I work as a defense contractor in safety engineering. In these parts, we refer to this process as "sailor-proofing". The joke is that every time you think you've got your system sailor-proofed, they come up with a better sailor!
Lest anyone think I'm bashing the fine members of the USN, it should be noted that I was a sailor myself for some 20 years.
Firing a straight white guy is a piece of cake; any reason will do, because at-will employment means you can fire them for NO REASON. If you go to HR and tell them you want to fire the gay black woman in your group because she's been snorting coke at her desk, coming in all of 3 hours a week, and took a bat to your car when you asked her about her project, they'd probably ask you to put her on a Performance Improvement Plan for 6 weeks and issue warnings for every infraction before they'd even consider firing her.
HR is going to make you do the performance improvement plan and issue warnings for the straight white guy too, even in an at-will state. The object of the game is for the company can win if you're sued, and the surest way is to be able to prove that you've given the (straight, white, guy, or otherwise) sufficient opportunity to change, and he/she didn't take advantage of it. I've just been through this process with the proverbial straight white guy, who for various reasons, just wasn't working out as an employee.
I have one of those too, but I eventually stopped using it... for those who haven't seen them, they combine the coffeemaker and grinder into one unit. You put in the beans, filter, and water in the appropriate spots and turn on. The grinder grinds the beans, and once they get small enough to pass through a certain size mesh, they fly out of the grinder, though a little tube, and into the filter basket. Once grinding is done, it perks as usual.
It makes really good coffee, but the problem is that steam from the perking process gets up into the grinder and tube part, and it becomes a real bitch to get the slightly soggy coffee ground dust cleaned out of there. I switched to a Chemex pot and I've been a lot happier.
Unlike a paper filter, the screen does not perform chromatography on all of the tasty oils in the coffee so more flavor gets to the coffee.
Helpful hint: if you use paper, wet the filter before adding coffee grounds. When the filter's already wet, there's no capillarity going on, and therefore no tendency to draw the volatile oils up the paper.
And never freeze your coffee, like I've heard some people say.
Many people do say this, but color me unconvinced. I roast my own beans and routinely freeze them afterwards. I never have problems with either moisture getting into the beans or off flavors developing. I think that this is mainly a problem for people who have stinky refrigerators/freezers.
Given that C-12 constitutes 99% of naturally occurring carbon, getting enough C-13 to make all these diamond memories is likely to require some rather expensive equipment to concentrate/extract the C-13. Say you needed one carat worth of memory, which was 50-50 1's and 0's - then you'd need to mine like 50+ carats worth of coal (accounting for impurities, etc) to get your half-carat of C-13. Then you'd have to use some sort of centrifuge to separate out the C-13. My guess is that this is likely to make the process expensive enough to be impractical.
This is what drives me nuts about all this "singularity" talk. Charlie brings it out in his talk, but doesn't seem to understand the implications. From the fine article:
Vinge asked, "what if there exist new technologies where the curve never flattens, but looks exponential?"
Yes, Moore's law is an exponential growth function - the transistor count doubles every 18 months or so. So where's the "singularity"? Exponential functions are defined everywhere along the curve. They NEVER go to infinity for any defined input. And no one thinks that even Moore's law is going on for too terribly much longer. In fact, no real exponentially growing process can go on forever - you'll eventually run into some kind of natural limit.
I think this singularity stuff is a bunch of hogwash.
I don't know about gas prices in the U.S. "being held artificially low". A good chunk of what you pay at the pump is gasoline taxes, plus sales taxes on the gas taxes. Rather, in many other countries, the gas taxes are much higher.
As I pointed out in another thread, gasoline taxes in the US still don't reflect the actual costs of providing gasoline to US drivers. There's an enormous "defense subsidy": we pay for a gigantic military, one of whose main missions is to defend the middle east... which, in turn, is done to ensure a steady supply of oil. Currently, motorists are paying gas taxes primarily to fund transportation improvements and maintenance (and not even all of that - a lot of highway construction is funded from general revenue). If motorists had to pay a gas tax that fully paid for that part of the military budget devoted to USCENTCOM, you'd see significantly higher prices at the pump, and high-mileage technologies would look a lot more attractive.
Cheap gas is why MPG hasn't gone up. And gas is being kept at an artificially low price by the "defense subsidy": we're using general tax revenue to pay for an enormous defense force, a main function of which is to maintain stability in the middle east. If motorists had to pay a gas tax to fund the portion of the defense budget devoted to USCENTCOM (plus other oil producing areas such as Nigeria, Indonesia, Venezuela, etc... but CENTCOM is by far the biggest), you'd see prices that reflected the actual costs of providing gasoline, and MPGs would go up in a big hurry.
... I also have a hard time signing on to the idea that having one or more armed students shooting it out with Cho would have led to a better result. I think it highly likely that the student body would have ended up caught in the cross-fire, with no good way to escape, and no easy way for the police to figure out who were the bad guy(s). Among the possibilities: Cho bursts into a classroom and begins shooting the students. An armed student begins returning fire. Then a third armed student, hearing this, enters the room. Whom does he shoot? Where do all these bullets end up (given typical college classroom construction, at least some will penetrate into adjoining rooms)? What are the police supposed to do when they enter?
I think adding more armed students into the mix at VT would have changed situation from "slaughter pen" to "Vietnam firefight", only with poorer training and worse aim... which is not necessarily an improvement.
The Annals of Internal Medicine recently published a study that compared veterans health facilities with commercial managed-care systems in their treatment of diabetes patients. In seven out of seven measures of quality, the VA provided better care.
Also:
It gets stranger. Pushed by large employers who are eager to know what they are buying when they purchase health care for their employees, an outfit called the National Committee for Quality Assurance today ranks health-care plans on 17 different performance measures. These include how well the plans manage high blood pressure or how precisely they adhere to standard protocols of evidence-based medicine such as prescribing beta blockers for patients recovering from a heart attack. Winning NCQA's seal of approval is the gold standard in the health-care industry. And who do you suppose this year's winner is: Johns Hopkins? Mayo Clinic? Massachusetts General? Nope. In every single category, the VHA system outperforms the highest rated non-VHA hospitals.
People need to just drop the idea that government-provided healthcare is somehow inferior. It's not. By almost any measure - patient satisfaction, outcomes, costs - the government run VA system is significantly better than private medicine. You don't need heavy sedation to believe it.
Subs are still not gender integrated, so there's no hanky-panky going on there (at least no straight hanky-panky). Surface ships, though, have a version of this situation going on - there's a relatively small crew (FFG's have a notional manning of about 190 people), mixed gender, and are at sea for months at a time. The answer is pretty much what you'd expect... even though sex at sea is strictly verboten, it's pretty routine for rendezvous to go on in various out of the way places like fanrooms. The Navy, unlike NASA, has not thought through this issue at all. They throw these kids together in a cramped environment for months on end, and the guidance regarding sex is "just say no". It's crazy.
If you believe this is impossible then you would be wrong as there are a few companies who have access to enough Internet data to make this privacy lover's nightmare a reality and believe it or not a relatively new science called behavioral targeting is taking the online advertising world by storm.
Holy crap, I think we need to undertake an emergency mission to airdrop some punctuation into this guy's office. That sentence was just about incomprehensible.
Unfortunately, we don't have a viable micro-payment system yet
Frankly, I doubt we'll ever have a viable micropayment system - not because of technological limitations, but because deciding whether to pay $.0199 for an article is way more trouble than it's worth. Think of how you actually use the web - if you spend an hour or so surfing in the evening, you could be looking at a dozen web sites, each with several pages. No one wants to make dozens of buying decisions just to do a little reading.
The technology to do micropayments is there - but there's just no demand for it.
2. Ok, same thing, except you fast forward through the commericials. Is this still morally acceptable? Really you're not upholding your part of the bargain (watching commercials) for the free TV you're getting.
This is where you go off track - there is no bargain. I didn't agree to watch any commercials as a price of watching the rest of the show. The broadcaster put commercials in there in hopes that I would watch them, but I never promised to do so.
I'm not sure if this means that ad-supported television is doomed... but frankly, as I literally never watch it, I really don't care that much.
He made a number of very specific claims: e.g. "Russian ASAT weapons were effective", yet he never provided any evidence this was true. His counterclaims were just as mythical as the "myths" he was trying to refute.
Oooh, "puerile ineptitude". Obviously I've tangled with the wrong anonymous internet guy! I was going to continue arguing, but my resistance has crumbled in the face of your determined (if ad hominem) attack!
Let me toss you a clue: if you're going to make an argument, particularly in a relatively formal setting like a magazine article, it's customary to provide some actual evidence for your argument. It's not the reader's job to go looking for it. You yourself might have made some more headway if you had taken this advice rather than wasting my time with pointless insults.
Geez, I never SAID he was wrong! I just said that he hadn't proven any claim! I wasn't the one writing a big article in an online journal, so I don't feel like I'm obligated to prove or disprove his claims... that's HIS job!
When I was first in the Navy, I left a ship in Hong Kong to fly back to the US. We were on military transport planes, so multiple hops were involved, including Japan and Alaska. Crossing that many time zones over very long plane flights was very temporally disorienting - I got off the plane in Elmendorf, and the clock said 8:00 - but I absolutely couldn't figure out if it was 8 in the morning or 8 in the evening. The sky was no help, this was Alaska in the summertime. I had wanted to call home, but I couldn't even figure out what time it was locally, to say nothing of what time it would have been back there. I ended up not making the call!
So, I can conclude from this that your IT people work for free, then? And that you have a support agreement with Microsoft that doesn't cost anything? The cost might have been hidden, but it's not "free".
You make a good point - where do the "myths" themselves come from? Is anyone really saying this stuff, or are these just convenient strawmen for the author to knock down? Some citations on the "myths" would have come in handy too.
Without any supporting evidence, this whole article is just some guy's opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
I work as a defense contractor in safety engineering. In these parts, we refer to this process as "sailor-proofing". The joke is that every time you think you've got your system sailor-proofed, they come up with a better sailor!
Lest anyone think I'm bashing the fine members of the USN, it should be noted that I was a sailor myself for some 20 years.
HR is going to make you do the performance improvement plan and issue warnings for the straight white guy too, even in an at-will state. The object of the game is for the company can win if you're sued, and the surest way is to be able to prove that you've given the (straight, white, guy, or otherwise) sufficient opportunity to change, and he/she didn't take advantage of it. I've just been through this process with the proverbial straight white guy, who for various reasons, just wasn't working out as an employee.
I have one of those too, but I eventually stopped using it... for those who haven't seen them, they combine the coffeemaker and grinder into one unit. You put in the beans, filter, and water in the appropriate spots and turn on. The grinder grinds the beans, and once they get small enough to pass through a certain size mesh, they fly out of the grinder, though a little tube, and into the filter basket. Once grinding is done, it perks as usual.
It makes really good coffee, but the problem is that steam from the perking process gets up into the grinder and tube part, and it becomes a real bitch to get the slightly soggy coffee ground dust cleaned out of there. I switched to a Chemex pot and I've been a lot happier.
Helpful hint: if you use paper, wet the filter before adding coffee grounds. When the filter's already wet, there's no capillarity going on, and therefore no tendency to draw the volatile oils up the paper.
Many people do say this, but color me unconvinced. I roast my own beans and routinely freeze them afterwards. I never have problems with either moisture getting into the beans or off flavors developing. I think that this is mainly a problem for people who have stinky refrigerators/freezers.
What, pray tell, does it exist for? Without oil, the Mideast looks a lot like Bangladesh... lots of people, no particular reason to be there.
Given that C-12 constitutes 99% of naturally occurring carbon, getting enough C-13 to make all these diamond memories is likely to require some rather expensive equipment to concentrate/extract the C-13. Say you needed one carat worth of memory, which was 50-50 1's and 0's - then you'd need to mine like 50+ carats worth of coal (accounting for impurities, etc) to get your half-carat of C-13. Then you'd have to use some sort of centrifuge to separate out the C-13. My guess is that this is likely to make the process expensive enough to be impractical.
This is what drives me nuts about all this "singularity" talk. Charlie brings it out in his talk, but doesn't seem to understand the implications. From the fine article:
Yes, Moore's law is an exponential growth function - the transistor count doubles every 18 months or so. So where's the "singularity"? Exponential functions are defined everywhere along the curve. They NEVER go to infinity for any defined input. And no one thinks that even Moore's law is going on for too terribly much longer. In fact, no real exponentially growing process can go on forever - you'll eventually run into some kind of natural limit.
I think this singularity stuff is a bunch of hogwash.
As I pointed out in another thread, gasoline taxes in the US still don't reflect the actual costs of providing gasoline to US drivers. There's an enormous "defense subsidy": we pay for a gigantic military, one of whose main missions is to defend the middle east... which, in turn, is done to ensure a steady supply of oil. Currently, motorists are paying gas taxes primarily to fund transportation improvements and maintenance (and not even all of that - a lot of highway construction is funded from general revenue). If motorists had to pay a gas tax that fully paid for that part of the military budget devoted to USCENTCOM, you'd see significantly higher prices at the pump, and high-mileage technologies would look a lot more attractive.
George W Bush, is that you?
Cheap gas is why MPG hasn't gone up. And gas is being kept at an artificially low price by the "defense subsidy": we're using general tax revenue to pay for an enormous defense force, a main function of which is to maintain stability in the middle east. If motorists had to pay a gas tax to fund the portion of the defense budget devoted to USCENTCOM (plus other oil producing areas such as Nigeria, Indonesia, Venezuela, etc... but CENTCOM is by far the biggest), you'd see prices that reflected the actual costs of providing gasoline, and MPGs would go up in a big hurry.
After all, if there's a Taco meter, it's only fair.
Sean
... I also have a hard time signing on to the idea that having one or more armed students shooting it out with Cho would have led to a better result. I think it highly likely that the student body would have ended up caught in the cross-fire, with no good way to escape, and no easy way for the police to figure out who were the bad guy(s). Among the possibilities: Cho bursts into a classroom and begins shooting the students. An armed student begins returning fire. Then a third armed student, hearing this, enters the room. Whom does he shoot? Where do all these bullets end up (given typical college classroom construction, at least some will penetrate into adjoining rooms)? What are the police supposed to do when they enter?
I think adding more armed students into the mix at VT would have changed situation from "slaughter pen" to "Vietnam firefight", only with poorer training and worse aim... which is not necessarily an improvement.
... brought you some of the "best care anywhere". From the article:
Also:
People need to just drop the idea that government-provided healthcare is somehow inferior. It's not. By almost any measure - patient satisfaction, outcomes, costs - the government run VA system is significantly better than private medicine. You don't need heavy sedation to believe it.
Subs are still not gender integrated, so there's no hanky-panky going on there (at least no straight hanky-panky). Surface ships, though, have a version of this situation going on - there's a relatively small crew (FFG's have a notional manning of about 190 people), mixed gender, and are at sea for months at a time. The answer is pretty much what you'd expect... even though sex at sea is strictly verboten, it's pretty routine for rendezvous to go on in various out of the way places like fanrooms. The Navy, unlike NASA, has not thought through this issue at all. They throw these kids together in a cramped environment for months on end, and the guidance regarding sex is "just say no". It's crazy.
Holy crap, I think we need to undertake an emergency mission to airdrop some punctuation into this guy's office. That sentence was just about incomprehensible.
Frankly, I doubt we'll ever have a viable micropayment system - not because of technological limitations, but because deciding whether to pay $.0199 for an article is way more trouble than it's worth. Think of how you actually use the web - if you spend an hour or so surfing in the evening, you could be looking at a dozen web sites, each with several pages. No one wants to make dozens of buying decisions just to do a little reading.
The technology to do micropayments is there - but there's just no demand for it.
... Oceania has always been at war with terrorism.
This is where you go off track - there is no bargain. I didn't agree to watch any commercials as a price of watching the rest of the show. The broadcaster put commercials in there in hopes that I would watch them, but I never promised to do so.
I'm not sure if this means that ad-supported television is doomed... but frankly, as I literally never watch it, I really don't care that much.
He made a number of very specific claims: e.g. "Russian ASAT weapons were effective", yet he never provided any evidence this was true. His counterclaims were just as mythical as the "myths" he was trying to refute.
Oooh, "puerile ineptitude". Obviously I've tangled with the wrong anonymous internet guy! I was going to continue arguing, but my resistance has crumbled in the face of your determined (if ad hominem) attack!
Let me toss you a clue: if you're going to make an argument, particularly in a relatively formal setting like a magazine article, it's customary to provide some actual evidence for your argument. It's not the reader's job to go looking for it. You yourself might have made some more headway if you had taken this advice rather than wasting my time with pointless insults.
Geez, I never SAID he was wrong! I just said that he hadn't proven any claim! I wasn't the one writing a big article in an online journal, so I don't feel like I'm obligated to prove or disprove his claims... that's HIS job!
Sean
When I was first in the Navy, I left a ship in Hong Kong to fly back to the US. We were on military transport planes, so multiple hops were involved, including Japan and Alaska. Crossing that many time zones over very long plane flights was very temporally disorienting - I got off the plane in Elmendorf, and the clock said 8:00 - but I absolutely couldn't figure out if it was 8 in the morning or 8 in the evening. The sky was no help, this was Alaska in the summertime. I had wanted to call home, but I couldn't even figure out what time it was locally, to say nothing of what time it would have been back there. I ended up not making the call!
So, I can conclude from this that your IT people work for free, then? And that you have a support agreement with Microsoft that doesn't cost anything? The cost might have been hidden, but it's not "free".
You make a good point - where do the "myths" themselves come from? Is anyone really saying this stuff, or are these just convenient strawmen for the author to knock down? Some citations on the "myths" would have come in handy too.
Without any supporting evidence, this whole article is just some guy's opinion.