So, he goes up to space, sees that the edge of the world is not a straight line, and that the earth curves. So to maintain his "flat earth" delusion, he will come back and announce that the earth is actually a flat plate? Aside from the fact that I would *never* wish harm on another human being, I really hope that when he lands, he does not land on his head. There is probably not much inside it to be damaged, but it might leave a sizeable crater.
For some people, it would make no difference. But for the vast majority of people, being in the air for an extra 30 minutes would actually be less arduous than landing and being close enough that you could (regulations aside) walk the last few steps. An illustrative anecdote that I saw a few years ago was about the design of a new airport terminal (I think it might have been Terminal E at Dallas Fort Worth or one of the newer terminals at Atlanta, but I am not 100% sure and my Google skills are as bad as usual...). The architects and designers were very vocal about how much time, effort, and new-fangled computer simulation time they had spent in optimizing the passenger off-boarding, minimizing the time and distance from deplaning to the passengers getting to the public areas. Almost everybody who flew into that terminal hated it. Why? Because while it was incredibly quick to get through the whole process if you only had carry-on luggage, the baggage handling system was the same as at every other airport. So people found that they got through security and to the baggage claim area very quickly, but they were waiting a long time for their luggage. How was it solved? With a brand new automated baggage handling and prioritization system? No... it was solved by giving passengers who were deplaning an artificially long route from the Arrivals Gate to Security, and from there to the Baggage Claim. The goal was that the passengers and their baggage should arrive at about the same time. It worked... people now loved (or at least liked) arriving at the new terminal, because they were able to get to Baggage Claim, pick up their luggage (or wait a minute or two for it to arrive) and go. The fact that they were not actually saving any time with the new process (no change was made to the baggage handling system, it was still operating at the same speed as before) was irrelevant and un-noticed. All that changed was the passenger perception - they were kept busy by walking, just long enough for everything else around them to work.
People are stupid. As babies, our parents give us brightly coloured toys to distract us and keep us quiet. As we get older, the toys get more expensive, but there are all sorts of adults giving us things to achieve the same goal, and sometimes we even do it to ourselves.
Of course... neither Pence or Trump will be going in the journey, so why do they need to waste time and money on things life safety? After all, any- and every-one apart from the aforementioned two are expendable and replaceable.
In most cases, working on outside projects will be grounds for some kind of disciplinary process,
I've never seen that happen. Nobody at work cares what I do on my own time. I have seen cases in some states where the company successfully claimed the outcome of the outside project, but that's illegal in mine.
ok, I was not totally clear on that point, my bad.:) The focus with that sentence was not on what the employee does in their own time, but rather what they do during their contracted employment hours. Apologies for the confusion.
Daylighting. Some companies (Google, for example) embrace it, while others try to stamp it out.
Does the employee contract state that working on outside projects is not allowed, on company equipment and/or on company time? Does the contract state that anything external that the employee works on automatically becomes IP of the company (good luck with trying to enforce that in some countries)? The employee contract usually defines responsibilities for both the employee and the employer. Using the employee contract to enforce behaviour on the part of the employee can be problematic if the employee has a good lawyer versed in employment law on their speed-dial, and will often result in a shit storm for all parties that does nobody any favours (except for the lawyers).
In most cases, working on outside projects will be grounds for some kind of disciplinary process, but if the employee is valued then asking them why they are daylighting. Look at whether they are completing projects/meeting targets on time, and whether you are happy for the employee to walk away.
I would say that the supervisor was probably 100% honest and totally ok with it. He then goes to HR and asks what kind of support they can give, and the HR troll hits the kill switch. Although the idea that a cryptographer for a defence contractor would be granted remote access to the systems they would need to do their job is an interesting one from a security perspective.
Of course, it could be that the supervisor is a wet blanket who cannot handle conflict, plays the sympathetic boss and then runs to the HR girl to get her to do the shitty thing. She is then pissed at the supervisor for putting her in that position, and takes it out on the candidate.
HR might also be pissed at both supervisor and candidate that the wife's terminal cancer diagnosis has obviously not been mentionned at all during the interview process - as a candidate in that position, I would be tempted to keep quiet about it unless the cancer was so advanced that my wife had only a couple of months to live, in which case I pretty much have to 'fess up to it at an interview - "look, my wife has terminal stomach cancer, and has at most a few months. During that time, I am her out-of-hours carer so if OOH work is required, I would need to tackle that from home". From the HR perspective, if that vital information was not forthcoming during interview, what else is there to come out, and is this candidate suddenly a bad risk? At the very least, will the candidate need extensive bereavement leave that was not anticipated during the hiring, or will this go on for an extended period because the wife hangs on for years rather than weeks/months (not likely with stomach cancer, but that is not an evaluation HR can make). It should still be handled professionally and with compassion, rather than by going postal on the guy, but the interview and candidate evaluation process is the stage where all such issues need to be raised.
On balance, and from my experience as a supervisor and working with HR, I would say that the supervisor was probably being honest and that the HR woman was either being a bitch or was pissed that the limitation didn't come out during the interview stage and just did not handle the situation well.
The way that I read the article (sorry for not following/. tradition) is that you have a central grocery distribution point within the apartment building, condo complex or similar, and in those situations it could work, and becomes more viable the larger the apartment building/complex. For small apartment buildings, or for people who live in houses, it would almost certainly not be viable or workable. Doing it the "other way" - you order online via and the groceries are shipped from a warehouse using some combination of delivery process that includes autonomous drones/vehicles for "last mile" service would work for all cases but is not much more efficient than current solutions and is prone to package loss/damage.
When you have a situation where each party is blaming the other, the cause is almost always a lack of effective communication by BOTH sides. If each thinks that the other is responsible, then neither has successfully articulated their opinions to the other. As an IT person, I do not mind being given the responsibility for handling cyber attacks, as long as I am also given the express authority that "handling" will require, and the budget to provision security and prevention measures. Of course, I am not going to get the budget that I ask for, no department head ever does. But then my acceptance of that budget comes with the written caveat that a reduced budget directly impacts my ability to "handle" cyber incidents and will increase the risk of successful attacks or sub-optimal mitigation of attacks.
This is maybe not quite so much of a tinfoil-hat post as the title might make it seem, but any data published by any party which uses that data to support their argument has to be seen in the light that the data is a supporting argument for their point of view. Whether it is a scientist/politician/manager/slashdot poster tweaking their selection criteria to give more favourable results or just wholesale making up statistics by pulling them out of a dark hole, we are all human and we are all going to be tempted. Citation and open availability of the complete dataset for peer/independent review is the only way to avoid it. And yes, I am sure that my post would benefit from some citations to confirm the described human behaviour. But as 95% of/. users will not read the comment and 90% of those that do will not click on the citation links, and 100% of the people involved in writing the comment are too damned lazy to go and find the citations and link them, someone else can write the [citation needed] comment below.
Not sure would say Intel has a monopoly, but there is a huge capital cost involved in adopting each new generation of fabrication facilities, to the point where there are very few companies that can take a seat at that table - that is the reason why most chip design companies outsource their fabrication requirements to one of the companies with the desired/required technical facilities.
This may be a silly question since I've never been in this kind of situation, but why doesn't the IT staff all collectively refuse to train their outsourced replacements? Or go on strike? Even if they aren't unionized, they could go on strike (I assume). Am I just making some bad assumptions here?
Two main reasons - One of the conditions of getting a half-decent severance package will be that you have to train the outsourced labor to a standard satisfactory to the remaining management; secondly, one of the unwritten but impossible to avoid/prove conditions of getting a good reference from the employer will be training the replacement. So... refuse to play nice with the managers screwing you over like this? No problem, you're fired immediately and you will get no reference from the employer (or even worse, an "off-the-record" conversation between your old manager and a potential new employer saying that they were happy to get rid of you because you are not a team player, have a bad attendance/disciplinary record, poor standards, racist views, take regular holidays in the MIddle East, and take regular breaks every hour or so to pray to Allah.
For the small minority who have enough money in the bank to get them through a lean year, or who get head-hunted, it is deeply satisfying to play the clown for a week while "training" the new hire then walking into the manager's office and taking a crap on his expensive chair. For the vast majority, though, who have the kind of personal finances that most members of the consumer society have, that severance package is badly needed and should just about cover the basics.
Very true... but outside of the article title, the article makes no distinction or breakdown between mass transit and personal transit, while alluding in the text to cars and other small/personal transport options - the Mike Orcutt article mentions vehicle sales, trucks, SUVs and cars, thus giving the impression that the increase is down to the American vehicle owner. Maybe the paper it references, written by John DeCicco, has a bit more of an objective viewpoint, but this particular paper is not yet linked from Prof. DeCicco's page on the MIT Faculty so it is impossible to say for sure. Having said that, much of the language of his other linked papers specifically references "cars" and seems to point to an assumption that private transport is a greater contributory problem than mass transport so I would not hold my breath waiting for a balanced view on the relative impacts of mass- versus private-transport solutions.
So, an elected official is either approached by an AT&T/Comcast lobby group or approaches them, and she then allows that lobby group to submit legislative proposals to the council in her name because (paraphrasing somewhat) "she was too busy doing other stuff to make time to do it herself". You know, I recall a few British and European politicians doing that over the last 15-20 years. One example, the "Cash for Questions" scandal in the 1990's... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... It was labelled Corruption, and resulted in the end of a few political careers.
I am all in favour of using a cheaper option that is equally as effective as its more expensive alternative - that is simply an expression of one of the bases of most Capitalist economic models, after all - that an existing incumbent in the market can be challenged by a new competitor providing the same or similar service at a lower cost. I also happen to love home-built and self-built solutions to many problems. But I mostly apply that passion when making furniture and tinkering with my car or the innards of my computers. The reservation that I have with that approach around medicines and pharnaceuticals though, is the dosage, effectiveness of the delivery and consistency of the product. A case in point - Sanofi's Auvi-Q (the main EipPen alternative) which was withdrawn by Sanofi in 2015 because of concerns about its ability to deliver the correct amount of epinephrine. These pens are designed to be used without medical training, so someone with the skill required to recognise an under- or overdose may not be present. Heathkit solutions are great, IF they deliver a consistent (and correct) dose of the medicine, and IF the medicine contains a consistent (and correct) dose of the active ingredients. Without that reliability that the mechanism is going to work and deliver the correct dose, it is difficult to put trust in that solution, especially for for a parent or guardian whose child may have such an extreme allergic reaction that their health or life will be in danger without proper care. For sure, this is a pretty blatant (in my opinion) example of price-gouging by Mylan. Trying to blame it on the US Healthcare system is weak, but they have been given a pretty clear monopoly in schools thanks to their political lobbying efforts and now they are extracting the maximum value possible from the situation - another example of capitalist economics at work - setting the cost of a product/service at a level the market can bear and that the seller is happy with, rather than the cost the market would like to pay.
I would applaud any serious attempt by any company to contribute to the Open Source community, both in terms of active contributors and also the open-sourcing of projects (particularly widely-used ones, such as the.Net Framework).
However, purely focussing on the number of contributors is potentially misleading for a number of reasons. For example, a contributor who posts a single one-line update fixing a spelling mistake is still a contributor, and in the total that contributor carries as much weight as a contributor who has pushed out thousands of high quality updates across several/many projects. Also, the quality of the contributions is important - on one level all contributions are welcome as they are an effort to help. But contributions which require subsequent additional contributions to resolve issues they have introduced are less desireable than the actual fix. I would assume that programmers working for MS and the other big contributing companies are more competent and therefore less likely to introduce problems than a part-time coder working from home, but that is a potentially dangerous assumption. Either way the quality of the contribution would be important, while also being hard to measure and quantify on a site-wide basis. However, my biggest feeling for the misleading factor of the total contributors number is the range of projects on which those contributions are seen - if MS's 16k+ contributors all contribute solely to the open-sourced MS products, then (purely in my opinion) that somewhat devalues those contributions - they are still useful, welcome and gratefully accepted because the projects they are contributing to are themselves useful, but I feel they do less to improve the overall ecosystem of the Open Source community than the contributors putting time into projects from a range of different sources.
.... How do you manage 50 hours of gameplay over a 48 hour period?
Start playing at 18:00 (6PM) on Friday, leave the computer switched on and the game loaded, finish playing at 20:00 (8PM) on Sunday. 50 hours. Bonus points if you mainline coffee, and give up at 06:00 on Monday morning just before leaving for work/school, because then you clocked up 60 hours... if 50 hours is theft then 60 must be close to murder.
Mainly for failing to perform any checks to see if the party filing the DMCA notice actually has the authority (i.e. copyright ownership) to be able to enforce the notice. However, such checks would go a long way toward invalidating the defense used by media companies who abuse the DMCA provisions when faced with such patently absurd filings - that they filed this specific request in error as a result of a failure of an automated reporting system, and that nobody at the media company making the filing was aware that the filing was incorrect. In the meantime, sanctions related to the number of DMCA notices received against content uploaded by specific accounts remains triggered even when many/most of the notices are shown to be bogus/in error, meaning that there is no incentive for the media companies to change and there are no satisfactory mechanisms in place for small uploaders to recover their content/challenge the behaviour.
The C-level executives in any large company are disconnected from the customers who buy/use their products, being concerned with the "high level" views. But for most of those companies, they know that they have some competitors in the marketplace and will lose market share to those competitors if they fail to deliver. In the case of domestic US ISPs, decades of almost completely unregulated consolidation have put pretty much the whole country in a situation where each geographical area has a single large incumbent ISP (read, monopoly) and many have managed to get legislators in those areas to enact laws that effectively ban or put unfeasibly large hurdles in the way of competition starting up (for reference, see the "fun" that Google has gone through when trying to build out their fiber service in various cities). In a typical capitalist model of an economy, when the large incumbent enterprise is unable or unwilling to provide customers with the service they want, a smaller competitor can come in and provide that service - whether it is lower cost, higher speed, no/higher data cap, or monthly bills hand-delivered by Playboy Bunnies. However, that model assumes that the economic barriers to starting to offer that service are low and that there are no legal blocks protecting the incumbent - in the case of domestic ISPs, there are both - because most of the cables, backbone to door, are owned by those incumbents, a competitor either has to buy from those incumbents thus limiting their ability to compete (because the incumbent can say "no" or set the pricing to be prohibitive, or set data caps on the competitor), or the competitor has to build out their own network of cables (resulting in a high capital cost - a significant barrier to market entry - and running up against many of those legislative blocks that state or city legislators have put in place).
So the ISPs can be pretty comfortable - they know that complaints are on the rise, and that they are more unpopular now than they have been for years, but they also know that their customers have little or no choice than to keep on giving them money.
Sorry, but forcing idiot politicians to show the electorate how good a job they are doing would basically put them in a continuous election/campaigning cycle (because that is effectively their job performance review, and the Congress/Senate campaign cycle lasts for at least 6-9 months as it is), meaning that they would do even less useful work than they do now. The fact that you are right about the attention span of voters being too short to remember anything that has not happened in the last week (not sure if I am being too generous there, sometimes I think it is much shorter than that) does not mean that the election/performance review cycle should be shortened, it means that the electorate actually need to put some effort into considering who to vote for. Too hard? Then the electorate are too lazy/stupid/incompetent, and they get the candidate they deserve. Remember, these politicians are supposed to be the best representatives of the people in their constituency. So if the electorate are lazy, then the politician has to be only slightly less lazy. Remember, when being chased by zombies or cannibals, you do not have to be faster than the zombies or cannibals, you just have to be faster than the dumb schmuck next to you, so that they catch him, and you get away. On in the case of politicians, they only have to be slightly better than the other guy, who has to be only slightly better than anyone else.
Yes, the technical analysis and implementation of security fixes/updates for hardware and software within a company is a set of IT tasks, but the task of budgeting for that is/should be a finance task, with oversight from C-level legal representation. If the CEO doesn't know how to handle it, that is fine - as long as he/she understands that they are the ones who will ultimately be left holding the can for a data breach, they will have the incentive to get somebody in place who does know how to handle it - the role of the CEO is to be the figurehead and "big picture" source, not subject-matter expert in all areas. So the CEO needs to think "this is an IT problem, but I will be carrying the can for a problem, so I need to talk to the head of IT and see what they need to help me save my job", and work from there.
BackBlaze might have their own alternative reasons, but in my case... Because whether you are using RAID, the Reed-Solomon setup that BackBlaze are using, or no distributed data system at all, it is easier/quicker to recover data directly from a drive that is showing signs of failure than it is to restore from a backup or recover from a RAID parity check. Yes, it means that I am removing drives from my arrays that still have useful life in them, but they get repurposed - I am quite frequently asked by friends and family for a drive they can use as a one-time transport mechanism for music, photos, videos, documents, pretty much anything, and I go to great pains to point out that the drive is potentially failing. If the data size is "only" a few GB/10's of GB, then I usually have a USB drive or 3 lying around that they can use. But I also have a few external drive caddies that I can drop an old drive into, and which is either preferable or taken as a second copy, because the USB can get lost very easily, while a 1/2 kilo drive is less "lose-able".
Having spent a large part of my life living in Devon (a very rural part of the United Kingdom, lots of farms, tiny villages, small roads/lanes - often not wide enough for 1 car in each direction, except at specific "passing places" - with high hedges to the side limiting both long range visibility of the road ahead and the run-off/avoidance options for traffic coming in the opposite direction), I can say that driving on a road with no central line marking, which is also narrow and with limited visibility, does tend to lead to either slower speeds (the careful drivers) or much higher speeds (the drivers who fantasize about being a rally driver, and who assume nothing will be coming the other way). Take away the line down the middle of the road, and the road feels narrower, at least to me. But there may also be an assumption that the road is a (very wide) one-way street, so the result would be that drivers move to the middle of the road. That would make life interesting if you come around the corner on such a road, and see a car driving in the middle of the road. Maybe I am not giving my fellow drivers enough credit, but when my father taught me to drive, he always reminded me "assume every other driver on the road is an incompetent idiot with no control over their vehicle"... sadly I have seen a lot of evidence that backed up his statement. Another element came when driving the E10 highway in northern Norway and Sweden with my girlfriend (very competent driver, in a landscape that was sometimes the typical alpine "wall of rock on one side, sheer drop down the other"). She was perfectly happy and capable of driving when there was a line in the middle of the road, even with large semi-artic trucks coming in the opposite direction at 80+km/h (50+mph), but as soon as the lines disappeared because the road narrowed a bit, or there was a stretch of newly resurfaced road with no markings, she was very uncomfortable and wanted me to drive, because the road then felt restrictively narrow, especially with the trucks driving on it (there was space for the truck plus our car, but not a huge margin for error in car positioning).
At least in theory, what he is supposed to do is go to his direct superior or a direct superior of the individuals who were involved in the conduct and say "This client of ours is involved in illegal/unethical/unconstitutional (delete as appropriate) conduct. This client happens to be the Department of Justice". Except that he was working for the DoJ at the time, so painting the DoJ as the "client" in this case seems at first face to be a tenuous thread on which to hang the case against him, and if it really was that tenuous, his lawyer would have no trouble breaking the argument. So I am guessing that there is something in the DoJ employment contracts or in some recent legal precedent that allows the DC Bar to go after him, because if there is one thing that a lawyer hates more than an open-and-shut case requiring little billable work, it is an honest lawyer who makes the rest of them look as bad as they really are. So now that there is some basis on which to charge Tamm, the DC Bar are going to go for it. Unless of course there is some other political consideration at play, and the case itself is just a front - a vehicle for someone to run for political office, perhaps. Anyway, the idea is that Tamm should have gone to his superiors or the superiors of the person(s) involved in the scheme and raised the issue. And after a verbal discussion, he should have put the issue in writing, both email and printed version, and kept a copy or 20 of each for himself. He could then be fired for any number of reasons, from the color of his tie or a supposed drinking habit, to transmission of confidential documents to outside sources (his own email addresses or physical storage *cough* that the DoJ could not touch without a warrant), thus tainting him as a "disgruntled former employee". Then, if there is no action following his escalation, and if he miraculously still has any credibility left following a smear campaign about his (previously un-known) mental health issues - Psych reports from willing doctors attached - he would be justified in going to the press. Except that you would probably find no-one within the DoJ who remembers a meeting with him about this, no record of any email communication about it with anyone inside the DoJ, and so on. So then there is still no validation for his "claim" that he raised the issue with his superiors, and he is right back in the situation he is in now, except that he was fired because of the apparent mental health issues, illegal extraction of documents, and oh by the way we also found evidence on his computer than he is a pedophile with extreme Islamist sympathies. Note, I am not saying that all areas of the US Government are hopelessly corrupt and will destroy anyone who tries to disturb their spot at the pig trough. I am sure the US Government has lots of people who genuinely believe they are doing the Right Thing. But given the various oaths that people in Government swear (like "protecting the constitution", etc., etc.), I am damned sure that there are a lot of people who are not fulfilling those oaths, even if they do believe they are doing the Right Thing.
One of the best things about science is that, while we accept things "as they appear to be" and formulate theories about why that is, and what the mechanisms are that govern what we see, those theories are continually up for examination and re-examination in light of new evidence that is not explained by the existing theory. If the new evidence can be independently verified, and the results replicated, then the theory can be adjusted. So, by (at least as I read it based on the summary) allowing teachers and students the possibility to discuss evolution versus creationism, to look with a critical eye at the evidence and find (NOT make) new evidence, to draw conclusions and either reinforce existing theories (by concluding that the evidence supports them) or contradict existing theories and propose new ones (because the evidence does not support the existing theories), this approach appears at first glance to be a very scientific approach to the debate. However, that will "obviously"* not be the case. The goal is almost certainly not to allow a free and open discussion, but to push an agenda by only acknowledging evidence that supports the agenda, with the rationale that the time allotted for the debate is insufficient to consider all the evidence, so we have to pick and choose. * Why do I say "obviously"? Partly because my (limited) experience of Oklahoma is of a state dominated by the conservative religious Right, who would mostly rather give a blow-job to Satan than admit that evolution is right and they are descended from monkeys; and partly because the people of Oklahoma are more concerned with where their next pay check is coming from than they are concerned with where THEY came from (not unlike many other parts of the world, though). The basic approach of most religions is to say "come to us, we have the answers to all your questions", and most religious authority figures really dislike the fact that science ("we are still looking for the answers to all our questions, but we have some interesting answers to some of your questions already") comes up with answers that disagree with their religious doctrine and proof to support those answers, instead of relying on peoples' faith in the "right" religious answer.
Yes, in a perfect world, you would have technologists (whose motivation is a close variation of "design stuff that will benefit all people, make society safer and allow us all to reap the benefits of technology") and politicians (whose motivation is a close variation of "partake in an informed debate which leads to the drafting of laws and statutes that provide protection for all individuals and allow the evolution of society into a more enlightened state") getting to better know how to communicate effectively with the other, so that technologists and politicians can better understand the technology of today, how it will be used by the people of today, and how the peoples' best interests can be served by drafting new laws or amending existing ones. However, in the world we have, the technologists almost always haven't got the slightest clue how the technology of today will be used in the next 5 minutes, and most of them are more interested in making money for themselves than they are in "benefiting all people". Similarly, most politicians (and I refer mainly to the politicians in the US and Europe now, but I am sure that a depressingly high percentage of them world-wide would fit this description) are primarily interested in keeping themselves in office to safeguard their own place on the gravy train, and are only interested in "change" or "progress" until that message gets them into office, at which point they become a drop-in for the one they replaced. So the goal for politicians, unfortunately, seems to be the maintenance of the existing status quo. If one of them gets voted out of office (being replaced by, as mentioned before, one with a vested interest in not rocking the boat), they typically get a job as a lobbyist or back-room power broker, with even more incentive to maintain the existing status quo - they are now earning more money, and probably have more personal influence than they had when serving as a politician, as well as less public oversight or need to campaign for re-election. To these people, technology is not something they need to understand (they have experts for that, earning quite a bit less than they do) - technology is something they need to control. "Ah", you say "technology is not something that you can control, because many different people developing and driving technology in all sorts of different ways!", and this is true. But behind the politicians at their pig trough/gravy train, there are the lobbyists financed by wealthy business and industrial influences. If those individuals or small companies driving technology are being too much of a potentially disruptive nature, then one of the larger industrial players can either buy the company or hire a few strategic people from them to halt or slow the development, engage in litigation, or various other practices to control the smaller player. Any individual, whether technologist or politician, who seems to be too much of a danger to the stability of the current setup can be sidelined - the technologist through acquisition or competition, the politician by not giving them any oxygen of publicity. Time for me to go and make a new tinfoil hat... I sat on the old one while writing this and broke it:/
Slashdot Mirror
So, he goes up to space, sees that the edge of the world is not a straight line, and that the earth curves. So to maintain his "flat earth" delusion, he will come back and announce that the earth is actually a flat plate?
Aside from the fact that I would *never* wish harm on another human being, I really hope that when he lands, he does not land on his head. There is probably not much inside it to be damaged, but it might leave a sizeable crater.
For some people, it would make no difference. But for the vast majority of people, being in the air for an extra 30 minutes would actually be less arduous than landing and being close enough that you could (regulations aside) walk the last few steps.
An illustrative anecdote that I saw a few years ago was about the design of a new airport terminal (I think it might have been Terminal E at Dallas Fort Worth or one of the newer terminals at Atlanta, but I am not 100% sure and my Google skills are as bad as usual...). The architects and designers were very vocal about how much time, effort, and new-fangled computer simulation time they had spent in optimizing the passenger off-boarding, minimizing the time and distance from deplaning to the passengers getting to the public areas.
Almost everybody who flew into that terminal hated it.
Why? Because while it was incredibly quick to get through the whole process if you only had carry-on luggage, the baggage handling system was the same as at every other airport. So people found that they got through security and to the baggage claim area very quickly, but they were waiting a long time for their luggage.
How was it solved? With a brand new automated baggage handling and prioritization system?
No... it was solved by giving passengers who were deplaning an artificially long route from the Arrivals Gate to Security, and from there to the Baggage Claim. The goal was that the passengers and their baggage should arrive at about the same time.
It worked... people now loved (or at least liked) arriving at the new terminal, because they were able to get to Baggage Claim, pick up their luggage (or wait a minute or two for it to arrive) and go.
The fact that they were not actually saving any time with the new process (no change was made to the baggage handling system, it was still operating at the same speed as before) was irrelevant and un-noticed. All that changed was the passenger perception - they were kept busy by walking, just long enough for everything else around them to work.
People are stupid. As babies, our parents give us brightly coloured toys to distract us and keep us quiet. As we get older, the toys get more expensive, but there are all sorts of adults giving us things to achieve the same goal, and sometimes we even do it to ourselves.
Setting bold goals and staying on schedule.
So I guess, they sacrifice safety.
Of course... neither Pence or Trump will be going in the journey, so why do they need to waste time and money on things life safety? After all, any- and every-one apart from the aforementioned two are expendable and replaceable.
I've never seen that happen. Nobody at work cares what I do on my own time. I have seen cases in some states where the company successfully claimed the outcome of the outside project, but that's illegal in mine.
ok, I was not totally clear on that point, my bad. :)
The focus with that sentence was not on what the employee does in their own time, but rather what they do during their contracted employment hours.
Apologies for the confusion.
Daylighting. Some companies (Google, for example) embrace it, while others try to stamp it out.
Does the employee contract state that working on outside projects is not allowed, on company equipment and/or on company time?
Does the contract state that anything external that the employee works on automatically becomes IP of the company (good luck with trying to enforce that in some countries)?
The employee contract usually defines responsibilities for both the employee and the employer. Using the employee contract to enforce behaviour on the part of the employee can be problematic if the employee has a good lawyer versed in employment law on their speed-dial, and will often result in a shit storm for all parties that does nobody any favours (except for the lawyers).
In most cases, working on outside projects will be grounds for some kind of disciplinary process, but if the employee is valued then asking them why they are daylighting. Look at whether they are completing projects/meeting targets on time, and whether you are happy for the employee to walk away.
I would say that the supervisor was probably 100% honest and totally ok with it. He then goes to HR and asks what kind of support they can give, and the HR troll hits the kill switch. Although the idea that a cryptographer for a defence contractor would be granted remote access to the systems they would need to do their job is an interesting one from a security perspective.
Of course, it could be that the supervisor is a wet blanket who cannot handle conflict, plays the sympathetic boss and then runs to the HR girl to get her to do the shitty thing. She is then pissed at the supervisor for putting her in that position, and takes it out on the candidate.
HR might also be pissed at both supervisor and candidate that the wife's terminal cancer diagnosis has obviously not been mentionned at all during the interview process - as a candidate in that position, I would be tempted to keep quiet about it unless the cancer was so advanced that my wife had only a couple of months to live, in which case I pretty much have to 'fess up to it at an interview - "look, my wife has terminal stomach cancer, and has at most a few months. During that time, I am her out-of-hours carer so if OOH work is required, I would need to tackle that from home".
From the HR perspective, if that vital information was not forthcoming during interview, what else is there to come out, and is this candidate suddenly a bad risk? At the very least, will the candidate need extensive bereavement leave that was not anticipated during the hiring, or will this go on for an extended period because the wife hangs on for years rather than weeks/months (not likely with stomach cancer, but that is not an evaluation HR can make). It should still be handled professionally and with compassion, rather than by going postal on the guy, but the interview and candidate evaluation process is the stage where all such issues need to be raised.
On balance, and from my experience as a supervisor and working with HR, I would say that the supervisor was probably being honest and that the HR woman was either being a bitch or was pissed that the limitation didn't come out during the interview stage and just did not handle the situation well.
The way that I read the article (sorry for not following /. tradition) is that you have a central grocery distribution point within the apartment building, condo complex or similar, and in those situations it could work, and becomes more viable the larger the apartment building/complex. For small apartment buildings, or for people who live in houses, it would almost certainly not be viable or workable.
Doing it the "other way" - you order online via and the groceries are shipped from a warehouse using some combination of delivery process that includes autonomous drones/vehicles for "last mile" service would work for all cases but is not much more efficient than current solutions and is prone to package loss/damage.
When you have a situation where each party is blaming the other, the cause is almost always a lack of effective communication by BOTH sides.
If each thinks that the other is responsible, then neither has successfully articulated their opinions to the other.
As an IT person, I do not mind being given the responsibility for handling cyber attacks, as long as I am also given the express authority that "handling" will require, and the budget to provision security and prevention measures.
Of course, I am not going to get the budget that I ask for, no department head ever does. But then my acceptance of that budget comes with the written caveat that a reduced budget directly impacts my ability to "handle" cyber incidents and will increase the risk of successful attacks or sub-optimal mitigation of attacks.
This is maybe not quite so much of a tinfoil-hat post as the title might make it seem, but any data published by any party which uses that data to support their argument has to be seen in the light that the data is a supporting argument for their point of view. /. users will not read the comment and 90% of those that do will not click on the citation links, and 100% of the people involved in writing the comment are too damned lazy to go and find the citations and link them, someone else can write the [citation needed] comment below.
Whether it is a scientist/politician/manager/slashdot poster tweaking their selection criteria to give more favourable results or just wholesale making up statistics by pulling them out of a dark hole, we are all human and we are all going to be tempted. Citation and open availability of the complete dataset for peer/independent review is the only way to avoid it.
And yes, I am sure that my post would benefit from some citations to confirm the described human behaviour. But as 95% of
Not sure would say Intel has a monopoly, but there is a huge capital cost involved in adopting each new generation of fabrication facilities, to the point where there are very few companies that can take a seat at that table - that is the reason why most chip design companies outsource their fabrication requirements to one of the companies with the desired/required technical facilities.
This may be a silly question since I've never been in this kind of situation, but why doesn't the IT staff all collectively refuse to train their outsourced replacements? Or go on strike? Even if they aren't unionized, they could go on strike (I assume). Am I just making some bad assumptions here?
Two main reasons - One of the conditions of getting a half-decent severance package will be that you have to train the outsourced labor to a standard satisfactory to the remaining management; secondly, one of the unwritten but impossible to avoid/prove conditions of getting a good reference from the employer will be training the replacement.
So... refuse to play nice with the managers screwing you over like this? No problem, you're fired immediately and you will get no reference from the employer (or even worse, an "off-the-record" conversation between your old manager and a potential new employer saying that they were happy to get rid of you because you are not a team player, have a bad attendance/disciplinary record, poor standards, racist views, take regular holidays in the MIddle East, and take regular breaks every hour or so to pray to Allah.
For the small minority who have enough money in the bank to get them through a lean year, or who get head-hunted, it is deeply satisfying to play the clown for a week while "training" the new hire then walking into the manager's office and taking a crap on his expensive chair. For the vast majority, though, who have the kind of personal finances that most members of the consumer society have, that severance package is badly needed and should just about cover the basics.
Very true... but outside of the article title, the article makes no distinction or breakdown between mass transit and personal transit, while alluding in the text to cars and other small/personal transport options - the Mike Orcutt article mentions vehicle sales, trucks, SUVs and cars, thus giving the impression that the increase is down to the American vehicle owner. Maybe the paper it references, written by John DeCicco, has a bit more of an objective viewpoint, but this particular paper is not yet linked from Prof. DeCicco's page on the MIT Faculty so it is impossible to say for sure.
Having said that, much of the language of his other linked papers specifically references "cars" and seems to point to an assumption that private transport is a greater contributory problem than mass transport so I would not hold my breath waiting for a balanced view on the relative impacts of mass- versus private-transport solutions.
So, an elected official is either approached by an AT&T/Comcast lobby group or approaches them, and she then allows that lobby group to submit legislative proposals to the council in her name because (paraphrasing somewhat) "she was too busy doing other stuff to make time to do it herself".
You know, I recall a few British and European politicians doing that over the last 15-20 years. One example, the "Cash for Questions" scandal in the 1990's... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It was labelled Corruption, and resulted in the end of a few political careers.
I am all in favour of using a cheaper option that is equally as effective as its more expensive alternative - that is simply an expression of one of the bases of most Capitalist economic models, after all - that an existing incumbent in the market can be challenged by a new competitor providing the same or similar service at a lower cost. I also happen to love home-built and self-built solutions to many problems. But I mostly apply that passion when making furniture and tinkering with my car or the innards of my computers.
The reservation that I have with that approach around medicines and pharnaceuticals though, is the dosage, effectiveness of the delivery and consistency of the product. A case in point - Sanofi's Auvi-Q (the main EipPen alternative) which was withdrawn by Sanofi in 2015 because of concerns about its ability to deliver the correct amount of epinephrine. These pens are designed to be used without medical training, so someone with the skill required to recognise an under- or overdose may not be present. Heathkit solutions are great, IF they deliver a consistent (and correct) dose of the medicine, and IF the medicine contains a consistent (and correct) dose of the active ingredients. Without that reliability that the mechanism is going to work and deliver the correct dose, it is difficult to put trust in that solution, especially for for a parent or guardian whose child may have such an extreme allergic reaction that their health or life will be in danger without proper care.
For sure, this is a pretty blatant (in my opinion) example of price-gouging by Mylan. Trying to blame it on the US Healthcare system is weak, but they have been given a pretty clear monopoly in schools thanks to their political lobbying efforts and now they are extracting the maximum value possible from the situation - another example of capitalist economics at work - setting the cost of a product/service at a level the market can bear and that the seller is happy with, rather than the cost the market would like to pay.
I would applaud any serious attempt by any company to contribute to the Open Source community, both in terms of active contributors and also the open-sourcing of projects (particularly widely-used ones, such as the .Net Framework).
However, purely focussing on the number of contributors is potentially misleading for a number of reasons.
For example, a contributor who posts a single one-line update fixing a spelling mistake is still a contributor, and in the total that contributor carries as much weight as a contributor who has pushed out thousands of high quality updates across several/many projects.
Also, the quality of the contributions is important - on one level all contributions are welcome as they are an effort to help. But contributions which require subsequent additional contributions to resolve issues they have introduced are less desireable than the actual fix. I would assume that programmers working for MS and the other big contributing companies are more competent and therefore less likely to introduce problems than a part-time coder working from home, but that is a potentially dangerous assumption. Either way the quality of the contribution would be important, while also being hard to measure and quantify on a site-wide basis.
However, my biggest feeling for the misleading factor of the total contributors number is the range of projects on which those contributions are seen - if MS's 16k+ contributors all contribute solely to the open-sourced MS products, then (purely in my opinion) that somewhat devalues those contributions - they are still useful, welcome and gratefully accepted because the projects they are contributing to are themselves useful, but I feel they do less to improve the overall ecosystem of the Open Source community than the contributors putting time into projects from a range of different sources.
.... How do you manage 50 hours of gameplay over a 48 hour period?
Start playing at 18:00 (6PM) on Friday, leave the computer switched on and the game loaded, finish playing at 20:00 (8PM) on Sunday. 50 hours.
Bonus points if you mainline coffee, and give up at 06:00 on Monday morning just before leaving for work/school, because then you clocked up 60 hours... if 50 hours is theft then 60 must be close to murder.
Mainly for failing to perform any checks to see if the party filing the DMCA notice actually has the authority (i.e. copyright ownership) to be able to enforce the notice.
However, such checks would go a long way toward invalidating the defense used by media companies who abuse the DMCA provisions when faced with such patently absurd filings - that they filed this specific request in error as a result of a failure of an automated reporting system, and that nobody at the media company making the filing was aware that the filing was incorrect. In the meantime, sanctions related to the number of DMCA notices received against content uploaded by specific accounts remains triggered even when many/most of the notices are shown to be bogus/in error, meaning that there is no incentive for the media companies to change and there are no satisfactory mechanisms in place for small uploaders to recover their content/challenge the behaviour.
The C-level executives in any large company are disconnected from the customers who buy/use their products, being concerned with the "high level" views. But for most of those companies, they know that they have some competitors in the marketplace and will lose market share to those competitors if they fail to deliver.
In the case of domestic US ISPs, decades of almost completely unregulated consolidation have put pretty much the whole country in a situation where each geographical area has a single large incumbent ISP (read, monopoly) and many have managed to get legislators in those areas to enact laws that effectively ban or put unfeasibly large hurdles in the way of competition starting up (for reference, see the "fun" that Google has gone through when trying to build out their fiber service in various cities).
In a typical capitalist model of an economy, when the large incumbent enterprise is unable or unwilling to provide customers with the service they want, a smaller competitor can come in and provide that service - whether it is lower cost, higher speed, no/higher data cap, or monthly bills hand-delivered by Playboy Bunnies. However, that model assumes that the economic barriers to starting to offer that service are low and that there are no legal blocks protecting the incumbent - in the case of domestic ISPs, there are both - because most of the cables, backbone to door, are owned by those incumbents, a competitor either has to buy from those incumbents thus limiting their ability to compete (because the incumbent can say "no" or set the pricing to be prohibitive, or set data caps on the competitor), or the competitor has to build out their own network of cables (resulting in a high capital cost - a significant barrier to market entry - and running up against many of those legislative blocks that state or city legislators have put in place).
So the ISPs can be pretty comfortable - they know that complaints are on the rise, and that they are more unpopular now than they have been for years, but they also know that their customers have little or no choice than to keep on giving them money.
Sorry, but forcing idiot politicians to show the electorate how good a job they are doing would basically put them in a continuous election/campaigning cycle (because that is effectively their job performance review, and the Congress/Senate campaign cycle lasts for at least 6-9 months as it is), meaning that they would do even less useful work than they do now.
The fact that you are right about the attention span of voters being too short to remember anything that has not happened in the last week (not sure if I am being too generous there, sometimes I think it is much shorter than that) does not mean that the election/performance review cycle should be shortened, it means that the electorate actually need to put some effort into considering who to vote for.
Too hard? Then the electorate are too lazy/stupid/incompetent, and they get the candidate they deserve. Remember, these politicians are supposed to be the best representatives of the people in their constituency. So if the electorate are lazy, then the politician has to be only slightly less lazy.
Remember, when being chased by zombies or cannibals, you do not have to be faster than the zombies or cannibals, you just have to be faster than the dumb schmuck next to you, so that they catch him, and you get away. On in the case of politicians, they only have to be slightly better than the other guy, who has to be only slightly better than anyone else.
Yes, the technical analysis and implementation of security fixes/updates for hardware and software within a company is a set of IT tasks, but the task of budgeting for that is/should be a finance task, with oversight from C-level legal representation.
If the CEO doesn't know how to handle it, that is fine - as long as he/she understands that they are the ones who will ultimately be left holding the can for a data breach, they will have the incentive to get somebody in place who does know how to handle it - the role of the CEO is to be the figurehead and "big picture" source, not subject-matter expert in all areas.
So the CEO needs to think "this is an IT problem, but I will be carrying the can for a problem, so I need to talk to the head of IT and see what they need to help me save my job", and work from there.
BackBlaze might have their own alternative reasons, but in my case ... Because whether you are using RAID, the Reed-Solomon setup that BackBlaze are using, or no distributed data system at all, it is easier/quicker to recover data directly from a drive that is showing signs of failure than it is to restore from a backup or recover from a RAID parity check.
Yes, it means that I am removing drives from my arrays that still have useful life in them, but they get repurposed - I am quite frequently asked by friends and family for a drive they can use as a one-time transport mechanism for music, photos, videos, documents, pretty much anything, and I go to great pains to point out that the drive is potentially failing. If the data size is "only" a few GB/10's of GB, then I usually have a USB drive or 3 lying around that they can use. But I also have a few external drive caddies that I can drop an old drive into, and which is either preferable or taken as a second copy, because the USB can get lost very easily, while a 1/2 kilo drive is less "lose-able".
Having spent a large part of my life living in Devon (a very rural part of the United Kingdom, lots of farms, tiny villages, small roads/lanes - often not wide enough for 1 car in each direction, except at specific "passing places" - with high hedges to the side limiting both long range visibility of the road ahead and the run-off/avoidance options for traffic coming in the opposite direction), I can say that driving on a road with no central line marking, which is also narrow and with limited visibility, does tend to lead to either slower speeds (the careful drivers) or much higher speeds (the drivers who fantasize about being a rally driver, and who assume nothing will be coming the other way).
Take away the line down the middle of the road, and the road feels narrower, at least to me. But there may also be an assumption that the road is a (very wide) one-way street, so the result would be that drivers move to the middle of the road. That would make life interesting if you come around the corner on such a road, and see a car driving in the middle of the road. Maybe I am not giving my fellow drivers enough credit, but when my father taught me to drive, he always reminded me "assume every other driver on the road is an incompetent idiot with no control over their vehicle"... sadly I have seen a lot of evidence that backed up his statement.
Another element came when driving the E10 highway in northern Norway and Sweden with my girlfriend (very competent driver, in a landscape that was sometimes the typical alpine "wall of rock on one side, sheer drop down the other"). She was perfectly happy and capable of driving when there was a line in the middle of the road, even with large semi-artic trucks coming in the opposite direction at 80+km/h (50+mph), but as soon as the lines disappeared because the road narrowed a bit, or there was a stretch of newly resurfaced road with no markings, she was very uncomfortable and wanted me to drive, because the road then felt restrictively narrow, especially with the trucks driving on it (there was space for the truck plus our car, but not a huge margin for error in car positioning).
At least in theory, what he is supposed to do is go to his direct superior or a direct superior of the individuals who were involved in the conduct and say "This client of ours is involved in illegal/unethical/unconstitutional (delete as appropriate) conduct. This client happens to be the Department of Justice".
Except that he was working for the DoJ at the time, so painting the DoJ as the "client" in this case seems at first face to be a tenuous thread on which to hang the case against him, and if it really was that tenuous, his lawyer would have no trouble breaking the argument. So I am guessing that there is something in the DoJ employment contracts or in some recent legal precedent that allows the DC Bar to go after him, because if there is one thing that a lawyer hates more than an open-and-shut case requiring little billable work, it is an honest lawyer who makes the rest of them look as bad as they really are. So now that there is some basis on which to charge Tamm, the DC Bar are going to go for it. Unless of course there is some other political consideration at play, and the case itself is just a front - a vehicle for someone to run for political office, perhaps.
Anyway, the idea is that Tamm should have gone to his superiors or the superiors of the person(s) involved in the scheme and raised the issue. And after a verbal discussion, he should have put the issue in writing, both email and printed version, and kept a copy or 20 of each for himself. He could then be fired for any number of reasons, from the color of his tie or a supposed drinking habit, to transmission of confidential documents to outside sources (his own email addresses or physical storage *cough* that the DoJ could not touch without a warrant), thus tainting him as a "disgruntled former employee".
Then, if there is no action following his escalation, and if he miraculously still has any credibility left following a smear campaign about his (previously un-known) mental health issues - Psych reports from willing doctors attached - he would be justified in going to the press. Except that you would probably find no-one within the DoJ who remembers a meeting with him about this, no record of any email communication about it with anyone inside the DoJ, and so on. So then there is still no validation for his "claim" that he raised the issue with his superiors, and he is right back in the situation he is in now, except that he was fired because of the apparent mental health issues, illegal extraction of documents, and oh by the way we also found evidence on his computer than he is a pedophile with extreme Islamist sympathies.
Note, I am not saying that all areas of the US Government are hopelessly corrupt and will destroy anyone who tries to disturb their spot at the pig trough. I am sure the US Government has lots of people who genuinely believe they are doing the Right Thing. But given the various oaths that people in Government swear (like "protecting the constitution", etc., etc.), I am damned sure that there are a lot of people who are not fulfilling those oaths, even if they do believe they are doing the Right Thing.
One of the best things about science is that, while we accept things "as they appear to be" and formulate theories about why that is, and what the mechanisms are that govern what we see, those theories are continually up for examination and re-examination in light of new evidence that is not explained by the existing theory. If the new evidence can be independently verified, and the results replicated, then the theory can be adjusted.
So, by (at least as I read it based on the summary) allowing teachers and students the possibility to discuss evolution versus creationism, to look with a critical eye at the evidence and find (NOT make) new evidence, to draw conclusions and either reinforce existing theories (by concluding that the evidence supports them) or contradict existing theories and propose new ones (because the evidence does not support the existing theories), this approach appears at first glance to be a very scientific approach to the debate.
However, that will "obviously"* not be the case. The goal is almost certainly not to allow a free and open discussion, but to push an agenda by only acknowledging evidence that supports the agenda, with the rationale that the time allotted for the debate is insufficient to consider all the evidence, so we have to pick and choose.
* Why do I say "obviously"? Partly because my (limited) experience of Oklahoma is of a state dominated by the conservative religious Right, who would mostly rather give a blow-job to Satan than admit that evolution is right and they are descended from monkeys; and partly because the people of Oklahoma are more concerned with where their next pay check is coming from than they are concerned with where THEY came from (not unlike many other parts of the world, though).
The basic approach of most religions is to say "come to us, we have the answers to all your questions", and most religious authority figures really dislike the fact that science ("we are still looking for the answers to all our questions, but we have some interesting answers to some of your questions already") comes up with answers that disagree with their religious doctrine and proof to support those answers, instead of relying on peoples' faith in the "right" religious answer.
Yes, in a perfect world, you would have technologists (whose motivation is a close variation of "design stuff that will benefit all people, make society safer and allow us all to reap the benefits of technology") and politicians (whose motivation is a close variation of "partake in an informed debate which leads to the drafting of laws and statutes that provide protection for all individuals and allow the evolution of society into a more enlightened state") getting to better know how to communicate effectively with the other, so that technologists and politicians can better understand the technology of today, how it will be used by the people of today, and how the peoples' best interests can be served by drafting new laws or amending existing ones. :/
However, in the world we have, the technologists almost always haven't got the slightest clue how the technology of today will be used in the next 5 minutes, and most of them are more interested in making money for themselves than they are in "benefiting all people". Similarly, most politicians (and I refer mainly to the politicians in the US and Europe now, but I am sure that a depressingly high percentage of them world-wide would fit this description) are primarily interested in keeping themselves in office to safeguard their own place on the gravy train, and are only interested in "change" or "progress" until that message gets them into office, at which point they become a drop-in for the one they replaced.
So the goal for politicians, unfortunately, seems to be the maintenance of the existing status quo. If one of them gets voted out of office (being replaced by, as mentioned before, one with a vested interest in not rocking the boat), they typically get a job as a lobbyist or back-room power broker, with even more incentive to maintain the existing status quo - they are now earning more money, and probably have more personal influence than they had when serving as a politician, as well as less public oversight or need to campaign for re-election. To these people, technology is not something they need to understand (they have experts for that, earning quite a bit less than they do) - technology is something they need to control.
"Ah", you say "technology is not something that you can control, because many different people developing and driving technology in all sorts of different ways!", and this is true. But behind the politicians at their pig trough/gravy train, there are the lobbyists financed by wealthy business and industrial influences. If those individuals or small companies driving technology are being too much of a potentially disruptive nature, then one of the larger industrial players can either buy the company or hire a few strategic people from them to halt or slow the development, engage in litigation, or various other practices to control the smaller player.
Any individual, whether technologist or politician, who seems to be too much of a danger to the stability of the current setup can be sidelined - the technologist through acquisition or competition, the politician by not giving them any oxygen of publicity.
Time for me to go and make a new tinfoil hat... I sat on the old one while writing this and broke it