The problem with gasoline as far as price goes is that it's more than 200% or more above where it was not too long ago. We can't increase the supply 200%.
WTF are you smoking? Percentage increase in market price is not in any way linearly related to shortfall in supply. Supply can sit at 99% of demand and prices can climb a lot more than 1% before leveling off. Conversely, if production is 105% of demand, prices can drop a hell of a lot more than 5% before it levels off. It's completely dependent on the shape of the demand curve.
All together, first-hand, hearing it from either the person let go or someone (non-IT) working for the company? 30 cents or so. Counting third hand reports and things I've read on the internet, probably a buck and a quarter.
see, that's the problem with mixing scientists and psychics. Scientists insist that stuff happen on demand, within defined parameters. Psychic abilities just don't seem to work like that.
"I can sometimes tell the future, but I never know when or what about"
"Tell me what the first thing I'll hear on the radio next Tuesday will be."
Now there are 6 billion people on this world.
How many of them would you assume have such abilities?
1, 10, 100, thousands, millions?
Of all those people there is going to be at least one, just 1 who is also a real scientist who cares less about a quiet life and more about discovering by what mechanisms their abilities work and who is not afraid to submit to detailed testing under the watchful eyes of scientists and professional illusionists for the sake of this.
Too many unfounded assumptions, not least of which is that the sets of "psychic" and "scientist" must overlap to a statistically significant degree. Furthermore, your argument assumes psychic ability is something that's simply present, rather than something that's developed. Given the confoundingly subtle and proof-defying nature of most psychic abilities, it's not at all unreasonable to assume that the type of person who spends their life defying reason and working to develop something as faith-centric as psychic abilities, is exactly the opposite of the type of person who spends their life seeking verifiable proof before believing anything for sure.
That's the entire problem with all this psychic shit: it is by definition stuff that defies scientific explanation.
If psychics are so real, how come none have come forward to debunk James Randi (the way that he has debunked dozens of them)? It would seem a fairly simple task. He has even agreed to meet psychics on "neutral ground," but still no takers.
I think James Randi is great, and I love seeing him debunk the fraudsters out there--- and there are a lot of them. Still, I've seen enough weird shit anecdotally that I believe there is something to some claims of psychic abilities. In such cases, I reason that the complexity of what would need to be done to perpetrate a fraud reaches a point where Occam's Razor comes into play.
The problem with Mr Randi's challenge is that it is narrowly tailored to classic fraudsters. Perhaps the most telling requirement for the challenge is this one:
"This offer is not open to any and all persons. Before being considered as an applicant, the person applying must satisfy two conditions: First, he/she must have a âoemedia presence,â which means having been published, written about, or known to the media in regard to his/her claimed abilities or powers."
So right there he's pretty much limited the challenge entirely to showmen and fame seekers, the traditional territory of con artists.
The other problem is that his challenge requires performance on demand of his interpretation of what a challengers psychic powers ought to be able to do. Again, this is great for showing up scammers who make sweeping claims, but it also basically excludes all the "real" psychics who freely admit that their "powers" are often random, inscrutable, and unpredictable. The classic case is with mediums who claim to speak to the dead. Randi's challenge test would be along the lines of "OK, ask my assitant's grandfather what his dog's name was". From the few I've seen that appear credible, it just doesn't work like that, like a telephone call. You get who coems through, if anyone does at all.
Finally, there's the whole nature of the challenge itself. I can't say I've encountered anyone who I considered to be "psychic" in my estimation that gave a rat's ass about money, fame, or proving that they're not a fraud. I can't say why that is, but it just doesn't fit the personality type.
The key to passing a lie detector test is to bring yourself to believe the lies you are telling.
Actually, the real key to passing a lie detector test is to react more strongly to the control questions than the relevant ones. The control questions aren't the one's like "what is your name"--- those are just fillers. Control questions are the ones where they KNOW you will answer untruthfully, such as "have you ever lied to your spouse about money?" So long as the magic needles stay below the baseline set by the control questions when they ask the relevant questions, the security theater performer... I mean polygraph expert won't declare you a witch. You can try to convince yourself that your lies are true, but it's easier to convince yourself that your small known lies are big.
For more detailed information on just what a ridiculous sham polygraphy is, check out antipolygraph.org.
I never understood the whole split-phase duplex outlet thing. Why do you Canadians do that?:) (And doesn't it lead to an overloaded neutral?)
The two phases can share the neutral because the AC sine waves aren't synchronized. As one wave reaches peak, the other is hitting zero. Together, they never add up to more than one wire can handle. Further proof of the superiority of AC over DC. Edison sucks! Go Tesla!
... Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko,... etc. did not demonstrate particularly exceptional technical skill in the conventional sense. but their artistic talent and creativity are still undeniable.
I challenge that assertion. Pollack was a talentless paint-dribbling drunkard. Rothko was perhaps talented, but it certainly didn't show up in any of his paintings. They became famous because a whole lot of rich New York art scene fools were sold on the idea that you could have art with no content.
i disagree. i think there are a lot more competent programmers out there than there are visionary individuals. programming is a technical skill, but with most non-menial trades, it takes more than just technical prowess to succeed. you also need to be inspired or possess a little more creativity than the next guy.
Creativity without technical knowledge is as much a road to nowhere as technical knowledge with no creativity. You end up with guys like my brother in law who have all these great things they want to patent, but lack the technical knowledge to realize that what they propose generally either A) violates the laws of physics, or B) is actually quite trivial and already exists, but isn't useful in that capacity (often for reasons pertaining to (A)).
So what you're saying is that it doesn't matter that he's not smart enough to do it himself? Well..... OK. How does that relate to the subject at hand?
perhaps it was just a combination of the surge, elimination of key targets and conversion of sunni groups
Most likely a combination of the three. The surge plus the high value target elimination apparently made the "foreign fighters/al qaeda in iraq" redouble their efforts by escalating their methods. They were always vicious borderline insane fanatics (you'd have to be to go running to Iraq to support your cause), but this escalation apparently made it abundantly clear to the Sunnis that they weren't interested in Iraq and its people so much as killing infidels and infidel "collaborators". When the local Sunnis stop hiding and feeding you and instead run to the police stations and say "hey, the Syrian motherfuckers who killed my neighbor for selling a Pepsi to a US soldier are in the building next door making bombs", well, then you are pretty much fucked.
Not really, a terminal server could easily have a modem on one end and a bunch of serial cables on the other, not at all an uncommon setup.
Doubtful. They're able to get to the login prompt and know they don't have the password. If it was just a phone line/extension, it's a simple matter of tracing the copper pair. That'd take one call to the telco and an hour max with a tone generator and tracer.
Then there's the bloody obvious question of "what do you think those serial cables would have to be attached to"? If you say "out of bandwidth hardware management ports", you missed the part where it says it provides access to their network.
If doc_doofus knows and is talking, he's standing by to spend some time making little rocks out of big rocks at Leavenworth. I'd take his assessment with a huge grain of salt.
Hah. You clearly haven't dealt with a lot of classified information. It's not like what he said isn't common knowledge. Highly classified and heavily compartmentalized information is excruciatingly dull. I could bore a thousand people to DEATH with all the stuff I know that the military has classified "Top Secret". Believe it or not, the highest classifications are reserved largely for the most uninteresting technical minutiae you can imagine. "Big picture" stuff just doesn't rate serious classification because it's usually a big picture that everyone can see. An amusing anecdote about the Navy's IT ineptitude doesn't even rate a classification of "CONFIDENTIAL".
heh. I helped my brother set up a small Linux based web server at his house a few years ago. In order to put it as close to the DSL modem as possible, we stuffed it in a cupboard in the dining room which was practically unreachable and otherwise unusable because it was blocked by this massive cherrywood buffet. I named the server "Fortunato". Sadly, no one ever really got the joke...
Given that the list of "activities" is dominated by things related to cleaning/organizing, I'd say it's more like methamphetamine induced OCD. Never met an ADD person whose first thought was "ooo, something to clean"....
See, what you're missing is that people have no natural racism per se, but rather we have a natural tendency towards "group identity". In a biological sense, human history hasn't been some happy fairy tale where we all just get along as one groovy family. Our natural tendency is towards supporting our own familial group or tribe. Physical traits are simply one way of telling "us from them". Language is another. So yeah, when you put two people together in a room, the only "us" will be the two of them, so there'll be a tendency towards inclusiveness.
meaning that their 5-nines SLAs are shot for approximately the next 100 years.
Bah, that's nothing. The school district I work for (very big one) bought a $50 million web-based maintenance and operations tracking software package that fails all the time. We like to joke that it has "almost two nines of availability!" The supplier of the software (whose salesmen claimed it would "do everything you need, right out of the box") says that it can be fixed for another $30 million. Your tax dollars at work!
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The problem with gasoline as far as price goes is that it's more than 200% or more above where it was not too long ago. We can't increase the supply 200%.
WTF are you smoking? Percentage increase in market price is not in any way linearly related to shortfall in supply. Supply can sit at 99% of demand and prices can climb a lot more than 1% before leveling off. Conversely, if production is 105% of demand, prices can drop a hell of a lot more than 5% before it levels off. It's completely dependent on the shape of the demand curve.
All together, first-hand, hearing it from either the person let go or someone (non-IT) working for the company? 30 cents or so. Counting third hand reports and things I've read on the internet, probably a buck and a quarter.
tech workers are looked down upon, because people only ever come to us when things go badly
If I had a nickel for every time I've heard of an IT guy being [sacked|not replaced after leaving] because some ass in a suit reasoned thusly:
"What do we need an IT guy for? We never have any computer problems!"
break != brake
Interesting how a post linking to a story that rather credibly illuminates a rather interesting bait-and-switch by Mr Randi gets modded "flamebait".
see, that's the problem with mixing scientists and psychics. Scientists insist that stuff happen on demand, within defined parameters. Psychic abilities just don't seem to work like that.
"I can sometimes tell the future, but I never know when or what about"
"Tell me what the first thing I'll hear on the radio next Tuesday will be."
"It doesn't work like that."
"Fraud."
Now there are 6 billion people on this world. How many of them would you assume have such abilities? 1, 10, 100, thousands, millions? Of all those people there is going to be at least one, just 1 who is also a real scientist who cares less about a quiet life and more about discovering by what mechanisms their abilities work and who is not afraid to submit to detailed testing under the watchful eyes of scientists and professional illusionists for the sake of this.
Too many unfounded assumptions, not least of which is that the sets of "psychic" and "scientist" must overlap to a statistically significant degree. Furthermore, your argument assumes psychic ability is something that's simply present, rather than something that's developed. Given the confoundingly subtle and proof-defying nature of most psychic abilities, it's not at all unreasonable to assume that the type of person who spends their life defying reason and working to develop something as faith-centric as psychic abilities, is exactly the opposite of the type of person who spends their life seeking verifiable proof before believing anything for sure.
That's the entire problem with all this psychic shit: it is by definition stuff that defies scientific explanation.
If psychics are so real, how come none have come forward to debunk James Randi (the way that he has debunked dozens of them)? It would seem a fairly simple task. He has even agreed to meet psychics on "neutral ground," but still no takers.
I think James Randi is great, and I love seeing him debunk the fraudsters out there--- and there are a lot of them. Still, I've seen enough weird shit anecdotally that I believe there is something to some claims of psychic abilities. In such cases, I reason that the complexity of what would need to be done to perpetrate a fraud reaches a point where Occam's Razor comes into play.
The problem with Mr Randi's challenge is that it is narrowly tailored to classic fraudsters. Perhaps the most telling requirement for the challenge is this one:
"This offer is not open to any and all persons. Before being considered as an applicant, the person applying must satisfy two conditions: First, he/she must have a âoemedia presence,â which means having been published, written about, or known to the media in regard to his/her claimed abilities or powers."
So right there he's pretty much limited the challenge entirely to showmen and fame seekers, the traditional territory of con artists.
The other problem is that his challenge requires performance on demand of his interpretation of what a challengers psychic powers ought to be able to do. Again, this is great for showing up scammers who make sweeping claims, but it also basically excludes all the "real" psychics who freely admit that their "powers" are often random, inscrutable, and unpredictable. The classic case is with mediums who claim to speak to the dead. Randi's challenge test would be along the lines of "OK, ask my assitant's grandfather what his dog's name was". From the few I've seen that appear credible, it just doesn't work like that, like a telephone call. You get who coems through, if anyone does at all.
Finally, there's the whole nature of the challenge itself. I can't say I've encountered anyone who I considered to be "psychic" in my estimation that gave a rat's ass about money, fame, or proving that they're not a fraud. I can't say why that is, but it just doesn't fit the personality type.
The key to passing a lie detector test is to bring yourself to believe the lies you are telling.
Actually, the real key to passing a lie detector test is to react more strongly to the control questions than the relevant ones. The control questions aren't the one's like "what is your name"--- those are just fillers. Control questions are the ones where they KNOW you will answer untruthfully, such as "have you ever lied to your spouse about money?" So long as the magic needles stay below the baseline set by the control questions when they ask the relevant questions, the security theater performer... I mean polygraph expert won't declare you a witch. You can try to convince yourself that your lies are true, but it's easier to convince yourself that your small known lies are big.
For more detailed information on just what a ridiculous sham polygraphy is, check out antipolygraph.org.
I never understood the whole split-phase duplex outlet thing. Why do you Canadians do that? :) (And doesn't it lead to an overloaded neutral?)
The two phases can share the neutral because the AC sine waves aren't synchronized. As one wave reaches peak, the other is hitting zero. Together, they never add up to more than one wire can handle. Further proof of the superiority of AC over DC. Edison sucks! Go Tesla!
... Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko,... etc. did not demonstrate particularly exceptional technical skill in the conventional sense. but their artistic talent and creativity are still undeniable.
I challenge that assertion. Pollack was a talentless paint-dribbling drunkard. Rothko was perhaps talented, but it certainly didn't show up in any of his paintings. They became famous because a whole lot of rich New York art scene fools were sold on the idea that you could have art with no content.
i disagree. i think there are a lot more competent programmers out there than there are visionary individuals. programming is a technical skill, but with most non-menial trades, it takes more than just technical prowess to succeed. you also need to be inspired or possess a little more creativity than the next guy.
Creativity without technical knowledge is as much a road to nowhere as technical knowledge with no creativity. You end up with guys like my brother in law who have all these great things they want to patent, but lack the technical knowledge to realize that what they propose generally either A) violates the laws of physics, or B) is actually quite trivial and already exists, but isn't useful in that capacity (often for reasons pertaining to (A)).
...I was literally driven nuts...
Literally?
So what you're saying is that it doesn't matter that he's not smart enough to do it himself? Well..... OK. How does that relate to the subject at hand?
And of course you openly question if its illigitimate to fight a foreign military occupation and their puppet regime.
Puppet regime? How does it differ from the post-WW2 Federal Republic of Germany? Was Konrad Adenauer the puppet?
perhaps it was just a combination of the surge, elimination of key targets and conversion of sunni groups
Most likely a combination of the three. The surge plus the high value target elimination apparently made the "foreign fighters/al qaeda in iraq" redouble their efforts by escalating their methods. They were always vicious borderline insane fanatics (you'd have to be to go running to Iraq to support your cause), but this escalation apparently made it abundantly clear to the Sunnis that they weren't interested in Iraq and its people so much as killing infidels and infidel "collaborators". When the local Sunnis stop hiding and feeding you and instead run to the police stations and say "hey, the Syrian motherfuckers who killed my neighbor for selling a Pepsi to a US soldier are in the building next door making bombs", well, then you are pretty much fucked.
Not really, a terminal server could easily have a modem on one end and a bunch of serial cables on the other, not at all an uncommon setup.
Doubtful. They're able to get to the login prompt and know they don't have the password. If it was just a phone line/extension, it's a simple matter of tracing the copper pair. That'd take one call to the telco and an hour max with a tone generator and tracer.
Then there's the bloody obvious question of "what do you think those serial cables would have to be attached to"? If you say "out of bandwidth hardware management ports", you missed the part where it says it provides access to their network.
If doc_doofus knows and is talking, he's standing by to spend some time making little rocks out of big rocks at Leavenworth. I'd take his assessment with a huge grain of salt.
Hah. You clearly haven't dealt with a lot of classified information. It's not like what he said isn't common knowledge. Highly classified and heavily compartmentalized information is excruciatingly dull. I could bore a thousand people to DEATH with all the stuff I know that the military has classified "Top Secret". Believe it or not, the highest classifications are reserved largely for the most uninteresting technical minutiae you can imagine. "Big picture" stuff just doesn't rate serious classification because it's usually a big picture that everyone can see. An amusing anecdote about the Navy's IT ineptitude doesn't even rate a classification of "CONFIDENTIAL".
heh. I helped my brother set up a small Linux based web server at his house a few years ago. In order to put it as close to the DSL modem as possible, we stuffed it in a cupboard in the dining room which was practically unreachable and otherwise unusable because it was blocked by this massive cherrywood buffet. I named the server "Fortunato". Sadly, no one ever really got the joke...
That's called ADD. Google it.
Given that the list of "activities" is dominated by things related to cleaning/organizing, I'd say it's more like methamphetamine induced OCD. Never met an ADD person whose first thought was "ooo, something to clean"....
See, what you're missing is that people have no natural racism per se, but rather we have a natural tendency towards "group identity". In a biological sense, human history hasn't been some happy fairy tale where we all just get along as one groovy family. Our natural tendency is towards supporting our own familial group or tribe. Physical traits are simply one way of telling "us from them". Language is another. So yeah, when you put two people together in a room, the only "us" will be the two of them, so there'll be a tendency towards inclusiveness.
Dunno why you refer to Starship Troopers in your reply as I did not specify it in any way.
The guy who replied to you mentioned it
actually, it does, so long as you are becoming Anonymous Coward by only checking the "post anonymously" box and not logging out.
meaning that their 5-nines SLAs are shot for approximately the next 100 years.
Bah, that's nothing. The school district I work for (very big one) bought a $50 million web-based maintenance and operations tracking software package that fails all the time. We like to joke that it has "almost two nines of availability!" The supplier of the software (whose salesmen claimed it would "do everything you need, right out of the box") says that it can be fixed for another $30 million. Your tax dollars at work!
HTML is a markup language for adding useful elements to text documents, smartass.