"I don't know, but my grandfather says it's the phrase you recite to get into Heaven. It has to be exact. He passed it on to my father, who passed it on to me."
"Wow. So what if you don't recite it perfectly?"
"Ack! Don't even say that! I'd get sent to the land of eternal punishment!"
In complete agreement with this, but a bit more elaboration is needed IMHO.
If a full-on Carrington Event irreparably blows the electrical grid, you're going to have a hard time finding something that would compile your source code, let alone having an audience to sell your final products to.
If electricity blew out for a few days, no biggie. On the other hand, something that damned big may well take out power for months, if not years. Same goes for most modern trucks, trains, and ships - specifically their computer-run engine controllers. Without transportation, most cities would see grocery stores run out of food within 3-5 days. Most home have an average of 1 day up to two weeks of food in a given pantry. The military could conceivably step in as most of their vehicles are hardened against frickin' nuclear EMPs, but there are only so many mil-spec vehicles to go around (less in the US, when you consider how many of them are currently in the Mideast right now). Long story short, relief would be haphazard at best, and would certainly not reach anyone who isn't in one of the top 5-10 metro areas of your country.
The rest just comes apart from there.
I'm a sysadmin. I take a rather paranoid approach to DR/BC measures. On the other hand, if something like the sun going apeshit to Carrington levels happened and blew out the infrastructure? Fuck it - I wouldn't even go into work at that point, because we would all have much bigger problems to tackle than a screaming CEO.
I do disagree with parent about relying solely on a "bug-out bag". Unless you live in a dense urban area where you have no other choice? Once you leave home you're a refugee, period. 3 days worth of food will run out pretty quickly, and if panic truly set in, I doubt you'd find much shelter beyond whatever the government might provide.
Long story short? You will save yourself a lot of grief and money by preparing your datacenter/source/whatever for the more common outage causes. Anything beyond the typical stuff (fire, flood, hacking, etc) is likely going to make you question whether or not civilization as we know it will even survive - and I'm fairly sure that you place your family/spouse/kids/etc at a far higher priority than a bunch of source code to a game.
I didn't mention "anyone", or intimate that disagreement meant anything in the way of sycophancy or astroturfing, so I suspect your strawman may need a bit more stuffing.;)
Given Metro (or whatever the UI is specifically called nowadays), the damned thing had better come with the ability to turn one's computer into a flying car, a washing machine, a working submarine, a microwave stuffed with all the foods I ever liked, and a fembot with a penchant for evil.
Seriously - using the Windows 8 UI is sometimes like pulling one's own teeth out with a rusty pair of tweezers. I don't even want to know what the few Windows-using relatives I have left are going to think (right before my phone line gets all jammed-up with questions and pleas for help, that is).
I know, I know - cue all the sycophants and astroturfers reminding me how allegedly easy using Windows8 will be. >:(
Sort of gives me the urge to post it under the name "FTC Field Office", just to see how many telemarketing types are either too stupid or ballsy to notice.
Once the water is gone from a corpse, there really isn't much ecosystem left to go around for bacteria (or any other underground organisms that normally feed on dead human flesh).
The easiest explanation for the other bit is that the bodies came back "up" due to wind erosion, which the Atacama, like many deserts, would probably have more than enough of to go around.
Hard to say, really. They may still be out there, or they may have been rounded up and (mostly) buried when the region was converted to Christianity back in the 16th-17th century or so. Probably a bit of both, considering that scientists are still stumbling across the things.
Hell, for all we know, they may have suffered the same fate as all too many Egyptian mummies, which were used as literal firewood and train boiler fuel, among other things.
I mean, you have a perfectly sane and logical idea there, but it won't work, and here's why:
== Fact the first: My wee little facebook page has been deluged of late with a megaton of hatred against a guy that I suspect none of my friends (or their friends, etc) have ever heard of until this past Friday. My sister-in-law's fault... let's just say that she's a bit of an 'activist'. So I decided to do a bit of questioning...
Fact the second: On one of the earliest postings, I asked a simple, humble question: "Show of hands: how many of you guys even knew this guy's name before the VP announcement?" In response, nearly every last one of these people claimed to have studied the guy from time immemorial. Mind you, none of them live in Ryan's state/district/etc., nor are they professional politicos, etc.
Fact the third: In response, I asked that if this guy were so evil/bad/etc, why has no one mentioned him until now, and why are all the graphics and such just regurgitated professional propaganda from left-leaning blogs and sites? In other words, I wanted to hear in their own words what their reasoning is for hating the guy, and not just cut+pasted pre-digested talking points that someone else wrote.
Fact the fourth: So far, the only responses have been a bunch of sputtering outrage directed against myself, accusing me of being an evil whatever-party-they-hate, but no actual explanation at time of posting this comment (and continued claims of ongoing and tenured expertise on the guy's life, work history, etc). ==
Thing is, I suspect that it's a hobby of some folks to go from admitted ignoramus to soi-disant expert on a political person or subject, and to do it in less time than it takes to type a few lines and click "submit".
Well, I used to use (and love) Qt as a language... I still dabble in it once in awhile.
Not sure how many patents would be attached to Qt, so I guess it'll require me to at least half-assed check before I do anything commercial with code written in it.
Those idiots who advertise on the 'cheap' channels, promising a free ringtone for your phone of some semi-popular quote or song if you text a certain number with your credit card info and set up a $10/mo. subscription with them.
Think of it as a company that administers a public telecom IQ test (hint: if you pass, you're not one of their customers).
Every time I fly (for business), most of the TSA drones are either friendly when things are slow, or harried/frazzled when things are busy. I've never had the displeasure of being groped/scanned/whatever - maybe I'm just lucky, I don't know.
As for justifying the TSA's existence? No way to do so with a rational argument, so I won't. Personally, if I were Joe Terrorist, I'd be too busy trying to steal a private place (where the TSA doesn't bother) then targeting large sporting events or something.
My company tends to frown on being two weeks offline each way whilst riding a ship to/from a client (assuming I could find ships that regularly crosses the Pacific in both directions, and takes on passengers).:(
Personal life? I can avoid air travel with the greatest of ease. At work? I'm not so lucky about that.
You mean, like, if an employer-provided insurance plan covers it?
There's quite a few million people out there who will have to, you know, get a job first before they can get that.
There's also that "employer-provided insurance plan" - fact is, most of them suck. Instead of my previous catastrophic plan that was dirt cheap ( > $100/mo plus $5k sitting around in the bank to cover the deductible)? The required changes my employer made will mean that my health insurance bill will now cost more per month than a car payment, and I'd still have to pay $3,500 out of pocket* before it actually kicked in and did anything.
So, thanks to the government, instead of my regular salary? I have to dock it by the annual insurance payments.
Way to reduce my fucking wages, Mr President. Anything else I can do to further your short-sighted partisan agenda?
* (That $3,500 becomes a $7,000 annual out-of-pocket max if I got stuck with using an out-of-network provider)
As an Oregon resident (in the soaking wet portion of the state), my solution was simple: I removed the stupid flow restrictor. Even if were made of metal and not easily-removable rubber, it's easy to break out a drill and make that hole bigger...
Small point of order: Salt Lake City (well, the whole valley) is fairly self-sufficient water-wise. Not because they want to be, but because they have to be. Piping water hundreds of miles over and into a neck of the Rocky Mountains called The Great Basin is a bit, shall we say, expensive.
OTOH, to their credit, the Ogden-Salt Lake corridor has a pretty ingenious solution, water-wise. Most homes have two types of water and piping systems: culinary and secondary. You drink/bathe-in/wash-with the culinary water (and it is fairly costly to use the stuff in large amounts). You water the yard, wash the car, run your swamp-cooler, and fill your hot tub or pool with the secondary water (it is also used for agricultural and light industrial uses where applicable). The secondary water is a flat-rate fee, and is (mostly) untreated water which is collected from the nearby mountainsides via catch-ponds. It's dirt cheap, but once it's gone in a season, it's gone - you have to wait for next year's snowmelt to get more.
Either way, conservation is promoted: the sheer expense of culinary water keeps you from using too much of that, and the finite/seasonal secondary water requires conservation lest you end up with a dry lawn and no water by August.
IIRC, a couple of the former SCO honchos offed themselves (quite literally), and last I heard, Darl McBride had to file for bankruptcy.
Long story short?
* Microsoft got what it wanted (delayed/slowed Linux acceptance) without Joe Sixpack or the DOJ being too aware of it * Mr. Boies (as evidenced by his previous public loss in Bush v. Gore) proved that with a bit of name recognition, you can be a shitty lawyer but still get rich. * SCO's board of directors proved that if you're going to die anyway as a corporation, you may as well use some fantastic claims to kite your stock one last time. * Originally, SCO did a lot of good things with Caldera... pity that they had to fuck it up with their stupid licensing on the modifications. * A couple of good Linux-oriented companies that were also under the Tarantella umbrella (and were also in Utah, in the same literal neighborhood even) got fucked thanks to the poisonous reputation that SCOX gave 'em. Watching that happen up-close was pretty painful.
So - when's the asset sale? I think someone needs to buy the SCO logo sign, mount it with antlers, and present it to Mr. Torvalds as a trophy.
Slashdot Mirror
"one-zero-zero-zero-one-zero-one-zero-one-one-zero..."
"Err, what's that mean?"
"I don't know, but my grandfather says it's the phrase you recite to get into Heaven. It has to be exact. He passed it on to my father, who passed it on to me."
"Wow. So what if you don't recite it perfectly?"
"Ack! Don't even say that! I'd get sent to the land of eternal punishment!"
"You mean Hell?"
"No - worse! It's a place Grampa called DotNet!"
In complete agreement with this, but a bit more elaboration is needed IMHO.
If a full-on Carrington Event irreparably blows the electrical grid, you're going to have a hard time finding something that would compile your source code, let alone having an audience to sell your final products to.
If electricity blew out for a few days, no biggie. On the other hand, something that damned big may well take out power for months, if not years. Same goes for most modern trucks, trains, and ships - specifically their computer-run engine controllers. Without transportation, most cities would see grocery stores run out of food within 3-5 days. Most home have an average of 1 day up to two weeks of food in a given pantry. The military could conceivably step in as most of their vehicles are hardened against frickin' nuclear EMPs, but there are only so many mil-spec vehicles to go around (less in the US, when you consider how many of them are currently in the Mideast right now). Long story short, relief would be haphazard at best, and would certainly not reach anyone who isn't in one of the top 5-10 metro areas of your country.
The rest just comes apart from there.
I'm a sysadmin. I take a rather paranoid approach to DR/BC measures. On the other hand, if something like the sun going apeshit to Carrington levels happened and blew out the infrastructure? Fuck it - I wouldn't even go into work at that point, because we would all have much bigger problems to tackle than a screaming CEO.
I do disagree with parent about relying solely on a "bug-out bag". Unless you live in a dense urban area where you have no other choice? Once you leave home you're a refugee, period. 3 days worth of food will run out pretty quickly, and if panic truly set in, I doubt you'd find much shelter beyond whatever the government might provide.
Long story short? You will save yourself a lot of grief and money by preparing your datacenter/source/whatever for the more common outage causes. Anything beyond the typical stuff (fire, flood, hacking, etc) is likely going to make you question whether or not civilization as we know it will even survive - and I'm fairly sure that you place your family/spouse/kids/etc at a far higher priority than a bunch of source code to a game.
I didn't mention "anyone", or intimate that disagreement meant anything in the way of sycophancy or astroturfing, so I suspect your strawman may need a bit more stuffing. ;)
BTW as a sidenote I actually really like Ubuntu Unity.
You don't, like, wear argyle golfing pants and a paisley polka-dot tie to work, do you?
I promise I'm not trying to be insulting, but I am curious now... :)
Given Metro (or whatever the UI is specifically called nowadays), the damned thing had better come with the ability to turn one's computer into a flying car, a washing machine, a working submarine, a microwave stuffed with all the foods I ever liked, and a fembot with a penchant for evil.
Seriously - using the Windows 8 UI is sometimes like pulling one's own teeth out with a rusty pair of tweezers. I don't even want to know what the few Windows-using relatives I have left are going to think (right before my phone line gets all jammed-up with questions and pleas for help, that is).
I know, I know - cue all the sycophants and astroturfers reminding me how allegedly easy using Windows8 will be. >:(
Sort of gives me the urge to post it under the name "FTC Field Office", just to see how many telemarketing types are either too stupid or ballsy to notice.
Once the water is gone from a corpse, there really isn't much ecosystem left to go around for bacteria (or any other underground organisms that normally feed on dead human flesh).
The easiest explanation for the other bit is that the bodies came back "up" due to wind erosion, which the Atacama, like many deserts, would probably have more than enough of to go around.
Hard to say, really. They may still be out there, or they may have been rounded up and (mostly) buried when the region was converted to Christianity back in the 16th-17th century or so. Probably a bit of both, considering that scientists are still stumbling across the things.
Hell, for all we know, they may have suffered the same fate as all too many Egyptian mummies, which were used as literal firewood and train boiler fuel, among other things.
You're kidding, right?
I mean, you have a perfectly sane and logical idea there, but it won't work, and here's why:
==
Fact the first: My wee little facebook page has been deluged of late with a megaton of hatred against a guy that I suspect none of my friends (or their friends, etc) have ever heard of until this past Friday. My sister-in-law's fault... let's just say that she's a bit of an 'activist'. So I decided to do a bit of questioning...
Fact the second: On one of the earliest postings, I asked a simple, humble question: "Show of hands: how many of you guys even knew this guy's name before the VP announcement?" In response, nearly every last one of these people claimed to have studied the guy from time immemorial. Mind you, none of them live in Ryan's state/district/etc., nor are they professional politicos, etc.
Fact the third: In response, I asked that if this guy were so evil/bad/etc, why has no one mentioned him until now, and why are all the graphics and such just regurgitated professional propaganda from left-leaning blogs and sites? In other words, I wanted to hear in their own words what their reasoning is for hating the guy, and not just cut+pasted pre-digested talking points that someone else wrote.
Fact the fourth: So far, the only responses have been a bunch of sputtering outrage directed against myself, accusing me of being an evil whatever-party-they-hate, but no actual explanation at time of posting this comment (and continued claims of ongoing and tenured expertise on the guy's life, work history, etc).
==
Thing is, I suspect that it's a hobby of some folks to go from admitted ignoramus to soi-disant expert on a political person or subject, and to do it in less time than it takes to type a few lines and click "submit".
Can't deprive folks of that, now can you? :)
what you're actually missing is that 400 bucks smartphones industry is _not_ going to last for another decade.
...and neither will Nokia, at least not without coming into some astronomical amount of luck.
It's one thing to look ahead, but another entirely to look so far ahead of you that you cannot see the great big hole you're about to walk into.
Because they're waiting for a massive payday from Microsoft when it comes time to buy up what's left.
(I didn't say they were smart...)
Well, I used to use (and love) Qt as a language... I still dabble in it once in awhile.
Not sure how many patents would be attached to Qt, so I guess it'll require me to at least half-assed check before I do anything commercial with code written in it.
WTF is a "video ring tone company"?
Those idiots who advertise on the 'cheap' channels, promising a free ringtone for your phone of some semi-popular quote or song if you text a certain number with your credit card info and set up a $10/mo. subscription with them.
Think of it as a company that administers a public telecom IQ test (hint: if you pass, you're not one of their customers).
This, right here.
Every time I fly (for business), most of the TSA drones are either friendly when things are slow, or harried/frazzled when things are busy. I've never had the displeasure of being groped/scanned/whatever - maybe I'm just lucky, I don't know.
As for justifying the TSA's existence? No way to do so with a rational argument, so I won't. Personally, if I were Joe Terrorist, I'd be too busy trying to steal a private place (where the TSA doesn't bother) then targeting large sporting events or something.
My company tends to frown on being two weeks offline each way whilst riding a ship to/from a client (assuming I could find ships that regularly crosses the Pacific in both directions, and takes on passengers). :(
Personal life? I can avoid air travel with the greatest of ease.
At work? I'm not so lucky about that.
You mean, like, if an employer-provided insurance plan covers it?
There's quite a few million people out there who will have to, you know, get a job first before they can get that.
There's also that "employer-provided insurance plan" - fact is, most of them suck. Instead of my previous catastrophic plan that was dirt cheap ( > $100/mo plus $5k sitting around in the bank to cover the deductible)? The required changes my employer made will mean that my health insurance bill will now cost more per month than a car payment, and I'd still have to pay $3,500 out of pocket* before it actually kicked in and did anything.
So, thanks to the government, instead of my regular salary? I have to dock it by the annual insurance payments.
Way to reduce my fucking wages, Mr President. Anything else I can do to further your short-sighted partisan agenda?
* (That $3,500 becomes a $7,000 annual out-of-pocket max if I got stuck with using an out-of-network provider)
1% of the purchase price goes to health care? That sounds like a bargain to me.
...until General Motors does the same thing, that is. :/
As an Oregon resident (in the soaking wet portion of the state), my solution was simple: I removed the stupid flow restrictor. Even if were made of metal and not easily-removable rubber, it's easy to break out a drill and make that hole bigger...
Small point of order: Salt Lake City (well, the whole valley) is fairly self-sufficient water-wise. Not because they want to be, but because they have to be. Piping water hundreds of miles over and into a neck of the Rocky Mountains called The Great Basin is a bit, shall we say, expensive.
OTOH, to their credit, the Ogden-Salt Lake corridor has a pretty ingenious solution, water-wise. Most homes have two types of water and piping systems: culinary and secondary. You drink/bathe-in/wash-with the culinary water (and it is fairly costly to use the stuff in large amounts). You water the yard, wash the car, run your swamp-cooler, and fill your hot tub or pool with the secondary water (it is also used for agricultural and light industrial uses where applicable). The secondary water is a flat-rate fee, and is (mostly) untreated water which is collected from the nearby mountainsides via catch-ponds. It's dirt cheap, but once it's gone in a season, it's gone - you have to wait for next year's snowmelt to get more.
Either way, conservation is promoted: the sheer expense of culinary water keeps you from using too much of that, and the finite/seasonal secondary water requires conservation lest you end up with a dry lawn and no water by August.
This, right here.
Of course, I'm hoping you didn't expect differently.
Urgh.
Okay kids, time to brace for the usual arguments:
"Itz teh global WarminGz!"
"Iz nawt! Itz teh outLiarz!"
"Yoo Dunt no SHIT abut SCIENCE!"
(rinse, repeat, ad nauseum...)
Seriously. Get a grip.
Apparently you're too drop-stupid to know how to use Wikipedia, so I'll help you out.
In other words, not only do you not know shit about patents, but you don't know shit about how to do some basic research.
Two words: Design Patent.
It works a bit differently than you think.
Good luck with that.
IIRC, a couple of the former SCO honchos offed themselves (quite literally), and last I heard, Darl McBride had to file for bankruptcy.
Long story short?
* Microsoft got what it wanted (delayed/slowed Linux acceptance) without Joe Sixpack or the DOJ being too aware of it
* Mr. Boies (as evidenced by his previous public loss in Bush v. Gore) proved that with a bit of name recognition, you can be a shitty lawyer but still get rich.
* SCO's board of directors proved that if you're going to die anyway as a corporation, you may as well use some fantastic claims to kite your stock one last time.
* Originally, SCO did a lot of good things with Caldera... pity that they had to fuck it up with their stupid licensing on the modifications.
* A couple of good Linux-oriented companies that were also under the Tarantella umbrella (and were also in Utah, in the same literal neighborhood even) got fucked thanks to the poisonous reputation that SCOX gave 'em. Watching that happen up-close was pretty painful.
So - when's the asset sale? I think someone needs to buy the SCO logo sign, mount it with antlers, and present it to Mr. Torvalds as a trophy.