Original article also implies this guy had been reminded of the computer policies in 2004. Sounds like a repeat offender, and moreover he embarrassed the boss in front of company.
No, what it said was, "The mayor's office said its records show that in 2004 Greenwood reviewed the policy that prohibits "inappropriate" use of city computers." That means that they gave everyone a written copy of the AUP and had everyone sign something saying they received a copy of it and read it, something that practically everyone that works in an office of any size does in this day and age. It doesn't in any way imply that he'd broken the rules at any time.
I'd believe that if it was his immediate supervisor that had canned him, but I somehow doubt Bloomberg even knows this guy's name, much less what his job performance is like.
I'm also not sure how wasting time on a photo-op enhances the quality of work the mayor is doing, particularly when he had just spent thousands of dollars of his constituents' money to fly to the state capitol just to hear a speech that he could just as easily have heard in his office.
Re:Does it have to be in production right now?
on
Global Flyer Part 2
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· Score: 1
Nothing, until it's something more than a pipe dream that's not done much more than hovered a few feet up for a little while.:-) Moller's idea *is* pretty cool, but the Global Flyer is on its second non-stop trip around the world as we speak, while the SkyCar has still yet to fly untethered after 40 years of development.
Re:What about efficient use of our resources?
on
Global Flyer Part 2
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· Score: 2, Funny
Show me any car, hybrid or otherwise, that gets 12 mpg while maintaining 425 mph.:-)
Next, he nominated to the Supreme Court his personal lawyer Harriet Miers who had absolutely no judicial experience.
I'm not suggesting that Miers was suitable for the high court, but a lack of judicial experience doesn't automatically make someone incompetent to serve there. A few other justices that started their judicial career with the Supreme Court: John Jay, John Marshall, Earl Warren, and William Rehnquist.
I'd argue that it's done well in the U.S. already. I can have a letter delivered to someone almost 6,000 miles away for the exhorbitant fee of 39 cents, and I can count the number of times I've had USPS mail (including envelopes and packages) lost or misdirected in the past 40 years or so on the fingers of one hand and still have fingers left over.
The DMVs will tend to be more location-dependent, but my local offices in central Florida have always been very easy to deal with. I did, however, have an under-21 friend a number of years ago that actually had the balls to get a replacement driver's license in his older brother's name at a Virginia Beach DMV office and got away with it. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't actually seen him do it, and I'd hate to be his brother if he got pulled over.:-)
You laugh, but that's almost exactly what happened when BellSouth screwed up a new neighbor's install - we got her line, and she got ours. It took a few days to figure out what was going on, and once my wife called BellSouth to resolve the problem (which ultimately took a week), they attempted to sell her all of the spiffy services (call waiting, caller ID, etc.) that cost them nothing but pad the customer's bill substantially. They continued to try to sell her stuff even after she told them not to.
I never will understand why someone decided it was a good idea to try to sell more services to a pissed-off customer that isn't even getting the services they're paying for, because that was the final straw that cost them my patronage. I left BellSouth for a VoIP provider that has provided fantastic service at half BellSouth's price for the six months or so we've had them, and as far as I'm concerned the Bells can eat shit and die. They had a good ride for many, many years at our expense, but if they want to survive they need to simply provide a decent pipe to their customers and not worry about what goes through it.
Bright House here too (Seminole County), although I'm paying $69.95 for 6000/384 with a static IP, no blocked ports, and very liberal ToS. Still a fairly decent deal, and a hell of a lot cheaper than a leased line. Like everyone else, I'd love to have better outbound speeds, but it's not worth it to me to pay the premium they're asking for 512K or 768K.
About the only down side is those unreasonable pricks at SOSDG have a real hard-on for RoadRunner, so there are a few mail servers using their blacklist that bounce my mail even though I'm not sending from a dynamic IP and have valid DNS records.
Where I live (Florida), law enforcement doesn't do too much if you report a car misbehaving, but if it was a truck they'd be all over him. We have state DOT agents that are primarily dedicated to keeping over-the-road trucks legal, and they take their jobs *very* seriously.
On the two occasions that I've called trucking companies about drivers, one was totally useless and never returned my call, and the other kept in touch for a week as they tracked the driver down, and he was fired at the first opportunity. My favorite non-trucking call was when I was driving on I-10 east of Tallahassee, and came across a marked Mississippi state cop that was riding in the left lane 10 mph under the speed limit, holding up traffic for a half-mile behind him. A Florida trooper pulled him over to have a chat with him shortly thereafter.:-)
True, but not every enforcement agency has access to a helicopter, not every helicopter is equipped with FLIR (making them less useful at night), and in any case helicopters are very expensive to maintain and operate, so I'd think this would be of interest from a financial perspective in addition to the tactical benefits.
That does not mean Jobs is the largest shareholder, just that he owns the most stock of any one person. There are several large financial institutions, mutual funds, and holding companies that own far more stock than Jobs.
No, Jobs is by far the single largest shareholder, period. The largest Disney institutional shareholder is Citigroup, with ownership of a little over 3.5% of the company (about half of Jobs' holdings). The largest mutual fund shareholder owns about 1%.
No matter which way you paint it, Jobs is the big dog at Disney now.
But what about the quality of movies that Disney puts out? I haven't seen anything to suggest it's going to get better
I think the fact that Eisner is gone is one indication that things are going to get better. Eisner allowed the evisceration of Feature Animation because of a mistaken belief that 2D animation had limited commercial value and simply focusing on CG stuff would magically revive their fortunes. Not having a creative bone in his body, he failed to understand that it's the story, not the visuals, that determine whether a movie succeeds or fails.
I believe that the current problems at Disney began when Frank Wells died in 1994, and Eisner was left with no one to check his power and a totally clueless board that rubber-stamped almost every decision he made. I don't think Iger has the same love of power that Eisner did, and from the people that I've spoken to that have met him, he appears to be much more understanding of his own limitations and willing to stand back and let people do their jobs. I believe this will be the best course of action re: Pixar, and the only changes I really see would be to put Pixar under the Feature Animation umbrella and putting Lassiter in charge of FA overall.
Incidentally, the sig comes from six years of playing part-time with the 14-mile electric train set there (and getting paid for it, no less!).:-)
One extremely important thing that stands out about Iger is that he hasn't shown a tendency to try to micromanage everything as Eisner did. Eisner insisted on being consulted when Imagineering was choosing carpet prints for the Yacht & Beach Club at Walt Disney World, for crying out loud. Certainly Iger would not be there were it not for Eisner, but he's not Eisner, and at least in Parks and Resorts things are starting to be a little more hopeful among the troops.
I'm a lot more optimistic on hearing this news. Bob Iger's not an idiot, and is well aware of what Pixar brings to the table in terms of creativity and a proven ability to make profitable films that also quality entertainment. Furthermore (and probably more importantly), Iger's not nearly the micro-manager that Michael Eisner was and respects the fact that other people might actually know what they're doing. I would not be surprised in the least to see John Lasseter installed as the new head of Feature Animation and given carte blanche to do what he felt necessary to help Disney regain their former stature in the animation world. I'm hoping that perhaps what we'll end up with is something similar to the Disney of the late 80's/early 90's, when Frank Wells was on hand to provide the creative balance to Eisner's money skills.
In any event, I'm sure that Jobs is having a good laugh at all this, as it's a wonderful slap in the face to Michael Eisner and a permanent reminder of his failure in the Pixar negotiations shortly before his departure.
If we do get an ocasional very good blockbuster like the lord of the rings or the spiderman series and other is only because there are very good directors, screen players and other people that are very briliant and are willing to figth those guys.
And let's not forget that Disney had the opportunity to do LOTR, but passed on it...
Re:Don't suppose the No Nukes freaks will apologiz
on
Pluto Probe Launches
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· Score: 1
Again - you miss the point. We handle energies on the magnitude of that needed for spaceflight hundreds (if not thousands) of times a day - with a failure rate orders of magnitude lower. 747's don't blow up, niether did Concorde, or Blackbird.
No, I didn't miss the point, I'm saying the point is invalid - space flight represents a much more difficult technical challenge than atmospheric flight, or even nuclear energy. Neither 747s, Concordes, nor Blackbirds deal with takeoff (and in the Shuttle's case, landing) stresses that remotely approach that which spacecraft experience. None of them deal with having fuel oxidizers readily available that, if there is a fuel system leak, can easily result in a catastrophic explosion. None of them have to rely solely on thrust vectoring for basic guidance functions - if you lose power on an aircraft, you can generally glide it to someplace safe. If the same thing happens on a spacecraft, you're simply screwed. Conversely, if you are using a solid-fuel motor, you don't even have the option of shutting the engine down if something goes catastrophically wrong. If you lose cabin pressure on an aircraft (as happens with some frequency on even commercial airliners), the pilot simply brings the plane to a lower altitude and then lands. You don't have that option with a spacecraft - if you lose pressure before everyone can get suited up, it won't be pretty. Aircraft don't have to worry about having their electronics cooked by radiation. Aircraft don't have to worry about being hit by something moving at 10 miles per second. Aircraft don't have to worry about a lot of things that come with the territory in space travel.
If you have better ideas for putting usefully-sized payloads into space with minimal risk, I'm sure NASA would be willing to listen.
Re:Don't suppose the No Nukes freaks will apologiz
on
Pluto Probe Launches
·
· Score: 1
No, it's abysmal. Nuclear submarines are hard, nuclear power plants are hard - neither has anywhere near the failure rate.
Apples and oranges - nuclear submarines have a very controllable nuclear reactor for their power, and never go faster than 30 mph or so. Yet, there are still accidents. Nuclear power plants don't move at all, yet there are still accidents, some of which have affected large areas of the world. The United States has suffered 17 fatalities in more than 40 years of manned space exploration. The USS Thresher disaster killed more than seven times that many by itself.
A fully loaded current model 747 at takeoff generates the same amount of energy that John Glenn's Atlas booster did in 1962. The failure rate of the Atlas has changed little since then - how many 747's blow up on take off each year?
Again, apples and oranges - how many 747s accelerate from zero to 17,000 mph in less than 10 minutes? Also, a current 747-400 with RB211 engines can develop about 250,000 pounds of thrust, which is about 80% of Glenn's Atlas, 20% of the thrust of the New Horizons launch vehicle, and less than 3% of the thrust of a Saturn V at launch.
I won't say that NASA can't improve, but the fundamental fact remains that space travel is a risky venture.
New Horizons won't be entering Pluto's orbit - it's a flyby mission.
Re:Don't suppose the No Nukes freaks will apologiz
on
Pluto Probe Launches
·
· Score: 1
It's not the plutonium that's the problem - it's the system that accepts such a failure rate as normal.
I'd say that considering the difficulty of what's being attempted, a failure rate of one in fifty is still doing pretty well. Hell, even model rocketry buffs can sometimes have trouble having that much success. Putting a payload in space involves lots of energy being released very quickly using dangerous and often unstable substances using very complex machines, and there's an inherent danger in that which people often can do precious little to mitigate.
Slashdot Mirror
Original article also implies this guy had been reminded of the computer policies in 2004. Sounds like a repeat offender, and moreover he embarrassed the boss in front of company.
No, what it said was, "The mayor's office said its records show that in 2004 Greenwood reviewed the policy that prohibits "inappropriate" use of city computers." That means that they gave everyone a written copy of the AUP and had everyone sign something saying they received a copy of it and read it, something that practically everyone that works in an office of any size does in this day and age. It doesn't in any way imply that he'd broken the rules at any time.
I'd believe that if it was his immediate supervisor that had canned him, but I somehow doubt Bloomberg even knows this guy's name, much less what his job performance is like.
I'm also not sure how wasting time on a photo-op enhances the quality of work the mayor is doing, particularly when he had just spent thousands of dollars of his constituents' money to fly to the state capitol just to hear a speech that he could just as easily have heard in his office.
Nothing, until it's something more than a pipe dream that's not done much more than hovered a few feet up for a little while. :-) Moller's idea *is* pretty cool, but the Global Flyer is on its second non-stop trip around the world as we speak, while the SkyCar has still yet to fly untethered after 40 years of development.
Show me any car, hybrid or otherwise, that gets 12 mpg while maintaining 425 mph. :-)
Ugh - this should be modded as "Funny", not "Flamebait". I guess some people don't get out and about on the net very much.
:-)
YA RLY.
Next, he nominated to the Supreme Court his personal lawyer Harriet Miers who had absolutely no judicial experience.
I'm not suggesting that Miers was suitable for the high court, but a lack of judicial experience doesn't automatically make someone incompetent to serve there. A few other justices that started their judicial career with the Supreme Court: John Jay, John Marshall, Earl Warren, and William Rehnquist.
I'd argue that it's done well in the U.S. already. I can have a letter delivered to someone almost 6,000 miles away for the exhorbitant fee of 39 cents, and I can count the number of times I've had USPS mail (including envelopes and packages) lost or misdirected in the past 40 years or so on the fingers of one hand and still have fingers left over.
:-)
The DMVs will tend to be more location-dependent, but my local offices in central Florida have always been very easy to deal with. I did, however, have an under-21 friend a number of years ago that actually had the balls to get a replacement driver's license in his older brother's name at a Virginia Beach DMV office and got away with it. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't actually seen him do it, and I'd hate to be his brother if he got pulled over.
Great letter, succinct, and to the point. Only problem is that Damian T. Thorne is the VP in question, not John Thorne. :-D
Does anyone else find it telling that this guy's name is "Damian Thorne"? I'll bet he had an interesting childhood....
You laugh, but that's almost exactly what happened when BellSouth screwed up a new neighbor's install - we got her line, and she got ours. It took a few days to figure out what was going on, and once my wife called BellSouth to resolve the problem (which ultimately took a week), they attempted to sell her all of the spiffy services (call waiting, caller ID, etc.) that cost them nothing but pad the customer's bill substantially. They continued to try to sell her stuff even after she told them not to.
I never will understand why someone decided it was a good idea to try to sell more services to a pissed-off customer that isn't even getting the services they're paying for, because that was the final straw that cost them my patronage. I left BellSouth for a VoIP provider that has provided fantastic service at half BellSouth's price for the six months or so we've had them, and as far as I'm concerned the Bells can eat shit and die. They had a good ride for many, many years at our expense, but if they want to survive they need to simply provide a decent pipe to their customers and not worry about what goes through it.
Bright House here too (Seminole County), although I'm paying $69.95 for 6000/384 with a static IP, no blocked ports, and very liberal ToS. Still a fairly decent deal, and a hell of a lot cheaper than a leased line. Like everyone else, I'd love to have better outbound speeds, but it's not worth it to me to pay the premium they're asking for 512K or 768K.
About the only down side is those unreasonable pricks at SOSDG have a real hard-on for RoadRunner, so there are a few mail servers using their blacklist that bounce my mail even though I'm not sending from a dynamic IP and have valid DNS records.
Where I live (Florida), law enforcement doesn't do too much if you report a car misbehaving, but if it was a truck they'd be all over him. We have state DOT agents that are primarily dedicated to keeping over-the-road trucks legal, and they take their jobs *very* seriously.
:-)
On the two occasions that I've called trucking companies about drivers, one was totally useless and never returned my call, and the other kept in touch for a week as they tracked the driver down, and he was fired at the first opportunity. My favorite non-trucking call was when I was driving on I-10 east of Tallahassee, and came across a marked Mississippi state cop that was riding in the left lane 10 mph under the speed limit, holding up traffic for a half-mile behind him. A Florida trooper pulled him over to have a chat with him shortly thereafter.
True, but not every enforcement agency has access to a helicopter, not every helicopter is equipped with FLIR (making them less useful at night), and in any case helicopters are very expensive to maintain and operate, so I'd think this would be of interest from a financial perspective in addition to the tactical benefits.
That does not mean Jobs is the largest shareholder, just that he owns the most stock of any one person. There are several large financial institutions, mutual funds, and holding companies that own far more stock than Jobs.
No, Jobs is by far the single largest shareholder, period. The largest Disney institutional shareholder is Citigroup, with ownership of a little over 3.5% of the company (about half of Jobs' holdings). The largest mutual fund shareholder owns about 1%.
No matter which way you paint it, Jobs is the big dog at Disney now.
I can't believe you totally failed to include "The Empire Strikes Back" in that list of successful sequels - bad Slashdotter!! Bad! No porn! :-)
Six words: "Pocahontas and Jasmine - The Forbidden Love." I'd go see it. :-)
But what about the quality of movies that Disney puts out? I haven't seen anything to suggest it's going to get better
:-)
I think the fact that Eisner is gone is one indication that things are going to get better. Eisner allowed the evisceration of Feature Animation because of a mistaken belief that 2D animation had limited commercial value and simply focusing on CG stuff would magically revive their fortunes. Not having a creative bone in his body, he failed to understand that it's the story, not the visuals, that determine whether a movie succeeds or fails.
I believe that the current problems at Disney began when Frank Wells died in 1994, and Eisner was left with no one to check his power and a totally clueless board that rubber-stamped almost every decision he made. I don't think Iger has the same love of power that Eisner did, and from the people that I've spoken to that have met him, he appears to be much more understanding of his own limitations and willing to stand back and let people do their jobs. I believe this will be the best course of action re: Pixar, and the only changes I really see would be to put Pixar under the Feature Animation umbrella and putting Lassiter in charge of FA overall.
Incidentally, the sig comes from six years of playing part-time with the 14-mile electric train set there (and getting paid for it, no less!).
One extremely important thing that stands out about Iger is that he hasn't shown a tendency to try to micromanage everything as Eisner did. Eisner insisted on being consulted when Imagineering was choosing carpet prints for the Yacht & Beach Club at Walt Disney World, for crying out loud. Certainly Iger would not be there were it not for Eisner, but he's not Eisner, and at least in Parks and Resorts things are starting to be a little more hopeful among the troops.
I'm a lot more optimistic on hearing this news. Bob Iger's not an idiot, and is well aware of what Pixar brings to the table in terms of creativity and a proven ability to make profitable films that also quality entertainment. Furthermore (and probably more importantly), Iger's not nearly the micro-manager that Michael Eisner was and respects the fact that other people might actually know what they're doing. I would not be surprised in the least to see John Lasseter installed as the new head of Feature Animation and given carte blanche to do what he felt necessary to help Disney regain their former stature in the animation world. I'm hoping that perhaps what we'll end up with is something similar to the Disney of the late 80's/early 90's, when Frank Wells was on hand to provide the creative balance to Eisner's money skills.
In any event, I'm sure that Jobs is having a good laugh at all this, as it's a wonderful slap in the face to Michael Eisner and a permanent reminder of his failure in the Pixar negotiations shortly before his departure.
If we do get an ocasional very good blockbuster like the lord of the rings or the spiderman series and other is only because there are very good directors, screen players and other people that are very briliant and are willing to figth those guys.
And let's not forget that Disney had the opportunity to do LOTR, but passed on it...
Again - you miss the point. We handle energies on the magnitude of that needed for spaceflight hundreds (if not thousands) of times a day - with a failure rate orders of magnitude lower. 747's don't blow up, niether did Concorde, or Blackbird.
No, I didn't miss the point, I'm saying the point is invalid - space flight represents a much more difficult technical challenge than atmospheric flight, or even nuclear energy. Neither 747s, Concordes, nor Blackbirds deal with takeoff (and in the Shuttle's case, landing) stresses that remotely approach that which spacecraft experience. None of them deal with having fuel oxidizers readily available that, if there is a fuel system leak, can easily result in a catastrophic explosion. None of them have to rely solely on thrust vectoring for basic guidance functions - if you lose power on an aircraft, you can generally glide it to someplace safe. If the same thing happens on a spacecraft, you're simply screwed. Conversely, if you are using a solid-fuel motor, you don't even have the option of shutting the engine down if something goes catastrophically wrong. If you lose cabin pressure on an aircraft (as happens with some frequency on even commercial airliners), the pilot simply brings the plane to a lower altitude and then lands. You don't have that option with a spacecraft - if you lose pressure before everyone can get suited up, it won't be pretty. Aircraft don't have to worry about having their electronics cooked by radiation. Aircraft don't have to worry about being hit by something moving at 10 miles per second. Aircraft don't have to worry about a lot of things that come with the territory in space travel.
If you have better ideas for putting usefully-sized payloads into space with minimal risk, I'm sure NASA would be willing to listen.
No, it's abysmal. Nuclear submarines are hard, nuclear power plants are hard - neither has anywhere near the failure rate.
Apples and oranges - nuclear submarines have a very controllable nuclear reactor for their power, and never go faster than 30 mph or so. Yet, there are still accidents. Nuclear power plants don't move at all, yet there are still accidents, some of which have affected large areas of the world. The United States has suffered 17 fatalities in more than 40 years of manned space exploration. The USS Thresher disaster killed more than seven times that many by itself.
A fully loaded current model 747 at takeoff generates the same amount of energy that John Glenn's Atlas booster did in 1962. The failure rate of the Atlas has changed little since then - how many 747's blow up on take off each year?
Again, apples and oranges - how many 747s accelerate from zero to 17,000 mph in less than 10 minutes? Also, a current 747-400 with RB211 engines can develop about 250,000 pounds of thrust, which is about 80% of Glenn's Atlas, 20% of the thrust of the New Horizons launch vehicle, and less than 3% of the thrust of a Saturn V at launch.
I won't say that NASA can't improve, but the fundamental fact remains that space travel is a risky venture.
You missed a decimal point there - 9K mi/h = 2.5 mi/sec, which is equivalent to 4.0225 km/sec.
New Horizons won't be entering Pluto's orbit - it's a flyby mission.
It's not the plutonium that's the problem - it's the system that accepts such a failure rate as normal.
I'd say that considering the difficulty of what's being attempted, a failure rate of one in fifty is still doing pretty well. Hell, even model rocketry buffs can sometimes have trouble having that much success. Putting a payload in space involves lots of energy being released very quickly using dangerous and often unstable substances using very complex machines, and there's an inherent danger in that which people often can do precious little to mitigate.