Words fail me. About the only thing I can imagine is that there is something in there that will utterly cripple morale when someone recognizes it for what it is and spreads the word. Of course, all this does it raise a giant banner up in the air saying, "PLEASE DO NOT LOOK AT THIS, THERE IS SOMETHING THAT WOULD EMBARRASS US!"
Well, either that, or this whole thing is designed to intensely focus analysis on something known to be benign.
SonicSpike links to what he calls "a transparent look at some statistics released by a small town's red-light camera program,"
"Small town?" While Farragut itself has only 20,000 people living in it, it's a suburb of Knoxville, and is part of the Knoxville metro (which has a population of almost 700,000 people). Characterizing it as a "small town" is highly misleading.
Many of the people I met in Fed prison had either done nothing, or something so minor as to certainly not merit hard time. (I was a bit of a jailhouse lawyer..not much else to do.) I saw guys serving 20 years for making a phone call. I am not kidding.
Then, you say:
Actually, at the spot I served, I never saw a single inmate who claimed to be innocent.
That doesn't exactly do much for your credibility.
Imagine the implications of a bunch of US carriers being sunk.
Given that US Navy carriers have a crew of around six thousand, I imagine that the US response to such an event would probably be very out of proportion to the actual event--on the order of turning the launch sites into glass, for example.
...or a software licensed per concurrent user,controlled by a dedicated server.
Even this doesn't always save you. For years, we've been running various engineering software from Bentley, who provides a license manager called SELECT Server for concurrent usage. Up until 2006 or so, it worked exactly the way you would expect it to--upon consuming all available licenses for $PROGRAM, it would inform the user that no licenses were available and disallow usage.
One day, they changed that behavior, and now usage is effectively unlimited--the SELECT server is merely an audit tool. When you exceed your license count, it still allows the user access, and logs an overage. Bentley claims this is for "user convenience" ("It's much better to allow the user access since it cuts down on frustration") but their sales reps will call you periodically claiming you have license problems, because you're exceeding your authorized usage "("You only have 8 seats of $APP, but you had 11 people using it at one point last month... I'll send you over a quote to resolve this ($TENS_OF_THOUSANDS)).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not someone who is ever going to suggest that we do everything better than the rest of the world, just because we're Americans. Honestly, it's very obvious to me when I am over there that they do many things better than we do (of course, there are things we do better than them as well).
Like I said, the 4Mbit DSL is the only cost effective option. Cable is not available (or wasn't in 2009, the last time I had a conversation about this with my colleagues over there). The town is fairly rural--it isn't even served by rail.
To go off on a tangent, it's kind of amusing to me... I've heard for years about how wonderful European mass transit is, how it's universal, how they do not have commutes like ours, how their homes are small, etc, and I have to say that from my experience, this is mostly true--but NOT universal. Whenever you travel to HQ, you fly into Bremen or Hamburg, then sit in a taxi for an hour, because trains do not go there. The local homes are fairly large (the average home is significantly larger than the average home where I live in east Tennessee). There isn't mass transit. Most of our professional employees live in Hamburg or Bremen, with 1+ hour commutes (driving, of course, and carpooling seems to be rare). The motorways are VERY crowded during the rush hours, and stop an go traffic is not uncommon. As I said in the previous post, it's enough that I take "$PROBLEM does not exist in Europe" with a large grain of salt.
Compare that to France's 28 mbps for ~$38 US, 50 mpbs for ~$65 or even 2.5 down/1.2 up gbps in Paris for ~$90 or how about Germany: 6 mbps for ~$26 or 32 mbps for ~$38.
You realize those service levels are not universal, right? My company's HQ is located between Bremen and Hamburg. The best data service available economically is 4Mbit DSL... anything better would require pulling a DS3 from Hamburg at phenomenal cost (>10k EUR/month). We have another site about 15 miles from Paris, and costs and availability are similar. Another office about 10 miles from Leeds in the UK. Similar story. Another office located in Shanghai, and the costs there were so high when we were shopping for an MPLS provider that it almost killed the project.
The most cost effective connectivity we have is in Bedford, NH, with the local cable co's lowest tier being 16mbit (they can live without comms for a few hours without suffering too much, so no SLA required).
(OTOH, our US HQ in east Tennessee can't get anything at all--not even consumer grade circuits--faster than DS1s at ~$750/month for each circuit).
Anyway, to get back on topic: whenever I hear that $COUNTRY is an absolute utopia for broadband that we have to emulate, I take it with a large grain of salt.
You assume I have any choice in what corporate purchasing dumps on us. We are big enough that the right hand and the left hand aren't well acquainted. Add in power struggles between IT and the purchasing group.
I commiserate with you. The solution for us at our site was to simply take the responsibility from everyone else in the company who had a finger in the pie. It's worked well for almost ten years now--in fact, it worked so well that corporate couldn't ignore it, and now it's written policy for all sites (including scheduled replacement time frames, and standard configurations).
You're probably bigger than we are (~10 sites in 6 countries, ~1000 employees) so may not be able to carry off such a revolution--in which case, I again commiserate with you.
''This was a sophisticated and lucrative operation with a multitiered management structure,'' the state attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, who oversees the task force, said in a statement. ''It was, however, nothing more than a prostitution ring, and now its owners and operators will be held accountable.''
The fact that this man is not subject to the same laws that he enforced is corrosive to justice.
Elliot Spitzer deserves an incredible amount of respect. He did wrong. He admitted it. He apologized for it. He resigned.
"Respect" is exactly opposite of what I feel for someone who put people in jail for the very acts he was himself engaged in. Further, the idea that resignation is seen as a suitable "punishment" for such a person is ridiculous. Note: I don't believe that people should be put in jail for engaging in a consensual "transaction" or this nature, but I firmly believe that our political leadership should be held to at least the same standard (and preferably a much higher one) as is applied to the general citizenry.
At work we have a fleet of assorted laptops, and regularly have to go on a scrounge to find a power brick for someone who is visiting from another location who either left their brick at the other office/hotel/home/car and is running low on power
Buy more standardized equipment, and you'll be amazed at how much easier life gets. I have fifteen different models of Dell laptops that have been in service here over the last decade and there have been a total of three, count them, three power brick designs--and the most recent two generations (D-series and E-series Latitude) are forward/backward compatible.
Of course, if you don't have any standards (buy an HP this week, an IBM/Lenovo next week, Toshiba the next) you end up with the nightmare you're dealing with--and the power bricks become the least of your problems since the dissimilar systems are a support nightmare all their own.
Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate for US Senate in Arizona, is using a copyright 'cease-and-desist' letter to stop her opponent, incumbent Harry Reid...
Harry Reid is from Nevada, so could not possibly be the opponent of someone running for senate in Arizona.
In the US, for example, (get this) corporations are now considered to be people and to have the same rights of free speech!
I don't think this issue is as cut and dried as it'd made out to be above. Arguing that corporate speech is not protected under the 1st amendment is essentially arguing that that people have fewer rights when acting collectively than they do when acting alone. I can't get behind this notion.
Where do you figure the ISS gets it's supplies from anyhow? Aliens?
I rather think how the ISS is supplied is not important in terms of this conversation. Simple fact is that you don't have to carry the supplies for a trip back with you, you can send them up ahead of time and collect them before returning.
Supplies save less than you might think because of the increase in crew size. Both will require roughly 42 person days of supplies - 3 crew times 14 days for Apollo, 7 crew times 6 days for the new module. Yes, six days. Two days to fly to the station, two days to fly from the station to re-entry, and two days for contingencies. (No, you can't shorten the fly to or fly home portions, those are dictated by orbital mechanics.)
If you assume you can re-provision at the ISS, then you could cut the supplies in half.
News flash - use Boost CDMA and you are using Sprint
I hereby retract "Sprint" from my statement above (not using Sprint, I didn't realize how poor their coverage actually was) but what I said still applies to AT&T and VZW.
Let's say we developed a system that detected earthquakes 1 minute before they went off, but 90% of the time it would be a false alarm. Then people proceed to ignore the alarm because it's usually wrong. Now when a real earthquake occurs, those who ignore the alarm blame it on bad technology.
I say no, this is the fault of the reaction, not the technology itself.
A broken clock is right twice a day, so there is no need to repair it?
Most of EU still has not realized that high taxes kill entrepreneurship, and thus kill the economy.
I agree with you in general, but the German economy is a particularly bad example to use here--calling their economy "strong" would be a massive understatement. Germany is second to the US in terms of total foreign exchange (second to China in terms of exports and imports, and third after the US and China for imports). Hell, their foreign exchange accounts for 2/3rds of the entire EU!
I live near a facility that manufactures food flavorings and scented additives, most notably ALL the scented oils that are used in the production of a well-known national candle store.
IFF smells better than the rest of New Jersey, though.:)
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Try fusing hydrogen, and I think that you will be pleasantly surprised.
Words fail me. About the only thing I can imagine is that there is something in there that will utterly cripple morale when someone recognizes it for what it is and spreads the word. Of course, all this does it raise a giant banner up in the air saying, "PLEASE DO NOT LOOK AT THIS, THERE IS SOMETHING THAT WOULD EMBARRASS US!"
Well, either that, or this whole thing is designed to intensely focus analysis on something known to be benign.
IOW: Damn Microsoft and their proprietary format. They should be more open, and use Adobe's proprietary format instead!
"Small town?" While Farragut itself has only 20,000 people living in it, it's a suburb of Knoxville, and is part of the Knoxville metro (which has a population of almost 700,000 people). Characterizing it as a "small town" is highly misleading.
First, you say:
Then, you say:
That doesn't exactly do much for your credibility.
Given that US Navy carriers have a crew of around six thousand, I imagine that the US response to such an event would probably be very out of proportion to the actual event--on the order of turning the launch sites into glass, for example.
Even this doesn't always save you. For years, we've been running various engineering software from Bentley, who provides a license manager called SELECT Server for concurrent usage. Up until 2006 or so, it worked exactly the way you would expect it to--upon consuming all available licenses for $PROGRAM, it would inform the user that no licenses were available and disallow usage.
One day, they changed that behavior, and now usage is effectively unlimited--the SELECT server is merely an audit tool. When you exceed your license count, it still allows the user access, and logs an overage. Bentley claims this is for "user convenience" ("It's much better to allow the user access since it cuts down on frustration") but their sales reps will call you periodically claiming you have license problems, because you're exceeding your authorized usage "("You only have 8 seats of $APP, but you had 11 people using it at one point last month... I'll send you over a quote to resolve this ($TENS_OF_THOUSANDS)).
It's fairly sickening.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not someone who is ever going to suggest that we do everything better than the rest of the world, just because we're Americans. Honestly, it's very obvious to me when I am over there that they do many things better than we do (of course, there are things we do better than them as well).
Like I said, the 4Mbit DSL is the only cost effective option. Cable is not available (or wasn't in 2009, the last time I had a conversation about this with my colleagues over there). The town is fairly rural--it isn't even served by rail.
To go off on a tangent, it's kind of amusing to me... I've heard for years about how wonderful European mass transit is, how it's universal, how they do not have commutes like ours, how their homes are small, etc, and I have to say that from my experience, this is mostly true--but NOT universal. Whenever you travel to HQ, you fly into Bremen or Hamburg, then sit in a taxi for an hour, because trains do not go there. The local homes are fairly large (the average home is significantly larger than the average home where I live in east Tennessee). There isn't mass transit. Most of our professional employees live in Hamburg or Bremen, with 1+ hour commutes (driving, of course, and carpooling seems to be rare). The motorways are VERY crowded during the rush hours, and stop an go traffic is not uncommon. As I said in the previous post, it's enough that I take "$PROBLEM does not exist in Europe" with a large grain of salt.
You realize those service levels are not universal, right? My company's HQ is located between Bremen and Hamburg. The best data service available economically is 4Mbit DSL... anything better would require pulling a DS3 from Hamburg at phenomenal cost (>10k EUR/month). We have another site about 15 miles from Paris, and costs and availability are similar. Another office about 10 miles from Leeds in the UK. Similar story. Another office located in Shanghai, and the costs there were so high when we were shopping for an MPLS provider that it almost killed the project.
The most cost effective connectivity we have is in Bedford, NH, with the local cable co's lowest tier being 16mbit (they can live without comms for a few hours without suffering too much, so no SLA required).
(OTOH, our US HQ in east Tennessee can't get anything at all--not even consumer grade circuits--faster than DS1s at ~$750/month for each circuit).
Anyway, to get back on topic: whenever I hear that $COUNTRY is an absolute utopia for broadband that we have to emulate, I take it with a large grain of salt.
I commiserate with you. The solution for us at our site was to simply take the responsibility from everyone else in the company who had a finger in the pie. It's worked well for almost ten years now--in fact, it worked so well that corporate couldn't ignore it, and now it's written policy for all sites (including scheduled replacement time frames, and standard configurations).
You're probably bigger than we are (~10 sites in 6 countries, ~1000 employees) so may not be able to carry off such a revolution--in which case, I again commiserate with you.
See this NY Times story from 2004 for an example. Choice quote:
The fact that this man is not subject to the same laws that he enforced is corrosive to justice.
"Respect" is exactly opposite of what I feel for someone who put people in jail for the very acts he was himself engaged in. Further, the idea that resignation is seen as a suitable "punishment" for such a person is ridiculous. Note: I don't believe that people should be put in jail for engaging in a consensual "transaction" or this nature, but I firmly believe that our political leadership should be held to at least the same standard (and preferably a much higher one) as is applied to the general citizenry.
Buy more standardized equipment, and you'll be amazed at how much easier life gets. I have fifteen different models of Dell laptops that have been in service here over the last decade and there have been a total of three, count them, three power brick designs--and the most recent two generations (D-series and E-series Latitude) are forward/backward compatible.
Of course, if you don't have any standards (buy an HP this week, an IBM/Lenovo next week, Toshiba the next) you end up with the nightmare you're dealing with--and the power bricks become the least of your problems since the dissimilar systems are a support nightmare all their own.
Harry Reid is from Nevada, so could not possibly be the opponent of someone running for senate in Arizona.
I don't think this issue is as cut and dried as it'd made out to be above. Arguing that corporate speech is not protected under the 1st amendment is essentially arguing that that people have fewer rights when acting collectively than they do when acting alone. I can't get behind this notion.
I rather think how the ISS is supplied is not important in terms of this conversation. Simple fact is that you don't have to carry the supplies for a trip back with you, you can send them up ahead of time and collect them before returning.
If you assume you can re-provision at the ISS, then you could cut the supplies in half.
I hereby retract "Sprint" from my statement above (not using Sprint, I didn't realize how poor their coverage actually was) but what I said still applies to AT&T and VZW.
Bad example, here--AT&T, Sprint, or VZW actually are "premium" services compared to Boost or Cricket. Just look at the coverage maps.
A broken clock is right twice a day, so there is no need to repair it?
I guess what you're saying is that in Soviet Russia, drugs absorb Ozzy?
I agree with you in general, but the German economy is a particularly bad example to use here--calling their economy "strong" would be a massive understatement. Germany is second to the US in terms of total foreign exchange (second to China in terms of exports and imports, and third after the US and China for imports). Hell, their foreign exchange accounts for 2/3rds of the entire EU!
IFF smells better than the rest of New Jersey, though. :)
I hear his lawyer is going to try the Magic SysReq defense, developed some years ago by Johnny Cochran.