Right. They could use missile delivery with a trigger designed to sense water pressure and go off at a certain depth - a nuclear depth charge delivered by IRBM, essentially, but again, I wonder about their guidance technology. NK does operate a number of submarines; they're not nuclear, which means they could theoretically run battery-powered (quieter than a fission-fueled sub, which can't shut down the reactor) to deliver a nuclear mine below the fleet. Still, I have to suspect the noise of their screws would be heard, though quite possibly not soon enough.
Also, I'd note that estimated kill range for a 200kt weapon in surface burst over water is around 2km (CDI estimate) - I couldn't find numbers for subsurface burst for a 20kt weapon, or even anything I would feel comfortable estimating from, but a complete SWAG for it might be around 500-600 meters.
Well, if you had read my second post on the subject, you'd have seen my clarification, which was basically because I was fucking tired and used a colloquialism that was, to say the least, somewhat amusing. So, take it as an expression as explained in my followup, since we can't edit to make our late-night stupidities more rational, or...
If you want to get technical, matter-antimatter has a larger blast radius per unit of explosive than a nuke does. And a suitable ion drive engine, manipulating the orbit of an asteroid and turning it into a kinetic kill weapon would have significantly more explosive potential.
No, neither of these technologies has been weaponized yet, but both are known to be at least somewhat realistic threats (antimatter is just expensive to produce, guidance is the real problem for orbital bombardment). Give it some time, I'm sure some evil fucker somewhere in the world, US, Europe, China, or otherwise, will manage to get it built.
Eventual total loss, depending on how close the device detonates, but in the meantime it could quite possibly still fight.
Which means, for a carrier battle group, that most likely they would do their best to get off cruise missiles and ground attack aircraft as quickly as possible, and even armed conventionally a CBG can do a lot of damage. I wouldn't bet on a ship surviving a direct hit from a NK-tech nuke, but I would bet that a fair portion of a battle group would survive a nuclear attack given the known state of NK's weapons technology. Enough to do a lot of damage.
And when I say "Don't have the world's biggest blast radius" I mean "Don't destroy everything for miles and miles and miles around." NK likely has some fairly low tech weapons, on the order of Hiroshima. A mild steel structure could likely survive (and this is serious seat-of-pants estimation, based on a reported blast pressure of 4600 psi at 1/3 mile and a very conservative estimate for steel plate yielding at around 20kpsi) being within 100 yards of ground zero of a Hiroshima sized weapon. However, anyone on deck, anyone looking outside would be dead or blind, and the radiation would likely take out the entire ship within a short period of time. Probably a lot of damage, too, but it wouldn't by any means vaporize the ship.
No offense, but military ships aren't exactly easy to kill, and nukes don't have the world's biggest blast radius.
You don't have to hit the ship, but you have to get pretty close. Last I heard, NK's ballistic missiles weren't close to the 500 or so yards margin of error you'd need to take out an entire carrier battle group.
Also, NK is unlikely to waste a nuke on a fleet (given that we have ICBMs, subs, and other things that'd pretty much glass them in a second) when they have perfectly good targets like, say, Seoul.
You can make estimated predictions. In these cases, saying "I estimate the value of X future event will be" is a totally valid sentence.
In some circumstances, predictions are not estimates, but in most cases predictions are also estimates. Estimation simply means that the answer you give is not analytic - that the result is not exact. Prediction, as you said, is using some form of knowledge (whether that be past behavior, present state, the current position of the stars, or the pattern of hair follicles on the ass you're pulling this shit out of) to make a guess as to the value of a future event. If you have one of the rare systems where you have enough information to perfectly predict future behavior, predictions are not estimates, but generally most predictions are estimated.
The crafts function was NOT to sit in solar flares; it was to sit in the nominal solar wind and collect particles. Saying its function was to sit in flares is like saying that a tidal energy generator's function is to sit in the path of a tsunami - sure, they may have to do it, but that is by NO means the function. Do you even understand the magnitude of a solar flare? The particle flux of the solar wind during a flare or a CME can increase by many orders of magnitude.
There is no oxygen, there is no corrosion, but to think that that makes space benign is totally wrong. Loading on the components includes thermal cycling (the heat it absorbs from the Sun has to go somewhere; many spacecraft rotate to even out the thermal loading, though this one might not have, but those that do have expansion/contraction cycles), vacuum effects (any contacting surfaces can have vacuum welds occur), and radiation. Remember - we have satellites that die inside of the magnetosphere from radiation effects. That's even with the protection afforded. You can build to withstand what you think is out there, but Genesis sat through a period of *major* unexpected solar activity (no one predicted the violence of the sun these last couple years).
I didn't say impossible. However, they aren't easy, and you implied that anyone who can't design to meet those challenges is obviously incompetent. Being that I can pretty safely assume you've never done it, and being that NO ONE HAS EVER DEVISED A RETURN SYSTEM for an unmanned capsule that survived the same kind of trip Genesis went through (60's spy sats don't count, as they were generally up for less than a year, were in LEO and thus protected by the magnetosphere, and the return path was much shorter/easier). So put your money where your mouth is, or admit you don't know shit and sit down.
So you've never heard of vacuum welds, the fact that this craft went comparatively close to the sun and thus experienced high thermal gradients (and no, constant heat gains aren't as nasty as expansion/contraction cycles, but a constant thermal gradient is still bad), heavy solar radiation (or did you forget those massive solar flares that would have wailed all over this craft?), micrometeorites and all the other crap that goes on in space?
Space is a *nasty* environment, and is in no way shape or form benign.
If a similar number of important Debian maintainers quit, Debian would be pretty screwed as well. The important thing in both cases is that someone else could pick up the ball if they so chose.
Debian is more stable than FreeBSD only if you interpret stability to mean number of maintainers.
Maybe, but Clear Channel would cost them 20 billion, and I'm not so sure MS wants to spend the remainder (was 50 billion, they payed out 32 billion to stockholders) of their cash reserves in quite that fashion.
"Avoid the midwest, there's nothing to see there anyways."?
Chicago. Detroit. St. Louis. Cleveland even has some stuff worth seeing. Ever been to backwoods New York? Not very different from the UP in Michigan. Most of Florida is filled with hicks. Long Island is a suburban hell far worse than most of the rest of the country will ever approach. Get over your elitist coastal attitude, get into the midwest and enjoy going somewhere where people are easygoing, prices aren't outrageous, and there are lots of fun things to do. Don't forget - if you like electronic music, it was basically invented in Chicago (house) and Detroit (techno). R&B and Soul? Motown, my man. The Chicago jazz scene is one of the best in the country. All the best protopunk, punk, and postpunk came out of the midwest (MC5, Stooges, Devo, Big Black, etc.) NY may be where people move once the mainstream snaps them up, but musical trends *start* in the heart of the country.
The idea behind extradition is to allow a country (country Alpha) which wishes to prosecute a criminal who committed a crime in country Alpha but is now residing in country Beta to gain the assistance of country Beta in returning the criminal to country Alpha.
The warez kid, by distributing warez to US recipients, could be (I'm not saying this is how copyright should work, just how its being treated in this case) considered to have committed a copyright violation in the US. As such, the US can legally ask for his extradition to stand trial for his US crimes. The Aussies could probably prosecute him under their own statutes, but the nature of the infringement is such that it could be considered to have happened in two disparate locations.
The question hinges on - did he commit a crime in Australia, the US, or both? If the answer is B or C, then the extradition isn't a problem, and from my understanding of the laws of both countries (limited as that is), the answer is probably C.
I interned at KSC a couple years ago. I actually did a bit of payload planning work on STS-107, as well as doing a bunch of things (and sitting in on multiple mission meetings) for STS-111.
Got inside of an orbiter (Endeavour - they're tiny inside, I can't believe 7 people can live in one for a week, even though I would in a second to get into space), a full tour of VAB including the roof, the SRB recovery ship, the main ground support vehicle (the one that carts 200 kW worth of generators around to provide shuttle with power once the engines are off), a tour through OPF, and watching a shuttle launch from the VIP viewing site, the one about 3 miles away.
VAB has its own weather systems inside. You really have no idea what the scale is without having been there.
Look at it this way - you could stick Yankee Stadium on the roof and have some extra space left over.
45 degree angles or curves are not going to change the fact that that is just a HUGE amount of square footage that would be facing into the wind, no matter what.
Not likely, but not because of these equations - more because of something called sensitive dependence (part of chaos theory, which is very applicable to weather prediction).
However, to my understanding, solving Nav-Stokes would allow us to improve the aerodynamics of bodies moving through fluids, possibly increasing fuel economy for cars, planes, and ships. Should also be applications anywhere there's fluid thermodynamics.
There is no difference between putting up wallpaper on my computer and putting a picture up in my cube. If they trust me to do one, they should trust me to do the other. Can you put pictures up in your cube?
I want HR to spend time resolving the issue when someone uses Playboy pictures as their wallpaper, yes. That's part of HR's job.
The internet is part of our jobs. Restricting it would be more trouble than its worth, since every time we dealt with a new parts supplier, I'd have to get IT to change the filters. Instead, they have a very non-restrictive filter (basically just known porn sites are blocked). Do I need a Dilbert screensaver to do my job? No, but neither does putting in an alternate screensaver (for instance, I use a monitor/LCD powerdown instead of the marquee that our default install has set) have particularly large potential costs. (Most) businesses don't try to prevent their employees from talking to each other, even if it isn't part of their job; why, then, should they try to prevent me from installing AIM?
Your policies are fascist. I'm sorry, but its true. It may allow you to get by with one or two less support people (I think we have 3 or 4 on-site IT for about 1500 people, plus the worldwide corporate network support folks - I suspect our numbers are on the order of a tech per 400 or 500, and we have a very reasonable policy - install what you want, you screw up your computer we'll help fix it, if your computer has a virus we'll isolate it from the network and if you intentionally bring in a virus/repeatedly and intentionall violate corporate computer policy (at least 3 times), you're fired). But any way, reducing your support staff by one or two isn't worth the grumbling the inability to personalize at all will generate amongst your staff.
Pasting passwords on the monitor is obviously not good practice, but it has nothing to do with this discussion.
A business need is keeping your employees happy. Ignoring that need in favor of minimal support improvements (and they are, quite frankly, minimal if you implement sane policies like proxying net traffic, mandating a virus checker and its regular operation, forcing patch installs over the network, and mandating a non-IE browser) is silly.
The first time I broke the network security rules, you wouldn't even know. I'm not suggesting cracking into servers or anything like that. I'm suggesting little things like tunneling over a protocol. Unless you block all traffic, I *can* get what I want. Considering how ineffective blocking all traffic can make my job (engineering - I need access to supplier data, datasheets, etc.) its unlikely that any job I ever work at will do so.
Just because I don't NEED to do something doesn't mean I shouldn't be able to, even in the workplace. What about on my lunchtime? Fuck that, I'm salary, there's no reason for my employer to care if I spend 20 minutes checking baseball scores, I still have to do the exact same amount of work. You're mired in an hourly world where you think you're God. You aren't, you're just another IT twit with a power trip.
A lawsuit? For what? Checking ESPN? I'm not saying people should go cracking their computers, but anyone who locks down their network so tightly I can't check sports scores/Slashdot is working in a counterproductive fashion. Employees WILL fuck around and waste time, its in their nature. I can do it online, I can do it with coworkers, and I'll be less anti-productive than if I go tie up someone else by bullshitting with them.
Of course common people do things that are inappropriate and against the rules. Your problem is you believe locking down screensavers and the Web will prevent them from doing this. It won't.
I work for a Fortune 50 company as an engineer, and my viewpoints are based on working there and on working IT for a 40,000 person University when I was still doing IT.
Our group just got yelled at about network storage use, actually.
In the other hand, we're using something like 2 TB worth of net storage between around 8 people, so I guess they have a reason to yell at us. (IC timing simulations, mainly. Those things are huge.)
Yeah, they're what we like to call 'fascists'. Not allowing write access to the local hard drive would pretty much prevent some of our engineers from working at all, so that one's right out as well; besides which, laptops make it impossible to mandate that particular piece of policy, as many of us work disconnected regularly.
The only thing my company mandates in this vein is screensaver policy - whenever you log in, it automatically resets your screensaver timeout to 10 minutes and turns "Require password when returning from screensaver" on. They do this so that people can't log into a machine someone has left running. It's annoying, but we live with it because we can pretty much admin our own machines otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
Ask 50 people on the street what record label releases the Beatles' records. How many of them do you think will come up with the right answer?
Everybody knows the *Beatles*. The same can hardly be said for Apple Records.
Right. They could use missile delivery with a trigger designed to sense water pressure and go off at a certain depth - a nuclear depth charge delivered by IRBM, essentially, but again, I wonder about their guidance technology. NK does operate a number of submarines; they're not nuclear, which means they could theoretically run battery-powered (quieter than a fission-fueled sub, which can't shut down the reactor) to deliver a nuclear mine below the fleet. Still, I have to suspect the noise of their screws would be heard, though quite possibly not soon enough.
Also, I'd note that estimated kill range for a 200kt weapon in surface burst over water is around 2km (CDI estimate) - I couldn't find numbers for subsurface burst for a 20kt weapon, or even anything I would feel comfortable estimating from, but a complete SWAG for it might be around 500-600 meters.
Well, if you had read my second post on the subject, you'd have seen my clarification, which was basically because I was fucking tired and used a colloquialism that was, to say the least, somewhat amusing. So, take it as an expression as explained in my followup, since we can't edit to make our late-night stupidities more rational, or...
If you want to get technical, matter-antimatter has a larger blast radius per unit of explosive than a nuke does. And a suitable ion drive engine, manipulating the orbit of an asteroid and turning it into a kinetic kill weapon would have significantly more explosive potential.
No, neither of these technologies has been weaponized yet, but both are known to be at least somewhat realistic threats (antimatter is just expensive to produce, guidance is the real problem for orbital bombardment). Give it some time, I'm sure some evil fucker somewhere in the world, US, Europe, China, or otherwise, will manage to get it built.
Eventual total loss, depending on how close the device detonates, but in the meantime it could quite possibly still fight.
Which means, for a carrier battle group, that most likely they would do their best to get off cruise missiles and ground attack aircraft as quickly as possible, and even armed conventionally a CBG can do a lot of damage. I wouldn't bet on a ship surviving a direct hit from a NK-tech nuke, but I would bet that a fair portion of a battle group would survive a nuclear attack given the known state of NK's weapons technology. Enough to do a lot of damage.
Three words: Someone Else's Shit
And when I say "Don't have the world's biggest blast radius" I mean "Don't destroy everything for miles and miles and miles around." NK likely has some fairly low tech weapons, on the order of Hiroshima. A mild steel structure could likely survive (and this is serious seat-of-pants estimation, based on a reported blast pressure of 4600 psi at 1/3 mile and a very conservative estimate for steel plate yielding at around 20kpsi) being within 100 yards of ground zero of a Hiroshima sized weapon. However, anyone on deck, anyone looking outside would be dead or blind, and the radiation would likely take out the entire ship within a short period of time. Probably a lot of damage, too, but it wouldn't by any means vaporize the ship.
No offense, but military ships aren't exactly easy to kill, and nukes don't have the world's biggest blast radius.
You don't have to hit the ship, but you have to get pretty close. Last I heard, NK's ballistic missiles weren't close to the 500 or so yards margin of error you'd need to take out an entire carrier battle group.
Also, NK is unlikely to waste a nuke on a fleet (given that we have ICBMs, subs, and other things that'd pretty much glass them in a second) when they have perfectly good targets like, say, Seoul.
You can make estimated predictions. In these cases, saying "I estimate the value of X future event will be" is a totally valid sentence.
In some circumstances, predictions are not estimates, but in most cases predictions are also estimates. Estimation simply means that the answer you give is not analytic - that the result is not exact. Prediction, as you said, is using some form of knowledge (whether that be past behavior, present state, the current position of the stars, or the pattern of hair follicles on the ass you're pulling this shit out of) to make a guess as to the value of a future event. If you have one of the rare systems where you have enough information to perfectly predict future behavior, predictions are not estimates, but generally most predictions are estimated.
BSD.
It's gone.
Me, I want dead:beef:feed:face:dead:beef:feed:face.
The crafts function was NOT to sit in solar flares; it was to sit in the nominal solar wind and collect particles. Saying its function was to sit in flares is like saying that a tidal energy generator's function is to sit in the path of a tsunami - sure, they may have to do it, but that is by NO means the function. Do you even understand the magnitude of a solar flare? The particle flux of the solar wind during a flare or a CME can increase by many orders of magnitude.
There is no oxygen, there is no corrosion, but to think that that makes space benign is totally wrong. Loading on the components includes thermal cycling (the heat it absorbs from the Sun has to go somewhere; many spacecraft rotate to even out the thermal loading, though this one might not have, but those that do have expansion/contraction cycles), vacuum effects (any contacting surfaces can have vacuum welds occur), and radiation. Remember - we have satellites that die inside of the magnetosphere from radiation effects. That's even with the protection afforded. You can build to withstand what you think is out there, but Genesis sat through a period of *major* unexpected solar activity (no one predicted the violence of the sun these last couple years).
I didn't say impossible. However, they aren't easy, and you implied that anyone who can't design to meet those challenges is obviously incompetent. Being that I can pretty safely assume you've never done it, and being that NO ONE HAS EVER DEVISED A RETURN SYSTEM for an unmanned capsule that survived the same kind of trip Genesis went through (60's spy sats don't count, as they were generally up for less than a year, were in LEO and thus protected by the magnetosphere, and the return path was much shorter/easier). So put your money where your mouth is, or admit you don't know shit and sit down.
So you've never heard of vacuum welds, the fact that this craft went comparatively close to the sun and thus experienced high thermal gradients (and no, constant heat gains aren't as nasty as expansion/contraction cycles, but a constant thermal gradient is still bad), heavy solar radiation (or did you forget those massive solar flares that would have wailed all over this craft?), micrometeorites and all the other crap that goes on in space?
Space is a *nasty* environment, and is in no way shape or form benign.
And if you've ever heard his bit about Stephen Hawking and a prostitute, it's worth a million Linuxes.
What's that you say? Not the same David Cross?
Well screw that guy, then.
If a similar number of important Debian maintainers quit, Debian would be pretty screwed as well. The important thing in both cases is that someone else could pick up the ball if they so chose.
Debian is more stable than FreeBSD only if you interpret stability to mean number of maintainers.
Maybe, but Clear Channel would cost them 20 billion, and I'm not so sure MS wants to spend the remainder (was 50 billion, they payed out 32 billion to stockholders) of their cash reserves in quite that fashion.
Only if they commit crime G before they commit crime F.
"Avoid the midwest, there's nothing to see there anyways."?
Chicago. Detroit. St. Louis. Cleveland even has some stuff worth seeing. Ever been to backwoods New York? Not very different from the UP in Michigan. Most of Florida is filled with hicks. Long Island is a suburban hell far worse than most of the rest of the country will ever approach. Get over your elitist coastal attitude, get into the midwest and enjoy going somewhere where people are easygoing, prices aren't outrageous, and there are lots of fun things to do. Don't forget - if you like electronic music, it was basically invented in Chicago (house) and Detroit (techno). R&B and Soul? Motown, my man. The Chicago jazz scene is one of the best in the country. All the best protopunk, punk, and postpunk came out of the midwest (MC5, Stooges, Devo, Big Black, etc.) NY may be where people move once the mainstream snaps them up, but musical trends *start* in the heart of the country.
Don't knock the midwest. We have more fun.
The idea behind extradition is to allow a country (country Alpha) which wishes to prosecute a criminal who committed a crime in country Alpha but is now residing in country Beta to gain the assistance of country Beta in returning the criminal to country Alpha.
The warez kid, by distributing warez to US recipients, could be (I'm not saying this is how copyright should work, just how its being treated in this case) considered to have committed a copyright violation in the US. As such, the US can legally ask for his extradition to stand trial for his US crimes. The Aussies could probably prosecute him under their own statutes, but the nature of the infringement is such that it could be considered to have happened in two disparate locations.
The question hinges on - did he commit a crime in Australia, the US, or both? If the answer is B or C, then the extradition isn't a problem, and from my understanding of the laws of both countries (limited as that is), the answer is probably C.
I interned at KSC a couple years ago. I actually did a bit of payload planning work on STS-107, as well as doing a bunch of things (and sitting in on multiple mission meetings) for STS-111.
Got inside of an orbiter (Endeavour - they're tiny inside, I can't believe 7 people can live in one for a week, even though I would in a second to get into space), a full tour of VAB including the roof, the SRB recovery ship, the main ground support vehicle (the one that carts 200 kW worth of generators around to provide shuttle with power once the engines are off), a tour through OPF, and watching a shuttle launch from the VIP viewing site, the one about 3 miles away.
Definitely experiences I will remember.
VAB has its own weather systems inside. You really have no idea what the scale is without having been there.
Look at it this way - you could stick Yankee Stadium on the roof and have some extra space left over.
45 degree angles or curves are not going to change the fact that that is just a HUGE amount of square footage that would be facing into the wind, no matter what.
Not likely, but not because of these equations - more because of something called sensitive dependence (part of chaos theory, which is very applicable to weather prediction).
However, to my understanding, solving Nav-Stokes would allow us to improve the aerodynamics of bodies moving through fluids, possibly increasing fuel economy for cars, planes, and ships. Should also be applications anywhere there's fluid thermodynamics.
There is no difference between putting up wallpaper on my computer and putting a picture up in my cube. If they trust me to do one, they should trust me to do the other. Can you put pictures up in your cube?
I want HR to spend time resolving the issue when someone uses Playboy pictures as their wallpaper, yes. That's part of HR's job.
The internet is part of our jobs. Restricting it would be more trouble than its worth, since every time we dealt with a new parts supplier, I'd have to get IT to change the filters. Instead, they have a very non-restrictive filter (basically just known porn sites are blocked). Do I need a Dilbert screensaver to do my job? No, but neither does putting in an alternate screensaver (for instance, I use a monitor/LCD powerdown instead of the marquee that our default install has set) have particularly large potential costs. (Most) businesses don't try to prevent their employees from talking to each other, even if it isn't part of their job; why, then, should they try to prevent me from installing AIM?
Your policies are fascist. I'm sorry, but its true. It may allow you to get by with one or two less support people (I think we have 3 or 4 on-site IT for about 1500 people, plus the worldwide corporate network support folks - I suspect our numbers are on the order of a tech per 400 or 500, and we have a very reasonable policy - install what you want, you screw up your computer we'll help fix it, if your computer has a virus we'll isolate it from the network and if you intentionally bring in a virus/repeatedly and intentionall violate corporate computer policy (at least 3 times), you're fired). But any way, reducing your support staff by one or two isn't worth the grumbling the inability to personalize at all will generate amongst your staff.
Pasting passwords on the monitor is obviously not good practice, but it has nothing to do with this discussion.
A business need is keeping your employees happy. Ignoring that need in favor of minimal support improvements (and they are, quite frankly, minimal if you implement sane policies like proxying net traffic, mandating a virus checker and its regular operation, forcing patch installs over the network, and mandating a non-IE browser) is silly.
The first time I broke the network security rules, you wouldn't even know. I'm not suggesting cracking into servers or anything like that. I'm suggesting little things like tunneling over a protocol. Unless you block all traffic, I *can* get what I want. Considering how ineffective blocking all traffic can make my job (engineering - I need access to supplier data, datasheets, etc.) its unlikely that any job I ever work at will do so.
Just because I don't NEED to do something doesn't mean I shouldn't be able to, even in the workplace. What about on my lunchtime? Fuck that, I'm salary, there's no reason for my employer to care if I spend 20 minutes checking baseball scores, I still have to do the exact same amount of work. You're mired in an hourly world where you think you're God. You aren't, you're just another IT twit with a power trip.
A lawsuit? For what? Checking ESPN? I'm not saying people should go cracking their computers, but anyone who locks down their network so tightly I can't check sports scores/Slashdot is working in a counterproductive fashion. Employees WILL fuck around and waste time, its in their nature. I can do it online, I can do it with coworkers, and I'll be less anti-productive than if I go tie up someone else by bullshitting with them.
Of course common people do things that are inappropriate and against the rules. Your problem is you believe locking down screensavers and the Web will prevent them from doing this. It won't.
I work for a Fortune 50 company as an engineer, and my viewpoints are based on working there and on working IT for a 40,000 person University when I was still doing IT.
Our group just got yelled at about network storage use, actually.
In the other hand, we're using something like 2 TB worth of net storage between around 8 people, so I guess they have a reason to yell at us. (IC timing simulations, mainly. Those things are huge.)
Yeah, they're what we like to call 'fascists'. Not allowing write access to the local hard drive would pretty much prevent some of our engineers from working at all, so that one's right out as well; besides which, laptops make it impossible to mandate that particular piece of policy, as many of us work disconnected regularly.
The only thing my company mandates in this vein is screensaver policy - whenever you log in, it automatically resets your screensaver timeout to 10 minutes and turns "Require password when returning from screensaver" on. They do this so that people can't log into a machine someone has left running. It's annoying, but we live with it because we can pretty much admin our own machines otherwise.