At 4PM I once was belatedly notified that consultants hired by a new employee who had developed an applicaition were going to install it on one of our critical servers that night, and by the consultants who had been flown in to do it. WHAT! I shouted! - no you're not! I took tons of grief about being obstructionist and stubborn and unrealistic - it seemed there was nothing that could go wrong! it was a simple application! Senior management got involved but I stuck by my guns (in detriment to my career) and insisted that we at least pretend to follow perocedures and take a few days to develop a "what-if" strategy.. The server was so critical that I also insisted on having our own knowledgeable experts on hand during the install who were familiar with that server, etc. Guess what - the impossible happened and the server was trashed. If we had not prepared for disaster and had our own experts there with ready to fix it there would have been hell-to-pay. As it was it took more than six hours to get it back up.
Did I get any credit for this -I did not. I was obstructional and unnecesarily interfering with other people's work goals.
This should be modded up to +5. You clearly know of what you speak. I, too, developed a system for pennies on the dollar that saved millions and greatly improved compliance with regulations. For a second I thought you were me. Once the company had the system they decided it was no big deal andno longer needed a project manager for development and fired me. They now let everyone develop their own apps with no oversight to interoperability or even if it duplicates already in place systems. What a recipe for disaster.
Companies need better planning, not less planning, but they need professionals to do it. One problem with independence is that everyone interprets planning as "interference" with their own pet projects. And that costs companies big in terms of money and people-resources needed to maintain all those disparate redundant systems..
And one of the biggest problems of all is that upper management doesn't have a clue that they don't have a clue.My group had over 80 applications spread over three independent divisions in my area of expertise. When resources couldn't be found to keep them running I was told to "just fix it" and when i didn't have it fixed in 90 days the project was deemed a failure. It makes me livid just to think about their stupidity even today.
Business needs better planning - not less planning.
Your logic that all the state could tell would be that the road to Dunkin Donuts is plowed really well is looking at the problem backwards. Dispatchers would actually be able to tell that the roads the drivers were supposed to be plowing weren't plowed, and could dispatch an actual working driver to do it.
I am sure the drivers are compensated for the time spent plowing and not time spent in Dunkin Donuts. I strongly suspect the exact details of when they are and are not compensated (including reasonable breaks) are spelled out in the contract. Employers, including state governments, have the right to monitor performance of contractors based on the contract requirements and to audit invoices for accuracy.
So the drivers are up for 20 hours... so what? They're compensated for it. Just because they are up for 20 hours doesn't mean they should be paid for six hours of dunkin donut time
Don't get me wrong - I know it is a hard job, and thanks to all the operators who keep the roads clear. But there are a always a few people in any group who take advantage of any opportunity to cheat. Those few actaully make it more difficult for the working drivers who have to spend more time doing the cheater's work as well as their own. And let's not forget the danger to the public that the cheaters cause by not clearing the roads they should have cleared.
When you push the bounderies of any technology, as with the Osprey, it is more dangerous than using an established technology. During development and early years of the Harrier many, many pilots were killed and aircraft lost - partly due to new skills needed to fly them and partly to problems with the planes themselves - an identical situation with the Osprey. The same argument you make about a failed application of a new technology could have been applied to the airplane itself, helicopters, the steam train, steamships, or even the automobile. In all cases they frequently crashed, exploded, burned and killed people regularly until the bugs were worked out. Even the first of the jet-powered airliners crashed frequently simply because they made the windows too big.
Thankfully we didn't abandon any of those technologies because of early accidents. True, there are some truly bad wacky-fringe ideas such as rocket-powered cars and nuclear-powered aircraft that deserved to be abandoned, but the Osprey doesn't fall into the wacky category.
We shouldn't immediately blame the technology as faulty and proclaim failure when things go wrong with new technologies - we always learn as we go and that is the price of progress.
This isn't a case of the money going to people in India who need it or going to people in the US or Germany who need it - the problem is that the money is going to the CORPORATIONS and the FAT CATS that run them instead of to those people. The money is going to pay for 6 million dollar birthday parties in Greece for CEO's blond 30 year old trophy wives, or 250 million retirement packages for stock exchange heads, or for corporate jets for Enron executives' wives to take shopping trips to Paris,...and yachts, cars, women, and obscene houses in Palm Beach, Palm Springs or Gstaad.
This is classic depression-era corporate greed. If there is an over-abundance of non-organized workers, companies can take advantage of that by having them bid against each other until the workers become so desperate that they will work for what isn't even a living wage - and there will STILL be people willing to work for less because working yourself to death slowly is preferable to starving to death quickly. And some people think this is great free-market stuff!?? Some poeple think it is a good idea to drive wages down for everyone for the benefit of the companies!? And why should we think that the $2/day rate in India is the lowest it can go? Do you really think that companies who can get the Indians to bid against each other won't fire all those $2 people if a $1 offer comes along and then fire all of them if a $0.80 offer appears?
The companies who outsource jobs overseas do nothing to support the community that allows them to work here in security and opulence. They take advantage of the low wages overseas and simultaneously feed off their own neighbors by charging US prices for the cheap goods.
They can only do it because not all companies have moved in that direction yet. As a result there are still enough middle class americans to buy their products. When enough jobs are moved to India so that there aren't enough poeople left to buy their products, the economy and their businesses will be destroyed (as in WorldCom and Enron) but they will have their yachts, jets and fancy houses already, so why should they give a shit. After all, they are the elite of the elite. They actually think they DESERVE to suck the wealth of the nation into their own gut.
If you have an RFID implant the government will be able to track you anywhere you go simply by placing passive RFID scanners on the street. They will also be able to tell who you are walking with and who you know. But this ability isn't confined to implanted RFID tags, they can do the same with any RFID tags in your clothes! So ID#347654-0 shows up at an anti-war rally and guess what, that shirt was sold to YOU, John Smith, at the Eugene, Oregon Eddie Bauer store. (And by the way, why were you in Eugene, Oregon in July 2003?).
Think you can pay for your clothes with cash and avoid it? Nope, all it takes is for you to identify yourself once at any government office or airline check-in counter having a scanner for all your tags to be assigned to you.
RFID tags in clothing is the holy grail of a police state. RFID tags give our government "internal security" abilities that Stalin and Hitler only dreamed about.
Son, we are building execution machines in Guatanamo NOW. Courtesy of Haliburton. The ovens are firing up, and I am screaming NOW before they get the idea that I would make a nice souffle.
I would be a little surprised if this were happening (yet), but not terribly so. Are these metaphorical execution machines or is there something we should know about?
Very telling, however, is that no one asked you to back up the rest of your post.
Also, you forgot to mention people taken off the streets without warrants, locked in prisons without charge and not allowed to speak to anyone. The government won't even say if they are being held or not. I saw pictures last year of mothers outside a prison holding signs with pictures of their sons - just wanting to know if they were in the prison. This was in AMERICA - "land of the free" - and not in Pinochet's Chile.
Anyone who doesn't see that we're all heading down right-wing rat hole is wearing blinders.
What convoluted psuedo-logic you speak. To say that we don't live in an increasingly oppressive police-state because people are openly complaining about their rights being violated is just weird. By speaking up and putting our freedom on the line there is still a chance to avoid the fate of actually having an Oberfuhrer Ashcroft.
And I always thought the 9/11 attacks had something to do with US policy decisions in the mid-east. Saying that the prohibition of contact with domestic FBI and non-domestic intelligence-gathering services CAUSED 9/11 is wrong. I won't even give you that they may have ALLOWED it to happen. The FBI knew that people listed as suspected terrorists were taking flying lessons and not bothering to learn how to land, but they chose to ignore the report from their field agent. Incompetence ALLOWED it to happen.
And by the way, WHAT &^$*@ RECOVERY? So we gained 22,000 jobs last quarter - we're still 500,000 in the hole.
You shouldn't take his original post too literally. I have no doubt it was flavored to make Himself sound reasonable and restrained and the other party as unreasonable as possible. I agree that IF the woman started shouting at him out of the blue then she was a boor, but that is a big "if". I don't believe BlockHeadMopar's account of the incident for a second.
And by the way, I apologize for going after you as strongly as I did. I understand what you were trying to say about confrontational women (aka people), and still being annoyed at BlockheadMopar I chose to misinterpret it.
I'll ignore the "So you also think women should go around yelling at men in public?" quote above for the same reason, althought the temptation to make a remark about the Taliban is strong. I think what you mean is the PEOPLE should not go around yelling at PEOPLE in public. Right?
This was a very long rant about how superior you are as a human being. However, all it points out is how limited you are in your perception of the world. You confuse technicality with importance, and mathematical difficulty with difficulty in finding meaningful understanding of ANY subject. For you, if it isn't a subject that can be quantified on a multiple choice test it is neither difficult nor important. That is almost beyond ignorance, as nothing could be further from reality. Understanding problems with answers that can be picked from a multiple choice tests (no matter how difficult the test) are trivial compared to understanding problems that don't have right or wrong answers and may not even have answers at all.
Your example of Beowolf being easy is classic self-delusion. It isn't READING 30 pages of Beowolf, it is understanding what it means to our culture and how it reflects on our beliefs. It helps one understand how people think, and knowing that is immeasurably more important than being able to calculate Gaussian flux (an ability with somewhat limited usefulness you have to admit). Of course all this is wasted on you, but maybe someone else will read this and see that there is more to the world than than can be quantified on your little multiple choice test, and what can't be is neither easy nor 'bullshit' (as you so elequently put it).
And by the way I have advanced degrees in environmental sciences and engineering.
I thank you too, filmsmith. I am both an engineer and an artist. Probably the most telling thing I can think of about my feelings for both careers is that I will tell people I am a technical person at the drop of a hat while I always hesitate to tell them I am an artist. This is NOT because I am ashamed of the artist but because I always feel as though I am bragging when I say "I'm an artist." No one ever gets accused of bragging when they announce they're in a technical field no matter how well they can factor terms.
Why would I want to date some undereducated, self-righteous, loudmouthed bitch who hears something, jumps to the wrong conclusions, and insults someone in public about it, making a complete fool of herself? I don't need someone like that in my life.
We can all thank our lucky stars that there are perfect people like you around.
As for uneducated - I've found that the most uneducated people are frequently the engineering types who know little about anything other than techno-crap. And before you say it, I have an engineering degree. I am also an artist.
As for women who don't push their different opinions on you - can you say "Stepford wives"? For me, any woman who doesn't have her own opinions and is strong enough to express them isn't worth my time. If I want my ideas fed back to me I'll buy a tape recorder.
During the Latest Gulf War our highly trained dolphins decided to leave the employ of the US government and were never heard from again. I guess they were smarter than the Navy thought.
I think you have it backwards. The written story definately lets you know Deckard is an android (or at least heavily hints at the possibility). In fact, I read the story after seeing Bladerunner, learned that Dekard was an android, and thought - "Oh, that explains a lot" about the movie.
Well, I guess I can see their point after Harvey Milk plus the recent City Hall shooting in New York City; but I can also see where an official "talking to" by the State Police would be chilling and not normally appropriate in a democracy.
Bug an official too much and [you're] liable to get a "talking to" by the authorities and still never get to the official.
BrynM, is this for real and you know it happens, or are you just projecting a potential issue to make your point? Officially intimidating citizens to stop expressing their opinions to officials is one of the most un-American things I can imagine.
Look, when a multi-billion dollar company like Enron implodes due to fraud and theft, making the front pages of every newspaper in the country, even the Bush administration will cut and run on their fat-cat buddies. Especially when the stories start talking about Kenny-boy Lay's close ties to the White House.
Ridiculous. These people became multi-milionaires and billionaires. Where do you think that money came from?
It came from investors who believed their lies and handed them their hard-earned money as an investment. So you think confidence men and con-artists don't steal money because they didn't grab a purse? What a novel viwpoint.
Besides, Enron executives did more than just inflate their company's earnings statements - they actually created shell companies that stripped money out of Enron into their own pockets.
From a purely emperical point of view, the war on terrorism is not working because there are a lot more terrorists now that there were on 9/11. Bush policies are creating terrorists by solidifying the opposition and increasing their resolve and fanaticism.
There are a lot more suicide bombers (and bombings) now than before the "war on terrorism" and the Iraq invasion. Bush and his minions are too arrogant to ever admit they have made the terrorist threat to Americans greater than it ever was.
Bush has squandered a world-wide sympathy and support for the United States in his arrogant, stupid personal war on Saddam. Saddam wasn't bothering us much before the invasion, but Bush has succeeded in making Iraq the biggest problem we have now, greater even that Al Queda. The resources we are devoting to Iraq would have been better spent gaining allies around the world and chasing down every last Al Queda operative.
Bush policies have turned the US into a lone wolf, and we are in over our heads and don't even have enough troops or money to handle things as they are, much less increase the effort against the real Al Queda terrorists. The Bush administration has alredy re-activated the draft boards across the country. Expect a military draft within a year.
Hey, one good thing - if you are out of work because of the economy, maybe you will be lucky enough to work for the army as a draftee.
If you dig into that site you will find...wait for it....drum roll...
The primary sponsorship for this project comes from the Public Information Committee of the American Nuclear Society...
and you actually believe the information coming from this this self-serving, industry-sponsored site? Your post sounds a lot like the spin that comes from the talking points provided for pro-nuclear speakers on the ANS site itself. If we are to believe them, everything is rosey and perfect in the nuclear industry and there are no issues at all with nuclear power that aren't raised by anyone other than ill-informed, non-technical luddites who think radioactive material is green goo (I got the green goo thing from their website).
Maybe a better resource for/.ers would be the book "Trust Us, We're Experts", which throws light on these so-called experts, their spin machines, and their tactics.
Nuclear power is SAFER than traditional power because fewer nuclear workers have been killed? Hogwash. If that's the case then walking in a minefield is safer than driving a car.
Welll... actually yes we do. Don't try taking one on an airplane these days.
Tests have shown that an aircraft hitting a dome would hardly scratch it.
There have not been any such tests. There were engineering estimates made that concluded that a nuclear containment dome would probably survive an aircraft impact, but even those estimates were only made with the largest aircraft at the time, a Boeing 707. Aircraft today are much larger and there is the added problem of having them packed with explosives or even shaped munitions designed to breach the vessel.
There is potential in designs of this type I think, but we can't rely on the overly optimistic article referenced by the oriinal post to be the basis for our informed decision on its safety.
I don't think they're luddites, particularly. They like technology, its more that they are just lazy. It is far easier to poke holes in an idea and point out why it won't work than it is to think of a way to make it better or to come up with creative extensions of the idea. I think there is also a lot of thinking along the lines of: "I'll look really smart if I show why this ideas is no good".
Another trend I see on/. is taking one miniscule part of an otherwise informative post, focusing on that one part and ignoring the creativity or insight that was in the rest of it. A perfect example was the post saying this idea was no good because it was tethered - how ridiculous!
I just try to ignore these kinds of posts as background noise.
One way to power to them would be by laser. A small photovoltaic cell on the robot could charge a capacitor or battery when hit by a laser beam. It should be easy to do with radar-guided lasers. This would make them very good for reconnaisance purposes. When the juice is running low they move to a location where they would have a line-of-sight link with the charging laser. Once charged they would then move back to surveil caves, ravines, structures and other dangerous areas. By using several of them at the same time, constant surveillance could be maintained - while a few are in the active zone, several more are at altitude getting charged. They could even be charged when they are inside buildings by moving to a window for a quick power top-up.
You are mistaken if you think they couldn't fire him. Unless he is in a labor union a company can do anything they want to an employee. An employer can fire an employee if they don't like the color of his socks, literally. It may not be right, it may not be moral and sometimes it may not be legal, but there are so many ways to skin a cat if a company wants an employee out it is easy for them to do.
Technically there are laws to prevent wrongful termination abuses, but in reality the company has all the power. No lawyer is going to take an employee's case if the amounts to be recovered are small, and the company knows that. It is also very difficult to win these cases even if the awards would be large. It is almost impossible to prove that the reason for a termination was not a reduction in force or due to a departmental restructuring, or was not made in good faith for any one of a hundred other reasons. Contrary to your opinion, the courts today are _very_ company-friendly when it comes to employment law. Decades of stacking the courts with right-wing conservative judges is taking its toll on the working wage-slaves.
Its the variant of the old 300-pound canary joke - What does the multi-billion dollar company do to an individual employee? Anything f**ing thing it wants to.
Slashdot Mirror
Its the same everyhwere.
At 4PM I once was belatedly notified that consultants hired by a new employee who had developed an applicaition were going to install it on one of our critical servers that night, and by the consultants who had been flown in to do it. WHAT! I shouted! - no you're not! I took tons of grief about being obstructionist and stubborn and unrealistic - it seemed there was nothing that could go wrong! it was a simple application! Senior management got involved but I stuck by my guns (in detriment to my career) and insisted that we at least pretend to follow perocedures and take a few days to develop a "what-if" strategy.. The server was so critical that I also insisted on having our own knowledgeable experts on hand during the install who were familiar with that server, etc. Guess what - the impossible happened and the server was trashed. If we had not prepared for disaster and had our own experts there with ready to fix it there would have been hell-to-pay. As it was it took more than six hours to get it back up.
Did I get any credit for this -I did not. I was obstructional and unnecesarily interfering with other people's work goals.
This should be modded up to +5. You clearly know of what you speak. I, too, developed a system for pennies on the dollar that saved millions and greatly improved compliance with regulations. For a second I thought you were me. Once the company had the system they decided it was no big deal andno longer needed a project manager for development and fired me. They now let everyone develop their own apps with no oversight to interoperability or even if it duplicates already in place systems. What a recipe for disaster.
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Companies need better planning, not less planning, but they need professionals to do it. One problem with independence is that everyone interprets planning as "interference" with their own pet projects. And that costs companies big in terms of money and people-resources needed to maintain all those disparate redundant systems.
And one of the biggest problems of all is that upper management doesn't have a clue that they don't have a clue.My group had over 80 applications spread over three independent divisions in my area of expertise. When resources couldn't be found to keep them running I was told to "just fix it" and when i didn't have it fixed in 90 days the project was deemed a failure. It makes me livid just to think about their stupidity even today.
Business needs better planning - not less planning.
Your logic that all the state could tell would be that the road to Dunkin Donuts is plowed really well is looking at the problem backwards. Dispatchers would actually be able to tell that the roads the drivers were supposed to be plowing weren't plowed, and could dispatch an actual working driver to do it.
I am sure the drivers are compensated for the time spent plowing and not time spent in Dunkin Donuts. I strongly suspect the exact details of when they are and are not compensated (including reasonable breaks) are spelled out in the contract. Employers, including state governments, have the right to monitor performance of contractors based on the contract requirements and to audit invoices for accuracy.
So the drivers are up for 20 hours... so what? They're compensated for it. Just because they are up for 20 hours doesn't mean they should be paid for six hours of dunkin donut time
Don't get me wrong - I know it is a hard job, and thanks to all the operators who keep the roads clear. But there are a always a few people in any group who take advantage of any opportunity to cheat. Those few actaully make it more difficult for the working drivers who have to spend more time doing the cheater's work as well as their own. And let's not forget the danger to the public that the cheaters cause by not clearing the roads they should have cleared.
When you push the bounderies of any technology, as with the Osprey, it is more dangerous than using an established technology. During development and early years of the Harrier many, many pilots were killed and aircraft lost - partly due to new skills needed to fly them and partly to problems with the planes themselves - an identical situation with the Osprey. The same argument you make about a failed application of a new technology could have been applied to the airplane itself, helicopters, the steam train, steamships, or even the automobile. In all cases they frequently crashed, exploded, burned and killed people regularly until the bugs were worked out. Even the first of the jet-powered airliners crashed frequently simply because they made the windows too big.
Thankfully we didn't abandon any of those technologies because of early accidents. True, there are some truly bad wacky-fringe ideas such as rocket-powered cars and nuclear-powered aircraft that deserved to be abandoned, but the Osprey doesn't fall into the wacky category.
We shouldn't immediately blame the technology as faulty and proclaim failure when things go wrong with new technologies - we always learn as we go and that is the price of progress.
This isn't a case of the money going to people in India who need it or going to people in the US or Germany who need it - the problem is that the money is going to the CORPORATIONS and the FAT CATS that run them instead of to those people. The money is going to pay for 6 million dollar birthday parties in Greece for CEO's blond 30 year old trophy wives, or 250 million retirement packages for stock exchange heads, or for corporate jets for Enron executives' wives to take shopping trips to Paris, ...and yachts, cars, women, and obscene houses in Palm Beach, Palm Springs or Gstaad.
This is classic depression-era corporate greed. If there is an over-abundance of non-organized workers, companies can take advantage of that by having them bid against each other until the workers become so desperate that they will work for what isn't even a living wage - and there will STILL be people willing to work for less because working yourself to death slowly is preferable to starving to death quickly. And some people think this is great free-market stuff!?? Some poeple think it is a good idea to drive wages down for everyone for the benefit of the companies!? And why should we think that the $2/day rate in India is the lowest it can go? Do you really think that companies who can get the Indians to bid against each other won't fire all those $2 people if a $1 offer comes along and then fire all of them if a $0.80 offer appears?
The companies who outsource jobs overseas do nothing to support the community that allows them to work here in security and opulence. They take advantage of the low wages overseas and simultaneously feed off their own neighbors by charging US prices for the cheap goods.
They can only do it because not all companies have moved in that direction yet. As a result there are still enough middle class americans to buy their products. When enough jobs are moved to India so that there aren't enough poeople left to buy their products, the economy and their businesses will be destroyed (as in WorldCom and Enron) but they will have their yachts, jets and fancy houses already, so why should they give a shit. After all, they are the elite of the elite. They actually think they DESERVE to suck the wealth of the nation into their own gut.
If you have an RFID implant the government will be able to track you anywhere you go simply by placing passive RFID scanners on the street. They will also be able to tell who you are walking with and who you know. But this ability isn't confined to implanted RFID tags, they can do the same with any RFID tags in your clothes! So ID#347654-0 shows up at an anti-war rally and guess what, that shirt was sold to YOU, John Smith, at the Eugene, Oregon Eddie Bauer store. (And by the way, why were you in Eugene, Oregon in July 2003?).
Think you can pay for your clothes with cash and avoid it? Nope, all it takes is for you to identify yourself once at any government office or airline check-in counter having a scanner for all your tags to be assigned to you.
RFID tags in clothing is the holy grail of a police state. RFID tags give our government "internal security" abilities that Stalin and Hitler only dreamed about.
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Son, we are building execution machines in Guatanamo NOW. Courtesy of Haliburton. The ovens are firing up, and I am screaming NOW before they get the idea that I would make a nice souffle.
I would be a little surprised if this were happening (yet), but not terribly so. Are these metaphorical execution machines or is there something we should know about?
Very telling, however, is that no one asked you to back up the rest of your post.
Also, you forgot to mention people taken off the streets without warrants, locked in prisons without charge and not allowed to speak to anyone. The government won't even say if they are being held or not. I saw pictures last year of mothers outside a prison holding signs with pictures of their sons - just wanting to know if they were in the prison. This was in AMERICA - "land of the free" - and not in Pinochet's Chile.
Anyone who doesn't see that we're all heading down right-wing rat hole is wearing blinders.
What convoluted psuedo-logic you speak. To say that we don't live in an increasingly oppressive police-state because people are openly complaining about their rights being violated is just weird. By speaking up and putting our freedom on the line there is still a chance to avoid the fate of actually having an Oberfuhrer Ashcroft.
And I always thought the 9/11 attacks had something to do with US policy decisions in the mid-east. Saying that the prohibition of contact with domestic FBI and non-domestic intelligence-gathering services CAUSED 9/11 is wrong. I won't even give you that they may have ALLOWED it to happen. The FBI knew that people listed as suspected terrorists were taking flying lessons and not bothering to learn how to land, but they chose to ignore the report from their field agent. Incompetence ALLOWED it to happen.
And by the way, WHAT &^$*@ RECOVERY? So we gained 22,000 jobs last quarter - we're still 500,000 in the hole.
You shouldn't take his original post too literally. I have no doubt it was flavored to make Himself sound reasonable and restrained and the other party as unreasonable as possible. I agree that IF the woman started shouting at him out of the blue then she was a boor, but that is a big "if". I don't believe BlockHeadMopar's account of the incident for a second.
And by the way, I apologize for going after you as strongly as I did. I understand what you were trying to say about confrontational women (aka people), and still being annoyed at BlockheadMopar I chose to misinterpret it.
I'll ignore the "So you also think women should go around yelling at men in public?" quote above for the same reason, althought the temptation to make a remark about the Taliban is strong. I think what you mean is the PEOPLE should not go around yelling at PEOPLE in public. Right?
This was a very long rant about how superior you are as a human being. However, all it points out is how limited you are in your perception of the world. You confuse technicality with importance, and mathematical difficulty with difficulty in finding meaningful understanding of ANY subject. For you, if it isn't a subject that can be quantified on a multiple choice test it is neither difficult nor important. That is almost beyond ignorance, as nothing could be further from reality. Understanding problems with answers that can be picked from a multiple choice tests (no matter how difficult the test) are trivial compared to understanding problems that don't have right or wrong answers and may not even have answers at all.
Your example of Beowolf being easy is classic self-delusion. It isn't READING 30 pages of Beowolf, it is understanding what it means to our culture and how it reflects on our beliefs. It helps one understand how people think, and knowing that is immeasurably more important than being able to calculate Gaussian flux (an ability with somewhat limited usefulness you have to admit). Of course all this is wasted on you, but maybe someone else will read this and see that there is more to the world than than can be quantified on your little multiple choice test, and what can't be is neither easy nor 'bullshit' (as you so elequently put it).
And by the way I have advanced degrees in environmental sciences and engineering.
I thank you too, filmsmith. I am both an engineer and an artist. Probably the most telling thing I can think of about my feelings for both careers is that I will tell people I am a technical person at the drop of a hat while I always hesitate to tell them I am an artist. This is NOT because I am ashamed of the artist but because I always feel as though I am bragging when I say "I'm an artist." No one ever gets accused of bragging when they announce they're in a technical field no matter how well they can factor terms.
Lots of easy karma points from dittohead Slashdot moderators
WELL SAID! I've noticed this too, but couldn't express it nearly as well.
Why would I want to date some undereducated, self-righteous, loudmouthed bitch who hears something, jumps to the wrong conclusions, and insults someone in public about it, making a complete fool of herself? I don't need someone like that in my life.
We can all thank our lucky stars that there are perfect people like you around.
As for uneducated - I've found that the most uneducated people are frequently the engineering types who know little about anything other than techno-crap. And before you say it, I have an engineering degree. I am also an artist.
As for women who don't push their different opinions on you - can you say "Stepford wives"? For me, any woman who doesn't have her own opinions and is strong enough to express them isn't worth my time. If I want my ideas fed back to me I'll buy a tape recorder.
During the Latest Gulf War our highly trained dolphins decided to leave the employ of the US government and were never heard from again. I guess they were smarter than the Navy thought.
I think you have it backwards. The written story definately lets you know Deckard is an android (or at least heavily hints at the possibility). In fact, I read the story after seeing Bladerunner, learned that Dekard was an android, and thought - "Oh, that explains a lot" about the movie.
Well, I guess I can see their point after Harvey Milk plus the recent City Hall shooting in New York City; but I can also see where an official "talking to" by the State Police would be chilling and not normally appropriate in a democracy.
Bug an official too much and [you're] liable to get a "talking to" by the authorities and still never get to the official.
BrynM, is this for real and you know it happens, or are you just projecting a potential issue to make your point? Officially intimidating citizens to stop expressing their opinions to officials is one of the most un-American things I can imagine.
Look, when a multi-billion dollar company like Enron implodes due to fraud and theft, making the front pages of every newspaper in the country, even the Bush administration will cut and run on their fat-cat buddies. Especially when the stories start talking about Kenny-boy Lay's close ties to the White House.
Ridiculous. These people became multi-milionaires and billionaires. Where do you think that money came from?
It came from investors who believed their lies and handed them their hard-earned money as an investment. So you think confidence men and con-artists don't steal money because they didn't grab a purse? What a novel viwpoint.
Besides, Enron executives did more than just inflate their company's earnings statements - they actually created shell companies that stripped money out of Enron into their own pockets.
From a purely emperical point of view, the war on terrorism is not working because there are a lot more terrorists now that there were on 9/11. Bush policies are creating terrorists by solidifying the opposition and increasing their resolve and fanaticism.
There are a lot more suicide bombers (and bombings) now than before the "war on terrorism" and the Iraq invasion. Bush and his minions are too arrogant to ever admit they have made the terrorist threat to Americans greater than it ever was.
Bush has squandered a world-wide sympathy and support for the United States in his arrogant, stupid personal war on Saddam. Saddam wasn't bothering us much before the invasion, but Bush has succeeded in making Iraq the biggest problem we have now, greater even that Al Queda. The resources we are devoting to Iraq would have been better spent gaining allies around the world and chasing down every last Al Queda operative.
Bush policies have turned the US into a lone wolf, and we are in over our heads and don't even have enough troops or money to handle things as they are, much less increase the effort against the real Al Queda terrorists. The Bush administration has alredy re-activated the draft boards across the country. Expect a military draft within a year.
Hey, one good thing - if you are out of work because of the economy, maybe you will be lucky enough to work for the army as a draftee.
If you dig into that site you will find...wait for it....drum roll...
/.ers would be the book "Trust Us, We're Experts", which throws light on these so-called experts, their spin machines, and their tactics.
The primary sponsorship for this project comes from the Public Information Committee of the American Nuclear Society...
and you actually believe the information coming from this this self-serving, industry-sponsored site? Your post sounds a lot like the spin that comes from the talking points provided for pro-nuclear speakers on the ANS site itself. If we are to believe them, everything is rosey and perfect in the nuclear industry and there are no issues at all with nuclear power that aren't raised by anyone other than ill-informed, non-technical luddites who think radioactive material is green goo (I got the green goo thing from their website).
Maybe a better resource for
Nuclear power is SAFER than traditional power because fewer nuclear workers have been killed? Hogwash. If that's the case then walking in a minefield is safer than driving a car.
Do we ban knives because people get stabbed?
Welll... actually yes we do. Don't try taking one on an airplane these days.
Tests have shown that an aircraft hitting a dome would hardly scratch it.
There have not been any such tests. There were engineering estimates made that concluded that a nuclear containment dome would probably survive an aircraft impact, but even those estimates were only made with the largest aircraft at the time, a Boeing 707. Aircraft today are much larger and there is the added problem of having them packed with explosives or even shaped munitions designed to breach the vessel.
There is potential in designs of this type I think, but we can't rely on the overly optimistic article referenced by the oriinal post to be the basis for our informed decision on its safety.
I don't think they're luddites, particularly. They like technology, its more that they are just lazy. It is far easier to poke holes in an idea and point out why it won't work than it is to think of a way to make it better or to come up with creative extensions of the idea. I think there is also a lot of thinking along the lines of: "I'll look really smart if I show why this ideas is no good".
/. is taking one miniscule part of an otherwise informative post, focusing on that one part and ignoring the creativity or insight that was in the rest of it. A perfect example was the post saying this idea was no good because it was tethered - how ridiculous!
Another trend I see on
I just try to ignore these kinds of posts as background noise.
One way to power to them would be by laser. A small photovoltaic cell on the robot could charge a capacitor or battery when hit by a laser beam. It should be easy to do with radar-guided lasers. This would make them very good for reconnaisance purposes. When the juice is running low they move to a location where they would have a line-of-sight link with the charging laser. Once charged they would then move back to surveil caves, ravines, structures and other dangerous areas. By using several of them at the same time, constant surveillance could be maintained - while a few are in the active zone, several more are at altitude getting charged. They could even be charged when they are inside buildings by moving to a window for a quick power top-up.
You are mistaken if you think they couldn't fire him. Unless he is in a labor union a company can do anything they want to an employee. An employer can fire an employee if they don't like the color of his socks, literally. It may not be right, it may not be moral and sometimes it may not be legal, but there are so many ways to skin a cat if a company wants an employee out it is easy for them to do.
Technically there are laws to prevent wrongful termination abuses, but in reality the company has all the power. No lawyer is going to take an employee's case if the amounts to be recovered are small, and the company knows that. It is also very difficult to win these cases even if the awards would be large. It is almost impossible to prove that the reason for a termination was not a reduction in force or due to a departmental restructuring, or was not made in good faith for any one of a hundred other reasons. Contrary to your opinion, the courts today are _very_ company-friendly when it comes to employment law. Decades of stacking the courts with right-wing conservative judges is taking its toll on the working wage-slaves.
Its the variant of the old 300-pound canary joke - What does the multi-billion dollar company do to an individual employee? Anything f**ing thing it wants to.