Considering that you can't easily tor-browse out of a mobile device, there's no way at all to maintain any sort of privacy when you use a 3g-cell device to access the internet. Your service provider has always had access to everything you browse, everything you ping, everything you email, every TCP/IP port you may have open and every bit-and-byte of all traffic passing through those port channels. Wasn't there supposed to be some modicum of privacy?
.
Wasn't there supposed to be some modicum of privacy afforded to the end-users by the networks if all they did was run a comm-channel? I guess the retro-active pardoning of the telco-spying on all customers turned the notion of privacy inside-out. So along with goggle's staring at you at all of your port-80 traffic with doubleclicks and javascript and others using flash-based cookies, you've got to worry about eaves-dropping of all of your activity over you communications channels.
.
I'm sure that "our" express consent is buried somewhere in the fine-print of the ever-changeable-when-they-want-to user agreements.
That concept of one-sided ability of the service provided to change the terms of the usage-agreement at any time and without notice has to be the most odious of the gotchas that exist in this world. I'm not face-booking because they change their privacy policy as often as possible and always reset the privacy settings to show-the-world-everything-including-your-undies every time they update anything like timeline.
.
Can the Public Utilities Commission do anything about this? or are cell-phone/wireless plans beyond the scope of the PUCs?
I'd bet it's more like nobility and royalty and other magical beliefs in the superiority of one class over others: buying the land owned by a nobleman does not confer upon one the title of nobility, whereas having a duly recorded ancestry that proves one's linkage to pre-existing nobility establishes the connection to give you a "title" of nobility also.
.
In other words, you can't buy your way into the club of nobles by buying their land; you remain a serf vs landed gentry. [warning, opinions only, not even a wikipedia link for this.]
Excellent point. Require civility and create some sort of loss of time to respond seems like a great idea. The couples' therapy/communication concept is a good one, particularly not putting words in the other one's mouth. However, in the context of a political debate, they should be able to get by with saying "Candidate X said..." as a statement of fact about past statements.
High schools are definitely not "open campus". While our school does not have metal detectors at the entry (like many schools in Los Angeles do), we are curtailed in our entry and exit. We have to have authorization and be signed out to leave school during school hours, including a written slip if we're supposed to go to the doctor or something.
.
As for lunch, seniors are allowed off campus for lunch if they are not failing any classes (except for jocks, who are allowed off campus even as juniors and no one seems to mind or call them on it) and there's enough time to get lunch if you're part of the first lunch period which starts a little past 11:15 am. These people can make it to In 'n' Out before the noon lunch rush. The second lunch period people are screeewed as the lunch rush lines make the burger place packed.
.
As for entry onto campus, there's a fence around the campus, and adults entering during school hours are also supposed to be checked in and authorized and not just wandering the halls. Though sometimes you'll see a recent grad (last year or two years ago) wandering in and looking high-schooly and not getting challenged. They don't really check IDs for entering if they think you're a student. Note that if you didn't sign in as a non-student, you won't be able to get back out as a signed-in visitor; they'll think you're a student and you won't be allowed off campus until the school day ends. Speaking of which, I better get going and get to school!;>)
Photographers and developers definitely "photo-shopped" images in the dark-room well before the software named "Photoshop" existed. In fact, this history of photo-manipulation in the dark-room or in front of the lens is exactly what this whole topic is about: photo-shopping and photo-manipulation in the early days...
Excellent and interestingly high level of detail from you; many Thanks for that information. That's the cool kind of stuff I like reading here. What's your opinion on what happened out near Hawaii with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehime_Maru_and_USS_Greeneville_collision ? Was the captain/OD hot-dogging (or would it be show-boating) in your opinion?
.
Second question regarding timing: how fast would the sequence you described usually occur? Is it all happening real fast like a movie sequence, or are these definite key-points or lock-points which must be verbally okayed and takes 5 or more minutes and anyone could shout out a veto or warning or so? Would the time scale be faster in case of a real emergency, or are people even more cautious when it's the real-deal instead of a controlled training exercise?
It seems like that sub-captain was hot-dogging it, just the pilots like to do at NAS-Miramar near San Diego. And if you look at the history of crashes, when you've got flat-hatting and hot-dogging, it's almost inevtiable that someone's going to get hurt and lose a job and lose a command, along with th e loss of lives, sadly.
So is jamming gear just the same as having a stronger transmitter than the other guy and blowing out their signal? Interfering with comms wouldn't require blowing out the signal level but just introducing enough noise to screw with it. And if they're using other modulation or spread-spectrum or multi-frequency transmissions, than a simple FM/AM transmitter wouldn't work so well. Would just plain old spark coils with a super-wide noise band be enough? (though I wouldn't think so since lightning doesn't screw with FM radio as much as it does with AM radio.) Sorry for the ramble, just some naive questions from someone who doesn't know all the buzzwords to search for on the wikipedia or other sites...
And cities also try it on their property and their high schools, e.g. Boston on city property and in city buildings and many school districts have banned candies and sodas, as did my elementary school here in San Diego almost ten years ago. Connecticut passed a law like that in 2005 but that was vetoed by the Governor as "undermin[ing] the control and responsibility of parents with school-aged children.".
My high school (and many other high schools around the country) also instituted a ban on sugary sodas and candy in vending machines, thinking that this would turn the student population healthier and less obese. Guess they forgot that kids can bring candy or pop-tarts or cookies and other goodies from home on their own. Or that they might just be packing an aluminum can of corn-syrup soda inside their backpacks. Just because you put expensive bottled water in the vending machines doesn't make it better or more likely that kids will shell out money for the healthy alternatives. You might as well try to put carrot and celery sticks in the vending machines!!! And anyway, about 1/2 of the senior class is allowed to go off campus to eat lunch anyway, so they can loophole their way into getting sugar sodas and refills anyway.
.
We don't need a nanny-state telling us what not to do by prohibition. The last prohibition of alcohol didn't really turn out that well. And forbidding things certainly makes it more appealing for certain young minds.
Strangely enough, after a while, one company's sugar sodas (well, they're really corn syrup sodas unless you get the imported ones from Mexico or the Dr Pepper from that one town in Texas) and sports-beverages (also sugar/corn-syrup laden) were re-introduced onto campus after they helped to pay for a scoreboard for the athletic field. No quid pro quos there, I suppose, eh?
The brain prefers to be asynchronous. Too much synchronicity leads to seizures and epilepsy, particularly when there is a "focus" or irritant which starts synchronized regular firing activity. This is the reason that (for some people) flashing visual displays with very bright contrast at a particular flicker rate can also lead to seizures: the consistent synchronized flashing leads to synchronous stimulation of the retina and the V1-part of the occipital lobe and on forward through the visual areas til it hits a recurrent area and a loop leads to continuing seizures even upon withdrawal from the stimulus.
.
Yes at night-time, certain rhythms are predominant, and yes some people say that rhythmic entrainment is part of the binding of phenomena and stimuli in the brain, but too much synchrony is a bad bad thing in the brain.
I think that it can be said that there are upper and lower bounds on signal propagation times through the geometry of the brain and upper and lower bounds on the firing rates of different populations of neurons, and that large pools of certain populations firing simultaneously present as particular types of EEG signals in certain regions, but I don't think you can say that the brain has a clock rate like a digital synchronous circuit requires. The brain's more asynchronous.
just like NOSC became SPAWAR (the Navy's center for SPAce WARfare, or officially the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command), this is about a turf battle, in the same way that each branch of the military also is sprouting a cyber-warfare division.
.
First one in can try to take over a certain portion of the operational budget and can claim to have been in the domain longer and thus worthy of more money. It's kind of like (to use an example from mom the doctor) the turf war for the carotid artery that gets operated on by general surgeons, by neurosurgeons, and vascular surgeons, each of which claims to be the best at it.
.
Or like spinal surgery fought for by neurosurgeons and orthopedic surgeons, or like carpal tunnel surgery with a tug-of-war between hand-surgeons from general surgery, neurosurgery, or plastic surgery. [in case anyone sees a bias, i listed each specialty in alphabetic order;>) ]
Plant the flag on the field and claim all of that turf as your branch's domain!
Egads, you're right about much of this. I back-tracked through more of the/. history and found out a lot more about this SF network issue. It seems like it was definitely not sabotage; but perhaps a bit (a little bit?) controlling? Anyway, it was not as clear as I made it out to be. It's sad and bizarre that it was taken to criminal court and that he was in jail for such a long time. I did not read about the internal politics and power struggles before except about the CIO as the problem-child who the net-admin would not give the password to [damn dangling infinitive], and I haven't seen any reference about the "girlfriend of another powerful city administrator" anywhere.
.
The CIO as the source of the problem definitely parallels the Gunn-Allen problem, though, and that is the point I was trying to make, though it did not come across clearly as I had wished. Do you have a pointer for the political problems and the girlfriend of the administrator thing? (or are you very in the know and that's why you had to post anonymously?) (by the way, if you'd responded to my comment, I would've been messaged and I would have replied earlier. I think your response is at the same parallel level as my statement. Anyway, thanks for the comment. And in SF, a politically connected boyfriend could be as likely a problem as a politically connect girlfriend, eh? (sez I as a member of the girl gender) )
Please mod parent comment up as informative. There's no excuse for a container with radioactive materials, even if it's class 3, to be so poorly secured that it is lost in transit by falling off of the vehicle.
I agree with you. I'm not yet old enough to be able to vote in this year's presidential election. I am going to have to wait until college for that. But I wish I could vote in this election. And I don't see why anyone who could vote would even consider not voting. But sadly, more than 50% of the voting-eligible population does not even turn out for the vote.
.
And there was the San Francisco City Network administrator who refused to hand over his password, even to his boss or the mayor until he was taken to court on a criminal charge.
If you know any other good tech example, I'd love to know about it.
It seems a lot like "Backdraft", the movie in which the fireman is also the firebug arsonist.
_
The network engineer was sabotaging the system by logging in during the middle of the night and breaking servers such as the Blackberry server, etc., so that he could come in during the morning and be the hero by fixing everything as quickly as he wanted.
"The network would get screwy over the weekend... then [he] would show up, and five minutes in on a Monday, he'd fix the problem," Saccavino said.
He got caught when they sent a different level of IT person to investigate the network slowdowns and who used a keylogger to catch the shenanigans.
_
The saboteur network engineer was also plain ol' lazy, he's also accused of
"purposely pulling a cable out of a production environment in order that you would not have to travel to Jacksonville to attend an HP event at the request of the CIO."
As a bonus, Microsoft also threatened to revoke their licenses for their version of SQL because, get this, the CIO had not gotten around to paying the license fees. That part seems to be a management problem, and not the network engineer's fault. But obviously, if this is the first time for a stand-alone SEC fine, then there were very crazy things going on at this company.
I must concede that you are correct. I reviewed my physics book, and while my comment is correct in how the "power transmission" efficiency of mode-conversion is calculated, the efficiency of conversion of the mode of power is not the key factor. Regarding the clutch, I was just thinking of the slippage that occurs when most people do not match revs (matching the RPM of the engine to the RPM of the shaft) when shifting gears.
There shouldn't be any frictional losses whatso-ever in the clutch when constantly in one gear. What do you know about CVTs in terms of power efficiency?
That's a great point that the decoupling of the internal combustion engine's RPM from the drive-train allows greater efficiency in energy production/transformation by keeping the engine at optimal torque whenever it's running.
However, (and I don't know the answer or the full math, but I'm asking) doesn't
_
fuel in diesel internal combustion engine -> \times ratio_1
mechanical rotation of alternator shaft -> \times ratio_2
generation of electrical output -> \times ratio_3
intermediate storage in electro-chemical battery potential -> \times ratio_4
rotation of electric motor -> \times ratio_5
mechanical linkage to wheels
_
create five fractions multiplied together decreasing efficiency
_
while automatic transmission:
fuel in diesel internal combustion engine -> \times ratio_b_1
mechanical rotation of torque input shaft -> \times ratio_b_2
friction rotation of transmission fluid -> \times ratio_b_3
friction rotation of torque output shaft -> \times ratio_b_4
mechanical linkage to wheels
_
while manual transmission has the least loss and best efficiency:
fuel in diesel internal combustion engine -> \times ratio_c_1
mechanical rotation of engine output shaft -> \times ratio_c_2
friction contact of clutch to output shaft-> \times ratio_c_3
mechanical linkage to wheels
_
Of course, the efficiency and loss ratios at each level matter, and probably vary non-linearly at different velocities/RPMs, so only actually running the vehicles will tell you the results, but my guess is that the manual transmission with a good driver (not over-revving, not terrible and shifting with the clutch at the rifht times) is probably the most efficient process. Your costs and mileage may vary, of course.;>)
So Google says "Trust us" while simultaneously saying "we don't trust you." If the point of being under sanctions requiring monitoring by the FTC was to get away with anything it wants to, it succeeded.
And how we an "independent audit" be trusted if it can't be vetted. It often occurs that government types enter the carousel of working for private industry after initially learning the ropes of regulation; it also often occurs that "independent audit" companies often create reports that are of benefit to the companies being audited in order to curry favor and receive payment for other services down the road. Isn't that what happened with all of the falsely-rated "AAA" mortgage-backed securities?
_
So I'll say it again, how can you trust the independence and validity of an audit process if it cannot be separately vetted?
Re:Domain of responsibility and "being uppity"
on
Sexism In Science
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for your answer. I must admit that I have to modify my answer to include your situation. If you are at a small company, then pretty much everyone must be able to pitch in and do everything. However, if you are getting the feeling that "if they had a man doing your current job, it's unlikely he'd be answering the phone", then wouldn't you have to concede that you are already perceiving sexism and bias at this job?
_
If what happens is because you're the low man (so to speak) on the totem pole, then I can understand accepting it. If it continues when they've got a new hire, then you might need to be concerned. As I read in another comment on/. and can't find right now, "if it's not a contract, it's not a promise".
May I ask what you majored in for your college degree and if that helped you get your current job? Are you a hardware person (I'm thinking of EE for myself) or a software/IT computer science person, or a mixture of both?
So do you feel that such a patent should have been granted in the first place? If f(d_1)==f(d_2), then allowing for the hash-space collision error, you can infer that d_1 == d_2 and de-duplicate. Should math isomorphism inferences be patentable?
Domain of responsibility and "being uppity"
on
Sexism In Science
·
· Score: 1
My response was specific to being asked to do work outside of the domain of responsibility. It's a commonly occuring problem for women to be asked to do scut work (to make coffee, to do dictation, to do typing/secretarial/answer the phone kind of baloney) even when they are professional employees.
They are often asked such a thing by so-called "peers" at the same status of employment. Now I could see going along with an older male or female employee asking a junior employee to perform a menial task as a one-time thing and appeasing them, but I draw the line at becoming an errand-girl-friday for a colleague at the same level or a school-mate at the same level.
Sometimes, avoiding being denigrated requires taking on the risk of being perceived as being or labelled as "uppity." That's a risk I'm willing to take.
A different attitude would definitely be better on an internship or volunteer position being taken on to learn about a job or to receive a letter of recommendation for a career in a particular field or for college applications or educational opportunities: in this case, do all of the work asked, regardless of the silliness of the request or the merit of the task. Learn all that's possible and get a glowing recommendation "blah-blah would do anything to get ahead in this field and is a wonderful so-and-so". I did just that this summer in order to get letters of recommendation for college and to see if medicine is of interest to me. Your mileage and results may vary.:)
Interesting aside, random search regarding the word uppity shows it is used to put down "blacks/African Americans" who are perceived to be stepping out of their place of subservience. That wasn't your intent at all, I am certain, but it is strange how some words come with loaded context.
Slashdot Mirror
.
Wasn't there supposed to be some modicum of privacy afforded to the end-users by the networks if all they did was run a comm-channel? I guess the retro-active pardoning of the telco-spying on all customers turned the notion of privacy inside-out. So along with goggle's staring at you at all of your port-80 traffic with doubleclicks and javascript and others using flash-based cookies, you've got to worry about eaves-dropping of all of your activity over you communications channels.
.
I'm sure that "our" express consent is buried somewhere in the fine-print of the ever-changeable-when-they-want-to user agreements. That concept of one-sided ability of the service provided to change the terms of the usage-agreement at any time and without notice has to be the most odious of the gotchas that exist in this world. I'm not face-booking because they change their privacy policy as often as possible and always reset the privacy settings to show-the-world-everything-including-your-undies every time they update anything like timeline.
.
Can the Public Utilities Commission do anything about this? or are cell-phone/wireless plans beyond the scope of the PUCs?
.
In other words, you can't buy your way into the club of nobles by buying their land; you remain a serf vs landed gentry. [warning, opinions only, not even a wikipedia link for this.]
Excellent point. Require civility and create some sort of loss of time to respond seems like a great idea. The couples' therapy/communication concept is a good one, particularly not putting words in the other one's mouth. However, in the context of a political debate, they should be able to get by with saying "Candidate X said..." as a statement of fact about past statements.
.
As for lunch, seniors are allowed off campus for lunch if they are not failing any classes (except for jocks, who are allowed off campus even as juniors and no one seems to mind or call them on it) and there's enough time to get lunch if you're part of the first lunch period which starts a little past 11:15 am. These people can make it to In 'n' Out before the noon lunch rush. The second lunch period people are screeewed as the lunch rush lines make the burger place packed.
.
As for entry onto campus, there's a fence around the campus, and adults entering during school hours are also supposed to be checked in and authorized and not just wandering the halls. Though sometimes you'll see a recent grad (last year or two years ago) wandering in and looking high-schooly and not getting challenged. They don't really check IDs for entering if they think you're a student. Note that if you didn't sign in as a non-student, you won't be able to get back out as a signed-in visitor; they'll think you're a student and you won't be allowed off campus until the school day ends. Speaking of which, I better get going and get to school! ;>)
Photographers and developers definitely "photo-shopped" images in the dark-room well before the software named "Photoshop" existed. In fact, this history of photo-manipulation in the dark-room or in front of the lens is exactly what this whole topic is about: photo-shopping and photo-manipulation in the early days...
.
Second question regarding timing: how fast would the sequence you described usually occur? Is it all happening real fast like a movie sequence, or are these definite key-points or lock-points which must be verbally okayed and takes 5 or more minutes and anyone could shout out a veto or warning or so? Would the time scale be faster in case of a real emergency, or are people even more cautious when it's the real-deal instead of a controlled training exercise?
It seems like that sub-captain was hot-dogging it, just the pilots like to do at NAS-Miramar near San Diego. And if you look at the history of crashes, when you've got flat-hatting and hot-dogging, it's almost inevtiable that someone's going to get hurt and lose a job and lose a command, along with th e loss of lives, sadly.
So is jamming gear just the same as having a stronger transmitter than the other guy and blowing out their signal? Interfering with comms wouldn't require blowing out the signal level but just introducing enough noise to screw with it. And if they're using other modulation or spread-spectrum or multi-frequency transmissions, than a simple FM/AM transmitter wouldn't work so well. Would just plain old spark coils with a super-wide noise band be enough? (though I wouldn't think so since lightning doesn't screw with FM radio as much as it does with AM radio.) Sorry for the ramble, just some naive questions from someone who doesn't know all the buzzwords to search for on the wikipedia or other sites...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Dr_Pepper#Use_of_cane_sugar
.
Richmond CA also banned sugary snacks and drinks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richmond,_California#Obesity
.
forgot those links above
.
We don't need a nanny-state telling us what not to do by prohibition. The last prohibition of alcohol didn't really turn out that well. And forbidding things certainly makes it more appealing for certain young minds.
Strangely enough, after a while, one company's sugar sodas (well, they're really corn syrup sodas unless you get the imported ones from Mexico or the Dr Pepper from that one town in Texas) and sports-beverages (also sugar/corn-syrup laden) were re-introduced onto campus after they helped to pay for a scoreboard for the athletic field. No quid pro quos there, I suppose, eh?
Pretty any women's magazine cover and most of the photos inside will show you multiple ways of lying with images.
Very cool photos. I wish I could have come up from SD to see it landing (well, piggy-backing during a landing) or to see it land-crawl to the museum.
.
Yes at night-time, certain rhythms are predominant, and yes some people say that rhythmic entrainment is part of the binding of phenomena and stimuli in the brain, but too much synchrony is a bad bad thing in the brain.
I think that it can be said that there are upper and lower bounds on signal propagation times through the geometry of the brain and upper and lower bounds on the firing rates of different populations of neurons, and that large pools of certain populations firing simultaneously present as particular types of EEG signals in certain regions, but I don't think you can say that the brain has a clock rate like a digital synchronous circuit requires. The brain's more asynchronous.
.
First one in can try to take over a certain portion of the operational budget and can claim to have been in the domain longer and thus worthy of more money. It's kind of like (to use an example from mom the doctor) the turf war for the carotid artery that gets operated on by general surgeons, by neurosurgeons, and vascular surgeons, each of which claims to be the best at it.
.
Or like spinal surgery fought for by neurosurgeons and orthopedic surgeons, or like carpal tunnel surgery with a tug-of-war between hand-surgeons from general surgery, neurosurgery, or plastic surgery. [in case anyone sees a bias, i listed each specialty in alphabetic order ;>) ]
Plant the flag on the field and claim all of that turf as your branch's domain!
.
The CIO as the source of the problem definitely parallels the Gunn-Allen problem, though, and that is the point I was trying to make, though it did not come across clearly as I had wished. Do you have a pointer for the political problems and the girlfriend of the administrator thing? (or are you very in the know and that's why you had to post anonymously?) (by the way, if you'd responded to my comment, I would've been messaged and I would have replied earlier. I think your response is at the same parallel level as my statement. Anyway, thanks for the comment. And in SF, a politically connected boyfriend could be as likely a problem as a politically connect girlfriend, eh? (sez I as a member of the girl gender) )
Please mod parent comment up as informative. There's no excuse for a container with radioactive materials, even if it's class 3, to be so poorly secured that it is lost in transit by falling off of the vehicle.
I agree with you. I'm not yet old enough to be able to vote in this year's presidential election. I am going to have to wait until college for that. But I wish I could vote in this election. And I don't see why anyone who could vote would even consider not voting. But sadly, more than 50% of the voting-eligible population does not even turn out for the vote.
_
I meant to find a real example of another lazy network tech., sabotaging for the sake of self-aggrandization or for getting out of work, but I couldn't find an example easily, or think of the search-terms that would do it. ("Self-aggrandization" didn't lead to much..., though there are some good reads like http://www.metafilter.com/88359/Not-enough-women-have-what-it-takes-to-behave-like-arrogant-selfaggrandizing-jerks
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/01/a-rant-about-women/
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9034438/Former_network_engineer_faces_jail_time_for_sabotaging_patient_data ) but that last one is more of a criminal sociapath.
. And there was the San Francisco City Network administrator who refused to hand over his password, even to his boss or the mayor until he was taken to court on a criminal charge.
If you know any other good tech example, I'd love to know about it.
_
The network engineer was sabotaging the system by logging in during the middle of the night and breaking servers such as the Blackberry server, etc., so that he could come in during the morning and be the hero by fixing everything as quickly as he wanted.
"The network would get screwy over the weekend ... then [he] would show up, and five minutes in on a Monday, he'd fix the problem," Saccavino said.
He got caught when they sent a different level of IT person to investigate the network slowdowns and who used a keylogger to catch the shenanigans.
_
The saboteur network engineer was also plain ol' lazy, he's also accused of
"purposely pulling a cable out of a production environment in order that you would not have to travel to Jacksonville to attend an HP event at the request of the CIO." As a bonus, Microsoft also threatened to revoke their licenses for their version of SQL because, get this, the CIO had not gotten around to paying the license fees. That part seems to be a management problem, and not the network engineer's fault. But obviously, if this is the first time for a stand-alone SEC fine, then there were very crazy things going on at this company.
There shouldn't be any frictional losses whatso-ever in the clutch when constantly in one gear. What do you know about CVTs in terms of power efficiency?
However, (and I don't know the answer or the full math, but I'm asking) doesn't
_
fuel in diesel internal combustion engine -> \times ratio_1
mechanical rotation of alternator shaft -> \times ratio_2
generation of electrical output -> \times ratio_3
intermediate storage in electro-chemical battery potential -> \times ratio_4
rotation of electric motor -> \times ratio_5 mechanical linkage to wheels
_
create five fractions multiplied together decreasing efficiency
_
while automatic transmission:
fuel in diesel internal combustion engine -> \times ratio_b_1
mechanical rotation of torque input shaft -> \times ratio_b_2
friction rotation of transmission fluid -> \times ratio_b_3
friction rotation of torque output shaft -> \times ratio_b_4
mechanical linkage to wheels
_
while manual transmission has the least loss and best efficiency:
fuel in diesel internal combustion engine -> \times ratio_c_1
mechanical rotation of engine output shaft -> \times ratio_c_2
friction contact of clutch to output shaft-> \times ratio_c_3
mechanical linkage to wheels
_
Of course, the efficiency and loss ratios at each level matter, and probably vary non-linearly at different velocities/RPMs, so only actually running the vehicles will tell you the results, but my guess is that the manual transmission with a good driver (not over-revving, not terrible and shifting with the clutch at the rifht times) is probably the most efficient process. Your costs and mileage may vary, of course. ;>)
And how we an "independent audit" be trusted if it can't be vetted. It often occurs that government types enter the carousel of working for private industry after initially learning the ropes of regulation; it also often occurs that "independent audit" companies often create reports that are of benefit to the companies being audited in order to curry favor and receive payment for other services down the road. Isn't that what happened with all of the falsely-rated "AAA" mortgage-backed securities?
_
So I'll say it again, how can you trust the independence and validity of an audit process if it cannot be separately vetted?
_
If what happens is because you're the low man (so to speak) on the totem pole, then I can understand accepting it. If it continues when they've got a new hire, then you might need to be concerned. As I read in another comment on /. and can't find right now, "if it's not a contract, it's not a promise".
May I ask what you majored in for your college degree and if that helped you get your current job? Are you a hardware person (I'm thinking of EE for myself) or a software/IT computer science person, or a mixture of both?
So do you feel that such a patent should have been granted in the first place? If f(d_1)==f(d_2), then allowing for the hash-space collision error, you can infer that d_1 == d_2 and de-duplicate. Should math isomorphism inferences be patentable?
A different attitude would definitely be better on an internship or volunteer position being taken on to learn about a job or to receive a letter of recommendation for a career in a particular field or for college applications or educational opportunities: in this case, do all of the work asked, regardless of the silliness of the request or the merit of the task. Learn all that's possible and get a glowing recommendation "blah-blah would do anything to get ahead in this field and is a wonderful so-and-so". I did just that this summer in order to get letters of recommendation for college and to see if medicine is of interest to me. Your mileage and results may vary. :)
Interesting aside, random search regarding the word uppity shows it is used to put down "blacks/African Americans" who are perceived to be stepping out of their place of subservience. That wasn't your intent at all, I am certain, but it is strange how some words come with loaded context.