I suspect that the FCC will eventually have to step-in. One of the Part 15 rules is about not interfering, and clearly that's not working out so well. I can imagine a day when power levels have to be so low that an AP is basically only good for the room that it's in, or that's the default programming on an AP even if the end user might be able to raise it, and then the process to raise it would require bringing it up in steps, so that the user is encouraged to keep testing as they keep raising the level, so that they stop when they find enough power.
I want Linux on a laptop. The bulk of my work involves connecting at the command-line to other systems, sometimes through SSH, sometimes through serial. I like that the same command-line interface for initiating these connections is also the command line interface through which I can manipulate files in the filesystem, edit files through text editors, and manipulate files through command-line utilities.
While usually I can do my work from the office, sometimes I have to work in the field too. It's much easier to have one computer doing that work than it is to have one at the office, one out in the field, and one at home. Unfortunately the newest batch of portable computers, the convertible tablets, don't work well with X-Windows. This means having to have a separate computer at the office to connect into in order to work out of if I want access to everything that is helpful.
I've played with OSX-based laptops, I find the GUI clunky when it comes to working with multiple terminal windows, as Apple has taken the approach of using Apple-Tab to switch between applications, rather than switch between windows. It's more awkward than it should be to switch between multiple terminal sessions quickly. It also doesn't help that Apple has removed important keys from the keyboard, like pgup/pgdn, home/end, back-tab as shift of tab, and the distinction between backspace and delete, so a lot of the keys and combinations that I use effectively aren't available to me on the Mac.
I've ever heard of Guido-something or Allan Day, and Linux's mascot as a penguin, as an amimal that Linus Torvalds happens to like, has gotten fanbois salivating at the zoo near their enclosure.
Mr. Torvalds has a bit of a cult of personality around him, even if he doesn't participate with it much or contribute to it.
For many uses of Linux such as on the desktop, other software beyond the kernel and the base GNU tools are required. What other projects would you like to see given priority, and what would you like to see implemented or improved?
Admittedly I thought most about X-Windows when asking this question; but I don't doubt that other daemons or systems can be just as important to the user experience.
If pre-algebra, aka, 6th grade through 8th grade study counts as math for high school graduation, the basic use of logic structures for loops and control in programming may as well count too.
Inch by inch, the social justice warriors are getting closer to the truth that boys dominate these fields because of all of their informal experience. Why? Because boys tend to be more willing to go against peer pressure and do what interests them. Male nerds and geeks may resent peer pressure and bullying, but they'll stick to what they like. Never met a single boy who took the attitude that he couldn't pursue his hobbies because of peer pressure unless those hobbies were things you don't mention in polite society (and maybe even make the avante garde squeamish).
No, girls don't need "more pushing." It would be a problem if a family let the sons fire up an IDE, editor + interpreter, etc. and told the girls that that was forbidden for them. I can pretty much assure you, that in the vast majority of American households, even religious ones, that doesn't happen. What naturally happens is that the boys will say "this is cool" and try it out and the girl will make all sorts of excuses ranging from lack of interest, to what would her girlfriends think.
And no, boys by and large don't put pressure on girls to not share hobbies with them. I've never met a red-blooded male who thought a generally feminine female who shared most of his interests was a bad thing.
I don't think that your conclusions are entirely correct.
Boys accept being ostracized from the mainstream more readily than girls, and ostracized boys form their own culture. One of those cultures revolves around technology past the point of being a simple user of it. To a degree it's involuntary. There are girls in that culture too, but in my anecdotal experiences many of the girls are there more by choice than out of necessity.
The nature of manipulating technology lends itself to those that are accustomed to isolation and to spending very long periods of time working on something to the exclusion of other things. Those that find themselves alone already start out with a perverse advantage in that regard.
True. My '95 Impala is a bastard, it's got the GM OBD-I connector, but it doesn't work with conventional OBD-I code readers. I own an OBD-I/II reader, but it doesn't work with that either. Unfortunately I'll have to find an old Tech1 if I want to read my car's computer codes, an those are very, very pricey.
Yep. I imagine the only sort of thing that would work would be an encrypted archiving format, but there will not be a seamless method to open the contents. One will probably have to manually decrypt all files in order to have access to them.
This is par for the course with cloud, aka, someone else's computer. If you want secure, you need to buy your own server, set it up with an encrypted file system, pay for colocation in a datacenter, and host everything yourself.
Have you actually studied the cost to grade-out a site, pour the necessary footings and build the shack, assemble the tower, cable the tower and the building, and supply electricity to it, compared to the cost to build a satellite and launch the satellite?
I bet that for a given number of rural subscribers over a the same area, the cell towers will always be cheaper, especially when long-term maintenance of the tower sites versus the continued construction and launch of not-physically-maintainable sateliites is factored in.
Consider another analogy... 802.11 wireless technology is constantly being revised. Wired technology is mature. One 48-port switch can cover an area of about 200,000 square feet, about 18,500 square meters, assuming that the area is cabled, and can give 1Gb connectivity to all devices, and if the devices follow the usual utilization patterns, a 10Gb trunk would be more than adequate. That switch with fiber transceiver probably costs $10,000, and if there's a high-end router needed, add another $10,000. Drops and infrastructure costs about $150 per drop assuming that one uses higher-cost plenum-rated cable and quality jacks and faceplates. Let's be pessimistic and add some supplies cost and we end up at $7500. So, a generously-high-end setup, probably far more than needed, is $27500 for equipment and installation, and it will run for more than a decade.
To do wireless in that same area you'll probably need more than twelve access points, and at two drops per AP to use 802.11ac you still need the 48-port switch. Now you need to buy APs. You might not need 24 (ie, use every copper port) but you'll spend $300 per AP to cable them, plus $250 per AP itself. You'll spend $2500 for the controller too. The router doesn't change. So, take the original $27,500 and add the $2500, then add the money for the APs.
Now scale-up to most size organizations, which have many more than 48 users in 200,000 square feet. Your switch needs probably will decrease on a wireless solution, but your AP and controller demands will go up if you want to keep the average user count per AP low enough to make the experience good, and as wireless technology keeps changing you're going to regularly re-buy those APs and somewhat regularly re-buy the controller(s).
Additionally importantly, some books are simply worth more than others, even in low-volume batches, especially if the books are necessities to those buying them. That's part why textbooks are so expensive, and part why Patricia Cornwell is sold in grocery stores and is perpetually 20% off the cover price. If mass-market paperbacks and even new hardcover books were too much more expensive they probably just wouldn't sell.
I assume that a lot of e-books are the same way, and honestly, they're not priced well, and too many middle-men get in the way. e-books should be the author selling right to me. Call it the exact opposite of the music distribution model; author owns the work and potentially contracts-out editing and marketing, and retains all profit after costs are paid or shares profits as a percentage with editors and marketing depending on the arrangement that they come to.
That Amazon is involved as a middleman is itself a problem. There's no need for the author to sell to Amazon for them to then sell to me when there's no physical medium for e-books, and for traditional publishing, Amazon should just be another traditional retailer, not something special.
When you've had a really, really good washing machine that handles a diverse set of fabrics with equal capability and relatively quietly washes them faster than the cycle time of the clothes dryer, you tend to not want to part with that machine.
Toploaders are the way to go. Frontloaders can suck it.
Homicide as a legal term and homicide as a language term are not the same thing actually. Any event where a human kills a human is homicide. That doesn't necessarily mean that a crime was committed through the act of killing though.
Note that I'm specifically not addressing the topic of abortion at all, for the sake of my post, I'm referring the to the killing of a human that exists outside the womb.
Is the fingerprint data going to the federal government or any other government entity outside of the school district food and nutrition department, or is the fingerprint data simply being used as a form of authentication, and then the data associated with the student's meal logged with the student's student information system tracking number?
In my experience with student information systems like SASI and Edupoint, there's a lot of information that the software tracks for the school district's purposes that isn't part of the export to the state reporting agency or to Title I or anything like that, and those systems usually don't even have DB columns for things like thumbprints. I expect that the IT department does an SIS export to the F&N department of enrollees, then the F&N department inputs thumbprints after importing the records list, so that when the kid puts their thumb on the scanner it looks up the record and confirms validity and notes the meal, then later exports the student number and meal, to either be sent to the SIS or to the state or federal agency. I very much doubt they're sending thumbprints between systems, the exports would take too damn long.
Thing is, while I do agree that a standard unit that allows for easy conversion has its advantages, the Metric System's units do not correlate well to real-world situations. 0 degrees Fahrenheit through 100 degrees Fahrenheit correspond well with the temperature range at which a human can work outdoors without resorting to special equipment. A foot, as it is similar to the anatomical part of the same name, is sized conveniently to work with in the physical world with things that the average person will interact with in arms-reach. A gallon of water is about at the limit of what most people can pour and handle in drinkable liquid.
I don't find the centimeter to be terribly useful, it's too big to replace the quarter-inch where high precision isn't important and the millimeter is too small in the same situations. There is no equivalent to the foot. Degrees Celsius are too far apart to make for gradation on weather maps; when all of the UK is at almost the same temperature on the scale it isn't doing a good job of differentiation. Likewise for tools; it's not common to find fractional units below 1/16 of an inch, but that is still larger than millimeters, so more wrenches and sockets are needed to cover a given size range than with SAE tools, and it's much easier to say above a certain size to stop using 1/16 inch divisions and use 1/8" or 1/4", but there is no clear case for when to start skipping whole-mm sizes.
I do agree that the Metric System works well for science. The relationship between joules, cubic centimeters, and degrees can really make science and engineering easy, and in those realms where the temperatures reach below the units-place digit and where the precision reaches down below tenths of millimeters it makes a lot of sense. It just seems...applied... to everything else whether it fits or not.
Admittedly I grew up in a Fractional world, but it still feels like SI isn't quite right even though it is internally consistent.
Yeah, was it so bad having a link to the discussion, oh, I donno, below the goddamn summary that one just finished reading?
If SoylentNews would get their goddamn color schemes where they looked good and weren't hard on the eyes like the burgundy I'd probably read there more often.
Thing is, he's right to a certain degree, in that the powerful usually have a degree of choice in what they do that isn't afforded to what the average person can do with regard to the law.
Look at the American South right before the Confederacy seceded. The population was around 9 million people, and over a third of those people were enslaved of African descent. Of the rest, probably a third were poor share-croppers and black freed-men or their descendants that were effectively serfs, vassals to the plantation owners on whose land they lived and worked. This was in a society that arguably was literally the richest in the world for a time; the wealthiest families centered around Charleston, South Carolina were richer than any royal families of any other countries in the world, all built on the backs of the people they exploited to toil for them. I suspect that this is why they expected the British Empire to side with them in the war, they thought the British and their class system would naturally align even though the British had discontinued direct slavery in the UK itself years earlier. Anyway, it literally took war and a million dead men to unseat those in power in the South, and even after slavery was legally abolished, we're still dealing with the fallout from it 150 years later.
Look at all of the major revolutions and you find that they resulted from the systematic abuse of accumulated power by the wealthy against the interests of the average person, and after revolution sometimes inequality reasserts itself. I've concluded that this is normal; just the way it is, and the altruisim that we believe to have existed in various parts of the world over time is either short-lived or else a fiction. That said we should still work toward it, but so many people at the bottom seem to think that give them one chance and they too can be at the top are willing to go against their own interests for a never-to-realize dream that it's getting harder and harder to push for that result.
Voice mail and/or a phone answering machine are my first lines of deference. Friends and family know how to get in touch ASAP if it's an emergency.
I find that the vast majority of robocallers are actually robodialers, with an actual human being on the other end. My solution is to get incredibly verbally abusive to them. I'm entirely calm but I use language that would peel the paint on a battleship and get truckers to cry. The amusing part is when they stammer and get defensive that I'm treating them this way and I get to remind them, "hey, you called me, remember?"
The owner in a construction setting typically doesn't manage the day-to-day details, they leave that up to the Contractor. The Contractor (as in Capital-C) both maintains its own employees that are on-salary in some fashion for the duration of the job, and brings in Subcontractors as contractors (lowercase-c) for a limited duration for a specific aspect of the project with specific scope that isn't open-ended. The Subcontractor may employ salaried employees or may themselves use contractors (lowercase-c) depending on their business model.
Generally the defining points are in degrees of oversight and duration of employment. Those indiviuals engaged as contractors (lowercase-c) usually are overseen in big-picture ways and have shorter duration jobs. Those that are on-staff are probably managed more and their jobs are open-ended, there's no scope built-in to their retention that defines the completion of their business arrangement.
The recent impacts also weren't large enough to cause more than regional damage. Didn't even reach regional surface devastation like Tunguska or regional geologic devastation like Barringer Crater.
I'm assuming that we'll never be able to reliably detect impactors as small as Tunguska, but we might be able to detect Barringer-sized objects if we make an effort to look for them.
If one puts nuclear devices into orbit, I expect that would would place solid-fuel rockets into orbit attached to the nukes. So long as they're not segmented with O-rings like the ones on the Space Shuttle they can probably remain up there service-free for decades and still function as intended.
Slashdot Mirror
...punch the-equiavlent-of-bin-laden apps?
Based on the amount of anti-bin-laden crap that was around the office after Sept 11, there's clearly a market for anti-bogeyman propaganda.
I suspect that the FCC will eventually have to step-in. One of the Part 15 rules is about not interfering, and clearly that's not working out so well. I can imagine a day when power levels have to be so low that an AP is basically only good for the room that it's in, or that's the default programming on an AP even if the end user might be able to raise it, and then the process to raise it would require bringing it up in steps, so that the user is encouraged to keep testing as they keep raising the level, so that they stop when they find enough power.
I want Linux on a laptop. The bulk of my work involves connecting at the command-line to other systems, sometimes through SSH, sometimes through serial. I like that the same command-line interface for initiating these connections is also the command line interface through which I can manipulate files in the filesystem, edit files through text editors, and manipulate files through command-line utilities.
While usually I can do my work from the office, sometimes I have to work in the field too. It's much easier to have one computer doing that work than it is to have one at the office, one out in the field, and one at home. Unfortunately the newest batch of portable computers, the convertible tablets, don't work well with X-Windows. This means having to have a separate computer at the office to connect into in order to work out of if I want access to everything that is helpful.
I've played with OSX-based laptops, I find the GUI clunky when it comes to working with multiple terminal windows, as Apple has taken the approach of using Apple-Tab to switch between applications, rather than switch between windows. It's more awkward than it should be to switch between multiple terminal sessions quickly. It also doesn't help that Apple has removed important keys from the keyboard, like pgup/pgdn, home/end, back-tab as shift of tab, and the distinction between backspace and delete, so a lot of the keys and combinations that I use effectively aren't available to me on the Mac.
I've ever heard of Guido-something or Allan Day, and Linux's mascot as a penguin, as an amimal that Linus Torvalds happens to like, has gotten fanbois salivating at the zoo near their enclosure.
Mr. Torvalds has a bit of a cult of personality around him, even if he doesn't participate with it much or contribute to it.
Mr. Torvalds,
For many uses of Linux such as on the desktop, other software beyond the kernel and the base GNU tools are required. What other projects would you like to see given priority, and what would you like to see implemented or improved?
Admittedly I thought most about X-Windows when asking this question; but I don't doubt that other daemons or systems can be just as important to the user experience.
Thank you for your efforts all these years.
If pre-algebra, aka, 6th grade through 8th grade study counts as math for high school graduation, the basic use of logic structures for loops and control in programming may as well count too.
That doesn't work so well for Reddit.
The average person is stupid. What one needs is an intelligent editorial committee. Slashdot's quality in that regard is slipping.
Inch by inch, the social justice warriors are getting closer to the truth that boys dominate these fields because of all of their informal experience. Why? Because boys tend to be more willing to go against peer pressure and do what interests them. Male nerds and geeks may resent peer pressure and bullying, but they'll stick to what they like. Never met a single boy who took the attitude that he couldn't pursue his hobbies because of peer pressure unless those hobbies were things you don't mention in polite society (and maybe even make the avante garde squeamish).
No, girls don't need "more pushing." It would be a problem if a family let the sons fire up an IDE, editor + interpreter, etc. and told the girls that that was forbidden for them. I can pretty much assure you, that in the vast majority of American households, even religious ones, that doesn't happen. What naturally happens is that the boys will say "this is cool" and try it out and the girl will make all sorts of excuses ranging from lack of interest, to what would her girlfriends think.
And no, boys by and large don't put pressure on girls to not share hobbies with them. I've never met a red-blooded male who thought a generally feminine female who shared most of his interests was a bad thing.
I don't think that your conclusions are entirely correct.
Boys accept being ostracized from the mainstream more readily than girls, and ostracized boys form their own culture. One of those cultures revolves around technology past the point of being a simple user of it. To a degree it's involuntary. There are girls in that culture too, but in my anecdotal experiences many of the girls are there more by choice than out of necessity.
The nature of manipulating technology lends itself to those that are accustomed to isolation and to spending very long periods of time working on something to the exclusion of other things. Those that find themselves alone already start out with a perverse advantage in that regard.
True. My '95 Impala is a bastard, it's got the GM OBD-I connector, but it doesn't work with conventional OBD-I code readers. I own an OBD-I/II reader, but it doesn't work with that either. Unfortunately I'll have to find an old Tech1 if I want to read my car's computer codes, an those are very, very pricey.
Yep. I imagine the only sort of thing that would work would be an encrypted archiving format, but there will not be a seamless method to open the contents. One will probably have to manually decrypt all files in order to have access to them.
This is par for the course with cloud, aka, someone else's computer. If you want secure, you need to buy your own server, set it up with an encrypted file system, pay for colocation in a datacenter, and host everything yourself.
Have you actually studied the cost to grade-out a site, pour the necessary footings and build the shack, assemble the tower, cable the tower and the building, and supply electricity to it, compared to the cost to build a satellite and launch the satellite?
I bet that for a given number of rural subscribers over a the same area, the cell towers will always be cheaper, especially when long-term maintenance of the tower sites versus the continued construction and launch of not-physically-maintainable sateliites is factored in.
Consider another analogy... 802.11 wireless technology is constantly being revised. Wired technology is mature. One 48-port switch can cover an area of about 200,000 square feet, about 18,500 square meters, assuming that the area is cabled, and can give 1Gb connectivity to all devices, and if the devices follow the usual utilization patterns, a 10Gb trunk would be more than adequate. That switch with fiber transceiver probably costs $10,000, and if there's a high-end router needed, add another $10,000. Drops and infrastructure costs about $150 per drop assuming that one uses higher-cost plenum-rated cable and quality jacks and faceplates. Let's be pessimistic and add some supplies cost and we end up at $7500. So, a generously-high-end setup, probably far more than needed, is $27500 for equipment and installation, and it will run for more than a decade.
To do wireless in that same area you'll probably need more than twelve access points, and at two drops per AP to use 802.11ac you still need the 48-port switch. Now you need to buy APs. You might not need 24 (ie, use every copper port) but you'll spend $300 per AP to cable them, plus $250 per AP itself. You'll spend $2500 for the controller too. The router doesn't change. So, take the original $27,500 and add the $2500, then add the money for the APs.
Now scale-up to most size organizations, which have many more than 48 users in 200,000 square feet. Your switch needs probably will decrease on a wireless solution, but your AP and controller demands will go up if you want to keep the average user count per AP low enough to make the experience good, and as wireless technology keeps changing you're going to regularly re-buy those APs and somewhat regularly re-buy the controller(s).
Only inspections here are literally emissions tests, and there are protocols to perform emissions tests on non-OBD-II vehicles already.
I will continue to drive older, low-mileage cars. Right now my two vehicles are both of the 1995 model year and neither is OBD-II.
Additionally importantly, some books are simply worth more than others, even in low-volume batches, especially if the books are necessities to those buying them. That's part why textbooks are so expensive, and part why Patricia Cornwell is sold in grocery stores and is perpetually 20% off the cover price. If mass-market paperbacks and even new hardcover books were too much more expensive they probably just wouldn't sell.
I assume that a lot of e-books are the same way, and honestly, they're not priced well, and too many middle-men get in the way. e-books should be the author selling right to me. Call it the exact opposite of the music distribution model; author owns the work and potentially contracts-out editing and marketing, and retains all profit after costs are paid or shares profits as a percentage with editors and marketing depending on the arrangement that they come to.
That Amazon is involved as a middleman is itself a problem. There's no need for the author to sell to Amazon for them to then sell to me when there's no physical medium for e-books, and for traditional publishing, Amazon should just be another traditional retailer, not something special.
When you've had a really, really good washing machine that handles a diverse set of fabrics with equal capability and relatively quietly washes them faster than the cycle time of the clothes dryer, you tend to not want to part with that machine.
Toploaders are the way to go. Frontloaders can suck it.
Homicide as a legal term and homicide as a language term are not the same thing actually. Any event where a human kills a human is homicide. That doesn't necessarily mean that a crime was committed through the act of killing though.
Note that I'm specifically not addressing the topic of abortion at all, for the sake of my post, I'm referring the to the killing of a human that exists outside the womb.
Is the fingerprint data going to the federal government or any other government entity outside of the school district food and nutrition department, or is the fingerprint data simply being used as a form of authentication, and then the data associated with the student's meal logged with the student's student information system tracking number?
In my experience with student information systems like SASI and Edupoint, there's a lot of information that the software tracks for the school district's purposes that isn't part of the export to the state reporting agency or to Title I or anything like that, and those systems usually don't even have DB columns for things like thumbprints. I expect that the IT department does an SIS export to the F&N department of enrollees, then the F&N department inputs thumbprints after importing the records list, so that when the kid puts their thumb on the scanner it looks up the record and confirms validity and notes the meal, then later exports the student number and meal, to either be sent to the SIS or to the state or federal agency. I very much doubt they're sending thumbprints between systems, the exports would take too damn long.
Thing is, while I do agree that a standard unit that allows for easy conversion has its advantages, the Metric System's units do not correlate well to real-world situations. 0 degrees Fahrenheit through 100 degrees Fahrenheit correspond well with the temperature range at which a human can work outdoors without resorting to special equipment. A foot, as it is similar to the anatomical part of the same name, is sized conveniently to work with in the physical world with things that the average person will interact with in arms-reach. A gallon of water is about at the limit of what most people can pour and handle in drinkable liquid.
I don't find the centimeter to be terribly useful, it's too big to replace the quarter-inch where high precision isn't important and the millimeter is too small in the same situations. There is no equivalent to the foot. Degrees Celsius are too far apart to make for gradation on weather maps; when all of the UK is at almost the same temperature on the scale it isn't doing a good job of differentiation. Likewise for tools; it's not common to find fractional units below 1/16 of an inch, but that is still larger than millimeters, so more wrenches and sockets are needed to cover a given size range than with SAE tools, and it's much easier to say above a certain size to stop using 1/16 inch divisions and use 1/8" or 1/4", but there is no clear case for when to start skipping whole-mm sizes.
I do agree that the Metric System works well for science. The relationship between joules, cubic centimeters, and degrees can really make science and engineering easy, and in those realms where the temperatures reach below the units-place digit and where the precision reaches down below tenths of millimeters it makes a lot of sense. It just seems...applied... to everything else whether it fits or not.
Admittedly I grew up in a Fractional world, but it still feels like SI isn't quite right even though it is internally consistent.
Yeah, was it so bad having a link to the discussion, oh, I donno, below the goddamn summary that one just finished reading?
If SoylentNews would get their goddamn color schemes where they looked good and weren't hard on the eyes like the burgundy I'd probably read there more often.
"I was just following orders" rarely works as a defense.
Thing is, he's right to a certain degree, in that the powerful usually have a degree of choice in what they do that isn't afforded to what the average person can do with regard to the law.
Look at the American South right before the Confederacy seceded. The population was around 9 million people, and over a third of those people were enslaved of African descent. Of the rest, probably a third were poor share-croppers and black freed-men or their descendants that were effectively serfs, vassals to the plantation owners on whose land they lived and worked. This was in a society that arguably was literally the richest in the world for a time; the wealthiest families centered around Charleston, South Carolina were richer than any royal families of any other countries in the world, all built on the backs of the people they exploited to toil for them. I suspect that this is why they expected the British Empire to side with them in the war, they thought the British and their class system would naturally align even though the British had discontinued direct slavery in the UK itself years earlier. Anyway, it literally took war and a million dead men to unseat those in power in the South, and even after slavery was legally abolished, we're still dealing with the fallout from it 150 years later.
Look at all of the major revolutions and you find that they resulted from the systematic abuse of accumulated power by the wealthy against the interests of the average person, and after revolution sometimes inequality reasserts itself. I've concluded that this is normal; just the way it is, and the altruisim that we believe to have existed in various parts of the world over time is either short-lived or else a fiction. That said we should still work toward it, but so many people at the bottom seem to think that give them one chance and they too can be at the top are willing to go against their own interests for a never-to-realize dream that it's getting harder and harder to push for that result.
Voice mail and/or a phone answering machine are my first lines of deference. Friends and family know how to get in touch ASAP if it's an emergency.
I find that the vast majority of robocallers are actually robodialers, with an actual human being on the other end. My solution is to get incredibly verbally abusive to them. I'm entirely calm but I use language that would peel the paint on a battleship and get truckers to cry. The amusing part is when they stammer and get defensive that I'm treating them this way and I get to remind them, "hey, you called me, remember?"
Am I missing something here?
The owner in a construction setting typically doesn't manage the day-to-day details, they leave that up to the Contractor. The Contractor (as in Capital-C) both maintains its own employees that are on-salary in some fashion for the duration of the job, and brings in Subcontractors as contractors (lowercase-c) for a limited duration for a specific aspect of the project with specific scope that isn't open-ended. The Subcontractor may employ salaried employees or may themselves use contractors (lowercase-c) depending on their business model.
Generally the defining points are in degrees of oversight and duration of employment. Those indiviuals engaged as contractors (lowercase-c) usually are overseen in big-picture ways and have shorter duration jobs. Those that are on-staff are probably managed more and their jobs are open-ended, there's no scope built-in to their retention that defines the completion of their business arrangement.
The recent impacts also weren't large enough to cause more than regional damage. Didn't even reach regional surface devastation like Tunguska or regional geologic devastation like Barringer Crater.
I'm assuming that we'll never be able to reliably detect impactors as small as Tunguska, but we might be able to detect Barringer-sized objects if we make an effort to look for them.
If one puts nuclear devices into orbit, I expect that would would place solid-fuel rockets into orbit attached to the nukes. So long as they're not segmented with O-rings like the ones on the Space Shuttle they can probably remain up there service-free for decades and still function as intended.