When I worked for a large provider, we actually did what the "cloud" was suppose to offer. We ran redundant servers in geographically diverse locations. No one knew if I yanked a server, or a switch went down, or even the datacenter had a power outage. The site just worked. I'd know, because I'd get paged. I'd see the bandwidth shift on our graphs. Other than that, no one cared. Well, I cared. If it was a whole datacenter, I'd call, let them know we saw the problem, and got the estimated time for the repair, for my own reference.
All of our "magic" ability was our redundancy, and enough extra bandwidth to take whatever was thrown at us. I don't know if they even do it the same way any more. People have reported outages to me, which I simply respond to them, "I don't work there any more. I don't care. I couldn't do anything about it if I did care."
Funny thing, I thought "cloud" computing means that you're placed into an automatically redundant network of machines, so if there's a site wide outage it didn't interfere with the operations.
Now I see that Amazon's definition of "cloud" simply means "hosting provider". I guess in this case it means hosting provider with no DC power room, N+1 generators and regular testing to ensure the fallback systems actually work.
That kind of reminds me of a company (who will remain nameless) who did tape backups, but never verified their tapes. When the data was lost, a good percentage of the tapes didn't work.
I worked near a good datacenter. Out on smoke breaks late at night, you could hear them test fire their generators once a week. I was in there helping someone one night during a thunderstorm that sounded like it would rip the roof off, when I heard the generators spin up. The inside of the datacenter didn't miss a beat. When I left an hour later, I saw that there was no power (street lights, traffic lights, and normally illuminated buildings) for about 1/2 mile around it. The power company had it fixed by morning though. When I came back in the morning, everything was fine. Well, except my workstation in the office that didn't have redundant power.
Well, I couldn't shorten the report much. It included detailed information that was actually requested. Consider just the network maps. The maps themselves were a dozen pages. Anything smaller became unreadable. Well, it didn't matter since he didn't go past the first page. It was to be a comprehensive report of all the available providers, from the ones who distinctly met our criteria, to the ones who barely made it.
If you want a comprehensive report, it won't fit on one page. The executive summary was all of like 3 paragraphs taking up about 1/3 of the first page.
Ooohhh, you don't know how strong my BOFH-foo is. It was better to play nice there though. Otherwise, most of the senior management would have been disappeared.
"Hello Homeland Security? We have a target that needs to be on a rendition flight ASAP."
Where did Bob go? I have no idea. And I don't know what those guys in suits and dark sunglasses were doing with all the stuff from his office. They said something about "National Security", but I wasn't really paying attention.
Sorry, this window only takes up half my screen. I have streaming porn on the other side. I only got as far as "boobies". Can you explain what you were saying again?
I see that a lot in regular emails. Well, not "tl;dr", but I type at over 100wpm, so my dialogue can get rather verbose. from a slow typer, I may just get "thx". What's more annoying is when they do that where I'm asking a bunch of questions.
In conversation, is it presumed that an articulate speaker trying to convey a lot of information should have their questions responded to with "ok."? It only indicates that the listener (or reader) has the attention span of a 2 year old, and they cannot focus on a spoken or written conversation long enough to form a decent response.
At one job, they requested me to establish where our new datacenters were to be, and with what carriers. I gave them the 5 minute speech about connectivity, major peering locations, and locations that were most beneficial to the company. The COO didn't like that, and just wanted a short list. I repeated the city names that I had just said. He then said that he required "proof", rather than just my opinion. I put together an informative presentation of where all the major pops were in the US and international areas of focus for our customer base. I reviewed the access logs for one year and built a Google Earth model with vertical lines showing the density per area. I gave a list of what connectivity providers were in what hosting environments. That list got pretty big until I eliminated those who didn't have peerings in at least 4 diverse cities (i.e., San Francisco and San Jose don't count as diverse cities). I then showed what transoceanic fiber existed, their entry points to North America, and who operated those lines. I also showed the network maps for each provider. For the high ranking providers, I contacted them and got pricing from most. Some wouldn't give out any pricing information without a commitment.
With all of that information gathered, I suggested the space provider (with street address), bandwidth provider with how much connectivity they had at the location. There were 4 primary suggestions, one due to a particular large customer demand. There were two secondary suggestions based on a large minority of our customer base. My data spanned hundreds of pages. I compiled it into a well written 30 page document formatted for the attention challenged. The first page summarized everything. The supporting information contained all the important information gathered, including the maps and Google Earth images of the customer density.
He read the first few lines of the summary page, threw it down and said "It says the same thing you told me before. I don't believe you." i.e., how could my opinion be correct. I reminded him that I had already been doing this kind of work for over a decade, and had been paying attention to the providers almost constantly.
30 pages detailing the requested information, and all I got was two sentences calling me a liar.
He sent my report to someone who hadn't worked for the company for a decade. He was just doing freelance IT work, mostly repairing servers for small companies. He told me, "Your report looks good. I don't know why they asked me." For that, he was paid a few hundred dollars.
A few days later, a crappy provider called in. It was just a cold call. We had providers doing that all the time, so it wasn't anything new. They made huge promises that couldn't be delivered on. I referenced how far down they were on the list of suggestions. They were second to last. Their sales guys came in, made a winning presentation, and they got the contract. I had no financial interest in it, other than keeping my job. Either way, I was making the same salary. My only goal was to serve the interest of the company.
We were provided two GigE fiber drops into each cage. That implied that they had enough bandwidth to support them.
After the migration, things didn't go as well as they would h
Us humans can evaluate and make decisions on our own. Myself, I would have stopped or gone around the obstacle. Your decision to drive straight into it and then turn on the windshield wipers was very impressive.
A lot of the "standard" equipment in modern performance cars were inspired by "hotrod" enthusiasts of the 1930 and on, who would take a vehicle, lighten it swap engines, modify away from factory specifications, end up with a much more powerful cars. As it became apparent that consumers would spend good money for the same type of performance, these changes were adopted in. Being that the major manufacturers started adopting these changes in, the aftermarket crowd has continued to improve them even more.
Significant time and money was spent by enthusiasts and aftermarket companies to develop and test their aftermarket parts, which some of have eventually shown up in factory vehicles. I doubt even a small percentage of the people who put in the work got any sort of reimbursement from the manufacturer. It's never been a game of "I hope I impress the manufacturer and get a job". It's always been "I want my vehicle to be bigger, better, and faster". For most of us, when we see a car that includes the changes we would have done on previous generations, we're impressed.
Now on the topic at hand, I do agree that it was wrong for the author to use code by a third party. I'm sure many (likely including the author) were happy that it was done, so the modifications were no longer necessary. It would not have been practical for them to attribute the work to the third party author, so maybe by leaving enough of his code in so the top of their banner was visible was all the attribution they could give. It may not have been a "FU, we stole your code", but a "thank you, we liked your change so we included it."
Since these cracks and cheats are done (primarily) for free, and handed out liberally, there is no monetary loss, because there was no monetary gain to begin with.
On #2, I ripped a front tire from it's rim in a Crown Vic once doing that. Well, it was actually a 30mph J-turn, but still the same general movement. Low profile tires help reduce that. In my case, a fun J-turn on a closed course (performance driving training pad, after hours), turned into an exercise of changing a tire when it was 95 degrees out with the sun beating down on you.
I wouldn't worry about the uneven treadwear. I'd worry more about the stress it's putting on the suspension and steering.
At the speed and distance they executed that maneuver, and since the driver went past the space already, they would have been able to evaluate the situation. I don't know how well their computer is going to evaluate the road conditions. Did it hear the loose gravel tapping under the car when it drove through the first time. Us humans take all kinds of clues from our environment to make our decisions.
In performance driving (closed track, of course), I'd have to say a human will still be far superior to a computer. At one course, because I was a "newbie" to their track, I had an instructor with me (their rules). I ran the track hard for 1/2 hour, and got used to how the whole course handled. I parked for about an our while other sets of folks ran. When I went back out, since my tires were now cold, when I hit the first turn (a tight 270), the back end kicked out. I drifted the turn, rather than spinning or sliding off the track, and took it easy for the next couple laps until the tires warmed up again. When we got back to the pits the instructor said to me, "I didn't think you'd make that turn. Most of the people out here would have lost it."
Us humans learn a lot from practice. I knew immediately what was happening from the way the car responded. It could have been a bunch of other reasons, but I knew my car, and I already knew how it should respond on the track. It wasn't because I'm an amazing driver, or my car is the best in the world, but through experience I know what those little feelings mean. I kind of cheated. When I was a kid, I'd take my 4,800 pound car (that cost a whopping $300 used) with an amazingly sloppy suspension on grassy roads (laid out but never developed) after it rained and would intentionally spin it so I could practice recovering. At first, I'd end up off the road. With practice, I learned to not stop sideways, but to actually bring it under control and continue driving. But hey, I was 16, and my friends loved to ride along while I practiced.
I guess with all that said, maybe computers will be able to outperform the average driver. I've seen enough people do enough stupid things because they didn't know what else to do, and never went to learn more about how to make their tons of steel drive down the road safely. I wish more drivers would go through a fraction of the proper training that I've done. Most people don't care. "I start the car. I point it to where I want to go. I get there." As long as the computers don't do as badly as the recent Volvo collision avoidance braking demonstration ("truck? What truck?"), I'll be impressed.:)
I wonder if this had anything to do with my own DNS outage yesterday. There seemed to be a rolling DoS attack which hit a couple of my nameservers. It hit a slightly out of date version of bind, which made it barf. Of course I have the servers monitoring themselves, so they kept bringing it back up, just to be knocked down again a few minutes later. The solution? Upgrade to current.
Did anyone else see this, or was it two isolated (and unrelated) cases?
Swinging bunch of yoyo's around by their strings, and getting them tangled are beginner or intermediate level? I thought that was pretty close to the "doesn't have a clue" level. At least when I played with yoyo's (like when I was a kid) I could not only make it go down, but back up the string too.
It would have been funnier if he knocked himself senseless with the 7 yoyo's that were still attached.:)
"Today is day 4. We're flying the remainder of the target area and capturing data."
"Today is day 15. We're still processing the data."
"Today is day 30. We're still processing the data."
"Today is day 45. We've taken a helicopter to the most obvious structure with a nearby clearing. We confirmed it is a structure, but there are no sort of identifying marks on it. They likely have been eroded by weathering."
"Today is day 56. We're still waiting for local government approval before entering the site."
"Today is day 109. We found a structure full of rocks and dirt."
"Today is day 215. We found what appears to be an arrow head."
"Today is day 220. We found fragments of an unremarkable clay pot."
"Today is day 222. Manuel disappeared. We heard a scream in the night last night. We believe a jaguar may have eaten him. We didn't find any of his remains. His camera is also missing, so we don't have the footage of the attack."
"Today is day 235. The results have come back from the lab. It is a 200 year old arrow head. The clay pot test was inconclusive."
Ahh, the real world of archeology versus the Hollywood version.
Nah, I just have a plan. Change the cash on a regular basis until I can make it something less traceable. Drug dealers are good for more than just buying drugs from. They're some of the few people that you can change out $500 for another $500 without asking any questions. It's the aliens you can't avoid. They're in orbit watching your every move. Monitoring 7 billion people isn't that hard with the right equipment. They also monitor all the cattle, should they need to replenish their stock of "special" parts.
I'm not that concerned about the aliens though. We have a special deal. I don't give out details on when they're doing flybys, and they won't pick me up until Dec 20th 2012. Good luck to the rest of you.
You haven't looked at a bright light before, have you? The dot will move to anywhere you are looking, and slowly disappear.
If he saw a flash, and then looked over at his coworker, and kept his focus there, it would appear to be exactly that. The question then is, what was the flash? It could have been anything. A reflection of the sun, a spark of some sort. Did they do any sort of welding in the warehouse? There's a good reason you're suppose to wear a welding mask, and it isn't to keep the sparks off your face.
You can't teach people how not to sin, without learning those sins for yourself.
That's why DUI classes are taught by rehabilitated drunk drivers. Anti-drug talks are given by reformed drug addicts. And anti-pedophilia talks are given by the church.
I had completely overlooked the idea the EPA would get pissy, but of course they will.
You do know, with the proper "funding", just about any law can be overlooked. That's how corporations get "special exceptions" to long standing and practical laws. Bribes are a long standing tradition in government that aren't going away anytime soon.
With that in mind, I'd bet if it was a cruise line that wanted to come in there, they'd allow dredging of the waterway so it would be deep enough, and a pier 100' wide and 1/4 mile long. There's a lot of money behind cruise ships. A little 50 slip marina wouldn't have the pull, unless it was owned by a billionaires club.
Sorcha Faal is a pseudonym used by David Booth. Every claim to credentials and sources is false. The only thing that is true in those "newsletters" is that there is one tidbid of fact used, and the rest is complete fantasy.
I sent a request asking for more information on her credentials. Instead, he added me to the mailing list. I've been getting spammed by his stuff for years now. It's actually almost funny, except he rambles on for so long on weird conspiracy tangents that your head starts to hurt. Maybe there's a requirement of wearing a tinfoil hat and having your windows covered in red tape, for it to make any sense.
At one point, he cited *MY* news site as a source of information. Unfortunately, we found that the original source for the information was incorrect and retracted it within a day of the original posting (removing the original story and replacing it with the retraction). Still, a week later we were listed as a source on his story about this huge government conspiracy that simply didn't exist.
But don't let me use that simple conclusion to say that they're all wrong. His stories have included cosmic rays that will kill all of humanity; alien overlords coming to retake power on earth; the US Government taking millions of Americans away to secret death camps. That's just a few off the top of my head.
If you read one and fall for it, that's understandable. If you get through the rambling, it could be the biggest breaking news of all time. If you follow them for a while, you'll understand that it's a burnt out conspiracy nutjob pretending to be a female Russian journalist who somehow has information from everywhere, including aliens in space.
Or have a look at some of the headlines from "her". This is directly from my mail archives, I didn't change any of them. I may have missed a few in there, and I cut the list short in 2008. I have "her" messages dating back into 2006.
May 7, 2010 - Obama Attack On Corporate Giant P&G Shatters US Stock Market May 3, 2010 - US Goes To "COCKED PISTOL" Alert Status Over Korean War Fears May 1, 2010 - US Orders Blackout Over North Korean Torpedoing Of Gulf Of Mexico Oil Rig April 28, 2010 - Blue Stork Omen, Lucifer Telescope Give "Death Star" Warning April 26, 2010 - Nazi Warlord Unleashes 'Olympic' Eco-Bomb On World April 23, 2010 - Wall Street Coup Against US Complete, Israel Set To Fall Next April 17, 2010 - Russia Reports Over 2 Million Dead In US As 'Mysterious" Die-Off Accelerates April 14, 2010 - Obama Warns World Leaders Global Economic Crash Can't Be Stopped April 10, 2010 - Russian Move Against US In Poland Kills President, Most Of Government April 9, 2010 - French Leader Sarkozy Slams Obama, Warns "He Might Be Insane" April 8, 2010 - Russia Moves Against US In Kyrgyzstan, Thailand As World War III Nears April 5, 2010 - 'Death Camps' Warned Being Prepared As Millions In US Left Hopeless March 28, 2010 - Obama Orders 'Immediate Stand-down' After Deadly North Korean Attack March 23, 2010 - Armed Tax Police Prepare To Sweep Across America As Revolution Feared Near March 13, 2010 - Earth Axis Shift Prompts Russian 'Doomsday' Warning March 7, 2010 - Parliament Of Owls Gives 'Final Warning' To America March 2, 2010 - Russia Warns US Communist Threat Endangering Entire World February 28, 2010 - US Puts South America "On Notice" With Catastrophic Chile Quake Test February 18, 2010 - US Move To Capture "Star Children" Alarms Russian Church February 16, 2010 - Obama Plot To Throw Millions Of Americans From Homes Uncovered February 15, 2010 - US Warns Japan They Will Destroy Toyota First, Honda Next February 12, 2010 - The "End Of Days" Are Upon Us, Warns Russian Patriarch February 9, 2010 - "Who Are They?" Russian Scientists Ask About Mysterious Objects Near Sun January 23, 2010 - Obama Warned Is "Main Target" Of CIA Coup Janu
You don't have to be able to read Russian. Just use an online translator. It may not be perfect, but it'll come close.
Their story cites the 5 times that Russia has done this, and the one disaster. Instead of sealing the leak, it blew it open even more. Based on this, they give it a 20% chance of failure.
They also mention that it was done in the movie Armageddon. If Bruce Willis can do it in space, why can't we do it under the water. {sigh}.
Finally, they mention Operation Plowshare (but not by name), and show the Sedan Crater, as proof that the United States has experimented with this before. The big problem there is, the Sedan Crater is still hot. You can visit it. For a very short period of time. You cannot take anything from inside the radioactive area. Funny that, huh?
On with the translation.
Translation:
Petroleum leak in the Gulf of Mexico can be eliminated nuclear explosion
In the USSR, and not as fountains and stopped using the peaceful atom Vladimir Lagowski - 03/05/2010 It is possible that unsuccessful attempts to stop the leakage of oil from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico through the underwater robots compel professionals to take extreme measures. Namely - to blow up next to the damaged wells nuclear warhead.
It sounds terribly and incredibly - the idiotic joke. But in fact there were several cases where catastrophes in the fields of fighting in this way. In the former USSR - five times. When nothing else has not helped. It's now in the Gulf of Mexico, where oil oozes out of the way from three places.
First underground nuclear explosion was used to extinguish burning gas wells in "Urt-Bulak (80 km from Bukhara) 30 September 1966. Power charge was 30 kilotons. For comparison, the Hiroshima bomb exploded about 20 kilotons. But at a height of 600 meters. A near Bukhara - at a depth of six kilometers.
The idea of the method is simple: an underground explosion pushes the rock, presses it and actually squeezes the channel well.
Powerful nuclear "plugs" - sometimes 3 Hiroshima - we have enjoyed until 1979. And only once failed. In 1972 in Kharkov region did not block the emergency gas blowout. The explosion was mysteriously left on the surface, forming a mushroom cloud. Although the charge was minimal - just a 4 kiloton. And laid deep - for more than two kilometers.
Total probability of failure in the Gulf of Mexico - 20 percent. Americans could take a chance. The chance of dying during the flight to the moon they were even higher. Of course, we used a civilian nuclear program on the ground, the Americans as to the sea - under water where the ocean depth reaches 1500 meters.
But in principle there is no difference - you still need to drill a well at a distance from leaking. And it lowered the bomb. As in the movie "Armageddon" with Bruce Willis in the role of a driller. It is desirable that the calculations were done correctly. Such hope is: the U.S. is full of smart scientists and powerful computers. And Russia could have contributed. We still live peaceful nuclear demolition.
REFERENCE "CC"
Nuclear war in the peaceful uses
of the USSR organized underground nuclear explosions for peaceful purposes in the period from 1966 to 1988. In total, the former Soviet Union tore more than a hundred atomic bombs. According to some data - 124, on the other 169. And that - not counting the military testing of nuclear weapons.
According to the official wording of the explosions were carried out in the interests of the national economy. Among them - the majority - for seismic minerals and for probing the depths. Explosions create underground reservoirs for gas storage, chemical waste, digging canals, building dams, increased the oil recovery. And did not think something harmful. Although, if the estimate, there are hundreds of atomic bombs, perhaps not in every nuclear war to explode.
Slashdot Mirror
When I worked for a large provider, we actually did what the "cloud" was suppose to offer. We ran redundant servers in geographically diverse locations. No one knew if I yanked a server, or a switch went down, or even the datacenter had a power outage. The site just worked. I'd know, because I'd get paged. I'd see the bandwidth shift on our graphs. Other than that, no one cared. Well, I cared. If it was a whole datacenter, I'd call, let them know we saw the problem, and got the estimated time for the repair, for my own reference.
All of our "magic" ability was our redundancy, and enough extra bandwidth to take whatever was thrown at us. I don't know if they even do it the same way any more. People have reported outages to me, which I simply respond to them, "I don't work there any more. I don't care. I couldn't do anything about it if I did care."
Funny thing, I thought "cloud" computing means that you're placed into an automatically redundant network of machines, so if there's a site wide outage it didn't interfere with the operations.
Now I see that Amazon's definition of "cloud" simply means "hosting provider". I guess in this case it means hosting provider with no DC power room, N+1 generators and regular testing to ensure the fallback systems actually work.
That kind of reminds me of a company (who will remain nameless) who did tape backups, but never verified their tapes. When the data was lost, a good percentage of the tapes didn't work.
I worked near a good datacenter. Out on smoke breaks late at night, you could hear them test fire their generators once a week. I was in there helping someone one night during a thunderstorm that sounded like it would rip the roof off, when I heard the generators spin up. The inside of the datacenter didn't miss a beat. When I left an hour later, I saw that there was no power (street lights, traffic lights, and normally illuminated buildings) for about 1/2 mile around it. The power company had it fixed by morning though. When I came back in the morning, everything was fine. Well, except my workstation in the office that didn't have redundant power.
Well, I couldn't shorten the report much. It included detailed information that was actually requested. Consider just the network maps. The maps themselves were a dozen pages. Anything smaller became unreadable. Well, it didn't matter since he didn't go past the first page. It was to be a comprehensive report of all the available providers, from the ones who distinctly met our criteria, to the ones who barely made it.
If you want a comprehensive report, it won't fit on one page. The executive summary was all of like 3 paragraphs taking up about 1/3 of the first page.
Ooohhh, you don't know how strong my BOFH-foo is. It was better to play nice there though. Otherwise, most of the senior management would have been disappeared.
"Hello Homeland Security? We have a target that needs to be on a rendition flight ASAP."
Where did Bob go? I have no idea. And I don't know what those guys in suits and dark sunglasses were doing with all the stuff from his office. They said something about "National Security", but I wasn't really paying attention.
Decision makers shouldn't have the power to make decisions.
Decisions should be left up to their advisors (staff) with expertise in their field.
Sorry, this window only takes up half my screen. I have streaming porn on the other side. I only got as far as "boobies". Can you explain what you were saying again?
Oh look.. boobies..
I see that a lot in regular emails. Well, not "tl;dr", but I type at over 100wpm, so my dialogue can get rather verbose. from a slow typer, I may just get "thx". What's more annoying is when they do that where I'm asking a bunch of questions.
In conversation, is it presumed that an articulate speaker trying to convey a lot of information should have their questions responded to with "ok."? It only indicates that the listener (or reader) has the attention span of a 2 year old, and they cannot focus on a spoken or written conversation long enough to form a decent response.
At one job, they requested me to establish where our new datacenters were to be, and with what carriers. I gave them the 5 minute speech about connectivity, major peering locations, and locations that were most beneficial to the company. The COO didn't like that, and just wanted a short list. I repeated the city names that I had just said. He then said that he required "proof", rather than just my opinion. I put together an informative presentation of where all the major pops were in the US and international areas of focus for our customer base. I reviewed the access logs for one year and built a Google Earth model with vertical lines showing the density per area. I gave a list of what connectivity providers were in what hosting environments. That list got pretty big until I eliminated those who didn't have peerings in at least 4 diverse cities (i.e., San Francisco and San Jose don't count as diverse cities). I then showed what transoceanic fiber existed, their entry points to North America, and who operated those lines. I also showed the network maps for each provider. For the high ranking providers, I contacted them and got pricing from most. Some wouldn't give out any pricing information without a commitment.
With all of that information gathered, I suggested the space provider (with street address), bandwidth provider with how much connectivity they had at the location. There were 4 primary suggestions, one due to a particular large customer demand. There were two secondary suggestions based on a large minority of our customer base. My data spanned hundreds of pages. I compiled it into a well written 30 page document formatted for the attention challenged. The first page summarized everything. The supporting information contained all the important information gathered, including the maps and Google Earth images of the customer density.
He read the first few lines of the summary page, threw it down and said "It says the same thing you told me before. I don't believe you." i.e., how could my opinion be correct. I reminded him that I had already been doing this kind of work for over a decade, and had been paying attention to the providers almost constantly.
30 pages detailing the requested information, and all I got was two sentences calling me a liar.
He sent my report to someone who hadn't worked for the company for a decade. He was just doing freelance IT work, mostly repairing servers for small companies. He told me, "Your report looks good. I don't know why they asked me." For that, he was paid a few hundred dollars.
A few days later, a crappy provider called in. It was just a cold call. We had providers doing that all the time, so it wasn't anything new. They made huge promises that couldn't be delivered on. I referenced how far down they were on the list of suggestions. They were second to last. Their sales guys came in, made a winning presentation, and they got the contract. I had no financial interest in it, other than keeping my job. Either way, I was making the same salary. My only goal was to serve the interest of the company.
We were provided two GigE fiber drops into each cage. That implied that they had enough bandwidth to support them.
After the migration, things didn't go as well as they would h
Robot, I'm very impressed with your skills.
Us humans can evaluate and make decisions on our own. Myself, I would have stopped or gone around the obstacle. Your decision to drive straight into it and then turn on the windshield wipers was very impressive.
Not to continue with your car analogy, but... :)
A lot of the "standard" equipment in modern performance cars were inspired by "hotrod" enthusiasts of the 1930 and on, who would take a vehicle, lighten it swap engines, modify away from factory specifications, end up with a much more powerful cars. As it became apparent that consumers would spend good money for the same type of performance, these changes were adopted in. Being that the major manufacturers started adopting these changes in, the aftermarket crowd has continued to improve them even more.
Significant time and money was spent by enthusiasts and aftermarket companies to develop and test their aftermarket parts, which some of have eventually shown up in factory vehicles. I doubt even a small percentage of the people who put in the work got any sort of reimbursement from the manufacturer. It's never been a game of "I hope I impress the manufacturer and get a job". It's always been "I want my vehicle to be bigger, better, and faster". For most of us, when we see a car that includes the changes we would have done on previous generations, we're impressed.
Now on the topic at hand, I do agree that it was wrong for the author to use code by a third party. I'm sure many (likely including the author) were happy that it was done, so the modifications were no longer necessary. It would not have been practical for them to attribute the work to the third party author, so maybe by leaving enough of his code in so the top of their banner was visible was all the attribution they could give. It may not have been a "FU, we stole your code", but a "thank you, we liked your change so we included it."
Since these cracks and cheats are done (primarily) for free, and handed out liberally, there is no monetary loss, because there was no monetary gain to begin with.
On #2, I ripped a front tire from it's rim in a Crown Vic once doing that. Well, it was actually a 30mph J-turn, but still the same general movement. Low profile tires help reduce that. In my case, a fun J-turn on a closed course (performance driving training pad, after hours), turned into an exercise of changing a tire when it was 95 degrees out with the sun beating down on you.
I wouldn't worry about the uneven treadwear. I'd worry more about the stress it's putting on the suspension and steering.
At the speed and distance they executed that maneuver, and since the driver went past the space already, they would have been able to evaluate the situation. I don't know how well their computer is going to evaluate the road conditions. Did it hear the loose gravel tapping under the car when it drove through the first time. Us humans take all kinds of clues from our environment to make our decisions.
In performance driving (closed track, of course), I'd have to say a human will still be far superior to a computer. At one course, because I was a "newbie" to their track, I had an instructor with me (their rules). I ran the track hard for 1/2 hour, and got used to how the whole course handled. I parked for about an our while other sets of folks ran. When I went back out, since my tires were now cold, when I hit the first turn (a tight 270), the back end kicked out. I drifted the turn, rather than spinning or sliding off the track, and took it easy for the next couple laps until the tires warmed up again. When we got back to the pits the instructor said to me, "I didn't think you'd make that turn. Most of the people out here would have lost it."
Us humans learn a lot from practice. I knew immediately what was happening from the way the car responded. It could have been a bunch of other reasons, but I knew my car, and I already knew how it should respond on the track. It wasn't because I'm an amazing driver, or my car is the best in the world, but through experience I know what those little feelings mean. I kind of cheated. When I was a kid, I'd take my 4,800 pound car (that cost a whopping $300 used) with an amazingly sloppy suspension on grassy roads (laid out but never developed) after it rained and would intentionally spin it so I could practice recovering. At first, I'd end up off the road. With practice, I learned to not stop sideways, but to actually bring it under control and continue driving. But hey, I was 16, and my friends loved to ride along while I practiced.
I guess with all that said, maybe computers will be able to outperform the average driver. I've seen enough people do enough stupid things because they didn't know what else to do, and never went to learn more about how to make their tons of steel drive down the road safely. I wish more drivers would go through a fraction of the proper training that I've done. Most people don't care. "I start the car. I point it to where I want to go. I get there." As long as the computers don't do as badly as the recent Volvo collision avoidance braking demonstration ("truck? What truck?"), I'll be impressed. :)
I wonder if this had anything to do with my own DNS outage yesterday. There seemed to be a rolling DoS attack which hit a couple of my nameservers. It hit a slightly out of date version of bind, which made it barf. Of course I have the servers monitoring themselves, so they kept bringing it back up, just to be knocked down again a few minutes later. The solution? Upgrade to current.
Did anyone else see this, or was it two isolated (and unrelated) cases?
... and to reply to myself ...
I found this YouTube video where they pretty much out him as being a fraud, and info on the other stations he's scammed.
Suckers. I thought they kept up with the competition, so they didn't make the same mistakes.
Swinging bunch of yoyo's around by their strings, and getting them tangled are beginner or intermediate level? I thought that was pretty close to the "doesn't have a clue" level. At least when I played with yoyo's (like when I was a kid) I could not only make it go down, but back up the string too.
It would have been funnier if he knocked himself senseless with the 7 yoyo's that were still attached. :)
Don't forget, significantly less interesting.
"Today is day 4. We're flying the remainder of the target area and capturing data."
"Today is day 15. We're still processing the data."
"Today is day 30. We're still processing the data."
"Today is day 45. We've taken a helicopter to the most obvious structure with a nearby clearing. We confirmed it is a structure, but there are no sort of identifying marks on it. They likely have been eroded by weathering."
"Today is day 56. We're still waiting for local government approval before entering the site."
"Today is day 109. We found a structure full of rocks and dirt."
"Today is day 215. We found what appears to be an arrow head."
"Today is day 220. We found fragments of an unremarkable clay pot."
"Today is day 222. Manuel disappeared. We heard a scream in the night last night. We believe a jaguar may have eaten him. We didn't find any of his remains. His camera is also missing, so we don't have the footage of the attack."
"Today is day 235. The results have come back from the lab. It is a 200 year old arrow head. The clay pot test was inconclusive."
Ahh, the real world of archeology versus the Hollywood version.
You'd understand if you had a properly adjusted tinfoil hat.
You know the secret, you must now be disappeared. It's a good thing you posted as AC, we won't have to disappear many others.
[waves hand]
None of you saw these posts. Go on with your lives like nothing ever happened.
Nah, I just have a plan. Change the cash on a regular basis until I can make it something less traceable. Drug dealers are good for more than just buying drugs from. They're some of the few people that you can change out $500 for another $500 without asking any questions. It's the aliens you can't avoid. They're in orbit watching your every move. Monitoring 7 billion people isn't that hard with the right equipment. They also monitor all the cattle, should they need to replenish their stock of "special" parts.
I'm not that concerned about the aliens though. We have a special deal. I don't give out details on when they're doing flybys, and they won't pick me up until Dec 20th 2012. Good luck to the rest of you.
1) Heat or stress induced hallucination
2) An artifact from seeing a bright light (or reflection)
3) A floater in your eye.
4) Your telepathic ability to force an electrical discharge to not only not dissipate, but to stay in your view.
5) An alien spacecraft with the specific goal of staying exactly where you're looking.
Pick one. Nah, go ahead and pick 2. I'd go with #5 and #4 myself.
You haven't looked at a bright light before, have you? The dot will move to anywhere you are looking, and slowly disappear.
If he saw a flash, and then looked over at his coworker, and kept his focus there, it would appear to be exactly that. The question then is, what was the flash? It could have been anything. A reflection of the sun, a spark of some sort. Did they do any sort of welding in the warehouse? There's a good reason you're suppose to wear a welding mask, and it isn't to keep the sparks off your face.
You need to have your hat adjusted. I do tinfoil hat adjustments for only $499.95. Bring cash.
You can't teach people how not to sin, without learning those sins for yourself.
That's why DUI classes are taught by rehabilitated drunk drivers. Anti-drug talks are given by reformed drug addicts. And anti-pedophilia talks are given by the church.
Wow.
I had completely overlooked the idea the EPA would get pissy, but of course they will.
You do know, with the proper "funding", just about any law can be overlooked. That's how corporations get "special exceptions" to long standing and practical laws. Bribes are a long standing tradition in government that aren't going away anytime soon.
With that in mind, I'd bet if it was a cruise line that wanted to come in there, they'd allow dredging of the waterway so it would be deep enough, and a pier 100' wide and 1/4 mile long. There's a lot of money behind cruise ships. A little 50 slip marina wouldn't have the pull, unless it was owned by a billionaires club.
Sorcha Faal is a pseudonym used by David Booth. Every claim to credentials and sources is false. The only thing that is true in those "newsletters" is that there is one tidbid of fact used, and the rest is complete fantasy.
I sent a request asking for more information on her credentials. Instead, he added me to the mailing list. I've been getting spammed by his stuff for years now. It's actually almost funny, except he rambles on for so long on weird conspiracy tangents that your head starts to hurt. Maybe there's a requirement of wearing a tinfoil hat and having your windows covered in red tape, for it to make any sense.
At one point, he cited *MY* news site as a source of information. Unfortunately, we found that the original source for the information was incorrect and retracted it within a day of the original posting (removing the original story and replacing it with the retraction). Still, a week later we were listed as a source on his story about this huge government conspiracy that simply didn't exist.
But don't let me use that simple conclusion to say that they're all wrong. His stories have included cosmic rays that will kill all of humanity; alien overlords coming to retake power on earth; the US Government taking millions of Americans away to secret death camps. That's just a few off the top of my head.
If you read one and fall for it, that's understandable. If you get through the rambling, it could be the biggest breaking news of all time. If you follow them for a while, you'll understand that it's a burnt out conspiracy nutjob pretending to be a female Russian journalist who somehow has information from everywhere, including aliens in space.
Or have a look at some of the headlines from "her". This is directly from my mail archives, I didn't change any of them. I may have missed a few in there, and I cut the list short in 2008. I have "her" messages dating back into 2006.
May 7, 2010 - Obama Attack On Corporate Giant P&G Shatters US Stock Market
May 3, 2010 - US Goes To "COCKED PISTOL" Alert Status Over Korean War Fears
May 1, 2010 - US Orders Blackout Over North Korean Torpedoing Of Gulf Of Mexico Oil Rig
April 28, 2010 - Blue Stork Omen, Lucifer Telescope Give "Death Star" Warning
April 26, 2010 - Nazi Warlord Unleashes 'Olympic' Eco-Bomb On World
April 23, 2010 - Wall Street Coup Against US Complete, Israel Set To Fall Next
April 17, 2010 - Russia Reports Over 2 Million Dead In US As 'Mysterious" Die-Off Accelerates
April 14, 2010 - Obama Warns World Leaders Global Economic Crash Can't Be Stopped
April 10, 2010 - Russian Move Against US In Poland Kills President, Most Of Government
April 9, 2010 - French Leader Sarkozy Slams Obama, Warns "He Might Be Insane"
April 8, 2010 - Russia Moves Against US In Kyrgyzstan, Thailand As World War III Nears
April 5, 2010 - 'Death Camps' Warned Being Prepared As Millions In US Left Hopeless
March 28, 2010 - Obama Orders 'Immediate Stand-down' After Deadly North Korean Attack
March 23, 2010 - Armed Tax Police Prepare To Sweep Across America As Revolution Feared Near
March 13, 2010 - Earth Axis Shift Prompts Russian 'Doomsday' Warning
March 7, 2010 - Parliament Of Owls Gives 'Final Warning' To America
March 2, 2010 - Russia Warns US Communist Threat Endangering Entire World
February 28, 2010 - US Puts South America "On Notice" With Catastrophic Chile Quake Test
February 18, 2010 - US Move To Capture "Star Children" Alarms Russian Church
February 16, 2010 - Obama Plot To Throw Millions Of Americans From Homes Uncovered
February 15, 2010 - US Warns Japan They Will Destroy Toyota First, Honda Next
February 12, 2010 - The "End Of Days" Are Upon Us, Warns Russian Patriarch
February 9, 2010 - "Who Are They?" Russian Scientists Ask About Mysterious Objects Near Sun
January 23, 2010 - Obama Warned Is "Main Target" Of CIA Coup
Janu
Damn, this identity is burnt.
[lights passport on fire]
Oh look, he has a nice watch. Hmm, he does look a lot like me.
[tappity][tappity]
And he has $18,000 in the bank.
[digs around in the desk]
And a passport valid through 2014.
[tappity][tappity]
Oh and look he just booked a ticket to Munich.
[tappity][tappity]
"Dear boss, I need to take some personal time off for a family emergency. I'll be out of communication for a few weeks. Sorry about the short notice."
[drags body to basement and throws it into the chest freezer]
This will just have to do for a while.
You don't have to be able to read Russian. Just use an online translator. It may not be perfect, but it'll come close.
Their story cites the 5 times that Russia has done this, and the one disaster. Instead of sealing the leak, it blew it open even more. Based on this, they give it a 20% chance of failure.
They also mention that it was done in the movie Armageddon. If Bruce Willis can do it in space, why can't we do it under the water. {sigh}.
Finally, they mention Operation Plowshare (but not by name), and show the Sedan Crater, as proof that the United States has experimented with this before. The big problem there is, the Sedan Crater is still hot. You can visit it. For a very short period of time. You cannot take anything from inside the radioactive area. Funny that, huh?
On with the translation.
Translation:
Petroleum leak in the Gulf of Mexico can be eliminated nuclear explosion
In the USSR, and not as fountains and stopped using the peaceful atom
Vladimir Lagowski - 03/05/2010
It is possible that unsuccessful attempts to stop the leakage of oil from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico through the underwater robots compel professionals to take extreme measures. Namely - to blow up next to the damaged wells nuclear warhead.
It sounds terribly and incredibly - the idiotic joke. But in fact there were several cases where catastrophes in the fields of fighting in this way. In the former USSR - five times. When nothing else has not helped. It's now in the Gulf of Mexico, where oil oozes out of the way from three places.
First underground nuclear explosion was used to extinguish burning gas wells in "Urt-Bulak (80 km from Bukhara) 30 September 1966. Power charge was 30 kilotons. For comparison, the Hiroshima bomb exploded about 20 kilotons. But at a height of 600 meters. A near Bukhara - at a depth of six kilometers.
The idea of the method is simple: an underground explosion pushes the rock, presses it and actually squeezes the channel well.
Powerful nuclear "plugs" - sometimes 3 Hiroshima - we have enjoyed until 1979. And only once failed. In 1972 in Kharkov region did not block the emergency gas blowout. The explosion was mysteriously left on the surface, forming a mushroom cloud. Although the charge was minimal - just a 4 kiloton. And laid deep - for more than two kilometers.
Total probability of failure in the Gulf of Mexico - 20 percent. Americans could take a chance. The chance of dying during the flight to the moon they were even higher.
Of course, we used a civilian nuclear program on the ground, the Americans as to the sea - under water where the ocean depth reaches 1500 meters.
But in principle there is no difference - you still need to drill a well at a distance from leaking. And it lowered the bomb. As in the movie "Armageddon" with Bruce Willis in the role of a driller. It is desirable that the calculations were done correctly. Such hope is: the U.S. is full of smart scientists and powerful computers. And Russia could have contributed. We still live peaceful nuclear demolition.
REFERENCE "CC"
Nuclear war in the peaceful uses
of the USSR organized underground nuclear explosions for peaceful purposes in the period from 1966 to 1988. In total, the former Soviet Union tore more than a hundred atomic bombs. According to some data - 124, on the other 169. And that - not counting the military testing of nuclear weapons.
According to the official wording of the explosions were carried out in the interests of the national economy. Among them - the majority - for seismic minerals and for probing the depths. Explosions create underground reservoirs for gas storage, chemical waste, digging canals, building dams, increased the oil recovery. And did not think something harmful. Although, if the estimate, there are hundreds of atomic bombs, perhaps not in every nuclear war to explode.
Peaceful nuclear energy "fooling"