Not too long ago, I applied for systems administrator job. The interviews were going very well, and I had to return twice because they flew people in to meet me. One of them was a guy who, God love him, seemed like a great person but his interview skills were a little hackneyed. He asked a lot of Job Interview 2.0 questions, which, up until this point, I had never heard of.
"If you had to move Mount Fuji," he asked, "how would you do it?" I recall thinking, "why is he asking this? What does he mean by Mount Fuji?"
"You mean, Mount Fuji, the volcano in Japan?"
He looked confused I asked. "Er, yes. How would you move it?"
What he didn't know was I was a science fiction author as well. I spent a lot of time asking odd questions like these. "Why kind of life form might evolve on Mars?" and so on. But like a writer, I had to have a principal motive of the protagonist.
"Why?" I asked.
The man chuckled as if he had never thought about that before. "Just how would you move it?"
I felt I didn't explain my question. "I mean, who is my customer? Why does he or she wish to move Mount Fuji? I mean, to move Mount Fuji seems like the middle of a plan; it's a verb that has an end mean. Like, does my client want the rubble? Do they want to move it 10 meters to the left? What drives such a vast plan?"
"Yes, say you want to move it... a mile to the left. How would you do it?"
I rolled my eyes in thought. "Wow, um. First, we'd have to get the permission of the Japanese government. I would imagine my client would have to be pretty persuasive to get past that hurdle; Mount Fuji is a national treasure of Japan. Whole economies are connected to it. It would vastly interrupt tourist industry and all surrounding towns connected to the mountain."
The man looked at me, completely dumbstruck.
"The environment impact would also have to be addressed. One does not simply move a volcano. I would imagine I'd study the geological hot spot in detail because once an exposed magma chamber were released, I could only imagine the risk of millions of people with hot lava, volcanic gasses, and the pyroclastic flow and eruption potential. Then you'd have to explain to all the environmentalists and convince the scientific world that this sort of project was necessary. And who is funding such a project?"
"You're over-thinking this," he said, "I just want to know how you would technically."
"Again, for what end result? I can't answer that without knowing what the client wishes."
"He just wants to move it."
"But why? I could imagine a lot cheaper and less destructive ways to get what someone might want. And frankly, what would be different than taking a kilometer of rock from one side and slapping it on the other? Is that considered moving it?"
He paused for a bit. "How man piano tuners are there in the United States?"
I paused. "This... is for the systems administration job, right?"
I didn't get the job. Not because I didn't understand his project prospective, but the following Monday, they had huge layoffs and a hiring freeze.
I once ran a back orifice honeypot (fakebo):) It was fun. The 'hackers' who took the bait would spend hours poking around in a virtual back orifice server. Some of them figured out it was a honeypot and left little messages for me ranging from "YOU BASTARD YOU MADE ME WASTE 2 HOURS OF MY LIFE!" to "Wow I finally figured out that this was a honeypot, very cool!"
Considering that Coventry was pretty much erased from the map (hence the revenge bombing of Dresden, subject to much hand-wringing in hindsight) I'd say it was quite accurate.
The reason why the cities were so erased was because the bombing wasn't accurate.
If you wanted to destroy a couple of factories in a city you pretty much had to wipe out the whole city to make sure you hit the factories.
"The product does something by design which I, the purchaser, was not made sufficiently aware of at time of purchase. Had I known that this product was designed to operate in this way I would not have purchased it. The vendor made no effort to advise purchasers of this functionality, which adversely affects users of the product."
Encrypting your hard drive's contents may not be such a good idea... If they decide to search your laptop (or any other device) and it's encrypted, they'll certainly ask you to provide the password. If you don't provide the password, expect being detained for as long as the law allows them to hold you. Also, if you're a foreign national, you'll probably be denied entry.
Don't encrypt the laptop.
Take a backup of the laptop hard drive, encrypt the backup. Upload that to an online storage service. Wipe the free space or get a new hard drive. Install basic operating system. Take THAT through customs with you. For 'extra points' create an online email account and populate it with some plausible emails, copy over some plausible photos, documents etc. Once at your destination, download your encrypted backup and restore it onto your hard drive.
But why make not picking up after your dog an arrestable offence anyway? To me it would be reasonable if the penalty was a fine rather than a criminal record!
In the UK being arrested doesn't automatically get you a criminal record and employers don't check if you've ever been arrested before hiring you. Its not, yet, part of the USA.
In Canada most of the small ATM machines belong to organized crime. They're not ripping you off (well, except for the $3 fee). What they are doing is making dirty money clean.
Ok I've watched Trailer Park Boys but... wow. I guess they are the most polite gangsters in the world? "Nice place you got here eh. Shame if something were to 'appen to it. Sorry 'boot that. Sorry."
I suppose that's a "feature", but Linux sure seemed primitive to me a few years ago when I discovered what an ordeal it was to read a floppy disk: with Windows, you just put it into the drive and it worked. I assume the same ordeal holds true today for USB sticks on Linux. (Ever wonder why "The Year of the Linux Desktop" always seems to be in the future, Linus?...)
(posting as AC due to non-orthodox opinion favoring Windows over Linux.)
Hah! When I first used Linux, if you mounted a floppy and then removed it without unmounting it you got a kernel panic!
Fun fact: Kiwi student loans never gain interest and have no late fees. There's almost no point in paying them back...except if you want to leave the country.
If you want to leave the country and come back.
The NZ government reached out to some other, friendly, governments such as UK, Canada about tracking down student loan absconders. The response of these 'friendly countries' was: "We don't bother tracking down our overseas debtors, why should we help you track down yours?"
no, its 0 in every direction which makes a sphere not a cube. If it was a cube then it would have corners and since its a dimensionless point how can it have corners? It has to be a sphere!
If only X amount of gold exists in the world, there is no replacement for it, assuming you desire the exact physical qualities of gold.
The interesting thing with gold will be when asteroid miners start bringing it back.
IIRC the first asteroid ever examined for it turned out to be very likely to have more precious metals in it than have ever been mined out of the Earth. And that was a random one.
Both parties in a trade value what they are getting more than what they give. The person selling the item values the cash higher than the item. The person buying values the item higher than the cash. The price is where the exchange takes place where both parties value what they get more.
This is a key part of the economic argument (The "Scrooge" argument) on why giving non-cash gifts is a colossal waste of time and money. It is difficult to know how much another person values something unless they tell you.
I've known plenty of Israelis. Their position, and from what I can tell, the Israeli states position, is that Palestinians don't exist, have never existed.
That in itself is a subtle form of genocide; to deny the existance of a people despite their self-identification as such.
Palestine was a mandate of the UK after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. It almost became a state but not quite. Iraq, Syria, Lebanon. Jordan all managed to become states but not Palestine. But Palestine wasn't inherently different to the rest of them.
The British and French guaranteed the Arab people of the region that if they would rise up against the Ottomans they'd get independence. The Palestinians never got it. Thats not the fault of the Palestinian people and not grounds to declare that they don't exist or don't deserve their own state.
To say that Palestinians have been subjected to a form of genocide at the hands of the state of Israel is hardly 'antisemitism'.
How is it antisemitism? Israel is a nation with a parliament, army, laws. It is not Judaism itself. Much of the population is Jewish and virtually all of the genocide has been conducted by people who happen to be Jews.
But to call it genocide is not being 'against Jews' any more than calling the Nazi-era holocaust genocide is being 'against Germans'. It doesn't make sense in the context of Germany and it just doesn't make sense in the context of Israel.
The people who drive the bulldozers that flatten Palestinian houses and kill old folks who are still in them? I hate them and the fact that they are Jewish makes absolutely no difference to me. Ariel Sharon, who slaughtered Egyptian prisoners of war in cold blood, I hate him and the fact that he is Jewish is completely irrelevant.
Its like this in a LOT of developing countries. Corruption is just business as usual, government makes things up as they go along, noone knows wtf is happening from moment to moment. Thats why they are developing countries and in arrested development at that. You might call them 'retarded countries'
I've seen plenty of occasions when Mythbusters used really bad reasoning and 'disguised' it as scientific method. I've seen plenty of episodes where they were just plain obviously faking it. Its not science, its dressed up as science and I think they do a TERRIBLE job. I wouldn't want kids to watch Mythbusters and think "thats how scientists think or do stuff". Also they are often just wrong in their assumptions, methods etc and declare something as a myth or not a myth on the most dubious grounds. Remember the PURPOSE of Mythbusters is to get good ratings.
I'm not going to rewatch every episode to give you references but feel free to do so yourself and with a critical eye next time.
Slashdot Mirror
From the daily WTF:
Not too long ago, I applied for systems administrator job. The interviews were going very well, and I had to return twice because they flew people in to meet me. One of them was a guy who, God love him, seemed like a great person but his interview skills were a little hackneyed. He asked a lot of Job Interview 2.0 questions, which, up until this point, I had never heard of.
"If you had to move Mount Fuji," he asked, "how would you do it?" I recall thinking, "why is he asking this? What does he mean by Mount Fuji?"
"You mean, Mount Fuji, the volcano in Japan?"
He looked confused I asked. "Er, yes. How would you move it?"
What he didn't know was I was a science fiction author as well. I spent a lot of time asking odd questions like these. "Why kind of life form might evolve on Mars?" and so on. But like a writer, I had to have a principal motive of the protagonist.
"Why?" I asked.
The man chuckled as if he had never thought about that before. "Just how would you move it?"
I felt I didn't explain my question. "I mean, who is my customer? Why does he or she wish to move Mount Fuji? I mean, to move Mount Fuji seems like the middle of a plan; it's a verb that has an end mean. Like, does my client want the rubble? Do they want to move it 10 meters to the left? What drives such a vast plan?"
"Yes, say you want to move it... a mile to the left. How would you do it?"
I rolled my eyes in thought. "Wow, um. First, we'd have to get the permission of the Japanese government. I would imagine my client would have to be pretty persuasive to get past that hurdle; Mount Fuji is a national treasure of Japan. Whole economies are connected to it. It would vastly interrupt tourist industry and all surrounding towns connected to the mountain."
The man looked at me, completely dumbstruck.
"The environment impact would also have to be addressed. One does not simply move a volcano. I would imagine I'd study the geological hot spot in detail because once an exposed magma chamber were released, I could only imagine the risk of millions of people with hot lava, volcanic gasses, and the pyroclastic flow and eruption potential. Then you'd have to explain to all the environmentalists and convince the scientific world that this sort of project was necessary. And who is funding such a project?"
"You're over-thinking this," he said, "I just want to know how you would technically."
"Again, for what end result? I can't answer that without knowing what the client wishes."
"He just wants to move it."
"But why? I could imagine a lot cheaper and less destructive ways to get what someone might want. And frankly, what would be different than taking a kilometer of rock from one side and slapping it on the other? Is that considered moving it?"
He paused for a bit. "How man piano tuners are there in the United States?"
I paused. "This... is for the systems administration job, right?"
I didn't get the job. Not because I didn't understand his project prospective, but the following Monday, they had huge layoffs and a hiring freeze.
I once ran a back orifice honeypot (fakebo) :) It was fun. The 'hackers' who took the bait would spend hours poking around in a virtual back orifice server. Some of them figured out it was a honeypot and left little messages for me ranging from "YOU BASTARD YOU MADE ME WASTE 2 HOURS OF MY LIFE!" to "Wow I finally figured out that this was a honeypot, very cool!"
Considering that Coventry was pretty much erased from the map (hence the revenge bombing of Dresden, subject to much hand-wringing in hindsight) I'd say it was quite accurate.
The reason why the cities were so erased was because the bombing wasn't accurate.
If you wanted to destroy a couple of factories in a city you pretty much had to wipe out the whole city to make sure you hit the factories.
"The product does something by design which I, the purchaser, was not made sufficiently aware of at time of purchase. Had I known that this product was designed to operate in this way I would not have purchased it. The vendor made no effort to advise purchasers of this functionality, which adversely affects users of the product."
Encrypting your hard drive's contents may not be such a good idea... If they decide to search your laptop (or any other device) and it's encrypted, they'll certainly ask you to provide the password. If you don't provide the password, expect being detained for as long as the law allows them to hold you. Also, if you're a foreign national, you'll probably be denied entry.
Don't encrypt the laptop.
Take a backup of the laptop hard drive, encrypt the backup. Upload that to an online storage service.
Wipe the free space or get a new hard drive. Install basic operating system. Take THAT through customs with you.
For 'extra points' create an online email account and populate it with some plausible emails, copy over some plausible photos, documents etc.
Once at your destination, download your encrypted backup and restore it onto your hard drive.
But why make not picking up after your dog an arrestable offence anyway? To me it would be reasonable if the penalty was a fine rather than a criminal record!
In the UK being arrested doesn't automatically get you a criminal record and employers don't check if you've ever been arrested before hiring you. Its not, yet, part of the USA.
In Canada most of the small ATM machines belong to organized crime. They're not ripping you off (well, except for the $3 fee). What they are doing is making dirty money clean.
You would be stupid to tangle with those groups.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/private-atms-vulnerable-to-money-laundering-1.2288659
Canadian. Gangsters. ?
Ok I've watched Trailer Park Boys but... wow. I guess they are the most polite gangsters in the world? "Nice place you got here eh. Shame if something were to 'appen to it. Sorry 'boot that. Sorry."
I suppose that's a "feature", but Linux sure seemed primitive to me a few years ago when I discovered what an ordeal it was to read a floppy disk: with Windows, you just put it into the drive and it worked. I assume the same ordeal holds true today for USB sticks on Linux. (Ever wonder why "The Year of the Linux Desktop" always seems to be in the future, Linus?...)
(posting as AC due to non-orthodox opinion favoring Windows over Linux.)
Hah! When I first used Linux, if you mounted a floppy and then removed it without unmounting it you got a kernel panic!
Fun fact: Kiwi student loans never gain interest and have no late fees. There's almost no point in paying them back...except if you want to leave the country.
If you want to leave the country and come back.
The NZ government reached out to some other, friendly, governments such as UK, Canada about tracking down student loan absconders. The response of these 'friendly countries' was: "We don't bother tracking down our overseas debtors, why should we help you track down yours?"
"All email must be either delivered or bounced" is an insane email policy.
It required 3rd party patches to make qmail behave in a sane way.
djb is a nutcase.
If that 'djb' guy is Dan Bernstein no, he can't be fucking trusted. He is the creator of the qmail MTA. He is clearly insane.
no, its 0 in every direction which makes a sphere not a cube. If it was a cube then it would have corners and since its a dimensionless point how can it have corners? It has to be a sphere!
A sphere has to have dimensions?
I would have thought being 0 in all dimensions made for a perfect sphere, I mean, hey, its not a cube is it?
Isn't a point a perfect sphere? In fact the most perfect sphere possible?
Not the members of 4chan. Arguably the most worthless site on the internet.
From 4chan, specifically /b/, I learned of the existance of the 'Trailer Park Boys' series, to me thats value right there.
If only X amount of gold exists in the world, there is no replacement for it, assuming you desire the exact physical qualities of gold.
The interesting thing with gold will be when asteroid miners start bringing it back.
IIRC the first asteroid ever examined for it turned out to be very likely to have more precious metals in it than have ever been mined out of the Earth. And that was a random one.
Both parties in a trade value what they are getting more than what they give. The person selling the item values the cash higher than the item. The person buying values the item higher than the cash. The price is where the exchange takes place where both parties value what they get more.
This is a key part of the economic argument (The "Scrooge" argument) on why giving non-cash gifts is a colossal waste of time and money. It is difficult to know how much another person values something unless they tell you.
Thats part of the fun of gift giving.
I've known plenty of Israelis. Their position, and from what I can tell, the Israeli states position, is that Palestinians don't exist, have never existed.
That in itself is a subtle form of genocide; to deny the existance of a people despite their self-identification as such.
Palestine was a mandate of the UK after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. It almost became a state but not quite. Iraq, Syria, Lebanon. Jordan all managed to become states but not Palestine. But Palestine wasn't inherently different to the rest of them.
The British and French guaranteed the Arab people of the region that if they would rise up against the Ottomans they'd get independence. The Palestinians never got it. Thats not the fault of the Palestinian people and not grounds to declare that they don't exist or don't deserve their own state.
To say that Palestinians have been subjected to a form of genocide at the hands of the state of Israel is hardly 'antisemitism'.
How is it antisemitism? Israel is a nation with a parliament, army, laws. It is not Judaism itself. Much of the population is Jewish and virtually all of the genocide has been conducted by people who happen to be Jews.
But to call it genocide is not being 'against Jews' any more than calling the Nazi-era holocaust genocide is being 'against Germans'. It doesn't make sense in the context of Germany and it just doesn't make sense in the context of Israel.
The people who drive the bulldozers that flatten Palestinian houses and kill old folks who are still in them? I hate them and the fact that they are Jewish makes absolutely no difference to me. Ariel Sharon, who slaughtered Egyptian prisoners of war in cold blood, I hate him and the fact that he is Jewish is completely irrelevant.
I've lived in Germany for a while now ... Overall America's system is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay better
Support the country you live in, or live in the country you support.
Or live in the country in which you wish to foment revolution.
If someone 'accidentally' sends you four million ICMP echo packets per minute, are you required through common decency to respond to them?
According to Dan 'Bonkers' Bernstein, creator of the infamous qmail SMTP server, ALL email must be either delivered or bounced.
Its like this in a LOT of developing countries. Corruption is just business as usual, government makes things up as they go along, noone knows wtf is happening from moment to moment. Thats why they are developing countries and in arrested development at that. You might call them 'retarded countries'
No. That's homophobic.
I'm not reading fear in it.
I've seen plenty of occasions when Mythbusters used really bad reasoning and 'disguised' it as scientific method. I've seen plenty of episodes where they were just plain obviously faking it. Its not science, its dressed up as science and I think they do a TERRIBLE job. I wouldn't want kids to watch Mythbusters and think "thats how scientists think or do stuff". Also they are often just wrong in their assumptions, methods etc and declare something as a myth or not a myth on the most dubious grounds. Remember the PURPOSE of Mythbusters is to get good ratings.
I'm not going to rewatch every episode to give you references but feel free to do so yourself and with a critical eye next time.
Because rich people need to learn to concentrate and sending them to concentration camp is obviously the best way to do this.