> I don't think talking peanut butter is there to necessarily track you, but probably to just make you notice it.
Kid: "Grandpa, what was it like when you were young?"
Geezer: "Well, until 2002, we had a word for people who tried to talk about what that jar of talking peanut butter was trying to accomplish. Instead of putting them in charge of grocery chains, we called them nuts, and we locked them up."
Skippy: "It was an unenlightened era. Want some toast?"
> > Yes, I do care if the government wants to know, but not some store managers. > >With Total Information Awareness, they will both know.
As much as I think TIA's a cool idea in principle, it fails to address the human factor, and that may be its undoing.
Your grocer will know there's a swarthy-looking guy who says he lives alone, but buys enough groceries to feed a family of four, and he always picks up a case of beer and a few slices of ham, a pack of hotdogs, and a copy of Hustler, which he handles while wearing thick rubber gloves (even in summertime) while muttering something about how hard it is to stay clean in this country of filth as his credit card is cleared.
The properietor of the local anarchist bookstore or Internet cafe will remember something about a swarthy-looking guy who drops by every couple of months ago lookin' for the latest books or textfiles on bomb-making, always paying with cash.
The electronic monitoring systems will have Total Information Awareness of Juan Doe, regular conbsumer of groceries, alcohol, pork products, and pr0n.
When the bomb goes off, it'll be blamed on Hispanic rednecks and/or the Internet, because Juan Doe clearly wasn't a Muslim, but the ratio of the residues in the blast corresponded to a recipe in the Anarchist's Cookbook.
TIA is cool, and will probably be a very helpful tool, but it's not a substitute for HUMINT. The minute our policymakers and policy-implementors lose sight of this fact, we're at risk.
> George Lucas, yes I think I've heard of him. Didn't he do a movie called SpaceBalls [yahoo.com]? or am I thinking of someone else?
No, SpaceBalls was that great Mel Brooks movie from a few years back. A great movie by a talented director.
Lucas did that lame parody of SpaceBalls, you know, that kids' movie with the stupid floppy-eared CGI character. There was a big line of knockoff sequels that ended with a movie about furry little teddy bears or some shit.
> I don't know of any homeless shelters with Chopsticks and Asian cooking... Let alone Beer, although some, if not most homeless might be able to sneak a few brews in...
Where some see only hopelessness, others see opportunity!
> Is it me, or is this at least #6 in a line of computers that cost billions yet do nothing more important than simulate at atomic explosion? > > Considering we can blow up the surface of the world a couple of times(at least) over with our existing stockpiles, why are we spending ANY money on ANYTHING except REDUCING said stockpiles?
It's you:-)
Seriously - reducing the need for large nuclear stockpiles exactly why the money's being spent on simulations.
Nukes are complicated devices, composed of weird stuff (the fissionables and other what-not), and normal stuff (the explosives that trigger the weird stuff).
Over time, the weird stuff changes its properties. So does the normal stuff.
One of many issues with nukes is that if you're gonna throw one at someone, you want to be damn sure it goes off. Otherwise, you've probably just given your enemy enough weird stuff that they could build their own bomb. This, I think we can agree, is a Bad Thing.
If you're going after a guy in a hardened bunker, and your nuke blows up but doesn't blow as strongly you thought it would, you may have to lob another one at the same target. And that means you need to have more nukes in reserve.
And worse yet, if you're going after the same bunker, but your nuke works a little too well, you've just wiped out a city instead of just the few hundred feet around your target. This is inefficient at best, and barbarism at worst. (The early fusion bombs had this "problem", and some tests resulted in radiation exposures far greater than was expected, mainly because the bomb was "better" than it was supposed to be.)
If you want to cut down on the number of nukes in the arsenal, a good way is to make sure that you've got a few very good ones that always go off when they're supposed to, with the correct amount of "boom".
One way to make damn sure your nukes blow up when and how big they're supposed to is to test them regularly. I'll grant that mushroom clouds over the Nevada desert were probably very pretty to watch, but they were also pretty messy for those living downwind. Bad idea.
The second way is underground testing, which solves most of the "downwind" problem, but can still result in some leakage under some circumstances.
That really only leaves one other option - to run simulations. Lots of simulations. Using the best math your scientists can come up with, and the fastest computers your geeks can build. No radiation leaks, and what you learn while building the supercomputers can be used for building higher-performance computers for peaceful purposes in the future.
I dunno about you, but I'll take Door Number Three any day.
> Ah, I beg to differ. Pour orange juice on a motherboard. Totally disfunctional in a few seconds. Now pour orange juice on your head. > > Brain 1, Computers 0.
Reminds me of an old "Far Side" cartoon. "Water off a duck's back, check. Milk off a duck's back, check. Acid off a duck's back, oops."
So in that vein, how 'bout liquid nitrogen? (I'd have suggested fluorinert, but that's fine for electronics and mammals alike.)
Brain 1, Computers 2.
(Ordinarily, I'd have scored that as 1-to-1, but with sufficient cooling, the computer gets faster. I wish I could overclock my brain. I wonder if it'd be like "Bullet Time" in Max Payne?:)
> > Now whose brain are we using as a benchmark? Anna Nicole Smith or Marilyn Vos Savant?
> >I might have an opportunity to meet Marilyn Vos Savant next month at the annual Parade Publications holliday party... I'll be sure and ask her the outcome of a 14 megaton detonation if it were to occur on the corner of 47th and Lex at about the 25th story level. I'll get back to you on that;)
The difference between theoretical and experimental science, in a nutshell.
A theoretical physicsist knows that the simplest way to get the answer is to just ask Marilyn Vos Savant, wait a few moments while she derives the equations for the 14MT blast at the desired altitude from first principles, and then punches it into Blast Mapper to demonstrate that indeed, her answer of "well, it'll suck more than the 1MT blast, and less than the 25MT blast" is within the paramaeters of the open literature.
An experimental physicist, on the other hand, will find out - and will do so much more quickly than the theoretician - simply by asking Anna Nicole Smith by means of a telephone call placed from at least 20 miles away, and observe the results as Anna's head explodes during her brain's attempted parsing of the question. (Predicted criticality point: somewhere between the words "outcome" and "of").
> Can this thing telecommute? It could hold several jobs since most people only use a fraction of their brain at work. I wonder if it can do its own taxes.
No, and no.
It's only got the power of one human brain.
First, that means it's too stupid to telecommute, and probably prefers to sit in traffic for an hour or two each day in a busy-wait.
Second, on the ability to do its own taxes, it's up against over 500 lawyers masquerading public servants on Capitol Hill who are drafting laws to make the tax code even more incomprehensible.
Even if we assume a generous lawyer-to-human intelligence ratio, it's still outgunned at least ten-to-one.
> Oh come on. That's *totally* a good geek joke. Of course not every geek fits the stereotype, but that doesn't mean there isn't truth to it. You've made it more negative by making the programmer say that he has no need for a girlfriend -- I've often heard it as having no *time* for one.
I always liked the frog joke, but my favorite in that vein is still the following "adultery koan":
Junior Developer: "My wife's always on my case because I'm working too hard and never see her anymore, but I can't spend any time with her if we're gonna get this project done."
Senior Developer: "I had that same problem until I found a mistress."
Junior Developer: "What? How so? Doesn't that make it worse?"
Senior Developer: "Not at all, Grasshopper. Every engineer should have both a wife and a mistress. That way, you can tell your wife you're with your mistress, and tell your mistress you're with your wife. Only then will you have enough time to get to the lab and work!"
Upon hearing this, the junior developer was enlightened.
> I'm doing my best to avoid being a corporate slave. I'm fortunate enough to have a champagne income (at 23 years old) but I live a beer lifestyle. That way I can ride out shit like this.
That's not luck, that's brains.
I live the same lifestyle. While many of my co-workers live paycheck-to-paycheck, and have a better house, a better car, and more toys, I have just as much fun and am on track for retirement at 40.
> I'm lucky to be at a company that is smart enough to ride this shit (ie/ recession) out w/o a round of massive layoffs. Maybe that's why they keep lots of talent but pay about 10% less than what I have seen elsewhere. Probably the last bastion of corporate loyalty I have ever seen in the non-government sector...
Now that's luck;-)
But not the last bastion. I'm lucky enough to work in a similar place. Good folks, clued management, and a viable business plan. The work is fun and interesting, and the money's good too.
To those not lucky enough to be in similarly-good jobs - they do exist. They're rare, and it may take you four or five job switches over the next 10 years to find one, but they're well worth finding.
> Corporate Greed knowns no shame. And since Enron, it knows no fear.
Huh? Enron was annihilated, and when they went down, they took Arthur Andersen with them.
I'd say those who practice dodgy accounting are terrified, and rightfully so.
My only concern is that the burden of compliance on companies with clean accounting may become so high that the end result is a minor, but long-term, drain on the productivity of everyone else.
> Today we have CEOs that lay-off thousands of employees just to "make the company more 'nimble'" (Jack Welsh, of General Electric) who then -on the way to his retirement mansion- starts stuffing his pockets with money while asking "You don't mind, do you?"
You make a valid point for some companies, but I don't think GE's one of them. Look at GE's market cap during Welch's tenure. Unlike those who artificially inflated the numbers and cooked the books (Enron, Worldcon), Welch did add bigtime shareholder value during his tenure at GE, and he more than earned his package.
I'll grant that GE may have lower long-term earnings growth in the years to come due to the strain on pension liabilities from the 3-year bear market. But I fail to see how anyone can make a case that the bear market is Welch's fault.
And finally, it's moot - because Welch gave up much of his package for the sake of some good PR for his former employer. I'll point out again that it demonstrates not corruption, but Welch's continued commitment (even when no longer required to have any such commitment) to GE's shareholder value.
There are scumbags out there, but Welch isn't one of 'em.
> Sadly a lot of poeople deserve to be laid off, all they do is dick off 90% of the day. Sure i dick off 90% of the day but my job is tech support and to baby sit the few servers we have, some days i'm very overwhelmed others i spend on slashdot.
And management has to realize that sometimes (and very often with sysadminning), the guy spending 90% of his day dicking around is the most productive guy they have!
A "lazy" sysadmin who spends 90% of his day with his feet up on the desk while alternating between Bugtraq, Slashdot, and a certain USENET newsgroup for monks, is probably doing a vastly better job than a "busy" one who's running around the office with six pagers all beeping at once.
> Are they fscking serious? How about Ms. R0$3n comes over my house, makes me a sandwich, _______ me and then I give her $19.99? Sound good?
s/sandwich/triple scotch/g
s/I give her/She pays me/g
s/19.99/1,999/g
And even then, I'm not sure I'd go for it unless I were blindfolded and we were talking about a download limit of terabyte of LAME-encoded MP3s at 320.
> There's a quote by Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." > >Unfortunately, I think it's bullshit. The only thing that changes the world nowadays is money and weapons.
Au contraire. Margaret Mead was right. Ask Hitler and Goebbels. Or Lenin and Stalin. Or Mao.
Whenever I see a "Successories" or other inspirational/motivational poster with that saying on it, I go back to my cube, print out a photo of one of the aforementioned big-body-count heavies (my favorite's Hitler and company drafting the Final Solution), and attach it nearby with a Post-It note reading "...and that's a bug, not a feature."
> Actually, beta partciles are stopped by a sheet of metal. Its alpha particles there are stopped by a sheet of paper. (Gamma rays are are stopped by 6 inches of steel.)
*brag* So even if it's an unshielded gamma emitter, my nuts are still safe as long as I've got a continual supply of pr0n!
> Screw that. I want the manufacturer, a government agency, and a dozen or so independent on-profit organizations to guarantee it is safe. I mean, we saw well letting the company tell us what is safe worked with tobacco.;)
Actually, this is one of the few cases wherein if you don't trust the gub'mint (setter of standards for rad-leakage) or the corporates (laptop manufacturer), you can just as easily verify for yourself.
Alpha: If you're not convinced from the laws of physics that alphas will be stopped by the casing of your laptop, build a cloud chamber with some dry ice and alcohol, and sit your laptop on top of it. Observe the lack of straight fat traces emanating from your laptop.
Beta: Ditto. You can also build a detector for charged particles out of gold leaf and leave it next to your laptop for a few hours, or you can just eyeball your cloud chamber for longer traces with occasional kinks as electrons are deflected in the medium.
Gamma: OK, your cloud chamber won't work as well here, so drop $300 for a pocket geiger counter from a place like Edmund Scientific. (It slices, it dices, it's something no kid who grew up during the Cold War should be without!:-)
Cloud chambers are easy to build, and fun to watch. Get an old radium-dial watch or clock, place a blue LED next to it, and you've got yourself a "nuclear lava lamp".
Case modders alert! You could replace the top flat part of a PC with it and the cool air from the base of the chamber would ooze down into your case, providing a little bit of extra cooling. along with one hell of a l33t case mod - permanently mount your rad-source in the middle of the chamber, mask off and paint a "radioactive" symbol in the plexiglass cover, with a small source directly beneath the center of the rad-symbol, and illuminate it with a one of those traffic-light/borg-cube-green LEDs, and bring a few blocks of dry ice to the LAN party! W00T!
OK, back on topic. The bottom line is that measuring the amount of ionizing radiation leacking from a nuke-powered laptop is trivial, and if you compare the (lack of) radiation coming from your laptop from the (big pile of) background radiation coming from the bricks in your house, the glaze on your grandma's dishes, and the potassium in that bundle of bananas, or just from living in the Rockies, you just might learn something about risk assessment - something about which those in the knee-jerk anti-nuclear movement would prefer to keep you in the dark.
The sad thing is we'll never know, because for want of $100,000 - or rather, because of a bureaucratic culture at NASA - we won't be taking any pictures as we fly by it at 100 km range.
So for anyone that wondered exactly what's in that red stuff that Io's splattered all over Amalthea's surface over the past few million years, tough. Wait for the next Jupiter probe. What's another 20-30 years, huh? But at least we've got a useless space station in a useless orbit!
> I thought the quote was "All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landings there"
All these moon are belong to you.
Except Europa. Europa are belong to us.
You have no chance to survive, make your time.
Move "Discovery"! For great monolith!
Hmm, I think must've seen the Japanese translation...
> If I remember correctly, the CD-RW blanks I have at home (14x compatable) say they are "guaranteed" for 100 re-writes.
Off the top of my head - that's a hell of a lot better than VHS, so I'd say the answer's "Yes".
(If you're trying to store 120 minutes of video on a CD-RW, you're going to have to compress it pretty heavily, but on the other hand, you're only competing with VHS quality, so you can probably sacrifice quality for compression.
If I were designing the thing, I'd go with VCD quality - less than 120 minutes per disc, but if your shows are 22, 44, or 66 minutes long (30/60/90 minutes, with the ads cut out), that's a win for the CDRW.
> The guy who pulled the fraud has confessed that it really was a scam to milk California by deliberate fraud. Go look in Google News for Enron stories from this week.
In my "burglary-free zone" analogy - a city council ordering me to leave my door open, disarm myself, and shutting down the 911 phone service - are they blameless when I get robbed?
As I said in my post, it takes two to tango. The criminal (my burglar / Enron) is guilty of his crime, but these are crimes that couldn't have happened without the government as enabler (a law that makes burglary trivially easy / California's partial deregulation scheme that guaranteed the trades profitable.)
To clarify, I never meant that California's partial deregulation was intended to have this effect. Just like my analogy to a "burglary-free zone" law - it was passed because it made folks feel good.
If I pass a law that says I have to buy my lemonade in bulk from people at market rates, but can only sell that lemonade from my own lemonade stand at $0.10 per glass ("Because no child should ever pay more than a dime for a glass of lemonade!"), it doesn't take an economics degree to figure out that I'm gonna wind up broke.
So Enron burns down the lemon grove and charges me $1.00 per glass, which I have to pay, and then I sell the lemonade back to FooCorp - at $0.10 per glass, because I'm prohibited by law from passing my costs on. Foocorp then pours it into another glass and sells that glass to Enron $0.50 (Foocorp makes $0.40). Enron then sells the $0.50 glass to me for $1.00 again (Enron makes $0.50).
In a fully-dregulated lemonade market - world without that stupid law - I could say "No way, Foocorp, lemonade's going for a buck a glass, so take your $0.10 bid and stuff it up your ass! I'll sell it back to you at $1.00 and not a penny less", and the scam collapses. The scam only works if you have a law that obstructs the normal rules of supply and demand in a free market.
> The Enron kids are confessing that the "California Energy Crisis" was all a big hoax perpretrated not just by Enron but by a whole consortium of Energy traders based in Houston with ties to both Bush and Cheney.
"With ties to"? Dude, I've "got ties to" Worldcom too. The packets in this/. post probably went through a router in uu.net land, after all. (Eeeew-eeeeew.net, I have to wash my modem:) More seriously, I've hung out with some folks in the wild wacky world of financial engineering, and none of us can figure out how any of the techniques employed by Enron could have worked in a free market.
The only reason the California Energy Crisis happened was because of laws that imposed price controls on one side of a transaction ("Thou Shalt Not Sell It For More Than $XYZ") but none on the other side ("You Must Buy At The Spot Rate.")
California's energy markets were akin to a law saying "This is a crime-free neighborhood. Citizens are required by law to leave their doors unlocked at night, burglar alarms and private firearms are banned, and telephone operators are prohibited from answering 911 calls between midnight and 6:00 am".
This doesn't make a thief any less guilty (it takes two to tango!) but a city council passing such an ordinance shouldn't be surprised when the burglary rate rises.
Now, if you wanna get political about it, if Gov. Davis was so sure he was being scammed by "Texas Energy Companies" (in a cheap politicial attempt to smear Bush/Cheney with the Enron brush - because he was deliberately overlooking the California energy companies that were doing the same goddamn thing), then why did he issue tens of billions of bonds to pay for it all?
It turned out he actually was being scammed - but his politicization of the issue cost him any credibility he had on the matter at the time. Nobody outside the extreme left believed him, they thought Davis was just politicking. Those thoughts were reinforced by Davis' actions - in perpetuating the broken partial-deregulation scheme by panicking and saddling the CA taxpayer with assloads of debt.
And if you really wanna get political, I'll even go out on a limb and say "...because there was an election coming up in 2002, and he knew that by shuffling the CA books, he could delay the resulting fiscal disaster until after the polls closed."
You can disregard my political points (opinion), but I think you have to concede the point (factual) about the analogy between CA deregulation, the "burglar-free zoning law", and free markets. The CA situation simply wasn't as simple as you're trying to make it out to be.
Finally - if Bush and Cheney were truly "friends" of Enron and Worldcom, as you speculate, then why are executives of those companies in jail, and their companies in ruins?
Slashdot Mirror
Kid: "Grandpa, what was it like when you were young?"
Geezer: "Well, until 2002, we had a word for people who tried to talk about what that jar of talking peanut butter was trying to accomplish. Instead of putting them in charge of grocery chains, we called them nuts, and we locked them up."
Skippy: "It was an unenlightened era. Want some toast?"
>
>With Total Information Awareness, they will both know.
As much as I think TIA's a cool idea in principle, it fails to address the human factor, and that may be its undoing.
Your grocer will know there's a swarthy-looking guy who says he lives alone, but buys enough groceries to feed a family of four, and he always picks up a case of beer and a few slices of ham, a pack of hotdogs, and a copy of Hustler, which he handles while wearing thick rubber gloves (even in summertime) while muttering something about how hard it is to stay clean in this country of filth as his credit card is cleared.
The properietor of the local anarchist bookstore or Internet cafe will remember something about a swarthy-looking guy who drops by every couple of months ago lookin' for the latest books or textfiles on bomb-making, always paying with cash.
The electronic monitoring systems will have Total Information Awareness of Juan Doe, regular conbsumer of groceries, alcohol, pork products, and pr0n.
When the bomb goes off, it'll be blamed on Hispanic rednecks and/or the Internet, because Juan Doe clearly wasn't a Muslim, but the ratio of the residues in the blast corresponded to a recipe in the Anarchist's Cookbook.
TIA is cool, and will probably be a very helpful tool, but it's not a substitute for HUMINT. The minute our policymakers and policy-implementors lose sight of this fact, we're at risk.
No, SpaceBalls was that great Mel Brooks movie from a few years back. A great movie by a talented director.
Lucas did that lame parody of SpaceBalls, you know, that kids' movie with the stupid floppy-eared CGI character. There was a big line of knockoff sequels that ended with a movie about furry little teddy bears or some shit.
Where some see only hopelessness, others see opportunity!
>
> Considering we can blow up the surface of the world a couple of times(at least) over with our existing stockpiles, why are we spending ANY money on ANYTHING except REDUCING said stockpiles?
It's you :-)
Seriously - reducing the need for large nuclear stockpiles exactly why the money's being spent on simulations.
Nukes are complicated devices, composed of weird stuff (the fissionables and other what-not), and normal stuff (the explosives that trigger the weird stuff).
Over time, the weird stuff changes its properties. So does the normal stuff.
One of many issues with nukes is that if you're gonna throw one at someone, you want to be damn sure it goes off. Otherwise, you've probably just given your enemy enough weird stuff that they could build their own bomb. This, I think we can agree, is a Bad Thing.
If you're going after a guy in a hardened bunker, and your nuke blows up but doesn't blow as strongly you thought it would, you may have to lob another one at the same target. And that means you need to have more nukes in reserve.
And worse yet, if you're going after the same bunker, but your nuke works a little too well, you've just wiped out a city instead of just the few hundred feet around your target. This is inefficient at best, and barbarism at worst. (The early fusion bombs had this "problem", and some tests resulted in radiation exposures far greater than was expected, mainly because the bomb was "better" than it was supposed to be.)
If you want to cut down on the number of nukes in the arsenal, a good way is to make sure that you've got a few very good ones that always go off when they're supposed to, with the correct amount of "boom".
One way to make damn sure your nukes blow up when and how big they're supposed to is to test them regularly. I'll grant that mushroom clouds over the Nevada desert were probably very pretty to watch, but they were also pretty messy for those living downwind. Bad idea.
The second way is underground testing, which solves most of the "downwind" problem, but can still result in some leakage under some circumstances.
That really only leaves one other option - to run simulations. Lots of simulations. Using the best math your scientists can come up with, and the fastest computers your geeks can build. No radiation leaks, and what you learn while building the supercomputers can be used for building higher-performance computers for peaceful purposes in the future.
I dunno about you, but I'll take Door Number Three any day.
This is obviously a poster who's never dealt with minimum-wage government employees, or he'd realize just how wrong he is.
>
> Brain 1, Computers 0.
Reminds me of an old "Far Side" cartoon. "Water off a duck's back, check. Milk off a duck's back, check. Acid off a duck's back, oops."
So in that vein, how 'bout liquid nitrogen? (I'd have suggested fluorinert, but that's fine for electronics and mammals alike.)
Brain 1, Computers 2.
(Ordinarily, I'd have scored that as 1-to-1, but with sufficient cooling, the computer gets faster. I wish I could overclock my brain. I wonder if it'd be like "Bullet Time" in Max Payne? :)
>
>I might have an opportunity to meet Marilyn Vos Savant next month at the annual Parade Publications holliday party... I'll be sure and ask her the outcome of a 14 megaton detonation if it were to occur on the corner of 47th and Lex at about the 25th story level. I'll get back to you on that
The difference between theoretical and experimental science, in a nutshell.
A theoretical physicsist knows that the simplest way to get the answer is to just ask Marilyn Vos Savant, wait a few moments while she derives the equations for the 14MT blast at the desired altitude from first principles, and then punches it into Blast Mapper to demonstrate that indeed, her answer of "well, it'll suck more than the 1MT blast, and less than the 25MT blast" is within the paramaeters of the open literature.
An experimental physicist, on the other hand, will find out - and will do so much more quickly than the theoretician - simply by asking Anna Nicole Smith by means of a telephone call placed from at least 20 miles away, and observe the results as Anna's head explodes during her brain's attempted parsing of the question. (Predicted criticality point: somewhere between the words "outcome" and "of").
No, and no.
It's only got the power of one human brain.
First, that means it's too stupid to telecommute, and probably prefers to sit in traffic for an hour or two each day in a busy-wait.
Second, on the ability to do its own taxes, it's up against over 500 lawyers masquerading public servants on Capitol Hill who are drafting laws to make the tax code even more incomprehensible.
Even if we assume a generous lawyer-to-human intelligence ratio, it's still outgunned at least ten-to-one.
>
>You could get one hell of a hooker for $1400
Someone's already observed that the pinball machine lasts a lot longer than the hooker.
I'd also like to ask if the hooker gives free replays if you play well enough ;)
I always liked the frog joke, but my favorite in that vein is still the following "adultery koan":
Junior Developer: "My wife's always on my case because I'm working too hard and never see her anymore, but I can't spend any time with her if we're gonna get this project done."
Senior Developer: "I had that same problem until I found a mistress."
Junior Developer: "What? How so? Doesn't that make it worse?"
Senior Developer: "Not at all, Grasshopper. Every engineer should have both a wife and a mistress. That way, you can tell your wife you're with your mistress, and tell your mistress you're with your wife. Only then will you have enough time to get to the lab and work!"
Upon hearing this, the junior developer was enlightened.
That's not luck, that's brains.
I live the same lifestyle. While many of my co-workers live paycheck-to-paycheck, and have a better house, a better car, and more toys, I have just as much fun and am on track for retirement at 40.
> I'm lucky to be at a company that is smart enough to ride this shit (ie/ recession) out w/o a round of massive layoffs. Maybe that's why they keep lots of talent but pay about 10% less than what I have seen elsewhere. Probably the last bastion of corporate loyalty I have ever seen in the non-government sector...
Now that's luck ;-)
But not the last bastion. I'm lucky enough to work in a similar place. Good folks, clued management, and a viable business plan. The work is fun and interesting, and the money's good too.
To those not lucky enough to be in similarly-good jobs - they do exist. They're rare, and it may take you four or five job switches over the next 10 years to find one, but they're well worth finding.
Huh? Enron was annihilated, and when they went down, they took Arthur Andersen with them.
I'd say those who practice dodgy accounting are terrified, and rightfully so.
My only concern is that the burden of compliance on companies with clean accounting may become so high that the end result is a minor, but long-term, drain on the productivity of everyone else.
> Today we have CEOs that lay-off thousands of employees just to "make the company more 'nimble'" (Jack Welsh, of General Electric) who then -on the way to his retirement mansion- starts stuffing his pockets with money while asking "You don't mind, do you?"
You make a valid point for some companies, but I don't think GE's one of them. Look at GE's market cap during Welch's tenure. Unlike those who artificially inflated the numbers and cooked the books (Enron, Worldcon), Welch did add bigtime shareholder value during his tenure at GE, and he more than earned his package.
I'll grant that GE may have lower long-term earnings growth in the years to come due to the strain on pension liabilities from the 3-year bear market. But I fail to see how anyone can make a case that the bear market is Welch's fault.
And finally, it's moot - because Welch gave up much of his package for the sake of some good PR for his former employer. I'll point out again that it demonstrates not corruption, but Welch's continued commitment (even when no longer required to have any such commitment) to GE's shareholder value.
There are scumbags out there, but Welch isn't one of 'em.
And management has to realize that sometimes (and very often with sysadminning), the guy spending 90% of his day dicking around is the most productive guy they have!
A "lazy" sysadmin who spends 90% of his day with his feet up on the desk while alternating between Bugtraq, Slashdot, and a certain USENET newsgroup for monks, is probably doing a vastly better job than a "busy" one who's running around the office with six pagers all beeping at once.
Well, that all depends on your all-n00d-live-streaming-webcam site's target demographic, doesn't it?
s/sandwich/triple scotch/g
s/I give her/She pays me/g
s/19.99/1,999/g
And even then, I'm not sure I'd go for it unless I were blindfolded and we were talking about a download limit of terabyte of LAME-encoded MP3s at 320.
>
>Unfortunately, I think it's bullshit. The only thing that changes the world nowadays is money and weapons.
Au contraire. Margaret Mead was right. Ask Hitler and Goebbels. Or Lenin and Stalin. Or Mao.
Whenever I see a "Successories" or other inspirational/motivational poster with that saying on it, I go back to my cube, print out a photo of one of the aforementioned big-body-count heavies (my favorite's Hitler and company drafting the Final Solution), and attach it nearby with a Post-It note reading "...and that's a bug, not a feature."
*brag* So even if it's an unshielded gamma emitter, my nuts are still safe as long as I've got a continual supply of pr0n!
Actually, this is one of the few cases wherein if you don't trust the gub'mint (setter of standards for rad-leakage) or the corporates (laptop manufacturer), you can just as easily verify for yourself.
Alpha: If you're not convinced from the laws of physics that alphas will be stopped by the casing of your laptop, build a cloud chamber with some dry ice and alcohol, and sit your laptop on top of it. Observe the lack of straight fat traces emanating from your laptop.
Beta: Ditto. You can also build a detector for charged particles out of gold leaf and leave it next to your laptop for a few hours, or you can just eyeball your cloud chamber for longer traces with occasional kinks as electrons are deflected in the medium.
Gamma: OK, your cloud chamber won't work as well here, so drop $300 for a pocket geiger counter from a place like Edmund Scientific. (It slices, it dices, it's something no kid who grew up during the Cold War should be without! :-)
Cloud chambers are easy to build, and fun to watch. Get an old radium-dial watch or clock, place a blue LED next to it, and you've got yourself a "nuclear lava lamp".
Case modders alert! You could replace the top flat part of a PC with it and the cool air from the base of the chamber would ooze down into your case, providing a little bit of extra cooling. along with one hell of a l33t case mod - permanently mount your rad-source in the middle of the chamber, mask off and paint a "radioactive" symbol in the plexiglass cover, with a small source directly beneath the center of the rad-symbol, and illuminate it with a one of those traffic-light/borg-cube-green LEDs, and bring a few blocks of dry ice to the LAN party! W00T!
OK, back on topic. The bottom line is that measuring the amount of ionizing radiation leacking from a nuke-powered laptop is trivial, and if you compare the (lack of) radiation coming from your laptop from the (big pile of) background radiation coming from the bricks in your house, the glaze on your grandma's dishes, and the potassium in that bundle of bananas, or just from living in the Rockies, you just might learn something about risk assessment - something about which those in the knee-jerk anti-nuclear movement would prefer to keep you in the dark.
The sad thing is we'll never know, because for want of $100,000 - or rather, because of a bureaucratic culture at NASA - we won't be taking any pictures as we fly by it at 100 km range.
So for anyone that wondered exactly what's in that red stuff that Io's splattered all over Amalthea's surface over the past few million years, tough. Wait for the next Jupiter probe. What's another 20-30 years, huh? But at least we've got a useless space station in a useless orbit!
All these moon are belong to you.
Except Europa. Europa are belong to us.
You have no chance to survive, make your time.
Move "Discovery"! For great monolith!
Hmm, I think must've seen the Japanese translation...
Off the top of my head - that's a hell of a lot better than VHS, so I'd say the answer's "Yes".
(If you're trying to store 120 minutes of video on a CD-RW, you're going to have to compress it pretty heavily, but on the other hand, you're only competing with VHS quality, so you can probably sacrifice quality for compression.
If I were designing the thing, I'd go with VCD quality - less than 120 minutes per disc, but if your shows are 22, 44, or 66 minutes long (30/60/90 minutes, with the ads cut out), that's a win for the CDRW.
In my "burglary-free zone" analogy - a city council ordering me to leave my door open, disarm myself, and shutting down the 911 phone service - are they blameless when I get robbed?
As I said in my post, it takes two to tango. The criminal (my burglar / Enron) is guilty of his crime, but these are crimes that couldn't have happened without the government as enabler (a law that makes burglary trivially easy / California's partial deregulation scheme that guaranteed the trades profitable.)
To clarify, I never meant that California's partial deregulation was intended to have this effect. Just like my analogy to a "burglary-free zone" law - it was passed because it made folks feel good.
If I pass a law that says I have to buy my lemonade in bulk from people at market rates, but can only sell that lemonade from my own lemonade stand at $0.10 per glass ("Because no child should ever pay more than a dime for a glass of lemonade!"), it doesn't take an economics degree to figure out that I'm gonna wind up broke.
So Enron burns down the lemon grove and charges me $1.00 per glass, which I have to pay, and then I sell the lemonade back to FooCorp - at $0.10 per glass, because I'm prohibited by law from passing my costs on. Foocorp then pours it into another glass and sells that glass to Enron $0.50 (Foocorp makes $0.40). Enron then sells the $0.50 glass to me for $1.00 again (Enron makes $0.50).
In a fully-dregulated lemonade market - world without that stupid law - I could say "No way, Foocorp, lemonade's going for a buck a glass, so take your $0.10 bid and stuff it up your ass! I'll sell it back to you at $1.00 and not a penny less", and the scam collapses. The scam only works if you have a law that obstructs the normal rules of supply and demand in a free market.
"With ties to"? Dude, I've "got ties to" Worldcom too. The packets in this /. post probably went through a router in uu.net land, after all. (Eeeew-eeeeew.net, I have to wash my modem :) More seriously, I've hung out with some folks in the wild wacky world of financial engineering, and none of us can figure out how any of the techniques employed by Enron could have worked in a free market.
The only reason the California Energy Crisis happened was because of laws that imposed price controls on one side of a transaction ("Thou Shalt Not Sell It For More Than $XYZ") but none on the other side ("You Must Buy At The Spot Rate.")
California's energy markets were akin to a law saying "This is a crime-free neighborhood. Citizens are required by law to leave their doors unlocked at night, burglar alarms and private firearms are banned, and telephone operators are prohibited from answering 911 calls between midnight and 6:00 am".
This doesn't make a thief any less guilty (it takes two to tango!) but a city council passing such an ordinance shouldn't be surprised when the burglary rate rises.
Now, if you wanna get political about it, if Gov. Davis was so sure he was being scammed by "Texas Energy Companies" (in a cheap politicial attempt to smear Bush/Cheney with the Enron brush - because he was deliberately overlooking the California energy companies that were doing the same goddamn thing), then why did he issue tens of billions of bonds to pay for it all?
It turned out he actually was being scammed - but his politicization of the issue cost him any credibility he had on the matter at the time. Nobody outside the extreme left believed him, they thought Davis was just politicking. Those thoughts were reinforced by Davis' actions - in perpetuating the broken partial-deregulation scheme by panicking and saddling the CA taxpayer with assloads of debt.
And if you really wanna get political, I'll even go out on a limb and say "...because there was an election coming up in 2002, and he knew that by shuffling the CA books, he could delay the resulting fiscal disaster until after the polls closed."
You can disregard my political points (opinion), but I think you have to concede the point (factual) about the analogy between CA deregulation, the "burglar-free zoning law", and free markets. The CA situation simply wasn't as simple as you're trying to make it out to be.
Finally - if Bush and Cheney were truly "friends" of Enron and Worldcom, as you speculate, then why are executives of those companies in jail, and their companies in ruins?
Not even if my first solution to "getting a 4600 pound magnet" involves a frictionless surface and a 4700 pound magnet?
Damn, the world's a cruel place. (And horribly undermagnetized, too.)