Last I checked you were the voter and put these clowns in power - along with the rest of us. If we don't like it - why don't we simply vote for someone else? Why keep picking the same clowns? Oh, I get it - voting must be a waste of time too.
So, it 'vanishes' when it is off? When it is on it lights up like a neon sign? I could be wrong - but a gigantic neon light antenna up in the air is going to be a pretty obvious target. The enemy is going to know exactly where you are. Also - they are going to know you are transmitting something - so they can start to jam/home in on your signal. How exactly does this prevent that?
Also - I would love it if the enemy used this brilliant antenna design. You will be left flabber"gas"ted as I use my ultra-portable, ultra-stealthy jamming device to explode your plasma tubes on the battlefield. What is my weapon? A rock and a slingshot. My eyes! The goggles do nothing!
NASA keeps a voluntary database of incidents/accidents and safety concerns from pilots. The idea is that it can be totally anonymous. They want pilots to feel free to report safety concerns without fear of being fired or discriminated against by their current airline. The database is fully on-line and you can search it. Look at the facts: The American airline industry completes thousands of flights every day without a single issue. That is friggen AMAZING! The ATC has a very hard job, and they do it well. A big part of why things are so safe is the over-zealous approach pilots (most pilots) take to safety. There are several different ways to report problems. If you are at a major airport and break the rules (in a small plane for example) you can usually expect an FAA inspector to meet you at the tarmac to pull your ticket on the spot. If you don't take safety seriously word gets around fast. Your fellow pilots don't appreciate it.
This program has been going for years and years. It helps make the skies above you safer. If there is an increase it is likely due to one of the major trends affecting aviation today. Fewer airports, more airplanes with smaller passenger sizes, more flights, younger pilots, etc. I highly doubt NASA is trying to deep-six some scary fact, they probably just didn't want to pay to deal with the fallout from a service that costs them dollars. They do it for free in the interest of safety. They should be applauded for their years of service to the aviation industry.
Keep in mind that the ASRS is in ADDITION to the NTSB and FAA programs for saftey (which also has searchable online-database).
Okay, that's great. Hard drives will get bigger. The problem is they aren't getting any faster. I'm having a hard time trying to get RAID 6 working well with my 1TB drives (think rebuild times, RAID 5 will be on its way out). How do I manage a RAID array of 4TB disks that still only give me about 60MB/s real-world write performance. So I put 12 in a RAID 6 and end up with 40TB. How many days will it take to rebuild a failed drive in real-world work loads? Capacity is great - but at some point we are all going to wake up and start begging for faster speeds as well. I think hybrid drives might have a shot, 1TB of flash with 3TB disk might be the right match - but you're still waiting forever on rebuilds (and a policy to manage it).
I imagine some of you out there, like myself, are starting to see problems with data integrity as the mountain of data you are sitting on climbs in to the petabytes. All I can say is: bit flips suck! Do you KNOW your data is intact? Do you REALLY believe your dozens of 750GB-1TB SATA drives are keeping your data safe? Do you think your RAID card knows what to do if your parity doesn't match on read - does it even CHECK? I hope your backup didn't copy over the silent corruption. I further hope you have the several days it will take to copy your data back over to your super big - super slow - hard drive.
Is anyone thinking optical? Or how about just straight flash? I have a whole stack of 2GB USB flash drives - should I put them in a RAID array?;-)
I purchased a 3rd gen Nano for my wife. She is very pleased with it. She even manages to watch some of her favorite TV shoes on it. It might be slightly wide - but it is very thin. Our only complaint is the dozens of bugs. However, these all appear to be software based so hopefully most of the annoying ones get fixed soon. How hard is it to code something like coverflow? Please forgive me if I'm wrong - but that feature is by far the most buggy. I also can't say too many nice things about iTunes. Is apple trying to make it suck on purpose? That's what it seems like to me.
Including it's shortcomings we are happy with it overall. Being able to personalize the player by engraving the back actually was a selling point. It takes a dumb electronic device and turns it in to a sentimental keepsake.
Everyone will experience a forced upgrade. It is simply a matter of time. When your non-tech friend buys his next gaming machine it is going to come with Vista because XP won't be an option. I remember a similar reluctance between 3.11 and Win95. Eventually everyone got there - or skipped Win95 and went right to Win98. In another year the landscape will be much different. Microsoft will eventually pull the plug on OEMs who are still selling XP (Dell).
This is a great time to consider an alternate desktop OS.
If you fail to make your boss happy - let me tell you what is coming next:
!!! Time Cards !!!
9:00 - Read Slashdot. 10:00 - Posted to Slashdot. 11:00 - Read a few other web sites. 12:00 - Left for lunch. 1:45 - Deleted old users. 2:00 - Restored deleted users from backup, oops. 3:00 - Sat in a meeting about SysAdmin productivity. 4:00 - Complained about sutpid productivity meetings in IRC. 5:00 - Posted "Ask Slashdot" about how to get out of productivity meetings.
Expect this to continue day in, day out, year after year - until you retire, die, are fired, or quit. Hopefully some day soon you'll realize the shop down the street expects none of this from you because they have competent managers. Even more hopful, you'll get hired there soon after this realization.
All I can say is, I feel for you. I really do. I was in a horrible company doing this until I came to my senses. Thank goodness I got out when I did. (Un)fortunatly for the company it sounds like you're an honest guy. Remember that a SysAdmin who's watchers are cluless appears the magician - if (s)he has quick enough hands.
From now on anyone who looses at MONOPOLY will now loose all their physical assets! This is serious folks! If you loose at Doom, guess what? The Rock is going to show up at your house with a BFG and blow your head off. Games are NOT for messing around! Coming soon will be twister - extreme edition. If you loose we'll send a REAL twister directly to your neighborhood! So START TAKING GAMES SERIOUSLY! We can't afford to have anyone not understand just how deadly serious we are. After all, what is real life but a gigantic real-world MMORPG?
Actually, I think that depends on how many beers he downs in any given 15 minute interval. The question is, who is the nicer Linus? The drunk one, or the sober one? My money is on the former.
I could really do with a hand conveying this to a manager whose only real knowledge of Linux is "if it's so good, why would you give it away for free"?" All I can say is: "1997 called, they want their manager back."
Linux is way past explaining itself to people. Quit while you can, or complain very loudly your manager doesn't have a clue and he should be fired. Any IT manager that doesn't know the strengths and weaknesses of Linux in today's business climate isn't worth much and will drag his entire organization down. Many large companies are running Linux on tens of thousands of servers, mainframes, embedded devices, etc. If Linux was not adequate why would you install it on your brand new MILLION DOLLAR mainframe? Has your manager even looked at what OSs are supported on mid and big iron boxes? Why would they go to the extreme trouble to certify a free/Free OS if it was worthless? Ask him that question right before you hand him your resignation.
If you take hundreds of cabs and consolidate them down to 40 (with the associated consolidated storage) you are going to save millions. That has little to do with Linux. It is the modern mainframe that makes this kind of thing possible, which is why more people are moving to them. They must have a lot of servers spinning idle to get this done.
The reason why companies are in this pickle is because they thought more was better. They though "All we need to do is buy 4000 x86 servers and we can do tons of work." They didn't realize how HARD it is to get 4000 servers to operate in a cluster so you can take advantage of those individual systems as one body. So, they ended up with islands of computing power instead of a cluster. Naturally the mainframe consolidates these islands back to computing continents and you end up running the mainframes at near capacity all the time. Modern mainframes make this easy with dynamic CPU/RAM allocation, as well as dynamic storage. So you segment out the mainframe in to four or eight chunks. Chunk 1 is hot, chunk 3 and 5 are idle. Simply re-assign some of the CPUs from chunk 3 and 5 to 1 until the load goes down. You can take advantage of this in a big way if you segment your work load to match global demand. So chunk 1 might be data for the western USA, and chunk 7 might be EMEA. You can bounce resources between those segments much more easily. You can even script it. HP has an offering that does this automagically, I'm sure IBM has something similar.
Now, my personal opinion is why Linux? Some of the more advanced features like dynamic RAM, CPU, and IO allocation don't appear to be that solid to me. Perhaps IBM added these features to Linux or made them more robust? Maybe they run Linux inside an AIX virtualization container?
FTA:
"I'd hate to get flames like "you destroyed
my entire collection of Sam Fox nude gifs (all 103 of them), I'll hate
you forever", just because I may have done something wrong." - Torvalds
Well, I'm not sure a 250KW generator is going to get a datacenter very far. Most require several MW. Someone posted this facility had 10 2MW generators when he took a tour. It may be more now. There have been many stories on/. about this in the last year. Datacenters are being delayed coming online because they can't get enough of the big generators they need. In the datacenters I've been in the generators are big - 10 feet tall, etc. They require specialized maintenance contracts to keep the 5+ generators up to spec. One place I was in even arranged to have fuel helicoptered or 4WD'd in should a natural disaster wipe out roads. They paid extra to ensure they had 2 months worth of fuel available to them via this method.
The reason why you have off-site replication is for when the redundant systems fail. And they DO fail. Water lines break. Things blow up. Literally. I know of a datacenter that BLEW UP (well, a wall did any way). It's a long story, that one. If your business can live with the very rare 2-3 hour outage (netflix) then you wouldn't pay extra. If your business would loose A LOT of money/clients if this happened, then you need to have off-site recovery capabilities regardless of the redundancies in place at site "A." Every time this happens it seems to shake up the money tree for the IT department.
Certain SAN technologies allow cross-site replication of data. That way if there is a major disaster, or the datacenter screws up and you end up with no power, you have an off-site replicated slave with your data. If done right it can be brought online in minutes (or even faster). There are many different vendor solutions for SAN replication. If you do it right you can use your replicated SAN for backups, and certain intensive read-only business processes. It also makes testing major production code changes easier, just make a new snap, export the volume to your stand-by test gear, and test away. When finished, undo it, and you're all good.
Master-slave database replication could be fine if all you need to replicate is databases. I think it would depend on your particular workflow - and how much data you had - on which one would be the better choice. Licensing could be a big issue as well when comparing the two choices. Data size is a big part of it. When you have hundreds of TB your choices start to get limited.
For some of these sites they are a lot more central than you might realize. If they failed to build their systems with a secondary site in mind it can be near impossible for the "CTO" types to pony up the dollars for it later. The biggest issue I have seen that affects this is storage. Either they aren't using suitable SAN technologies, or they didn't put enough money behind the storage initiative to set up secondary site replication. I agree with you though. This is a problem that has been solved. Perhaps netflix thought - wth - if we go out for a few hours and people can choose their movies that's just tough luck.
Sun.com going down is a good example of someone totally screwing up. They have absolutely NO excuse. The others - maybe they can get away with it and we won't care. If Sun can't keep their own site up, how can I expect them to keep mine up?
Well, as Surgeon General I believe his focus was on how global warming affected health. For example, deaths from heat waves, increase in disease, heat related illness, cancer, respiratory illness, how global health affects the USA (and is being affected by global warming), etc.
I can think of quite a few reasons why the "Nations Doctor" should be concerned about and understand global warming. Apart from that, if he was the only individual with scientific training in the room he probably just came off as being a jerk - and that is why they didn't invite him back.
Now this is just silly. The police have cameras in their car. I realize they don't always turn them on, particularly when 'bad' things happen. But hey! Nobody is perfect! The police are not out to get you. They don't want to take you to jail just to meet a quota, or because they are on a power trip. When you video the police what you are saying is: "We don't trust you." And that is just plain wrong. So wrong, in fact, it should be criminal.
Why, just the other day the neighbors called the cops to come visit me. I have such great neighbors. The officer said it was because someone *heard* a child crying. Think of that, they just wanted to be sure my children were happy. Of course, a crying child is very concerning. Why would a child cry? Well, only two reasons I know of: because you are hitting them with a shovel, or they want to stay up past their bed time. I'm sure my neighbor would know that my kids never cry at bedtime, so they naturally assumed a shovel.
The officer who showed up was such a friendly chap. He came in to my home and woke my kids by shining his flashlight in their faces. The kids thought it was a riot! We all had a good laugh afterwords. See kids! See what fun it is to be woken up by a big police officer with a gun and a flashlight in your face!? Good times. My two year old son especially appreciated it. I think he really grew to appreciate the police that day.
Well, the cop did his job. None of my kids were bleeding, nor had any signs of child abuse at all. He could see they were probably crying because they wanted to stay up and watch that friendly purple dinosaur. See how we trusted the police fully? I can let a complete stranger with a loaded weapon in to my child's bedroom and not have a care in the world. Why? Because he is an officer of the law. Just for good measure, of course, he referred us to the local child abuse center in order to keep our kids safe. What a great police officer. The city's finest I tell you. I wouldn't dream of video taping them because I trust them fully.
My wife sat in tears as the police officer left. She was so thrilled about the visit.
Other flawed surveys show: - Bush Is Actually Orangutan In Suit - RIAA Hates DRM Music, Gives Thousands To College Kids - Emacs Is Better Than Vim - IE Is Most Secure Browser Of All Time - Volcano Likely To Erupt In Redmond
You know what they say: "News for nerds. Stuff that matters."
A long time ago I worked in a recording studio. The studio payed extra for a bar of hundreds of LEDs to go across the top of the mixing board. They served no real purpose and cost quite a bit of money. I asked the head engineer why they spent so much money on useless lights. He replied: "It's a small price to pay for cool."
Slashdot Mirror
Last I checked you were the voter and put these clowns in power - along with the rest of us. If we don't like it - why don't we simply vote for someone else? Why keep picking the same clowns? Oh, I get it - voting must be a waste of time too.
So, it 'vanishes' when it is off? When it is on it lights up like a neon sign? I could be wrong - but a gigantic neon light antenna up in the air is going to be a pretty obvious target. The enemy is going to know exactly where you are. Also - they are going to know you are transmitting something - so they can start to jam/home in on your signal. How exactly does this prevent that?
Also - I would love it if the enemy used this brilliant antenna design. You will be left flabber"gas"ted as I use my ultra-portable, ultra-stealthy jamming device to explode your plasma tubes on the battlefield. What is my weapon? A rock and a slingshot. My eyes! The goggles do nothing!
NASA keeps a voluntary database of incidents/accidents and safety concerns from pilots. The idea is that it can be totally anonymous. They want pilots to feel free to report safety concerns without fear of being fired or discriminated against by their current airline. The database is fully on-line and you can search it. Look at the facts: The American airline industry completes thousands of flights every day without a single issue. That is friggen AMAZING! The ATC has a very hard job, and they do it well. A big part of why things are so safe is the over-zealous approach pilots (most pilots) take to safety. There are several different ways to report problems. If you are at a major airport and break the rules (in a small plane for example) you can usually expect an FAA inspector to meet you at the tarmac to pull your ticket on the spot. If you don't take safety seriously word gets around fast. Your fellow pilots don't appreciate it.
http://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/
This program has been going for years and years. It helps make the skies above you safer. If there is an increase it is likely due to one of the major trends affecting aviation today. Fewer airports, more airplanes with smaller passenger sizes, more flights, younger pilots, etc. I highly doubt NASA is trying to deep-six some scary fact, they probably just didn't want to pay to deal with the fallout from a service that costs them dollars. They do it for free in the interest of safety. They should be applauded for their years of service to the aviation industry.
Keep in mind that the ASRS is in ADDITION to the NTSB and FAA programs for saftey (which also has searchable online-database).
Okay, that's great. Hard drives will get bigger. The problem is they aren't getting any faster. I'm having a hard time trying to get RAID 6 working well with my 1TB drives (think rebuild times, RAID 5 will be on its way out). How do I manage a RAID array of 4TB disks that still only give me about 60MB/s real-world write performance. So I put 12 in a RAID 6 and end up with 40TB. How many days will it take to rebuild a failed drive in real-world work loads? Capacity is great - but at some point we are all going to wake up and start begging for faster speeds as well. I think hybrid drives might have a shot, 1TB of flash with 3TB disk might be the right match - but you're still waiting forever on rebuilds (and a policy to manage it).
;-)
I imagine some of you out there, like myself, are starting to see problems with data integrity as the mountain of data you are sitting on climbs in to the petabytes. All I can say is: bit flips suck! Do you KNOW your data is intact? Do you REALLY believe your dozens of 750GB-1TB SATA drives are keeping your data safe? Do you think your RAID card knows what to do if your parity doesn't match on read - does it even CHECK? I hope your backup didn't copy over the silent corruption. I further hope you have the several days it will take to copy your data back over to your super big - super slow - hard drive.
Is anyone thinking optical? Or how about just straight flash? I have a whole stack of 2GB USB flash drives - should I put them in a RAID array?
Bah! Why didn't I preview!! Shows! Shows! She likes to watch shows not shoes! What is a TV shoe any way?
I purchased a 3rd gen Nano for my wife. She is very pleased with it. She even manages to watch some of her favorite TV shoes on it. It might be slightly wide - but it is very thin. Our only complaint is the dozens of bugs. However, these all appear to be software based so hopefully most of the annoying ones get fixed soon. How hard is it to code something like coverflow? Please forgive me if I'm wrong - but that feature is by far the most buggy. I also can't say too many nice things about iTunes. Is apple trying to make it suck on purpose? That's what it seems like to me.
Including it's shortcomings we are happy with it overall. Being able to personalize the player by engraving the back actually was a selling point. It takes a dumb electronic device and turns it in to a sentimental keepsake.
Forget the car, I want to know how they divided zero! I can use that for all kinds of things:
Partial Zero Taxes
Partial Zero Rent
Partial Zero Marketing Speak
Think of the possibilities!
Everyone will experience a forced upgrade. It is simply a matter of time. When your non-tech friend buys his next gaming machine it is going to come with Vista because XP won't be an option. I remember a similar reluctance between 3.11 and Win95. Eventually everyone got there - or skipped Win95 and went right to Win98. In another year the landscape will be much different. Microsoft will eventually pull the plug on OEMs who are still selling XP (Dell).
This is a great time to consider an alternate desktop OS.
If you fail to make your boss happy - let me tell you what is coming next:
!!! Time Cards !!!
9:00 - Read Slashdot.
10:00 - Posted to Slashdot.
11:00 - Read a few other web sites.
12:00 - Left for lunch.
1:45 - Deleted old users.
2:00 - Restored deleted users from backup, oops.
3:00 - Sat in a meeting about SysAdmin productivity.
4:00 - Complained about sutpid productivity meetings in IRC.
5:00 - Posted "Ask Slashdot" about how to get out of productivity meetings.
Expect this to continue day in, day out, year after year - until you retire, die, are fired, or quit. Hopefully some day soon you'll realize the shop down the street expects none of this from you because they have competent managers. Even more hopful, you'll get hired there soon after this realization.
All I can say is, I feel for you. I really do. I was in a horrible company doing this until I came to my senses. Thank goodness I got out when I did. (Un)fortunatly for the company it sounds like you're an honest guy. Remember that a SysAdmin who's watchers are cluless appears the magician - if (s)he has quick enough hands.
From now on anyone who looses at MONOPOLY will now loose all their physical assets! This is serious folks! If you loose at Doom, guess what? The Rock is going to show up at your house with a BFG and blow your head off. Games are NOT for messing around! Coming soon will be twister - extreme edition. If you loose we'll send a REAL twister directly to your neighborhood! So START TAKING GAMES SERIOUSLY! We can't afford to have anyone not understand just how deadly serious we are. After all, what is real life but a gigantic real-world MMORPG?
Actually, I think that depends on how many beers he downs in any given 15 minute interval. The question is, who is the nicer Linus? The drunk one, or the sober one? My money is on the former.
Building a computer is the best inter-gender activity this guy came up with? He is a true geek.
Linux is way past explaining itself to people. Quit while you can, or complain very loudly your manager doesn't have a clue and he should be fired. Any IT manager that doesn't know the strengths and weaknesses of Linux in today's business climate isn't worth much and will drag his entire organization down. Many large companies are running Linux on tens of thousands of servers, mainframes, embedded devices, etc. If Linux was not adequate why would you install it on your brand new MILLION DOLLAR mainframe? Has your manager even looked at what OSs are supported on mid and big iron boxes? Why would they go to the extreme trouble to certify a free/Free OS if it was worthless? Ask him that question right before you hand him your resignation.
If you take hundreds of cabs and consolidate them down to 40 (with the associated consolidated storage) you are going to save millions. That has little to do with Linux. It is the modern mainframe that makes this kind of thing possible, which is why more people are moving to them. They must have a lot of servers spinning idle to get this done.
The reason why companies are in this pickle is because they thought more was better. They though "All we need to do is buy 4000 x86 servers and we can do tons of work." They didn't realize how HARD it is to get 4000 servers to operate in a cluster so you can take advantage of those individual systems as one body. So, they ended up with islands of computing power instead of a cluster. Naturally the mainframe consolidates these islands back to computing continents and you end up running the mainframes at near capacity all the time. Modern mainframes make this easy with dynamic CPU/RAM allocation, as well as dynamic storage. So you segment out the mainframe in to four or eight chunks. Chunk 1 is hot, chunk 3 and 5 are idle. Simply re-assign some of the CPUs from chunk 3 and 5 to 1 until the load goes down. You can take advantage of this in a big way if you segment your work load to match global demand. So chunk 1 might be data for the western USA, and chunk 7 might be EMEA. You can bounce resources between those segments much more easily. You can even script it. HP has an offering that does this automagically, I'm sure IBM has something similar.
Now, my personal opinion is why Linux? Some of the more advanced features like dynamic RAM, CPU, and IO allocation don't appear to be that solid to me. Perhaps IBM added these features to Linux or made them more robust? Maybe they run Linux inside an AIX virtualization container?
Well, I'm not sure a 250KW generator is going to get a datacenter very far. Most require several MW. Someone posted this facility had 10 2MW generators when he took a tour. It may be more now. There have been many stories on /. about this in the last year. Datacenters are being delayed coming online because they can't get enough of the big generators they need. In the datacenters I've been in the generators are big - 10 feet tall, etc. They require specialized maintenance contracts to keep the 5+ generators up to spec. One place I was in even arranged to have fuel helicoptered or 4WD'd in should a natural disaster wipe out roads. They paid extra to ensure they had 2 months worth of fuel available to them via this method.
The reason why you have off-site replication is for when the redundant systems fail. And they DO fail. Water lines break. Things blow up. Literally. I know of a datacenter that BLEW UP (well, a wall did any way). It's a long story, that one. If your business can live with the very rare 2-3 hour outage (netflix) then you wouldn't pay extra. If your business would loose A LOT of money/clients if this happened, then you need to have off-site recovery capabilities regardless of the redundancies in place at site "A." Every time this happens it seems to shake up the money tree for the IT department.
If you run a large data center, you might buy power systems from these guys:
http://www.cat.com/cda/layout?m=37508&x=7
Certain SAN technologies allow cross-site replication of data. That way if there is a major disaster, or the datacenter screws up and you end up with no power, you have an off-site replicated slave with your data. If done right it can be brought online in minutes (or even faster). There are many different vendor solutions for SAN replication. If you do it right you can use your replicated SAN for backups, and certain intensive read-only business processes. It also makes testing major production code changes easier, just make a new snap, export the volume to your stand-by test gear, and test away. When finished, undo it, and you're all good.
Master-slave database replication could be fine if all you need to replicate is databases. I think it would depend on your particular workflow - and how much data you had - on which one would be the better choice. Licensing could be a big issue as well when comparing the two choices. Data size is a big part of it. When you have hundreds of TB your choices start to get limited.
Here is a vendor link:
http://3par.com/products/remote_copy.php
For some of these sites they are a lot more central than you might realize. If they failed to build their systems with a secondary site in mind it can be near impossible for the "CTO" types to pony up the dollars for it later. The biggest issue I have seen that affects this is storage. Either they aren't using suitable SAN technologies, or they didn't put enough money behind the storage initiative to set up secondary site replication. I agree with you though. This is a problem that has been solved. Perhaps netflix thought - wth - if we go out for a few hours and people can choose their movies that's just tough luck.
Sun.com going down is a good example of someone totally screwing up. They have absolutely NO excuse. The others - maybe they can get away with it and we won't care. If Sun can't keep their own site up, how can I expect them to keep mine up?
Well, as Surgeon General I believe his focus was on how global warming affected health. For example, deaths from heat waves, increase in disease, heat related illness, cancer, respiratory illness, how global health affects the USA (and is being affected by global warming), etc.
I can think of quite a few reasons why the "Nations Doctor" should be concerned about and understand global warming. Apart from that, if he was the only individual with scientific training in the room he probably just came off as being a jerk - and that is why they didn't invite him back.
Now this is just silly. The police have cameras in their car. I realize they don't always turn them on, particularly when 'bad' things happen. But hey! Nobody is perfect! The police are not out to get you. They don't want to take you to jail just to meet a quota, or because they are on a power trip. When you video the police what you are saying is: "We don't trust you." And that is just plain wrong. So wrong, in fact, it should be criminal.
Why, just the other day the neighbors called the cops to come visit me. I have such great neighbors. The officer said it was because someone *heard* a child crying. Think of that, they just wanted to be sure my children were happy. Of course, a crying child is very concerning. Why would a child cry? Well, only two reasons I know of: because you are hitting them with a shovel, or they want to stay up past their bed time. I'm sure my neighbor would know that my kids never cry at bedtime, so they naturally assumed a shovel.
The officer who showed up was such a friendly chap. He came in to my home and woke my kids by shining his flashlight in their faces. The kids thought it was a riot! We all had a good laugh afterwords. See kids! See what fun it is to be woken up by a big police officer with a gun and a flashlight in your face!? Good times. My two year old son especially appreciated it. I think he really grew to appreciate the police that day.
Well, the cop did his job. None of my kids were bleeding, nor had any signs of child abuse at all. He could see they were probably crying because they wanted to stay up and watch that friendly purple dinosaur. See how we trusted the police fully? I can let a complete stranger with a loaded weapon in to my child's bedroom and not have a care in the world. Why? Because he is an officer of the law. Just for good measure, of course, he referred us to the local child abuse center in order to keep our kids safe. What a great police officer. The city's finest I tell you. I wouldn't dream of video taping them because I trust them fully.
My wife sat in tears as the police officer left. She was so thrilled about the visit.
Those dirty little penguins! Who knew?
Other flawed surveys show:
- Bush Is Actually Orangutan In Suit
- RIAA Hates DRM Music, Gives Thousands To College Kids
- Emacs Is Better Than Vim
- IE Is Most Secure Browser Of All Time
- Volcano Likely To Erupt In Redmond
You know what they say: "News for nerds. Stuff that matters."
This can help:t ion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_Type_Defini
embrace, extend... oh never mind. We'll never learn will we?
A long time ago I worked in a recording studio. The studio payed extra for a bar of hundreds of LEDs to go across the top of the mixing board. They served no real purpose and cost quite a bit of money. I asked the head engineer why they spent so much money on useless lights. He replied: "It's a small price to pay for cool."