Yes, I'm with you there. Losing Ukraine to the West is even worse than the Cuban missile crises... maybe more analogous to the 13 colonies seceding from the US.
Though my favorite conspiracy site explains it more in terms of thwacking Russia for trying to sell oil in Rubles, the same way we thwacked Iraq and Libya for making moves to sell oil in anything other than USD: http://scgnews.com/the-geopoli...
Heh, yeah, that's exactly why I bothered to stick the word "probably" in there. Plenty of less reputable news sources have been making hay of Kerry's Sept 11 visit with the king of Saudi Arabia ahead of the Nov 27 OPEC proclamation.
But yeah, the Saudis have enough of their own reasons to try to slow down the energy production of other states. http://blogs.reuters.com/great...
They know their supply of ridiculously cheap oil is finite, and a lot of the middle East/is/ starting to look forwards for ways to diversify their economies. This move might buy them a little more time in the... long/medium run.
...while the fat cats laugh at the little people a little before they plan their next chess move (and lobbyists) in Washington DC.
Fucking politics, gotta love it (eyeroll).
Yeah, from everything I've read about the Keystone Pipeline, there's going to be much more money to be gained in DC lobbying for/against this than there ever hopes to be made by anyone building (or not building) it. I can see both parties wanting to drag this out for as long as possible.
Er, hello? Oil is cheap right now because there's a price war going on... The Saudis voted to keep OPEC overproducing for the time being, probably at the prodding of the US Sec of State to hurt Russia in retaliation for the Ukraine thing. Russia's economy is very dependent on oil right now. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01...
Yes, this hurts US oil production too, which is probably why the Saudis agreed to do this. The US has been producing more of its own shale oil through fracking, which is relatively expensive. This will probably make some of the smaller players go bankrupt, so their assets can be seized and utilized by the larger oil companies at fire sale rates.
US demand for oil has also dropped (by about as much as US domestic production increased), we like to think due to more efficient use of renewables and electric vehicles, but probably mostly due to the recession. The US appears to be recovering from the recession, and certainly these cheap oil prices has gas guzzler sales bouncing back. So it's likely gas prices will bounce back in a big way once OPEC goes back to "normal" market-adjusted production capacity in a few months.
In any case, there are several good reasons for OPEC to delay competition by temporarily cutting prices, but the prices are certainly artificially low now and can easily be bumped back artificially high once we're a bit more distracted from developing our energy independency.
Problem: We can't released all of the excess stored solar energy (compacted into fossil fuel over the millennia) fast enough! Solution: Reduce the amount of solar energy the Earth receives now!
Word! And speaking a someone with the exact same BS degree from Cornell as Bill Nye, I wouldn't hesitate to characterize my profession as "Digital Plumber"
He visited my university when I was still in school, and I had the opportunity to meet him. The man is an asshole.
Eh, it goes both ways. I was volunteering at the ASME coffee shop at the Cornell Sibley School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering student lounge, when Bill Nye stopped by to say 'hi' on his way to give a talk in an auditorium.
Of course, we grew up in the Mr. Wizard generation, so the students studying in the lounge kinda glanced up at him, shrugged, and went back on to work with their problem sets.
I'm still sort of kicking myself for not trying to sell him a bagel or muffin, or even giving him one on the house. But whatever, the older I get, the more I realize I'm probably also an asshole.
So believe it or not, we actually have a couple of decades' worth of data showing how technology is changing the workforce, painstakingly tracked by the BLS... http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...
Yes, computers took away your secretaries, and replaced them with truck drivers.
Yes, truck drivers ought to worry about self-driving trucks, or else they too will need to learn to become software developers or primary school teachers.
Yep, but this is just a technicality of the "Industrial Exemption" that corporations lobbied for a few decades ago on the basis that states oughtn't license engineers involved with interstate commerce: http://engineeringethicsblog.b...
In any case, "engineers" are engineers by any definition of the word. But...
* engineers doing safety-of-life critical work should be licensed, or at least have their work reviewed by a licensed engineer. Otherwise the administration is liable. If there's one thing administration is competent at, it's legally assigning blame to someone else.
* the engineering work I've performed for big engineering firms seldom used anything I learned from getting a BS and MS from engineering school. So SW Engineering jobs are not unique in not caring much about engineering practices, it's like that in the rest of the engineering industry too. They do care about how well you communicate with the rest of the devs, hence questions focus on how much language you have in common with their understanding of their favorite brogramming language du jour.
* in the SW Dev world, the engineering skills that the poster is talking about -- process management, optimization, change management, requirements definition and management, lifecycle management, verification and validation, etc. are all lumped under "management". So you might say that your engineering experience gives you "management" ability... just be careful to specify "project management" rather than "people management" or else they'll lump you into one of those management roles where you have to review everyone's performance evaluations every year and fight for budget and all of that other useless backstabbing stuff for no additional pay because they think you get off enough by playing the sociopathic power struggle game.
Oh, sweet! Yeah, I was wondering about something like that after some other comment in the thread mentioned that staggered rows would be more natural than the staggered column layout used in most keyboards.
I don't really care much for this keyboard either, but please... you can just add an extra dedicated keypad for data entry for like $20 if you want one.
They're there using the "mod" keymap instead of the "Fn" modifier, but otherwise doesn't look too bad... better than the Fn - arrow keys I have to use now for PgUp/PgDn/Home/End on the PowerBook at work.
What does bother me about his layout is the position for the "Browser Back" in the mouse keymap, which is of course right in between mousewheel up and mouse up. And maybe also that he put LMB on the right and RMB to the left probably for ergonomic reasons, but it will probably still break people's brains. Mousewheel Left and Mousewheel right might be good mappings to have available as well.
Not to mention, this one already successfully finished its kickstarter campaign and is on to the next phase of actualization: https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...
Both keyboards appear to have somewhat awkward choices for the CTRL position, though.
I'm still sort of fascinated by the Twiddler, though... http://twiddler.tekgear.com/ Would be nice to try one out to see if I could get used to it before shelling out some Benjamins for it, though. Also would be neat to consider dual-wielding them.
Eh, surveillance is a problem only because it creates an imbalance of power between the people who have information and those who do not. There are a few approaches that could create some sort of balance.
1. Full transparency. With enough technological progress, eventually everyone will have universal access to essentially a God's eye view of everything that ever happens. Anyone would be able to reconstruct and playback a 3D model of any past event, perhaps even including the neural impulses in your brain and interpret your thoughts. This makes it impossible to lie or conceal things, and you can see everyone's actions and decisions simply as manifestations of their life's experiences.
2. Legislated opacity. Everyone is guaranteed the right to privacy. But no one knows if anyone is secretly spying. Unless we secretly spy on them. If we openly spy on those in power, they'll just figure out how to hide their spying better. So maybe we need two competing government agencies always spying on each other, ready to go to the press if they find some misconduct on the other side. Oh wait, that sorta sounds like what we have.
So if there's any mass surveillance that goes on, we ought to make sure it applies to those holding power in public office first. But if we really manage to achieve that, we'll see them legislating surveillance out immediately.
One of my neighbors works for Google... he says this entire thing has been blown out of proportion. Someone found some old internal Google document fantasizing about future uses of Google's self-driving car tech. The ride-sharing app screenshots are from Google's employee vanpool service.
That said, I'd admit that there could well simply be Business dealings going on. If Google can convince Uber and its shareholders that they'd rather build their own autonomous taxi service from scratch, then they could well be frightened enough to sell Uber to Google at a lower price (which seemed a likely outcome of the Google Venture capital funding up to this point).
Disney did the same kind of thing in the past when they acquired Pixar... they spent a few weeks spinning up a somewhat-convincing team and equipment to develop Toy Story 3 independently of Pixar. Then they suddenly announced that they procured Pixar and Toy Story 3 would be produced independently by them. The internal Disney TS3 team was dissolved just as fast as it was assembled.
I'm curious if this is the same story with the next set of low-earth-orbit satellite internet service... it sounds like Google, Facebook, Iridium, and SpaceX are all suddenly pushing for launching a new constellation, but it's been difficult to tell whether they were all throwing funding at the same constellation, if if they were actually competing with each other, of if it was just another negotiation tactic to keep launch prices down / profits up by one or all of the parties involved.
Yeah, the DSCOVR launch was originally scheduled for January, but the Air Force already delayed it by another week or two because "they wanted more insurance coverage for it"
If something else happens, I call political shenanigans.
(FULL DISCLOSURE: my FIL is the PM from the NASA GSFC side, and my son flew out to Cape Canaveral to watch the launch this weekend so we've been tracking this somewhat closely.)
Oh yes, Slashdot has one of the most fully-featured discussion engines on the interwebs. Fully atomic transactional commits, precise versioning and revision control, decent non-repudiation, and a CRUD-free engine. A lot of this functionality is accessible directly from the "Repy to This" button at the bottom of each post. Try it!
See, I can even use the classic Slashcode to defy the space-time continuum and make edits to posts in the future.
^^ Pay attention to this guy, he's super Insightful! -- the me of tomorrow. EDITED : 2015-02-09 15:40:02 +0800
Heh, as someone who's done web development from both OSX and Windows, by far the most annoying task was trying to figure out how to do things that were simple in Linux using cygwin in Windows or using homebrew on OSX. Good thing it's so easy to throw Linux on a fullscreen VM so I can still be productive while I figure out all of the issues and workarounds I run into on Win/Mac.
I was happiest when I had Linux on the bare metal, and tossed Windows into a VM to handle all of the office crap. That ensured that Outlook never ballooned to use more than a GB of RAM, and I could easily suspend the VM when I didn't want annoying popups and notifications jumping out in front of my work.
Yep, I moved from Verizon FIOS in the Washington DC area to Frontier FIOS in Redmond.
With Verizon I had to pay extra for the Business FIOS service so they would unblock server ports like HTTP/SMTP. Ostensibly it was worthwhile since I also got better customer service that didn't sound like they were going to step on a puppy if I didn't follow their script. The service would also go down 5 minutes into any power outage, even though my ONT and other equipment had plenty of battery power in reserve.
With Frontier FIOS here on the Left Coast, I got all of that at the residential service tier (except the backup power issue, haven't had any problem with that even after wind storms knocked out power to the neighborhood a few times.) "Oh, we don't do that" the guy said when I was telling him why I was interested in Business FIOS.
To be fair, there are some downsides.... They still use the troublesome Actiontec router that Verizon had. But I'm too cheap to replace it. Also once or twice in the past 3 years the service just dies and then they restore it after a 10-20 minute phone call where they're like, "oh, yeah... we know what that was, here we twiddled the thing, try again"
I got a nice beefy Winchester fire safe from Costco for ~$300 . No state sales tax on it either, I suppose since they want to encourage people to lock up their firearms.
There are much cheaper "plastic water cooler" fire safes available... some even have USB ports on them so you can backup to a big USB disk in them without having to open them.
I still encrypt and backup annually to AWS Glacier ( 42cents per month for 42 GB at the moment, mostly raw camera photo dumps) using the SAGU java client. Also have some online offsite backups of less important stuff from my home dir rsync'd to a HDD I bought for a friend's server.
But as you can see, I'm more worried about losing my data than someone else finding it.
This is what Fox News' viewers want to see: the barbarity of Muslims.
While this may be the case, there also seems to be that pesky fact they seem to have put someone in a cage, lit them on fire, and burned them to death.
We like to think that we're free from US Government media propaganda. But vilifying your enemy-du-jour by focusing on tragic, heinous actions is pretty much the only way to drag a democracy into war.
This kind of thing has been going on for a long time... you know those WMDs we were so sure Iraq had? We knew they had them because we sold them to Iraq back when we were supporting Iraq vs. Soviet-backed Iran. It's just a fringe benefit to be able to turn your former "allies" into "enemies" a bit later by showing everyone all the bad stuff they did with your weapons.
Not judging, but it's interesting to see how the defense-industrial complex works.
This! By all means ignore the GP post and RTFA. Lots of cool pictures and chat about how Phoebe is special and how ridges from old impact craters on Iapetus are really old.
Unless you're not all that into space stuff... then I'd understand if you might find TFA "long-winded" and would probably appreciate having more time for reading buzzfeed "articles".
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I'm with you there. Losing Ukraine to the West is even worse than the Cuban missile crises... maybe more analogous to the 13 colonies seceding from the US.
Though my favorite conspiracy site explains it more in terms of thwacking Russia for trying to sell oil in Rubles, the same way we thwacked Iraq and Libya for making moves to sell oil in anything other than USD:
http://scgnews.com/the-geopoli...
Sure helps make the world make a lot more sense :P
Heh, yeah, that's exactly why I bothered to stick the word "probably" in there. Plenty of less reputable news sources have been making hay of Kerry's Sept 11 visit with the king of Saudi Arabia ahead of the Nov 27 OPEC proclamation.
But yeah, the Saudis have enough of their own reasons to try to slow down the energy production of other states.
http://blogs.reuters.com/great...
They know their supply of ridiculously cheap oil is finite, and a lot of the middle East /is/ starting to look forwards for ways to diversify their economies. This move might buy them a little more time in the... long/medium run.
Fucking politics, gotta love it (eyeroll).
Yeah, from everything I've read about the Keystone Pipeline, there's going to be much more money to be gained in DC lobbying for/against this than there ever hopes to be made by anyone building (or not building) it. I can see both parties wanting to drag this out for as long as possible.
Er, hello? Oil is cheap right now because there's a price war going on... The Saudis voted to keep OPEC overproducing for the time being, probably at the prodding of the US Sec of State to hurt Russia in retaliation for the Ukraine thing. Russia's economy is very dependent on oil right now.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01...
Yes, this hurts US oil production too, which is probably why the Saudis agreed to do this. The US has been producing more of its own shale oil through fracking, which is relatively expensive. This will probably make some of the smaller players go bankrupt, so their assets can be seized and utilized by the larger oil companies at fire sale rates.
US demand for oil has also dropped (by about as much as US domestic production increased), we like to think due to more efficient use of renewables and electric vehicles, but probably mostly due to the recession. The US appears to be recovering from the recession, and certainly these cheap oil prices has gas guzzler sales bouncing back. So it's likely gas prices will bounce back in a big way once OPEC goes back to "normal" market-adjusted production capacity in a few months.
In any case, there are several good reasons for OPEC to delay competition by temporarily cutting prices, but the prices are certainly artificially low now and can easily be bumped back artificially high once we're a bit more distracted from developing our energy independency.
Yep, that sounds like some weird bitter irony:
Problem: We can't released all of the excess stored solar energy (compacted into fossil fuel over the millennia) fast enough!
Solution: Reduce the amount of solar energy the Earth receives now!
Way to rob the future to pay for the past.
Ahem. The term is "sanitation engineer."
Word! And speaking a someone with the exact same BS degree from Cornell as Bill Nye, I wouldn't hesitate to characterize my profession as "Digital Plumber"
He visited my university when I was still in school, and I had the opportunity to meet him. The man is an asshole.
Eh, it goes both ways. I was volunteering at the ASME coffee shop at the Cornell Sibley School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering student lounge, when Bill Nye stopped by to say 'hi' on his way to give a talk in an auditorium.
Of course, we grew up in the Mr. Wizard generation, so the students studying in the lounge kinda glanced up at him, shrugged, and went back on to work with their problem sets.
I'm still sort of kicking myself for not trying to sell him a bagel or muffin, or even giving him one on the house. But whatever, the older I get, the more I realize I'm probably also an asshole.
So believe it or not, we actually have a couple of decades' worth of data showing how technology is changing the workforce, painstakingly tracked by the BLS...
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...
Yes, computers took away your secretaries, and replaced them with truck drivers.
Yes, truck drivers ought to worry about self-driving trucks, or else they too will need to learn to become software developers or primary school teachers.
Yep, but this is just a technicality of the "Industrial Exemption" that corporations lobbied for a few decades ago on the basis that states oughtn't license engineers involved with interstate commerce:
http://engineeringethicsblog.b...
In any case, "engineers" are engineers by any definition of the word. But...
* engineers doing safety-of-life critical work should be licensed, or at least have their work reviewed by a licensed engineer. Otherwise the administration is liable. If there's one thing administration is competent at, it's legally assigning blame to someone else.
* the engineering work I've performed for big engineering firms seldom used anything I learned from getting a BS and MS from engineering school. So SW Engineering jobs are not unique in not caring much about engineering practices, it's like that in the rest of the engineering industry too. They do care about how well you communicate with the rest of the devs, hence questions focus on how much language you have in common with their understanding of their favorite brogramming language du jour.
* in the SW Dev world, the engineering skills that the poster is talking about -- process management, optimization, change management, requirements definition and management, lifecycle management, verification and validation, etc. are all lumped under "management". So you might say that your engineering experience gives you "management" ability... just be careful to specify "project management" rather than "people management" or else they'll lump you into one of those management roles where you have to review everyone's performance evaluations every year and fight for budget and all of that other useless backstabbing stuff for no additional pay because they think you get off enough by playing the sociopathic power struggle game.
Oh, sweet! Yeah, I was wondering about something like that after some other comment in the thread mentioned that staggered rows would be more natural than the staggered column layout used in most keyboards.
Oh, they labelled it "History Back" on the mouse layer... I'm assuming that'll probably do the same thing as "Hist -" on the Fn layer.
I don't really care much for this keyboard either, but please... you can just add an extra dedicated keypad for data entry for like $20 if you want one.
They're there using the "mod" keymap instead of the "Fn" modifier, but otherwise doesn't look too bad... better than the Fn - arrow keys I have to use now for PgUp/PgDn/Home/End on the PowerBook at work.
What does bother me about his layout is the position for the "Browser Back" in the mouse keymap, which is of course right in between mousewheel up and mouse up. And maybe also that he put LMB on the right and RMB to the left probably for ergonomic reasons, but it will probably still break people's brains. Mousewheel Left and Mousewheel right might be good mappings to have available as well.
Not to mention, this one already successfully finished its kickstarter campaign and is on to the next phase of actualization:
https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...
Both keyboards appear to have somewhat awkward choices for the CTRL position, though.
I'm still sort of fascinated by the Twiddler, though... http://twiddler.tekgear.com/
Would be nice to try one out to see if I could get used to it before shelling out some Benjamins for it, though. Also would be neat to consider dual-wielding them.
OTOH, I'm pretty happy with my $10 keyboards.
Eh, surveillance is a problem only because it creates an imbalance of power between the people who have information and those who do not. There are a few approaches that could create some sort of balance.
1. Full transparency. With enough technological progress, eventually everyone will have universal access to essentially a God's eye view of everything that ever happens. Anyone would be able to reconstruct and playback a 3D model of any past event, perhaps even including the neural impulses in your brain and interpret your thoughts. This makes it impossible to lie or conceal things, and you can see everyone's actions and decisions simply as manifestations of their life's experiences.
2. Legislated opacity. Everyone is guaranteed the right to privacy. But no one knows if anyone is secretly spying. Unless we secretly spy on them. If we openly spy on those in power, they'll just figure out how to hide their spying better. So maybe we need two competing government agencies always spying on each other, ready to go to the press if they find some misconduct on the other side. Oh wait, that sorta sounds like what we have.
So if there's any mass surveillance that goes on, we ought to make sure it applies to those holding power in public office first. But if we really manage to achieve that, we'll see them legislating surveillance out immediately.
One of my neighbors works for Google... he says this entire thing has been blown out of proportion. Someone found some old internal Google document fantasizing about future uses of Google's self-driving car tech. The ride-sharing app screenshots are from Google's employee vanpool service.
That said, I'd admit that there could well simply be Business dealings going on. If Google can convince Uber and its shareholders that they'd rather build their own autonomous taxi service from scratch, then they could well be frightened enough to sell Uber to Google at a lower price (which seemed a likely outcome of the Google Venture capital funding up to this point).
Disney did the same kind of thing in the past when they acquired Pixar... they spent a few weeks spinning up a somewhat-convincing team and equipment to develop Toy Story 3 independently of Pixar. Then they suddenly announced that they procured Pixar and Toy Story 3 would be produced independently by them. The internal Disney TS3 team was dissolved just as fast as it was assembled.
I'm curious if this is the same story with the next set of low-earth-orbit satellite internet service... it sounds like Google, Facebook, Iridium, and SpaceX are all suddenly pushing for launching a new constellation, but it's been difficult to tell whether they were all throwing funding at the same constellation, if if they were actually competing with each other, of if it was just another negotiation tactic to keep launch prices down / profits up by one or all of the parties involved.
Why "DSCOVR"? That's even worst than an MS-DOS filename.
Hey, give NASA credit for breaking out of the TLA or FFLA mold.
Yeah, the DSCOVR launch was originally scheduled for January, but the Air Force already delayed it by another week or two because "they wanted more insurance coverage for it"
If something else happens, I call political shenanigans.
(FULL DISCLOSURE: my FIL is the PM from the NASA GSFC side, and my son flew out to Cape Canaveral to watch the launch this weekend so we've been tracking this somewhat closely.)
Oh yes, Slashdot has one of the most fully-featured discussion engines on the interwebs. Fully atomic transactional commits, precise versioning and revision control, decent non-repudiation, and a CRUD-free engine. A lot of this functionality is accessible directly from the "Repy to This" button at the bottom of each post. Try it!
See, I can even use the classic Slashcode to defy the space-time continuum and make edits to posts in the future.
^^ Pay attention to this guy, he's super Insightful!
-- the me of tomorrow.
EDITED : 2015-02-09 15:40:02 +0800
Heh, as someone who's done web development from both OSX and Windows, by far the most annoying task was trying to figure out how to do things that were simple in Linux using cygwin in Windows or using homebrew on OSX. Good thing it's so easy to throw Linux on a fullscreen VM so I can still be productive while I figure out all of the issues and workarounds I run into on Win/Mac.
I was happiest when I had Linux on the bare metal, and tossed Windows into a VM to handle all of the office crap. That ensured that Outlook never ballooned to use more than a GB of RAM, and I could easily suspend the VM when I didn't want annoying popups and notifications jumping out in front of my work.
Yep, I moved from Verizon FIOS in the Washington DC area to Frontier FIOS in Redmond.
With Verizon I had to pay extra for the Business FIOS service so they would unblock server ports like HTTP/SMTP. Ostensibly it was worthwhile since I also got better customer service that didn't sound like they were going to step on a puppy if I didn't follow their script. The service would also go down 5 minutes into any power outage, even though my ONT and other equipment had plenty of battery power in reserve.
With Frontier FIOS here on the Left Coast, I got all of that at the residential service tier (except the backup power issue, haven't had any problem with that even after wind storms knocked out power to the neighborhood a few times.) "Oh, we don't do that" the guy said when I was telling him why I was interested in Business FIOS.
To be fair, there are some downsides.... They still use the troublesome Actiontec router that Verizon had. But I'm too cheap to replace it. Also once or twice in the past 3 years the service just dies and then they restore it after a 10-20 minute phone call where they're like, "oh, yeah... we know what that was, here we twiddled the thing, try again"
I got a nice beefy Winchester fire safe from Costco for ~$300 . No state sales tax on it either, I suppose since they want to encourage people to lock up their firearms.
There are much cheaper "plastic water cooler" fire safes available... some even have USB ports on them so you can backup to a big USB disk in them without having to open them.
I still encrypt and backup annually to AWS Glacier ( 42cents per month for 42 GB at the moment, mostly raw camera photo dumps) using the SAGU java client. Also have some online offsite backups of less important stuff from my home dir rsync'd to a HDD I bought for a friend's server.
But as you can see, I'm more worried about losing my data than someone else finding it.
This is what Fox News' viewers want to see: the barbarity of Muslims.
While this may be the case, there also seems to be that pesky fact they seem to have put someone in a cage, lit them on fire, and burned them to death.
We like to think that we're free from US Government media propaganda. But vilifying your enemy-du-jour by focusing on tragic, heinous actions is pretty much the only way to drag a democracy into war.
Bonus points for actually providing the enemy with weapons in the first place:
http://scgnews.com/the-covert-...
This kind of thing has been going on for a long time... you know those WMDs we were so sure Iraq had? We knew they had them because we sold them to Iraq back when we were supporting Iraq vs. Soviet-backed Iran. It's just a fringe benefit to be able to turn your former "allies" into "enemies" a bit later by showing everyone all the bad stuff they did with your weapons.
Not judging, but it's interesting to see how the defense-industrial complex works.
Yo Dawg, I heard you like flying drones, so I
http://www.cnet.com/news/hobby...
This!
By all means ignore the GP post and RTFA. Lots of cool pictures and chat about how Phoebe is special and how ridges from old impact craters on Iapetus are really old.
Unless you're not all that into space stuff... then I'd understand if you might find TFA "long-winded" and would probably appreciate having more time for reading buzzfeed "articles".