It's frequency dependent. Bricks and concrete will have a noticeable impact on a 2.4 GHz signal. Not so much when you're talking about HF and low VHF signals.
The Moon's mass gets altered fairly often as it is hit by meteors -- just like the Earth's mass does. One more relatively tiny spacecraft isn't going to have any measurable effect; the laws of physics don't change, even in the interest of anti-US hysteria. All the ejecta will fall back to the surface, so there's an insignificant mass gain, nothing more.
Shall we at least try to think about this a little? Jeez.
I think saying "No one codes in the line of duty" is over-reaching. Maybe no one you are aware of ever writes code in the line of duty. Being ex-Army myself (MI, FA and finally Signal) I knew quite a number of enlisted and warrant officers who wrote code for a living. Granted, this was in the days of CS3 and DAS3, but I suspect that somewhere you will still find uniformed code monkeys doing what they must under some pretty crappy circumstances. We used to call them 74F and 74G, back in the days of clay tablets and reed relays.
But they probably knew the difference between "cite" and "sight". Assuming that the two people you worked with are representative of everyone over 50 simply demonstrates how much you have yet to learn and experience.
Over 45 here, STILL no degree, continuously employed, and having no trouble. First off, at 35 you're not "old" by any definition other than maybe Myspace's. Second, by the age of 35 you probably (hopefully) have developed certain habits like showing up for work on time, not sending out ill-advised emails, and avoiding office drama. You'll likely be closer in age to your bosses, which is definitely not a bad thing.
I've been in management - we see a lot of resumes from people who started new tech careers in their 30s. It's no big deal. We figure even if you lack technical experience (like the rest of the newbies), you have some life experience that will give you a different perspective.
"Enterprise Ready" means, in the end, that you have a vendor to blame if something goes wrong.
Let's assume I spend a million bucks of investor money on software from IBM, another few million on BMC, a few mil on BEA -- and I'm not making these numbers up -- and pay a few million more per year on maintenance and support. Now assume something goes horribly, horribly wrong -- we're dead in the water for a day, for example, or our online stock trading application crashes at market open. I have spent millions of dollars on high end software from top tier vendors, who all work very hard to get us back up and running. Eventually it's all sorted out, and everyone is satisfied. I keep my job, and when it's time to renew the support contracts the vendors remind the senior execs about how they pulled our ass out of the fire. Total cost: Let's snatch a number out of mid air and say $12MM on software and support, and a $6MM outage. $18MM total.
Now let's assume we go another route. We use all FOSS and save millions, MILLIONS of dollars. Same "something" happens, but now there ARE no vendors to call. We, our loyal, courageous and highly skilled technical staff, work tirelessly to solve the problem. We're up in HALF the time it would have taken the vendors to rescue us. Total cost: a $3MM outage, plus say the two mil I spent on consultants and contractors to implement everything. We just saved $13MM, woo-hoo!
All the blame for the outage now falls upon me, the hapless putz whose idea it was to use all this "home-brewed" hacker shit the vendors warned our CEO, CIO, CFO and everyone else about. It matters not what happened, why it happened, nor how well we handled it. A few stockholders (who coincidentally also own stock in BMC, EMC, BEA, HP, Microsoft, IBM, Red Hat, Novell, etc) file a class action suit. Blame is assessed, disembodied heads demanded. I'm out on my ass, along with anyone associated with me, and my boss as well. Maybe his boss too. I end up selling fish stick dinners to tourists in T-shirts, not making even as much as some putz in a cheesy commercial. I can't find another tech job because it's all my fault my company took a six million dollar outage.
Get the picture? You think I'm making this shit up? Think again. There's a reason big companies pay shitloads of money for useless support contracts from Red Hat and Novell to run SLES and RHEL, instead of using free distros. And there's a reason they spend tens of millions (in the case of my own employer) for shit from Microsoft, IBM, BMC, HP, BEA, EMC, Oracle and all the rest. And for the most part it's got nothing to do with technical considerations.
The lessons we learn when working in an "enterprise" environment. Don't get me started.
A reasonable assumption, since he referred to "the government", and not "the US government". And if he doesn't live in the US, I couldn't give a rat's ass about his opinion of our government -- much like I'm sure no one outside the US would care about my opinion of their government.
You must have worked at a long string of shitty places. At every place I have worked in the past decade and a half we actually *test* our backups, along with our restore process, and have business continuity plans in place for all critical systems... plans which are vetted and tested. It's how professionals do things. Of course I have been working in the financial sector (brokerages & banks) for a while now.
Why? So they can waste even MORE of your tax dollars, and mine, repairing the damage? Do you think this would have any lasting effect? It would cost us money -- OUR money -- to have people investigate the root cause, bring the servers back up, remediate, test extensively, restore the data and get it all back on line.
So what's the point to be made? That we can waste money and screw ourselves? Already demonstrated quite well, thanks.
Does destroying an old car, that by today's standards only gets marginally better gas millage, really save resources? I don't know.
This proposed measure isn't about saving resources, it's about getting people to buy new vehicles so the manufacturers don't go tits-up. If implemented I'm sure Congress will, with their usual foresight, fuck it up completely. Of course for every $1K they "give away" they'll suck five times that from our pockets... but hey, it's only tax money, right?
Better yet, how about uninstalling AC from all cars? How about a tax deduction for running a car without AC? Remove all the automatics and force people to drive sticks.
Man, idealism must be nice. You obviously don't live where it gets over 100 in the summer and stays there for a few weeks. And modern automatics can get mileage about equal to, if not equal to, a manual transmission vehicle. Especially one driven by someone who hasn't learned to drive a manual well. Never mind that it's been shown that there's very little difference between driving with windows down and driving with AC on. We don't all drive '82 Dodge Chargers; I'm sure the AC on that thing would damn near bring it to a standstill.
I had an 82 dodge charger (Mitsubishi engine) hatchback
Jesus, I'm sorry to hear that. It must have really sucked.
I think the USA should give up making cars for everyone's well being.
What an absolutely stellar idea. Just lop off a significant chunk of the economy, put a few million people out of work, double our imports and cut our exports by half. That will get the economy back on track! Great idea. You must be an econ major.
I think US car manufacturers should pull their heads out of their asses and start acting responsibly for the long term, not concentrating on the next quarter's earnings report. Ford, GM and Chrysler should have been shifting away from SUVs and trucks five years ago, when it was obvious to anyone with reasoning skills that the "SUV bubble" wasn't going to last. But, like idiots, ignored the lessons of the "tech bubble" a decade ago along with the lessons from the early 70s.
But American corporations seem to have a talent for ignoring reality and acting as though current conditions will last forever. SUV and truck sales, like so many other things before, were a fad that was destined to collapse eventually. The signs were all there for anyone who was observing. The manufacturers just chose to ignore it and pretend they could sell more every year, regardless of gas prices, consumer preference or anything else. I wish I could get paid a few million a year for making dumb-assed decisions based on fantasy assumptions.
Hell I bet you some of the radio stations rebroadcast the television weather broadcasts during significant weather. Yea, just imagine sitting around an audio only device and listening to the weather man saying "As you can see on the right side of the screen..." and thinking to yourself man I wish I could look at what they were talking about. But no, I had to be the smart ass on slashdot who relied on the radio...
The only time I've ever heard TV audio on the radio was when tuning to the audio carrier of a local TV station. Radio stations aren't what they used to be, but then neither are TV stations.
Now just imagine yourself sitting in the dark, with no TV, no lights, nothing at all, wondering WTF is going on. Gosh, it sure would be nice to be able to listen to the radio so you 'd know what is coming your way. But no, you had to be the smartass on Slashdot who relied on the TV instead of keeping a battery powered radio around... possibly even one with receive coverage of the local amateur repeaters so you could listen to the storm spotters and know what's happening even before the broadcast stations.
Unless of course when your service goes out. You should ALWAYS have a way to receive over-the-air signals. This way when the cable, FIOS, or whatever is your favorite way to pay for programming goes offline (and it does during a hurricane, flood, and severe thunderstorms) you are still able to receive important information.
Got that... It's the cutting edge of technology. I call it a "radio".
I'm as big a tightwad as the next guy, but I still pay for cable. Why? Well, because it seems my broadband connection is discounted enough to pay for the basic cable service, with a quarter a month left over. If I drop cable TV and take only the cable modem connection alone, it will actually cost me a little more per month.
That, and the local broadcast stations are pretty much useless other than the news and prime time. Effing 30- ad 60-minute commercials for colon cleansers and Ginsu knives. On those rare occasions I want to veg out in front of the TV, it's nice to have Discovery, History and a couple of decent non-pay movie channels (AMC, TBS).
Not to be pedantic, but the IRS doesn't care whether or not you report and pay your use tax to your state, only your state department of revenue. Fortunately, there's no federal sales tax. Yet.
Amen to that... I tried searches for several sites I personally run, all of which are dead easy finds on Google and Yahoo. Cuil was decidedly un-"cool" and returned mostly useless crap from listserv archives, shitloads of bogus shopping redirect sites and the sort of crap most people try to avoid. And, yes, the pictures displayed next to the (very poor) search results had NOTHING whatsoever to do with the search term - or the results, for that matter. They seemed to be more or less random crap.
I see they've fixed their info page now... when I tried it this morning, I got a "Page not found" error. Smart guys, these. I'm getting less and less fond of Google as time goes by and wish there were a good, viable alternative -- but this doesn't appear to be it.
Hmm, file a false police report. Bold strategy, that way when you and the thieves are both in the same cell for booking, they can kick the shit out of you.
If you have the IP addresses, you should be able to contact the ISP to determine where they might be. The ISP might even have a contact with the local police who does have a clue, since they have to deal with people stealing equipment too.
Also, if you have email addresses and similar information, you may be able to use some "social engineering" to get the thieves to give you their address or a land line number you can use to do a reverse lookup.
It will take some work either way. Unfortunately, there seems to be an attitude that has developed over the past couple of decades that property crimes aren't a big deal, just let the insurance pay for it. I disagree. It *is* a big deal. Thieves need to be caught, stopped and punished.
If you think a person has to be rich to afford a $250 - $500 ticket for a ride, you have a seriously skewed view of the world. Space tourism - yes, you have to be rich for that. The so-called "Eco-tourism", well, you've either got to be well off or save up for a while. Your garden variety week-long cruise costs several times what we're talking about here, and is within reach of most working people. But a $250 Zep ride? Come on, half you pukes spent more than that on (games and trinkets for your console|iTunes|coffee) in the last six months. Now who's blowing money on frivolous entertainment?
Besides... most of the ones you call "rich people" keep other people employed.
Slashdot Mirror
It's frequency dependent. Bricks and concrete will have a noticeable impact on a 2.4 GHz signal. Not so much when you're talking about HF and low VHF signals.
The Moon's mass gets altered fairly often as it is hit by meteors -- just like the Earth's mass does. One more relatively tiny spacecraft isn't going to have any measurable effect; the laws of physics don't change, even in the interest of anti-US hysteria. All the ejecta will fall back to the surface, so there's an insignificant mass gain, nothing more.
Shall we at least try to think about this a little? Jeez.
I think saying "No one codes in the line of duty" is over-reaching. Maybe no one you are aware of ever writes code in the line of duty. Being ex-Army myself (MI, FA and finally Signal) I knew quite a number of enlisted and warrant officers who wrote code for a living. Granted, this was in the days of CS3 and DAS3, but I suspect that somewhere you will still find uniformed code monkeys doing what they must under some pretty crappy circumstances. We used to call them 74F and 74G, back in the days of clay tablets and reed relays.
But they probably knew the difference between "cite" and "sight". Assuming that the two people you worked with are representative of everyone over 50 simply demonstrates how much you have yet to learn and experience.
Janeway. Piccard was the best tactician, diplomat and commander of the three, but Janeway... sigh... yeah.
Over 45 here, STILL no degree, continuously employed, and having no trouble. First off, at 35 you're not "old" by any definition other than maybe Myspace's. Second, by the age of 35 you probably (hopefully) have developed certain habits like showing up for work on time, not sending out ill-advised emails, and avoiding office drama. You'll likely be closer in age to your bosses, which is definitely not a bad thing.
I've been in management - we see a lot of resumes from people who started new tech careers in their 30s. It's no big deal. We figure even if you lack technical experience (like the rest of the newbies), you have some life experience that will give you a different perspective.
"Enterprise Ready" means, in the end, that you have a vendor to blame if something goes wrong.
Let's assume I spend a million bucks of investor money on software from IBM, another few million on BMC, a few mil on BEA -- and I'm not making these numbers up -- and pay a few million more per year on maintenance and support. Now assume something goes horribly, horribly wrong -- we're dead in the water for a day, for example, or our online stock trading application crashes at market open. I have spent millions of dollars on high end software from top tier vendors, who all work very hard to get us back up and running. Eventually it's all sorted out, and everyone is satisfied. I keep my job, and when it's time to renew the support contracts the vendors remind the senior execs about how they pulled our ass out of the fire. Total cost: Let's snatch a number out of mid air and say $12MM on software and support, and a $6MM outage. $18MM total.
Now let's assume we go another route. We use all FOSS and save millions, MILLIONS of dollars. Same "something" happens, but now there ARE no vendors to call. We, our loyal, courageous and highly skilled technical staff, work tirelessly to solve the problem. We're up in HALF the time it would have taken the vendors to rescue us. Total cost: a $3MM outage, plus say the two mil I spent on consultants and contractors to implement everything. We just saved $13MM, woo-hoo!
All the blame for the outage now falls upon me, the hapless putz whose idea it was to use all this "home-brewed" hacker shit the vendors warned our CEO, CIO, CFO and everyone else about. It matters not what happened, why it happened, nor how well we handled it. A few stockholders (who coincidentally also own stock in BMC, EMC, BEA, HP, Microsoft, IBM, Red Hat, Novell, etc) file a class action suit. Blame is assessed, disembodied heads demanded. I'm out on my ass, along with anyone associated with me, and my boss as well. Maybe his boss too. I end up selling fish stick dinners to tourists in T-shirts, not making even as much as some putz in a cheesy commercial. I can't find another tech job because it's all my fault my company took a six million dollar outage.
Get the picture? You think I'm making this shit up? Think again. There's a reason big companies pay shitloads of money for useless support contracts from Red Hat and Novell to run SLES and RHEL, instead of using free distros. And there's a reason they spend tens of millions (in the case of my own employer) for shit from Microsoft, IBM, BMC, HP, BEA, EMC, Oracle and all the rest. And for the most part it's got nothing to do with technical considerations.
The lessons we learn when working in an "enterprise" environment. Don't get me started.
A reasonable assumption, since he referred to "the government", and not "the US government". And if he doesn't live in the US, I couldn't give a rat's ass about his opinion of our government -- much like I'm sure no one outside the US would care about my opinion of their government.
You must have worked at a long string of shitty places. At every place I have worked in the past decade and a half we actually *test* our backups, along with our restore process, and have business continuity plans in place for all critical systems... plans which are vetted and tested. It's how professionals do things. Of course I have been working in the financial sector (brokerages & banks) for a while now.
Why? So they can waste even MORE of your tax dollars, and mine, repairing the damage? Do you think this would have any lasting effect? It would cost us money -- OUR money -- to have people investigate the root cause, bring the servers back up, remediate, test extensively, restore the data and get it all back on line.
So what's the point to be made? That we can waste money and screw ourselves? Already demonstrated quite well, thanks.
Wait a sec... you're saying you think there's *more* freedom in Europe? Holy crap. Time for a reality check.
This proposed measure isn't about saving resources, it's about getting people to buy new vehicles so the manufacturers don't go tits-up. If implemented I'm sure Congress will, with their usual foresight, fuck it up completely. Of course for every $1K they "give away" they'll suck five times that from our pockets... but hey, it's only tax money, right?
Man, idealism must be nice. You obviously don't live where it gets over 100 in the summer and stays there for a few weeks. And modern automatics can get mileage about equal to, if not equal to, a manual transmission vehicle. Especially one driven by someone who hasn't learned to drive a manual well. Never mind that it's been shown that there's very little difference between driving with windows down and driving with AC on. We don't all drive '82 Dodge Chargers; I'm sure the AC on that thing would damn near bring it to a standstill.
Jesus, I'm sorry to hear that. It must have really sucked.
What an absolutely stellar idea. Just lop off a significant chunk of the economy, put a few million people out of work, double our imports and cut our exports by half. That will get the economy back on track! Great idea. You must be an econ major.
I think US car manufacturers should pull their heads out of their asses and start acting responsibly for the long term, not concentrating on the next quarter's earnings report. Ford, GM and Chrysler should have been shifting away from SUVs and trucks five years ago, when it was obvious to anyone with reasoning skills that the "SUV bubble" wasn't going to last. But, like idiots, ignored the lessons of the "tech bubble" a decade ago along with the lessons from the early 70s.
But American corporations seem to have a talent for ignoring reality and acting as though current conditions will last forever. SUV and truck sales, like so many other things before, were a fad that was destined to collapse eventually. The signs were all there for anyone who was observing. The manufacturers just chose to ignore it and pretend they could sell more every year, regardless of gas prices, consumer preference or anything else. I wish I could get paid a few million a year for making dumb-assed decisions based on fantasy assumptions.
A little known scientist? I can believe that. Well, the "little known" part at least.
My Porsche owning friend takes an entirely different kind of ribbing. You know the difference between a Porsche and a porcupine?
The porcupine has the pricks on the outside.
Yeah, OK, mod me off-topic now. I can take it.
Says who?
The only time I've ever heard TV audio on the radio was when tuning to the audio carrier of a local TV station. Radio stations aren't what they used to be, but then neither are TV stations.
Now just imagine yourself sitting in the dark, with no TV, no lights, nothing at all, wondering WTF is going on. Gosh, it sure would be nice to be able to listen to the radio so you 'd know what is coming your way. But no, you had to be the smartass on Slashdot who relied on the TV instead of keeping a battery powered radio around... possibly even one with receive coverage of the local amateur repeaters so you could listen to the storm spotters and know what's happening even before the broadcast stations.
$60 a month? I don't pay that for cable AND broadband.
Got that... It's the cutting edge of technology. I call it a "radio".
I'm as big a tightwad as the next guy, but I still pay for cable. Why? Well, because it seems my broadband connection is discounted enough to pay for the basic cable service, with a quarter a month left over. If I drop cable TV and take only the cable modem connection alone, it will actually cost me a little more per month.
That, and the local broadcast stations are pretty much useless other than the news and prime time. Effing 30- ad 60-minute commercials for colon cleansers and Ginsu knives. On those rare occasions I want to veg out in front of the TV, it's nice to have Discovery, History and a couple of decent non-pay movie channels (AMC, TBS).
Doesn't matter what hi-def looks like to anyone using a converter box on an analog TV, of course, since they'll be watching it in standard def.
Not to be pedantic, but the IRS doesn't care whether or not you report and pay your use tax to your state, only your state department of revenue. Fortunately, there's no federal sales tax. Yet.
Amen to that... I tried searches for several sites I personally run, all of which are dead easy finds on Google and Yahoo. Cuil was decidedly un-"cool" and returned mostly useless crap from listserv archives, shitloads of bogus shopping redirect sites and the sort of crap most people try to avoid. And, yes, the pictures displayed next to the (very poor) search results had NOTHING whatsoever to do with the search term - or the results, for that matter. They seemed to be more or less random crap.
I see they've fixed their info page now... when I tried it this morning, I got a "Page not found" error. Smart guys, these. I'm getting less and less fond of Google as time goes by and wish there were a good, viable alternative -- but this doesn't appear to be it.
Hmm, file a false police report. Bold strategy, that way when you and the thieves are both in the same cell for booking, they can kick the shit out of you.
If you have the IP addresses, you should be able to contact the ISP to determine where they might be. The ISP might even have a contact with the local police who does have a clue, since they have to deal with people stealing equipment too.
Also, if you have email addresses and similar information, you may be able to use some "social engineering" to get the thieves to give you their address or a land line number you can use to do a reverse lookup.
It will take some work either way. Unfortunately, there seems to be an attitude that has developed over the past couple of decades that property crimes aren't a big deal, just let the insurance pay for it. I disagree. It *is* a big deal. Thieves need to be caught, stopped and punished.
Besides... most of the ones you call "rich people" keep other people employed.