to your head and say "Arbeit macht Frei", but it's not common. Lesser extortions can be survived until you get a chance to break out.)