We don't have open campus lunches. We're not even allowed to leave the cafeteria during lunch.
Poor baby. When I went to high school, we didn't have a cafeteria, and we were still not allowed to leave the campus.
High School is really a lot more like prison than an educational experience, but I suppose going through it does teach you a lot about real life.
Primary education is about just that - general education. It was not intended to be fun before the self-esteem generation took over, and it doesn't teach you much about real life. When you actually get out into the real world, you'll wish you were back in high school living the easy life. If you aren't going to use the opportunity to soak up all the knowledge you can, that's your fault. Stop complaining about having an education handed to you. In some countries, that would be a dream or impossible if you were born the wrong gender.
The legislator who claims DST saves energy didn't pull the figures out of his ass, they come from studies done during the oil crisis in the 70s that showed energy savings during periods of extended DST.
Are you sure those weren't figures from the 1940's? I can give you my personal study that shows you're talking out of your butt. I wasn't using any lights two weeks ago. Since the time change, I've been using lights in the morning again.
And there is no increase in sunlight; claiming that there is is just stupid and it's not what Congress is claiming either.
The dimwit, excuse me I mean legislator, in question claimed that "The more daylight we have, the less electricity we use." Your apology is accepted.
As for making DST all year long, that would work too.
*Sigh* Clueless. Look up the term "robbing Peter to pay Paul". DST only benefits those who like to play and party late at the expense of those who are early to bed and early to rise. By all means switch to a year-long DST. I don't care, as long as the times switching stops. I don't care how you delude yourself as long as it doesn't affect my schedule.
Amortisation is a way of allocating the cost of capital equipment to the time it is used rather than the time is is bought. it is not dependent on when the cash payments are made.
Your whole point is based on periodic payments and tax considerations, none of which apply to U.S. federal agencies like NASA, which don't make installment payments or have tax considerations. Procurements are almost always a single payment unless there is some special contract involved. Since the one-time purchase is done through Congressional approval and allocation, there is no point in intra-agency charge-backs for subsequent usage -- it is already paid for.
If the cost is not being amortised then there ought to be some other way in which the cost of fixed assets is being charged to the project - unless government bodies accounts are even less meaningful than I thought...
I agree. You have no idea how U.S. government agency funding works. Funds are allocated by the Congress in response to a budget that is proposed by the agencies in advance, vetted by the President, and at some future point in time when a deal is concluded, approved by the Congress. The cost of a physical "asset" is paid for up front in a single payment. The agency must spend those funds under the specifications or lose them at the end of the fiscal year. Agency accounts are not meaningless, they are just much harder to manage since they work on yearly expenditures and the President/Congress has lately been unwilling to provide an actual budget until half-way through the current fiscal year. The allocations are yearly, and I cannot recall of hearing of monthly payments for assets - ever. (There could be minor labor/PBC contracts that are paid otherwise.) A single Slashdot comment cannot encompass the vagaries of the U.S. budget process.
Please tell me that noone actually believes that daylight savings time increases the number of sunlit hours in a day?
Congress Critters do. See the linked article. I remember a similar proposal about twenty years ago when a legislator claimed that DST gave farmers an extra hour of daylight. Never make the mistake of crediting Congress with too much intelligence.
You know what? DST saves *for free* millions of tons of oil worldwide. Oil supplies are being depleted at an alarming rate, and so every little bit helps to conserve it. I repeat again, DST is *free energy savings*.
You, like the legislator in the linked article who claimed that additional sunlight (as mandated by Congress) saves oil, are a nut-job. If extending DST by two months will save gazillions of energy, then let's make the next logical step and make DST effective all year long and save lots more gazillions of energy. Be done with the farce, and stop the whole time-change nonsense. Congress does not control the hours of sunlight in a day nor the daily routine of this country's residents - yet. Warning: Additional DST, due to the Congressionally claimed increase in sunlight causes faster global warming. (Hey, it makes as much sense as the parent.)
SP2 IS A PIG!!!
I have a question. Is there any compelling reason why shouldn't remove it?
It's a more secure pig than your previous pig, and many of us would appreciate it if you kept your pigs at home, so please don't remove it. Thanks. (Where's that Pighogger guy when he's needed?)
Because some of us like to be able to modify our OS if we want to?
Because some of us like to be able to use different UIs if we want to?
Freedom? *Picks up 5-pound sledge and sweatily pants and puffs while managing a fast walk through the conference room and throws it through the big, Apple plasma screen*
No. It is a one-time cash payment from allocated yearly funds.
In which case there is still a monthly charge of a similar size
No. There is a yearly allocation of funds with possible yearly review and adjustment of disputes. Some labor-based, PBC contracts may be on a quarterly-review basis, but the contract is still yearly. Why get involved in an argument where you have nothing to offer?
I work for a company that routinely works on NASA projects. My father worked at JPL during the original moon shots. I have some small familiarity with how things work at NASA.
Yet, our department still has to pay a monthly fee to the hospital to pay for IT services. It's standard budgetary principal: when you use resources, you have to pay for them. And you have to pay for the staff that set them up, and ran the wires, and does all maintenance. . . yada, yada, yada.
Which has nothing to do with interest payments on loans or renting supercomputers. And it still has nothing to do with how funding and procurement works in federal agencies (NASA).
If NASA builds a radio telescope, there are huge capital costs. Whether or not you're "taking a loan from a bank" or not, you're still taking a hit: bare minimum, you could put that money into a fund that gives you a ROI instead of making that extra telescope.
That has nothing to do with receiving telemetry, nor does it make any sense. If NASA needs a big dish, it is paid for out of allocated funds. Federal agencies (other than the treasury) are not allowed to retain unused funds after a fiscal year or to invest them in any manner.
Any reasonable company/organization will spend the minimum necessary to get the job done . ..
Again, NASA is told how to spend its funds by the Congress, and indirectly by the President's budget as modified by the Congress. Comparing federal agencies to private organizations is nonsense since they operate under far different rules.
$22 million is pocket change for a huge number of private americans, let alone for thousands of corporations. I just cannot believe that a project with such a huge public profile (even non-nerds have heard of Voyager) could be axed to save crumbs.
NASA does not have much discretion over how to spend allocated funds. Congress pretty much tells them how to spend it because it is all earmarked by our nasty pork-for-my-district budget process, and if the President convinces Congress to follow his budget guidelines, NASA will have no choice except to choose which programs to kill while dumping billions into the voyage-to-Mars fantasy. If it seems cynical, it's because it is and because it's true.
Your communications hardware will probably cost somewhere around 50m$ in terms of capital costs, with operating costs of perhaps 1m$/yr. Lets assume a repayment time similar to the operating time, and put that number at 30 years. Lots of assumptions here, I know;) Your loan repayment will probably be something like 125m$; that'd be around 5m$/yr for total comm hardware costs. We're up to 7.5m$. Add in any other hardware costs they might encounter (for example, rent on supercomputing work to process the data, or whatnot) . ..
What on Earth (or not on Earth) are you talking about? NASA does not take out loans for comm equipment - it is paid for up front through appropriated funds or budgeted yearly as a cost for payments to foreign ground stations. Nor do they use rented supercomputers to process telemetry. Landsat data is processed by commodity Linux hardware/software. EO-1 data is processed to Level 0 on a freakin' DEC Alpha box.
Despite the stereotype that some people like to present, NASA does not generally throw money around like a drunken sailor. Once the data is captured, processing can be done on anything with enough bits. The missing monetary piece is mostly the cost of data capture and storage/archival of the raw and processed data - it's not free, especially when you take the mandated backups into account. This is a subject that is going to bite us more often in the future. How much effort and cost are we willing to expend to protect data, especially historic data? The archives are growing every year, and the cost goes up, generally borne by federal agencies, including NASA.
That was a very stupid question. She didn't say anything about qualifications, because that's not the issue.
Wrong. It's my issue. In the last few months I have seen two very young females with little experience promoted over an older female with great skills and experience who really deserves a promotion.
As another female in a male dominated field, I can tell you that there are as many disadvantages as advantages to being a reasonably good-looking woman, because the men spend much more time looking at you than listening to you, and what you say get's mostly ignored till it's repeated by someone a foot taller with a voice two octaves lower.
We all have our crosses to bear. I agree many male workers have their priorities wrong, otherwise they wouldn't be promoting hot chicks with no experience to supervisory positions. I work for a forty-something female manager who is well-qualified (and attractive if that makes a difference). I have worked for other qualified women in the past. Having said that, it is difficult to suddenly have a new manager who is half my age and has absolutely no experience in supervision, management, or even working on more than project. In addition, I've been told that as a senior person with the knowhow, I am expected to see that she succeeds.
Should she stop bathing, or wear a false mustache?
Hopefully not. She should dress professionally. Let's take the two recent promotions I'm thinking of. One wears stretch pants so tight that make it obvious she's wearing thong underwear. One does not have to really look, it's quite obvious if she steps out and walks in front of you. The midriff-baring tops seem unprofessional as well unless you're an exotic dancer. The second tends to wear tight skirts that are slit up the side, black hosiery, and plays knee-pointing games during meetings.
My suggestion for women who want to be taken seriously in a tech environment is to dress professionally: no tight sweaters, stretch pants, slit skirts, short or low-cut tops.
You don't see the guys in spandex biker gear (ooh, that's a gruesome thought). Pay your dues, and put in your time before complaining about not being promoted. Apparently, you have, so I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about the girls gaming the system and the stupid guys who enable them.
As a young, inexperienced, not awful-looking female with ambition - you are right, but what is there that I can do about it? It is wrong, but thats the way it is sometimes. In order for me to not be advantaged by these biases, I would have to confront them outright and make myself the 'trouble maker', putting myself at extreme disadvantage.
[ Reply to This ]
So you think your gender and your physical form is a qualification for jobs that would normally require years of learning and professional dedication?
How many of you HP employees out there went out and bought a bottle (case ?) of champaigne the day Carly was fired.
I'm not an HP employee, but I raised a martini in a toast to her demise. Today, I nursed a martini in sorrow over the $20 million welcome mat for HP's new CEO. Apparently, HP's board of directors just can't screw the company hard enough.
What sucks for many in the IT field is that they were never really deserving of genuine respect, they just got the displayed kind because IT salaries were so nuts. Now the boom has burst and starving developers are [perceived as] a dime a dozen, they no longer qualify for the displayed kind. Thus, if you were genuinely deserving of respect, you continue to gain be shown it. If you were only ever getting the displayed kind - well, you don't merit it anymore.
While that sounds good, it has little validity in some companies where the IT wannabes were hired and are now viewed as being as good or better than the veterans just because they're younger with "fresh" viewpoints. It also makes a difference if the n00b is a young, inexperienced, attractive female with ambition and the manager is an old greaseball with fantasies. It's disgusting no matter which end you view it from, and respect, real or otherwise, has nothing to do with what's happening in some companies.
Slashdot Mirror
We don't have open campus lunches. We're not even allowed to leave the cafeteria during lunch.
Poor baby. When I went to high school, we didn't have a cafeteria, and we were still not allowed to leave the campus.
High School is really a lot more like prison than an educational experience, but I suppose going through it does teach you a lot about real life.
Primary education is about just that - general education. It was not intended to be fun before the self-esteem generation took over, and it doesn't teach you much about real life. When you actually get out into the real world, you'll wish you were back in high school living the easy life. If you aren't going to use the opportunity to soak up all the knowledge you can, that's your fault. Stop complaining about having an education handed to you. In some countries, that would be a dream or impossible if you were born the wrong gender.
The legislator who claims DST saves energy didn't pull the figures out of his ass, they come from studies done during the oil crisis in the 70s that showed energy savings during periods of extended DST.
Are you sure those weren't figures from the 1940's? I can give you my personal study that shows you're talking out of your butt. I wasn't using any lights two weeks ago. Since the time change, I've been using lights in the morning again.
And there is no increase in sunlight; claiming that there is is just stupid and it's not what Congress is claiming either.
The dimwit, excuse me I mean legislator, in question claimed that "The more daylight we have, the less electricity we use." Your apology is accepted.
As for making DST all year long, that would work too.
*Sigh* Clueless. Look up the term "robbing Peter to pay Paul". DST only benefits those who like to play and party late at the expense of those who are early to bed and early to rise. By all means switch to a year-long DST. I don't care, as long as the times switching stops. I don't care how you delude yourself as long as it doesn't affect my schedule.
Amortisation is a way of allocating the cost of capital equipment to the time it is used rather than the time is is bought. it is not dependent on when the cash payments are made.
Your whole point is based on periodic payments and tax considerations, none of which apply to U.S. federal agencies like NASA, which don't make installment payments or have tax considerations. Procurements are almost always a single payment unless there is some special contract involved. Since the one-time purchase is done through Congressional approval and allocation, there is no point in intra-agency charge-backs for subsequent usage -- it is already paid for.
If the cost is not being amortised then there ought to be some other way in which the cost of fixed assets is being charged to the project - unless government bodies accounts are even less meaningful than I thought...
I agree. You have no idea how U.S. government agency funding works. Funds are allocated by the Congress in response to a budget that is proposed by the agencies in advance, vetted by the President, and at some future point in time when a deal is concluded, approved by the Congress. The cost of a physical "asset" is paid for up front in a single payment. The agency must spend those funds under the specifications or lose them at the end of the fiscal year. Agency accounts are not meaningless, they are just much harder to manage since they work on yearly expenditures and the President/Congress has lately been unwilling to provide an actual budget until half-way through the current fiscal year. The allocations are yearly, and I cannot recall of hearing of monthly payments for assets - ever. (There could be minor labor/PBC contracts that are paid otherwise.) A single Slashdot comment cannot encompass the vagaries of the U.S. budget process.
Please tell me that noone actually believes that daylight savings time increases the number of sunlit hours in a day?
Congress Critters do. See the linked article. I remember a similar proposal about twenty years ago when a legislator claimed that DST gave farmers an extra hour of daylight. Never make the mistake of crediting Congress with too much intelligence.
So you're saying we need to keep an eye on Arnold?
You know what? DST saves *for free* millions of tons of oil worldwide. Oil supplies are being depleted at an alarming rate, and so every little bit helps to conserve it. I repeat again, DST is *free energy savings*.
You, like the legislator in the linked article who claimed that additional sunlight (as mandated by Congress) saves oil, are a nut-job. If extending DST by two months will save gazillions of energy, then let's make the next logical step and make DST effective all year long and save lots more gazillions of energy. Be done with the farce, and stop the whole time-change nonsense. Congress does not control the hours of sunlight in a day nor the daily routine of this country's residents - yet. Warning: Additional DST, due to the Congressionally claimed increase in sunlight causes faster global warming. (Hey, it makes as much sense as the parent.)
SP2 IS A PIG!!!
I have a question. Is there any compelling reason why shouldn't remove it?
It's a more secure pig than your previous pig, and many of us would appreciate it if you kept your pigs at home, so please don't remove it. Thanks. (Where's that Pighogger guy when he's needed?)
Why aren't we all using Macs in the first place?
Because some of like to build our own machines?
Because some of us like to be able to modify our OS if we want to?
Because some of us like to be able to use different UIs if we want to?
Freedom? *Picks up 5-pound sledge and sweatily pants and puffs while managing a fast walk through the conference room and throws it through the big, Apple plasma screen*
Because the MS Borg is out there? :)
Nothing is broken on my computer. But then, when I first bought it, I wiped the HD clean and installed Slackware 10.
Try running Microsoft Update, and then report back. :)
In which case it will be amortised
No. It is a one-time cash payment from allocated yearly funds.
In which case there is still a monthly charge of a similar size
No. There is a yearly allocation of funds with possible yearly review and adjustment of disputes. Some labor-based, PBC contracts may be on a quarterly-review basis, but the contract is still yearly. Why get involved in an argument where you have nothing to offer?
I work at a hospital.
I work for a company that routinely works on NASA projects. My father worked at JPL during the original moon shots. I have some small familiarity with how things work at NASA.
Yet, our department still has to pay a monthly fee to the hospital to pay for IT services. It's standard budgetary principal: when you use resources, you have to pay for them. And you have to pay for the staff that set them up, and ran the wires, and does all maintenance. . . yada, yada, yada.
Which has nothing to do with interest payments on loans or renting supercomputers. And it still has nothing to do with how funding and procurement works in federal agencies (NASA).
If NASA builds a radio telescope, there are huge capital costs. Whether or not you're "taking a loan from a bank" or not, you're still taking a hit: bare minimum, you could put that money into a fund that gives you a ROI instead of making that extra telescope.
That has nothing to do with receiving telemetry, nor does it make any sense. If NASA needs a big dish, it is paid for out of allocated funds. Federal agencies (other than the treasury) are not allowed to retain unused funds after a fiscal year or to invest them in any manner.
Any reasonable company/organization will spend the minimum necessary to get the job done . . .
Again, NASA is told how to spend its funds by the Congress, and indirectly by the President's budget as modified by the Congress. Comparing federal agencies to private organizations is nonsense since they operate under far different rules.
$22 million is pocket change for a huge number of private americans, let alone for thousands of corporations. I just cannot believe that a project with such a huge public profile (even non-nerds have heard of Voyager) could be axed to save crumbs.
NASA does not have much discretion over how to spend allocated funds. Congress pretty much tells them how to spend it because it is all earmarked by our nasty pork-for-my-district budget process, and if the President convinces Congress to follow his budget guidelines, NASA will have no choice except to choose which programs to kill while dumping billions into the voyage-to-Mars fantasy. If it seems cynical, it's because it is and because it's true.
Your communications hardware will probably cost somewhere around 50m$ in terms of capital costs, with operating costs of perhaps 1m$/yr. Lets assume a repayment time similar to the operating time, and put that number at 30 years. Lots of assumptions here, I know ;) Your loan repayment will probably be something like 125m$; that'd be around 5m$/yr for total comm hardware costs. We're up to 7.5m$. Add in any other hardware costs they might encounter (for example, rent on supercomputing work to process the data, or whatnot) . . .
What on Earth (or not on Earth) are you talking about? NASA does not take out loans for comm equipment - it is paid for up front through appropriated funds or budgeted yearly as a cost for payments to foreign ground stations. Nor do they use rented supercomputers to process telemetry. Landsat data is processed by commodity Linux hardware/software. EO-1 data is processed to Level 0 on a freakin' DEC Alpha box.
Despite the stereotype that some people like to present, NASA does not generally throw money around like a drunken sailor. Once the data is captured, processing can be done on anything with enough bits. The missing monetary piece is mostly the cost of data capture and storage/archival of the raw and processed data - it's not free, especially when you take the mandated backups into account. This is a subject that is going to bite us more often in the future. How much effort and cost are we willing to expend to protect data, especially historic data? The archives are growing every year, and the cost goes up, generally borne by federal agencies, including NASA.
Anything at all is art (to the observer) when the observer thinks it is because of a (artistic) quality or meaning percieved...
Ah. I see you're an abstractionist (and delusional). :)
Or a junk yard.
Started using my gas fireplace. Now costs me $50 a month MORE than using the server and laser printer. :-(
Enron was the experiment. The derived, acceptable result is what you get now.
No, but if I am offered such a position, I am not going to turn it down simply because I doubt the motives behind it.
That's fine as long as you're not the one providing any unwarranted motivation.
If I progress through my career because of advantages beyond my control, then so be it.
That's a non-answer, so I'll just link to my response to your defender who had more addressable points.
That was a very stupid question. She didn't say anything about qualifications, because that's not the issue.
Wrong. It's my issue. In the last few months I have seen two very young females with little experience promoted over an older female with great skills and experience who really deserves a promotion.
As another female in a male dominated field, I can tell you that there are as many disadvantages as advantages to being a reasonably good-looking woman, because the men spend much more time looking at you than listening to you, and what you say get's mostly ignored till it's repeated by someone a foot taller with a voice two octaves lower.
We all have our crosses to bear. I agree many male workers have their priorities wrong, otherwise they wouldn't be promoting hot chicks with no experience to supervisory positions. I work for a forty-something female manager who is well-qualified (and attractive if that makes a difference). I have worked for other qualified women in the past. Having said that, it is difficult to suddenly have a new manager who is half my age and has absolutely no experience in supervision, management, or even working on more than project. In addition, I've been told that as a senior person with the knowhow, I am expected to see that she succeeds.
Should she stop bathing, or wear a false mustache?
Hopefully not. She should dress professionally. Let's take the two recent promotions I'm thinking of. One wears stretch pants so tight that make it obvious she's wearing thong underwear. One does not have to really look, it's quite obvious if she steps out and walks in front of you. The midriff-baring tops seem unprofessional as well unless you're an exotic dancer. The second tends to wear tight skirts that are slit up the side, black hosiery, and plays knee-pointing games during meetings.
My suggestion for women who want to be taken seriously in a tech environment is to dress professionally: no tight sweaters, stretch pants, slit skirts, short or low-cut tops. You don't see the guys in spandex biker gear (ooh, that's a gruesome thought). Pay your dues, and put in your time before complaining about not being promoted. Apparently, you have, so I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about the girls gaming the system and the stupid guys who enable them.
Wow is right. I have to bookmark this as an example of slashdot moderation wrongness.
As a young, inexperienced, not awful-looking female with ambition - you are right, but what is there that I can do about it? It is wrong, but thats the way it is sometimes. In order for me to not be advantaged by these biases, I would have to confront them outright and make myself the 'trouble maker', putting myself at extreme disadvantage. [ Reply to This ]
So you think your gender and your physical form is a qualification for jobs that would normally require years of learning and professional dedication?
Not really, and the lame sheep joke proved it. But I do like Scotch. On the rocks. With soda or straight. It's all good. ;)
If you need to rant against your cow-orkers . . .
If someone is orking your cows, you should be ranting to the authorities, providing they aren't busy with your sheep, of course.
How many of you HP employees out there went out and bought a bottle (case ?) of champaigne the day Carly was fired.
I'm not an HP employee, but I raised a martini in a toast to her demise. Today, I nursed a martini in sorrow over the $20 million welcome mat for HP's new CEO. Apparently, HP's board of directors just can't screw the company hard enough.
What sucks for many in the IT field is that they were never really deserving of genuine respect, they just got the displayed kind because IT salaries were so nuts. Now the boom has burst and starving developers are [perceived as] a dime a dozen, they no longer qualify for the displayed kind. Thus, if you were genuinely deserving of respect, you continue to gain be shown it. If you were only ever getting the displayed kind - well, you don't merit it anymore.
While that sounds good, it has little validity in some companies where the IT wannabes were hired and are now viewed as being as good or better than the veterans just because they're younger with "fresh" viewpoints. It also makes a difference if the n00b is a young, inexperienced, attractive female with ambition and the manager is an old greaseball with fantasies. It's disgusting no matter which end you view it from, and respect, real or otherwise, has nothing to do with what's happening in some companies.
I think the fact that your humorless comment was modded as funny proves the GP's point. (Note to moderators: this comment is not funny. HTH)