used to work for the state highway authority, working on traffic signals. When I was there the entire bridge department were made redundant and replaced by contractors. No matter how much you document these things, you still need continuity from one generation to the next. The old guys have to be around to tell the young guys to look out for this and that, or it may cause problems.
But it is cheaper to outsource.
I find the notion of contractors comical. basically you pay 3 times the amount to them so that if you need to, you can fire them. Makes sens for things you don't always need but upper management seem to want them for everything even basic money making tasks and as far as I've seen within my own corporation.. it doesn't work well. You get all the sloth and inefficiencies of full time employees with the additional benefit of having no attachment to the job and the need to fill quota without doing things right. A buddy of mine works as a cable contract installer. Makes good coin because he does such an incredibly shitty but quick job when he's on the clock. The things he does will eventually bite his corp int he ass but by then he'll be off to greener pastures.
What funding do you propose we cut in order to find money to make bridges ever-so-slightly safer? Shall we cut funding for schools? Reduce the police force? Neglect other roads in need of repair?
Bridges in the western world already have an extremely low failure rate. Reducing it further would require an enormous investment for almost no gain. There are much better ways that we can spend that money.
Take money from various projects like the multi billion dollar war, or various graft projects awarded to Lockheed and Martin / Boeing and the various other money pits? How about revamping the US Medicare system so the Feds don't spend twice as much per person as the Canadians do for 1/3 the results. I think if there was enough transparency and political pressure the US could be a great place again.
Likewise, you're not exactly going to be able to attract funding to fix or replace the bridge if you're going around telling everybody that everything's just peachy.
Personally, I sort of doubt that this could have been prevented. It's one of those one-in-a-billion sort of odds that unfortunately caught up with us...
I'm more than a bit irked at the media for taking the "structurally deficient" term, and plastering it all over the news without a very clear understanding of what it means. There's no cause for a panic or a rucus -- our bridges are no more dangerous today than they were last week. Hell, we don't even know what caused the bridge to collapse, and ordering all sorts of emergency inspections (which has been done in many many states so far) is pointless considering that the bridge that collapsed was previously deemed to be safe on multiple occasions.
Of course, other recent incidents such as the con edison steam explosion in NYC reek of criminal negligence.
Dying by being hit by a meteorite is a uncontrollable event which is completely blameless. Dying because a bridge gave out is an act you can lay blame for. The engineers who checked the bridge didn't do their job. A freak accident would be if a whale and a bowl of petunia's sudden;t landed on the bridge and caused it's collapse. Buckling and giving out on it's own is negligence by the state due to lack of proper engineering.
Makes a lot of sense. Think, instead of saving the middle east, let them knock each other off. Let them buy the bombs for profit. Turn it to bridge reconstruction. No, I am not kidding, I though this parents post was accurate and sane. Why spend billions on Neanderthals when you can build at home.
Each American who thinks the invasion Iraq is "saving" the middle east is an active contributor of why the US has had a sharp decline in buying power and the general decline in common sense and intelligence. If they could find a selective pressure for lack of political critical thinking I think it would greatly help the world as a whole.
I realize that this post is a bit off topic, but the problem of not supporting what is already there exists all through government. In the case of this bridge, shutting it down would have met with massive protest from all involved. Projects would have caused inconvenience, just as increased personnel staffing creates great cost for the government in many areas. People do the same thing all the time - buy new cars and toys, but never spend the money on maintenance, it all went to the toy. But if we build it or buy it we better be able to keep it in good shape.
Speak for yourself, factboy... I suppose there's something to be said about all the football and baseball statistics all my friends (male) know off the top of their heads. But I'm the guy who analyzes everything to death while being constantly being reminded about appointments and dates and events by my gf.
Notice the words "on average". exceptions do occur.
Clearly so, but it could be worse: "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" is illustrative of subtraction, but somewhat tedious if one is not an actual red-eyed participant.
My little sister got hooke dsingin "this is the song that never ends.." I wished it was legal to euthanize her after the first hour.
I'm not so sure I buy your "reverse-sexism" argument. In my time at secondary school, many of the guys were too caught up in drugs, booze, and trying to get laid than academic performance. From what I noticed, girl's peer groups were more accepting of high academic performance than were groups of boys, where the social line between jock and nerd were much more strongly defined and enforced.
Boys will never do well as a group academically as long as academic performance is seen as a social stigma.
Historically when they had different ways of teaching english, history women did worse in everything. When they revised English and history to a more "critical thinking" and less "rote memorization" style they saw women did better and men did worse in those subjects. The way out males are raised or how their biology dictates (not confirmed to be either although evidence suggests the latter) we don't do as well with critical thinking and do much better at rote memorization of most things on average. This correlation implied men and women think and learn in different ways and most studdies suggests it's biological not cultural.
Michael Pachter does not work for Rockstar. He's an analyst. So it's like taking my word forit that they have sharks with lazerbeams patrolling the Iraqie gulf. of here:
"slashdots King-manic says Take-Two management has "stumbled badly for the first time" with the delay of GTA IV, and said that he believes difficulties are related to the lack of strippers in the Take two office."
Given it's not the first time Take-two has stumbled. And it's nto a port his opinion is pretty highly suspect.
I thought what destroyed Street Fighter was all the ridiculous pseudo-sequels. You had SF 2, then SF 2: Championship Edition, then SF 2: Turbo, then Street Fighter Alpha Championship Turbo Hyper EX II Deluxe Edition, etc...
Well many of them were smashing successess. The often riduculed re-tooled SFII turbo blah blah blah were capcoms responses to hacked roms, incorporating some of the novel ideas into standard play. I always liked the series and the follow up cross overs and SF III and alpha.
I don't think it's the army itself that defective I think it's the brass, politicians and the American people. America has become extremely risk averse in regards to American lives. The politicians thus won't touch anything that endangers people and the brass relay these sentiments. It might be because of better communication and media which makes casualties more then numbers, it might be a very big shift in the idea of duty vs cost of duty. It might be the frivolous nature of the wars America has gotten itself into lately. Vietnam was about ideology, Iraq is about economics and influence while the major wars previous WWI and WWII was about duty to your allies and stopping actual threats to your security and economy. Korea was about ideology as well so perhaps it is a shift of the people.
Yes, we know. You tell us in every single thread. But they do not have BioShock (I know, there is PC version, some of us don't run Windows or want to upgrade a perfectly capable graphics card/RAM/etc which will all cost more than a 360 anyway), Mass Effect, Halo 3 (I know, the Sony troll response is IT LOOKS LAST GEN, save your keystrokes -- the game will still sell), Overlord (yes, a PC version, see earlier), Too Human -- except for Halo 3, all games I'm more interested in than Motorstorm and sports games. Also, they lost a few exclusives (if I recall correctly, Assassin's Creed was going to be), and Call of Duty: Airborne comes out for the 360 two months before the PS3 version -- and this is the first CoD game I've even been remotely interested in. See, I can list games, too.
The only exclusive Sony really has that interests me is Resistance: Fall of Man. And not enough to fork out $499 (or $599, or $399) plus the cost of the game. They may lose FF13, they lost launch exclusivity of GTA4 (which they had for VC and SA). I guess "they will be fine" means "they'll remain in third place."
FF13 itself is denied to be multi platform. They mean the "franchise" of FF13 will be multi platform. The main game is still PS3 exclusive.
For me personally the only one that temps me is Mass effect. I know a lot of the art dept and some of the programmers and want to support them but I am not a 360 gamer. I'm not really in non PC FPS's, sports games, etc.. And I got a PS3 so I'm hoping for a PC port. BioShock looks sort of interesting but I keep getting the impression of Oblivion with guns. I don't know why. I didn't really like oblivion.
Decompression not compilation. A PC DVD can take it's time with a good but CPU intensive compression algorithm like a really right rar or 7zip or something. A PS3 games doesn't have that luxury yet. Most of the non-downloadable games have fairly light initial boot ups.
Evolution tends towards the more complex. Not simplification. Once you get a DNA sequence, it's pretty much there forever.
Evolution tends to nothing but survival. Your just as likely to lose a chromosome as to gain one (surviving it is less likely in most species). Just as likely to have an addition frameshift as a subtraction frameshift most of the time. Your much more likely to inactivate a transscribed gene then to create a new one. If in 62 million years you break the gene that codes for a better DNa repair system and it happens you reuire less energy to live you may have an advantage during the perios of low rad. The broken gene becomes the majority in the pop. Rad levels go up and the pop is brought down past the minimial numbers needed for viability.
Not nessacarily. If the rad levels go down. There is now a energetically more favorable to leave out that mechanism then to have it. So it could be the mainline 90% always have it while the 10% are sneaky and tyr to get away without it. work well for 62 mil then pow dead.
perhaps those 10% didn't have good DNA repair mechanisms as a species and it's only 10% because the species who evolve without it get smacked every 62 mil or so.
Radiation doesn't kill things off that well. Look at Chernobyl or the Savannah river plant...Both shut down, both radioactive, both experiencing a resurgence of pretty healthy wildlife across the board.
Take UV light. A veyr small dose causes phenotypic adaptiation to it. A little bit more cause tumors/DNA damage. A lot more causes cellular sterilization. It's all about dosage.
There a difference between people to mis-uses jargon and people who doesn't understand when others use unfamiliar but legitimate jargon. Those bits of jargon are legitimate devloper jargon. They've started springing up into common usage so either go with the flow or look foolish. I think you've chosen your option?
"Are they going to release it for the PC?" I highly doubt it. IIRC, this is one of those games that required Blu-ray. I'm pretty sure it's a 25 GB game, and I doubt you'd enjoy installing it from 5 DVDs (or 35(?) CDs) and having it take 25 Gigs on your drive. And it probably wouldn't look nearly as "gorgeous," either, because most computers are probably massively underpowered for it. According to Wiki, it's got: Progressive Mesh HDR Lighting Real-time Dynamic physics and Fluid dynamics just to name a few. I doubt if even 1% of PCs currently being sold have the capability of real-time fluid dynamics. Not to slag the Ps3, I really like mine. But if you implement it for Pc you don't have as much of a proccessing power vs disc space contraint. A Console game must contruct all the binaries/artwork/audio etc.. on the fly or with just a bit of preprocessing while a PC game can heaviyl crunch it and reconstruct on install and play without doign that step again and again. so a 25 gig on a console may only be 7 gigs on a PC with no quality loss.
I hope it doens't go to Pc because I could sure use some more exclusives ot promote more games for my PS3. I wish I coudl convince my friends at bioware to port Mass effect to the Ps3. They swore off the sony platforms after a game of theirs for the PS2 nearly killed all their programmers with stress.
There is little difference between the county shelter and the county clink. Neither is especially luxurious. Most urban center have shelters. Few non urban areas have homeless. Compare any shelter to any prison and you'll find them both dirty flea infested, marginally habitable places. So if the shelters are full then tyr the clink but theres not compelling reason for the homeless to want to be in prison. And no I've not heard from my officer friends of a rash of homeless trying to get arrested to go to the clink. I'm cetrain it happens when it's 30 below and the shelter is full but it's not a common thing and your arguement is pretty light weight in that regaurd. Prison isn't full of "homeless" as in having no home ouside of prison. the subty need not be set out as homelessness precludes having "prison" as a home as prison isn't a home. The majority of the US prison pop is there for drug related offences.
I should have said myth thats it's commong "for homeless people to want to go to jail". I realized it when I hit submit.
side note: Repeaditly repeating how clever your pun is is a sure sign it wasn't very clever.
That's trimmed the list from 19 to 4 games that you might expect the average slashdotter to care about on the PS3:
If you play that game, you could really say that the 360 has about 4 good games as it's mostly sports, FPS, multi-platform releases, games that are better when ported to PC, and re-releases of PS2 games.
Slashdot Mirror
used to work for the state highway authority, working on traffic signals. When I was there the entire bridge department were made redundant and replaced by contractors. No matter how much you document these things, you still need continuity from one generation to the next. The old guys have to be around to tell the young guys to look out for this and that, or it may cause problems.
But it is cheaper to outsource.
I find the notion of contractors comical. basically you pay 3 times the amount to them so that if you need to, you can fire them. Makes sens for things you don't always need but upper management seem to want them for everything even basic money making tasks and as far as I've seen within my own corporation.. it doesn't work well. You get all the sloth and inefficiencies of full time employees with the additional benefit of having no attachment to the job and the need to fill quota without doing things right. A buddy of mine works as a cable contract installer. Makes good coin because he does such an incredibly shitty but quick job when he's on the clock. The things he does will eventually bite his corp int he ass but by then he'll be off to greener pastures.
What funding do you propose we cut in order to find money to make bridges ever-so-slightly safer? Shall we cut funding for schools? Reduce the police force? Neglect other roads in need of repair?
Bridges in the western world already have an extremely low failure rate. Reducing it further would require an enormous investment for almost no gain. There are much better ways that we can spend that money.
Take money from various projects like the multi billion dollar war, or various graft projects awarded to Lockheed and Martin / Boeing and the various other money pits? How about revamping the US Medicare system so the Feds don't spend twice as much per person as the Canadians do for 1/3 the results. I think if there was enough transparency and political pressure the US could be a great place again.
Likewise, you're not exactly going to be able to attract funding to fix or replace the bridge if you're going around telling everybody that everything's just peachy.
Personally, I sort of doubt that this could have been prevented. It's one of those one-in-a-billion sort of odds that unfortunately caught up with us...
I'm more than a bit irked at the media for taking the "structurally deficient" term, and plastering it all over the news without a very clear understanding of what it means. There's no cause for a panic or a rucus -- our bridges are no more dangerous today than they were last week. Hell, we don't even know what caused the bridge to collapse, and ordering all sorts of emergency inspections (which has been done in many many states so far) is pointless considering that the bridge that collapsed was previously deemed to be safe on multiple occasions.
Of course, other recent incidents such as the con edison steam explosion in NYC reek of criminal negligence.
Dying by being hit by a meteorite is a uncontrollable event which is completely blameless. Dying because a bridge gave out is an act you can lay blame for. The engineers who checked the bridge didn't do their job. A freak accident would be if a whale and a bowl of petunia's sudden;t landed on the bridge and caused it's collapse. Buckling and giving out on it's own is negligence by the state due to lack of proper engineering.
Makes a lot of sense. Think, instead of saving the middle east, let them knock each other off. Let them buy the bombs for profit. Turn it to bridge reconstruction. No, I am not kidding, I though this parents post was accurate and sane. Why spend billions on Neanderthals when you can build at home.
Each American who thinks the invasion Iraq is "saving" the middle east is an active contributor of why the US has had a sharp decline in buying power and the general decline in common sense and intelligence. If they could find a selective pressure for lack of political critical thinking I think it would greatly help the world as a whole.
I realize that this post is a bit off topic, but the problem of not supporting what is already there exists all through government. In the case of this bridge, shutting it down would have met with massive protest from all involved. Projects would have caused inconvenience, just as increased personnel staffing creates great cost for the government in many areas. People do the same thing all the time - buy new cars and toys, but never spend the money on maintenance, it all went to the toy. But if we build it or buy it we better be able to keep it in good shape.
I wish they didn't have a 5 karma max on modding.
Cruelest...Parents...Evar If you think thats bad my dads name comes out phenetically as chew gay wang.
Speak for yourself, factboy ... I suppose there's something to be said about all the football and baseball statistics all my friends (male) know off the top of their heads. But I'm the guy who analyzes everything to death while being constantly being reminded about appointments and dates and events by my gf.
Notice the words "on average". exceptions do occur.
On the Ninth Day, G-d created Baseball. well. I guess thats proof against intelligent design.
Clearly so, but it could be worse: "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" is illustrative of subtraction, but somewhat tedious if one is not an actual red-eyed participant.
My little sister got hooke dsingin "this is the song that never ends.." I wished it was legal to euthanize her after the first hour.
I'm not so sure I buy your "reverse-sexism" argument. In my time at secondary school, many of the guys were too caught up in drugs, booze, and trying to get laid than academic performance. From what I noticed, girl's peer groups were more accepting of high academic performance than were groups of boys, where the social line between jock and nerd were much more strongly defined and enforced.
Boys will never do well as a group academically as long as academic performance is seen as a social stigma.
Historically when they had different ways of teaching english, history women did worse in everything. When they revised English and history to a more "critical thinking" and less "rote memorization" style they saw women did better and men did worse in those subjects. The way out males are raised or how their biology dictates (not confirmed to be either although evidence suggests the latter) we don't do as well with critical thinking and do much better at rote memorization of most things on average. This correlation implied men and women think and learn in different ways and most studdies suggests it's biological not cultural.
And are any videos online? Well baseball is unspeakibly boring so maybe it's that one?
Michael Pachter does not work for Rockstar. He's an analyst. So it's like taking my word forit that they have sharks with lazerbeams patrolling the Iraqie gulf. of here:
"slashdots King-manic says Take-Two management has "stumbled badly for the first time" with the delay of GTA IV, and said that he believes difficulties are related to the lack of strippers in the Take two office."
Given it's not the first time Take-two has stumbled. And it's nto a port his opinion is pretty highly suspect.
I thought what destroyed Street Fighter was all the ridiculous pseudo-sequels. You had SF 2, then SF 2: Championship Edition, then SF 2: Turbo, then Street Fighter Alpha Championship Turbo Hyper EX II Deluxe Edition, etc...
Well many of them were smashing successess. The often riduculed re-tooled SFII turbo blah blah blah were capcoms responses to hacked roms, incorporating some of the novel ideas into standard play. I always liked the series and the follow up cross overs and SF III and alpha.
I don't think it's the army itself that defective I think it's the brass, politicians and the American people. America has become extremely risk averse in regards to American lives. The politicians thus won't touch anything that endangers people and the brass relay these sentiments. It might be because of better communication and media which makes casualties more then numbers, it might be a very big shift in the idea of duty vs cost of duty. It might be the frivolous nature of the wars America has gotten itself into lately. Vietnam was about ideology, Iraq is about economics and influence while the major wars previous WWI and WWII was about duty to your allies and stopping actual threats to your security and economy. Korea was about ideology as well so perhaps it is a shift of the people.
Yes, we know. You tell us in every single thread. But they do not have BioShock (I know, there is PC version, some of us don't run Windows or want to upgrade a perfectly capable graphics card/RAM/etc which will all cost more than a 360 anyway), Mass Effect, Halo 3 (I know, the Sony troll response is IT LOOKS LAST GEN, save your keystrokes -- the game will still sell), Overlord (yes, a PC version, see earlier), Too Human -- except for Halo 3, all games I'm more interested in than Motorstorm and sports games. Also, they lost a few exclusives (if I recall correctly, Assassin's Creed was going to be), and Call of Duty: Airborne comes out for the 360 two months before the PS3 version -- and this is the first CoD game I've even been remotely interested in. See, I can list games, too.
The only exclusive Sony really has that interests me is Resistance: Fall of Man. And not enough to fork out $499 (or $599, or $399) plus the cost of the game. They may lose FF13, they lost launch exclusivity of GTA4 (which they had for VC and SA). I guess "they will be fine" means "they'll remain in third place."
FF13 itself is denied to be multi platform. They mean the "franchise" of FF13 will be multi platform. The main game is still PS3 exclusive.
For me personally the only one that temps me is Mass effect. I know a lot of the art dept and some of the programmers and want to support them but I am not a 360 gamer. I'm not really in non PC FPS's, sports games, etc.. And I got a PS3 so I'm hoping for a PC port. BioShock looks sort of interesting but I keep getting the impression of Oblivion with guns. I don't know why. I didn't really like oblivion.
VGchartz doesn't have any info from several major retailers. So it's number give you trends but not true volume.
Decompression not compilation. A PC DVD can take it's time with a good but CPU intensive compression algorithm like a really right rar or 7zip or something. A PS3 games doesn't have that luxury yet. Most of the non-downloadable games have fairly light initial boot ups.
Evolution tends towards the more complex. Not simplification. Once you get a DNA sequence, it's pretty much there forever.
Evolution tends to nothing but survival. Your just as likely to lose a chromosome as to gain one (surviving it is less likely in most species). Just as likely to have an addition frameshift as a subtraction frameshift most of the time. Your much more likely to inactivate a transscribed gene then to create a new one. If in 62 million years you break the gene that codes for a better DNa repair system and it happens you reuire less energy to live you may have an advantage during the perios of low rad. The broken gene becomes the majority in the pop. Rad levels go up and the pop is brought down past the minimial numbers needed for viability.
Not nessacarily. If the rad levels go down. There is now a energetically more favorable to leave out that mechanism then to have it. So it could be the mainline 90% always have it while the 10% are sneaky and tyr to get away without it. work well for 62 mil then pow dead.
perhaps those 10% didn't have good DNA repair mechanisms as a species and it's only 10% because the species who evolve without it get smacked every 62 mil or so.
Radiation doesn't kill things off that well. Look at Chernobyl or the Savannah river plant...Both shut down, both radioactive, both experiencing a resurgence of pretty healthy wildlife across the board.
Take UV light. A veyr small dose causes phenotypic adaptiation to it. A little bit more cause tumors/DNA damage. A lot more causes cellular sterilization. It's all about dosage.
There a difference between people to mis-uses jargon and people who doesn't understand when others use unfamiliar but legitimate jargon. Those bits of jargon are legitimate devloper jargon. They've started springing up into common usage so either go with the flow or look foolish. I think you've chosen your option?
I hope it doens't go to Pc because I could sure use some more exclusives ot promote more games for my PS3. I wish I coudl convince my friends at bioware to port Mass effect to the Ps3. They swore off the sony platforms after a game of theirs for the PS2 nearly killed all their programmers with stress.
There is little difference between the county shelter and the county clink. Neither is especially luxurious. Most urban center have shelters. Few non urban areas have homeless. Compare any shelter to any prison and you'll find them both dirty flea infested, marginally habitable places. So if the shelters are full then tyr the clink but theres not compelling reason for the homeless to want to be in prison. And no I've not heard from my officer friends of a rash of homeless trying to get arrested to go to the clink. I'm cetrain it happens when it's 30 below and the shelter is full but it's not a common thing and your arguement is pretty light weight in that regaurd. Prison isn't full of "homeless" as in having no home ouside of prison. the subty need not be set out as homelessness precludes having "prison" as a home as prison isn't a home. The majority of the US prison pop is there for drug related offences.
I should have said myth thats it's commong "for homeless people to want to go to jail". I realized it when I hit submit.
side note: Repeaditly repeating how clever your pun is is a sure sign it wasn't very clever.
That's trimmed the list from 19 to 4 games that you might expect the average slashdotter to care about on the PS3:
If you play that game, you could really say that the 360 has about 4 good games as it's mostly sports, FPS, multi-platform releases, games that are better when ported to PC, and re-releases of PS2 games.