They'll never learn otherwise. I am normally loathe to suggest involving BSA as they are generally scumbags who go after businesses trying to do the right thing and just want their money. But if this company really is doing what you say they deserve it. Not like they can say they didn't know and you didn't warn them.
Well, now some of our common programming languages (perl, prolog, etc.) include such tables as basic data types, and the programmers use them routinely.
Perl sure, but Prolog? A common programming language?
Not at all. The Cessna 210 I usually fly has a useful load around 1500lbs. 90 gallons of fuel weighs 540lbs. That leaves 960lbs left for flight crew and passengers. I weigh 165. That means I could take myself plus 3 265lb slashdotters. And that's just a Cessna 210. There are much bigger planes.
A few more datapoints here: We can reasonably fly anywhere between 1000 and 12,500'. We can fly anywhere between 60kts and 180kts depending on what airplane we want to fly (those are just the ones I reasonably have fast access to).
Bring good binoculars, fly high, and scan as much ground as possible as fast as possible? Fly just high enough that we can recognize weather balloons?
Anyone got a red weather balloon or red object of equivalent size we can set up in a field somewhere soon and experiment with? We can fly over it at various altitudes and distances and see how easily recognizable it is.
Any clues as to what kinds of areas these things would be placed in? Major city areas? Freeway corridors?
The balloons will be on display for 6 hours.
The Cessna 210 cruises at 160kts and carries 90 gallons of fuel. Fuel burn rate is between 10 and 15 gallons per hour depending on altitude/power setting etc. A 172 is cheaper but quite a bit slower. The 210 split four ways over 6 hours of flight time comes to about $315/person which isn't too unreasonable. Depending on altitude/power setting ultimately chosen it is quite possible to fly the whole 6 hours without refueling and have adequate VFR reserves.
6 hours at 160kts is 960 nautical miles. It may be possible to cover the entire I-5 route from the Mexican border south of San Diego to Portland, Oregon.
I imagine anyone participating in such a scheme would want to team up with other aircraft based teams combined with ground based teams. Sure, lots of people will see the balloons from the freeway (I bet that is where they would be placed to increase the chances of someone interested in this contest seeing them) but what are the chances of someone from YOUR team seeing each of the balloons? Especially since nobody can drive that whole route in that amount of team. Send a plane up the freeway and then send your ground based teams in other directions such as eastward.
But...really, would anyone want to look at the ground from an airplane through binoculars for 6 hours? And could you really see a balloon from a plane?
Your best bet may just be to get as many people driving around all over the US onto the same team as possible. This whole thing may well coalesce into one big team somehow.
If some folks want to pile into a 172 and go flying around San Diego County/Southern California/anywhere else we can get to from here armed with binoculars and split the cost 4 ways I'm game. I'm not sure what our chances of actually spotting anything would be though.
http://www.ntsb.gov/Pressrel/2009/091026.html says they DID have the cockpit speaker on. They are both very experienced pilots with long records of safe flying. Hard to believe they could do something like this. Everyone makes mistakes, even (especially!) pilots (I know I have) but...wow. Is the crew scheduling system locally installed software or something? Doesn't it need a network connection to be demonstrated? I'm not sure how they could have possibly connected with the ground although maybe they had onboard wireless Internet and were using it like the passengers. Any logs or anything to corroborate laptop use? Perhaps logs/file timestamps on the laptop itself? So far it looks like the CVR isn't going to be terribly useful. Flight data recorder will probably just show the plane flying smoothly on autopilot which doesn't tell us much about whether they were asleep or on laptops etc.
I am a pilot also. If I don't hear something on frequency after a certain period of time I get worried and check in. I have never gone a whole hour without hearing something.
Once I had a radio failure in Class B over LAX while talking to SoCal on the way north from San Diego. I could hear other pilots in the air but couldn't hear ATC. I was on a vector to avoid traffic heading mostly west out to sea (they had assigned me a temporary heading) instead of heading north to my destination. A couple minutes passed and I knew something was up. There is a pattern/timing to radio communications. And when things go amiss you get a weird feeling that someone should be talking to you by now. I tried to check in a couple of times, heard nothing, but could hear other pilot's replies. I thought there was a problem with the controller's radio or something. I went to the previous controller's frequency that I had been talking to earlier and told them who I was, where I was, and that I had lost contact with the freq I had been on. They knew exactly who I was, what I needed to be doing, who I needed to be talking to, and had been trying to get ahold of me.
It turns out the squelch was broken on my #1 radio. Other pilot's transmissions were strong enough to break squelch and I would hear them but SoCal's transmissions were being filtered. Everything worked as soon as I flipped over to #2. After I got back on the ground I had to call in and explain what happened. Since it was clearly equipment failure there was no problem but if I had fallen asleep or was on my laptop or whatever there would have been consequences. Not my first equipment failure (I've lost count) and not the first time I have had to call in to explain myself due to equipment failure.
I am definitely against second guessing the actions of other pilots in the event of an accident. Fortunately there was nobody hurt here. I am having difficulty understanding how this could possibly be reasonably explained. I am NOT in favor of firing pilots for one screwup. That is one of the things I hate most about the flying business: You invest $100k+ of your OWN money to get that first $30k/year job flying commuters, everything is seniority so as long as you don't screw up you are no better than the next guy (in contrast to the computer business where people can easily distinguish themselves and advance), and the first mistake you make is quite possibly career ending. Imagine if you accidentally lose the customer's data once and could never again be a sysadmin. Unthinkable.
But what I might consider firing them for is lying (if they lied). And right now I just can't see how they aren't lying. Off the radio intentionally for an hour and didn't think someone might want to talk to them? Lost track of time? Took headsets off/didn't have ATC on the cockpit speaker? Lost situational awareness and overflew the airport? Were using laptops in flight? Unbelievable. I have known pilots to read magazines and other things in flight (and even that I'm not a big fan of) but this is beyond the pale.
I could dust off my old Wildcat! floppies and external modems and UUCP and Fidonet and door games and it would be just like the old days all over again! Now having seen the future I'm not entirely sure that would necessarily be such a bad thing. The Internet and the web really made things so easy that everyone was able to jump on and the culture was diluted to the point of destruction. If we went back to the pre-Internet days September would finally end!
Those white boxes which make up the old style weather stations that Anthony Watts (the guy who did the video you linked to) is investigating are called "Stevenson screens".
They form the oldest weather network in the US. They have been replaced with much newer units. The stevenson screen setups don't even have anemometers.
But the data from those stations are only a very small fraction of all of the weather measurements taking place on earth. Satellites have been used extensively:
> In order to test the validity of Mr. Watts' accusations, > the NOAA scientists made a comparison of > temperature trends, using Mr. Watts' data. Two graphs > were plotted using the same technique. One analysis > was for the full data set of 1221 US weather stations. > The other used only the 70 stations that Mr. Watts and > his volunteers classified as "good" or "best". If climate > denier theories are correct, the temperatures at the > optimally sited stations should be markedly different > from the data as a whole. In fact, the curves show > virtually no difference. That's right. Even using the > cherry-picked stations listed in Watts' publication, the > data -- according to leading scientists at NOAA -- > shows no evidence of distortion.
Both of the replies to my posting are failing to take into account network effects. Sure, someday some Linux user will click on a trojan and get their homedir infected or maybe it will even exploit a local root vulnerability if it can find one for the distro in question (although this becomes less and less likely as more applications are constrained by SE Linux, Dan Walsh at RedHat is working on constraining desktop apps).
But that is far less likely to happen like it does on Windows due to all of the low hanging fruit in Windows land which creates massive network effects and rapidly spreading problems where you merely have to visit a website or open an email. Or visit a folder with an autorun.inf in it (which recently infected a few Windows machines on the office network of a client, I was called in to delete all of the autorun.inf from their Linux based fileserver and scan the shares for Windows viruses).
The monoculture of Windows further adds to the network effects and detracts from them in the case of Linux. Diversity is a good thing and I am glad we have so many different distributions which are all interoperable via http/html, ODF etc.
# My work network. iptables -A SSH_WHITELIST -s 1.2.3.0/24 -m recent --remove --name SSH -j ACCEPT # My home network iptables -A SSH_WHITELIST -s 4.5.6.0/24 -m recent --remove --name SSH -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -m recent --set --name SSH iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -j SSH_WHITELIST iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 60 --hitcount 4 --rttl --name SSH -j LOG iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 60 --hitcount 4 --rttl --name SSH -j DROP
Tune appropriately. I find that 4 per minute doesn't generate false positives but quite effectively blocks brute forcers. You could lower hitcount or increase the seconds to your liking.
And this is just for machines where I do need multiple people to be able to login from multiple locations. On other machines I definitely use ssh key only auth via the sshd_config.
PLUS: This proves that there ARE people out there interested in breaking into Linux boxes. It's just that this is the best way they can find to do it and I think that says a lot. So let's not hear any more of this "Linux would have viruses too if it were as popular as Windows" bull. Between this and the MySQL on Windows worm:
I think the ones who drop out at mention of a test are the ones you do not want anyhow. I have been tested plenty of times. And I test candidates myself also. Come up with a good test with real world problems and give everyone the same test. I encourage them to explain how they would find out and still solve the problem even if they do not know the answer off the top of their head. I usually give closed book tests and make them simple enough to pass without needing reference material. I do not ask about nitty gritty specific mundane stuff that no sane person should have to memorize. No questions about obscure gnu ls command line options or similar nonsense.
For technical jobs you have got to test. I have not tested before and regretted it. Now I always test. It is the only way to weed out the bullshitters. One technical person can usually interview another technical person and know who is a bullshitter but sometimes management will really like the person for one reason or another. Failing the test is very good ammo for not considering the person.
The ones who won't take the test are the ones you don't want.
Bad enough that the rabid prohibition group, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, or NAMBLA, has lobbied the legal BAL so low that I can't legally drive after eating a piece of my mother's rum cake..
What does the North American Marlon Brando Look-alike Association have against your mother's rum cake? I always knew they were fascists...
"that big" in this case means big enough to force you to use their services instead of others. They are not "that big". Their size relative to others is irrelevent.
They are big but not that big. And as far as I can see they do nothing to keep others out of the market. And prices are still quite good. Hard to see an anti-competitive effects in this market. Anyone else can run a search engine and nothing is stopping anyone from using it.
Depending on the social class, the highest insult you can throw at a Russian is probably either "intelligent" (as in belonging to intelligentsia) when directed by a prole against someone he perceives as a smartass, or "bydlo" (this is a Polish loanword that literally means "cattle", and figuratively someone who lives to eat and copulate, and nothing above that) when it is the other way around.
What about us intelligent smartasses who love to eat and copulate?
git and bitkeeper do not share much in concepts. Didn't you watch the video? He talks at length about how content is king, sha-1 hashes, etc. Bitkeeper mainly pushes around diffs. git works quite differently.
If you never start looking for a better job you will never find one. Regardless of what the unemployment rate is the time to start looking if you are unhappy with your current position is always NOW.
Yes, I met Andy when I was in Saigon also. You sure you weren't there in 2005? We met at some Indian type place which had a bar etc. in district 1. If you were there in 2005 I bet we met at that meeting.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Find new job.
2. call BSA.
They'll never learn otherwise. I am normally loathe to suggest involving BSA as they are generally scumbags who go after businesses trying to do the right thing and just want their money. But if this company really is doing what you say they deserve it. Not like they can say they didn't know and you didn't warn them.
Perl sure, but Prolog? A common programming language?
Not at all. The Cessna 210 I usually fly has a useful load around 1500lbs. 90 gallons of fuel weighs 540lbs. That leaves 960lbs left for flight crew and passengers. I weigh 165. That means I could take myself plus 3 265lb slashdotters. And that's just a Cessna 210. There are much bigger planes.
A few more datapoints here: We can reasonably fly anywhere between 1000 and 12,500'. We can fly anywhere between 60kts and 180kts depending on what airplane we want to fly (those are just the ones I reasonably have fast access to).
Bring good binoculars, fly high, and scan as much ground as possible as fast as possible? Fly just high enough that we can recognize weather balloons?
Anyone got a red weather balloon or red object of equivalent size we can set up in a field somewhere soon and experiment with? We can fly over it at various altitudes and distances and see how easily recognizable it is.
Any clues as to what kinds of areas these things would be placed in? Major city areas? Freeway corridors?
The balloons will be on display for 6 hours.
The Cessna 210 cruises at 160kts and carries 90 gallons of fuel. Fuel burn rate is between 10 and 15 gallons per hour depending on altitude/power setting etc. A 172 is cheaper but quite a bit slower. The 210 split four ways over 6 hours of flight time comes to about $315/person which isn't too unreasonable. Depending on altitude/power setting ultimately chosen it is quite possible to fly the whole 6 hours without refueling and have adequate VFR reserves.
6 hours at 160kts is 960 nautical miles. It may be possible to cover the entire I-5 route from the Mexican border south of San Diego to Portland, Oregon.
I imagine anyone participating in such a scheme would want to team up with other aircraft based teams combined with ground based teams. Sure, lots of people will see the balloons from the freeway (I bet that is where they would be placed to increase the chances of someone interested in this contest seeing them) but what are the chances of someone from YOUR team seeing each of the balloons? Especially since nobody can drive that whole route in that amount of team. Send a plane up the freeway and then send your ground based teams in other directions such as eastward.
But...really, would anyone want to look at the ground from an airplane through binoculars for 6 hours? And could you really see a balloon from a plane?
Your best bet may just be to get as many people driving around all over the US onto the same team as possible. This whole thing may well coalesce into one big team somehow.
If some folks want to pile into a 172 and go flying around San Diego County/Southern California/anywhere else we can get to from here armed with binoculars and split the cost 4 ways I'm game. I'm not sure what our chances of actually spotting anything would be though.
I think I saw a video about this somewhere. It was called "The Bang Bus".
http://www.ntsb.gov/Pressrel/2009/091026.html says they DID have the cockpit speaker on. They are both very experienced pilots with long records of safe flying. Hard to believe they could do something like this. Everyone makes mistakes, even (especially!) pilots (I know I have) but...wow. Is the crew scheduling system locally installed software or something? Doesn't it need a network connection to be demonstrated? I'm not sure how they could have possibly connected with the ground although maybe they had onboard wireless Internet and were using it like the passengers. Any logs or anything to corroborate laptop use? Perhaps logs/file timestamps on the laptop itself? So far it looks like the CVR isn't going to be terribly useful. Flight data recorder will probably just show the plane flying smoothly on autopilot which doesn't tell us much about whether they were asleep or on laptops etc.
I am a pilot also. If I don't hear something on frequency after a certain period of time I get worried and check in. I have never gone a whole hour without hearing something.
Once I had a radio failure in Class B over LAX while talking to SoCal on the way north from San Diego. I could hear other pilots in the air but couldn't hear ATC. I was on a vector to avoid traffic heading mostly west out to sea (they had assigned me a temporary heading) instead of heading north to my destination. A couple minutes passed and I knew something was up. There is a pattern/timing to radio communications. And when things go amiss you get a weird feeling that someone should be talking to you by now. I tried to check in a couple of times, heard nothing, but could hear other pilot's replies. I thought there was a problem with the controller's radio or something. I went to the previous controller's frequency that I had been talking to earlier and told them who I was, where I was, and that I had lost contact with the freq I had been on. They knew exactly who I was, what I needed to be doing, who I needed to be talking to, and had been trying to get ahold of me.
It turns out the squelch was broken on my #1 radio. Other pilot's transmissions were strong enough to break squelch and I would hear them but SoCal's transmissions were being filtered. Everything worked as soon as I flipped over to #2. After I got back on the ground I had to call in and explain what happened. Since it was clearly equipment failure there was no problem but if I had fallen asleep or was on my laptop or whatever there would have been consequences. Not my first equipment failure (I've lost count) and not the first time I have had to call in to explain myself due to equipment failure.
I am definitely against second guessing the actions of other pilots in the event of an accident. Fortunately there was nobody hurt here. I am having difficulty understanding how this could possibly be reasonably explained. I am NOT in favor of firing pilots for one screwup. That is one of the things I hate most about the flying business: You invest $100k+ of your OWN money to get that first $30k/year job flying commuters, everything is seniority so as long as you don't screw up you are no better than the next guy (in contrast to the computer business where people can easily distinguish themselves and advance), and the first mistake you make is quite possibly career ending. Imagine if you accidentally lose the customer's data once and could never again be a sysadmin. Unthinkable.
But what I might consider firing them for is lying (if they lied). And right now I just can't see how they aren't lying. Off the radio intentionally for an hour and didn't think someone might want to talk to them? Lost track of time? Took headsets off/didn't have ATC on the cockpit speaker? Lost situational awareness and overflew the airport? Were using laptops in flight? Unbelievable. I have known pilots to read magazines and other things in flight (and even that I'm not a big fan of) but this is beyond the pale.
I could dust off my old Wildcat! floppies and external modems and UUCP and Fidonet and door games and it would be just like the old days all over again! Now having seen the future I'm not entirely sure that would necessarily be such a bad thing. The Internet and the web really made things so easy that everyone was able to jump on and the culture was diluted to the point of destruction. If we went back to the pre-Internet days September would finally end!
Linux (and other free/open source software) really only comes in one version: AWESOME!
"casual friday" for avatars.
Bill Lumbergh: Oh, and remember: next Friday... is Hawaiian shirt day. So, you know, if you want to, go ahead and wear a Hawaiian shirt and jeans.
Homogenization or not, what we are looking for is a temperature change over time. Homogenization will not affect that. He dodges that issue.
Modern data IS accurate. The report you linked to is not. You are going to LOVE this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_0-gX7aUKk
That weather station location study discussed in the video you linked to attracted the attention of NOAA who wrote a reply:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/about/response-v2.pdf
Those white boxes which make up the old style weather stations that Anthony Watts (the guy who did the video you linked to) is investigating are called "Stevenson screens".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screen
They form the oldest weather network in the US. They have been replaced with much newer units. The stevenson screen setups don't even have anemometers.
But the data from those stations are only a very small fraction of all of the weather measurements taking place on earth. Satellites have been used extensively:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_temperature_measurements
As have radiosondes attached to weather balloons:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiosonde
as well as many other natural indications.
Quoted from the above linked video:
> In order to test the validity of Mr. Watts' accusations,
> the NOAA scientists made a comparison of
> temperature trends, using Mr. Watts' data. Two graphs
> were plotted using the same technique. One analysis
> was for the full data set of 1221 US weather stations.
> The other used only the 70 stations that Mr. Watts and
> his volunteers classified as "good" or "best". If climate
> denier theories are correct, the temperatures at the
> optimally sited stations should be markedly different
> from the data as a whole. In fact, the curves show
> virtually no difference. That's right. Even using the
> cherry-picked stations listed in Watts' publication, the
> data -- according to leading scientists at NOAA --
> shows no evidence of distortion.
Both of the replies to my posting are failing to take into account network effects. Sure, someday some Linux user will click on a trojan and get their homedir infected or maybe it will even exploit a local root vulnerability if it can find one for the distro in question (although this becomes less and less likely as more applications are constrained by SE Linux, Dan Walsh at RedHat is working on constraining desktop apps).
But that is far less likely to happen like it does on Windows due to all of the low hanging fruit in Windows land which creates massive network effects and rapidly spreading problems where you merely have to visit a website or open an email. Or visit a folder with an autorun.inf in it (which recently infected a few Windows machines on the office network of a client, I was called in to delete all of the autorun.inf from their Linux based fileserver and scan the shares for Windows viruses).
The monoculture of Windows further adds to the network effects and detracts from them in the case of Linux. Diversity is a good thing and I am glad we have so many different distributions which are all interoperable via http/html, ODF etc.
iptables -F
iptables -t nat -F
iptables -t mangle -F
iptables -X
iptables -N SSH_WHITELIST
# My work network.
iptables -A SSH_WHITELIST -s 1.2.3.0/24 -m recent --remove --name SSH -j ACCEPT
# My home network
iptables -A SSH_WHITELIST -s 4.5.6.0/24 -m recent --remove --name SSH -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -m recent --set --name SSH
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -j SSH_WHITELIST
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 60 --hitcount 4 --rttl --name SSH -j LOG
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 60 --hitcount 4 --rttl --name SSH -j DROP
Tune appropriately. I find that 4 per minute doesn't generate false positives but quite effectively blocks brute forcers. You could lower hitcount or increase the seconds to your liking.
And this is just for machines where I do need multiple people to be able to login from multiple locations. On other machines I definitely use ssh key only auth via the sshd_config.
PLUS: This proves that there ARE people out there interested in breaking into Linux boxes. It's just that this is the best way they can find to do it and I think that says a lot. So let's not hear any more of this "Linux would have viruses too if it were as popular as Windows" bull. Between this and the MySQL on Windows worm:
http://news.cnet.com/MySQL-worm-hits-Windows-systems/2100-7349_3-5553570.html
and the recent Linux botnet perpetrated via password brute forcing:
http://www.builderau.com.au/program/linux/soa/Linux-botnet-discovery-points-to-lazy-administrators/0,339028299,339298642,00.htm
you would think we could put that old chestnut to bed by now.
I think the ones who drop out at mention of a test are the ones you do not want anyhow. I have been tested plenty of times. And I test candidates myself also. Come up with a good test with real world problems and give everyone the same test. I encourage them to explain how they would find out and still solve the problem even if they do not know the answer off the top of their head. I usually give closed book tests and make them simple enough to pass without needing reference material. I do not ask about nitty gritty specific mundane stuff that no sane person should have to memorize. No questions about obscure gnu ls command line options or similar nonsense.
For technical jobs you have got to test. I have not tested before and regretted it. Now I always test. It is the only way to weed out the bullshitters. One technical person can usually interview another technical person and know who is a bullshitter but sometimes management will really like the person for one reason or another. Failing the test is very good ammo for not considering the person.
The ones who won't take the test are the ones you don't want.
Bad enough that the rabid prohibition group, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, or NAMBLA, has lobbied the legal BAL so low that I can't legally drive after eating a piece of my mother's rum cake..
What does the North American Marlon Brando Look-alike Association have against your mother's rum cake? I always knew they were fascists...
"that big" in this case means big enough to force you to use their services instead of others. They are not "that big". Their size relative to others is irrelevent.
They are big but not that big. And as far as I can see they do nothing to keep others out of the market. And prices are still quite good. Hard to see an anti-competitive effects in this market. Anyone else can run a search engine and nothing is stopping anyone from using it.
No, it's a trap. Use it at your peril.
Depending on the social class, the highest insult you can throw at a Russian is probably either "intelligent" (as in belonging to intelligentsia) when directed by a prole against someone he perceives as a smartass, or "bydlo" (this is a Polish loanword that literally means "cattle", and figuratively someone who lives to eat and copulate, and nothing above that) when it is the other way around.
What about us intelligent smartasses who love to eat and copulate?
Does anyone else have any real data to compare?
http://klausler.com/evolved.html
I would give dvorak a try but I still can't fathom how vi/emacs would work.
git and bitkeeper do not share much in concepts. Didn't you watch the video? He talks at length about how content is king, sha-1 hashes, etc. Bitkeeper mainly pushes around diffs. git works quite differently.
If you never start looking for a better job you will never find one. Regardless of what the unemployment rate is the time to start looking if you are unhappy with your current position is always NOW.
Yes, I met Andy when I was in Saigon also. You sure you weren't there in 2005? We met at some Indian type place which had a bar etc. in district 1. If you were there in 2005 I bet we met at that meeting.