As in, high risk of genetically modified bacteria escaping the lab and turning every carbohydrate it finds into fuel oil?
Hilariously, "fuel oil" already is a moderately short chain length carbohydrate. We're not exactly talking about turning lead into gold here.
The stuff that comes out of the ground has both longer and shorter chain contaminants, and usually some icky stuff like sulfur compounds.
The stuff that comes from sunflower seed plantations generally has too high of a melting point.
The refinery polishes up the major specs, filters out the icky stuff, adds some detergents and hi-pressure lube so the fuel pumps in the car last longer than a year, and off it goes to quickiemart or whatever to be sold.
A good friend of my father had one of those weird (for the usa) diesel cars and he drove around with a gallon jug of some particular vegetable oil, as its "good enough to get him to the next diesel pump" and perfectly safe in a crash (other than slipping hazard, I guess). Not recommended by the manufacturer for long term use due to lack of detergents, weird viscosity, and bioreactivity, but good enough to prevent freezing to death in a blizzard or whatever.
Getting rid of OTA tv will make life interesting for the local stations, since there won't be any local transmitters. That makes the concept of must-carry status a bit fuzzy on the cabletv.
Honestly, I would not miss endless daytime springer reruns and 4 hours of infotainment-psuedonews talking about cookie recipes and live onsite coverage of rain, snow, and wind. Oh and hot and cold temperatures too.
There is a lot of money tied up in local TV stations, which will have a lot to say about this topic, certainly a lot more than we will get to say...
Or is this just because we all keep getting older, the oldest are dying and the youngest are learning to use a computer?
The old quote used to be that young people always think their generation was the first to invent sex and music, and I guess we have to add "use computers" to that list.
Anyway, the management always says, "Well, how do I know if people are working if they're not in the office?" The answer is simple
tell them if you can't be trusted to work at home, there's no need to carry a pager/cellphone/laptop for after hours work. That instantly shuts them up.
There is not a manager out there whom "knows" if you'll be working when an automated page goes out at 2am, but they love the idea of you working at home at 2am regardless.
Either way its a win, either no more on call, or you work at home.
The other solution is sandbag it on a regular basis. Boss gets a call every day at 7am explaining how you got a page at 10pm and had to work 8 hours thru the night, will now get some sleep and see you tomorrow (unless you get another page at 10pm from your cooperating coworkers and carefully written perl and cron scripts of course). Not that I'm admitting anything here...
So, the point of the rant is, How in Hell do you expect me to concentrate on my work with no opportunity for peace and quiet?
They don't. Seriously! Those in charge believe thinking is only for execs in the offices. This is a strong indication of a dying company. Update the resume, don't want to be the last one out.
Managers need offices to focus on their planning, so a true office is a must.
First huge mistake, is thinking managers are the only employees whom need to focus, or plan, and the peons need not concern themselves with this "thinking" thing.
Not all jobs are conducive to this and many companies don't even trust their employees enough to allow it.
And the same moron companies will demand the employees be on call 24x365 and work all freaking night long at home. Work at home, sure dude, great idea from 5pm to 9am, every night if we can force you, but from 9am to 5pm you can forget it.
Maybe having your own space is bad for your morale, because then you'd have to do your own work, but for me, having my own defined space where I can concentrate without interruption, increases my morale by about 1000%.
Only your morale? It measurably increased my productivity by 1000% (accurate to about 2 sig figs only)
Nothing quite like concentrating on the mysteries of a regex or some insane control flow and then getting to hear someone yelling about yesterday nights football game.
Ah but there's no reason to "investigate" office workers in great detail, since the boss is theoretically watching their every move like a hawk (ha) On the other hand those lazy work at homers need to document every bathroom break in triplicate on carbonpaper forms for obvious reasons.
in a company the size of yahoo, i can't imagine that laying off 400 will really bring them to profitability.
If you assume an all in cost (not just salary) of $100k/employee; that's an annual saving of $40mil. It may not balance the books but it is a start. Anybody know YAHOO's cash flow last year?
Hit finance.yahoo.com for YHOO and they list over thirteen thousand employees (can't possibly be correct? what could they all be doing?) and lists an annual revenue of $6B although I can't imagine where that came from... all from banner advertising? And miraculously they are currently profitable?
Compared to GOOG they have about half the employees yet only a quarter the revenue.
Is Yahoo even relevant with anything anymore? They shut down their own search, they shut down geocities, no one really uses portal sites anymore and they don't make any hardware or provide services. The only thing I can think of is email, which is also is far away from popularity of gmail and hotmail. What do they even do?
Oh, they have a dying instant messenger (unless its already gone away?), a web based group system (can't be too hard to run) and at least used to have a decent photo sharing site.
I figure they have enough work to keep about 100 actual front line productive employees busy, and maybe 150 back office fluff, figure they should have about 250 full time seats. Depends how effective they are at outsourcing and contracting... Is the guy whom scrubs the toilets a yahoo employee or a contracted cleaning agency employee, etc. I have worked at multiple companies about that size that did things of similar complexity and scope.
The problem is if 4% of their workforce is 100 people, thats about 2500 employees.... So about 90% have to go.
Wow. Real men don't eat quiche? Look, I used to be heavily into PC gaming, to the point of having a popular Quake site* and being published on Planet Quake. But man, your comment is elitist to the point of silliness.
That's like saying "real golfers play golf every day". It's an absurd statement.
Agree completely with you, read the line directly above:
Its framing the question by careful selection of description to get the answer you want. It has little relationship with reality of course.
This yields an interesting idea... what Happens if the DoD decides to classify the US Constitution top secret?
Step away from the bong...
I suppose then... no members of the military will be allowed to read it;
False since we'd all inherently have a need to know, having taken an oath to obey it when we enlisted. I assume the officers have some similar oath with similar language. If you're legally required to know an order, its not illegal to know the order.
Dont forget the virus scanner guys have a pretty good system to create and distribute a new virus signature file in hours. But I have it on good gossip from someone whom should know, that it takes the feds endless months to distribute updates to their "classified data scanner". And someone responsible for that, is very embarrassed about that failure, and doesn't want it to become a public issue, hence any reaction, no matter how apparently stupid, to prevent that situation.
What this says to me is that the bonehead air force nutjob who instigated (and any who approved!) this has abso-bloody-lutely no idea what-so-ever how the internet works!
But he apparently does know how a virus scanner works, and how that general class of technology could be applied to detecting leaks of classified documents.... Probably the guy is not as dumb as you seem to think, just hemmed in on all sides by some old technological choices...
Agreed. My knee-jerk reaction is the same as others, but from someone in the military's perspective, it's better they not read something they aren't supposed to.
Yeah like 1984 or "Animal Farm", uh huh. (as an ex-serviceman, I roll eyes)
Its actually way the heck simpler. Here is the procedure, or so I am told from an unnamed prior service ex coworker from years back, whom could very well have been lying. Then again its pretty freaking obvious although no one on/. has mentioned it (because its so obvious?)
There exists a file that the M.I. group make of "safe" quotes from classified documents. By safe quotes, I mean if it were released no one would be in trouble. So if the classified document were "Pojut did not know what the grep command did as of Tuesday December 14 21:19" the spooks would release a file containing lines like "did not know what the grep command did" or "Tuesday December 14 21:19". His name would be a bad idea. Lat/Lon would be a bad idea. Telephone number would be a bad idea. Long phrases of meaningless management trendy buzzwords BS would be great. Certain project codewords inside long spans of otherwise unnoteworthy text would be great. Extremely specific timestamps would be great. Certain combinations of technical manual titles would be great.
Now that file goes thru about X number of human reviewers whom have the job of trying to reverse engineer and figure out that grep line is about "Pojut" or whatever. Its a tedious manual analysis project that burns an unholy amount of time, but you have to do it to protect your people. The assumption is we can break our file better than they ever could. There are of course reported metrics and (unofficial) bonuses and punishments for this would process, often involving the purchase and consumption of large amounts of alcohol, etc. Eventually, after infinite staff meetings and signoffs, maybe in 6 months, you get a grep file thats already a year out of date, but is believed safe.
You can also set up some crypto on this such that no one really knows whom redacted a line, but you know its redacted. Its kind of complicated and he didn't get into this. He compared it to some digital cash scheme of detecting double spending that frankly I didn't care enough about to remember, oh well, but this way you could hide the fact that you hid the data, if its so super secret you can't admit that it doesn't exist, or something weird like that.
Anyway, so you get the file then you randomly apply parts of the grep file to randomly selected DOD property and look for the results. Kind of like a virus scanner. Also if an outright crook gets busted for something else, you run the grep file against it to see if they've been involved in other activities. And you scan captured information from the enemy to see what they know about us.
Its actually a little more complicated than that. What if you hashed the grep lines, and compared them a seemingly infinite set of hashes of subsets of the questionable document... Assuming the hash function works, you could post those freaking hashes on wikileaks and no real info would be released, in theory... You distribute a list of hashes for each specific length of raw text. But, you get the general idea even without this extra frosting on the cake. You can also set up an oracle where you more or less upload something (raw or the hashes) to an intranet page and essentially magically get either a red light or green light, "refer it up the ranks" or "who cares".
Occasionally you'll get a false positive, in this case you found a genuine noob whom can not run "man grep" and the occasional/. comment that happened by luck to be at the same timestamp. No problemo. The key is using such long and complicated grep strings that this rarely happens. But it burns an unholy amount of time to feed back to an analyst to verify the noob is just an uninteresting noob and the coincidental post is unrelated to the "real" cla
Weight is dependant on acceleration due to gravity and mass. An atom would weigh more on Earth than it would on the moon.
Not relevant. Theres nothing chemists love more than STP standard temperature and pressure. Extending that to "we're going to define all our weights as being in a 9.81 m/s2 grav field" is to be expected from that crowd (which I was/are almost a part of)
Wait until you learn about the various gas laws, and start posting to slashdot that they are all wrong because a mole of gas "on the moon" would take up a heck of a lot more than 22.4 liters.
I don't think there are any constants in nature. We humans just like to perceive them as such, so it makes our calculations a whole lot easier.
Also, those same calculations show that some things, like proton mass, speed of light, gravitational constant, a couple others, have to have remained constant within a very large number of decimal places in order for old stuff to have changed the same way new stuff changes. More decimal places that we usually have sig figs to measure stuff, so by sig figs rules, have to treat them as constant, its not just an "easier" thing.
For your average chemical engineer bucket chemist, small changes in atomic weight are going to be statistical noise.
The short version is that the stuff propagates very easily through the environment and is toxic to bees even in very low doses.
Could be compared to Rotenone which is an absolutely fantastic spectacular garden beetle pesticide that is mostly harmless to humans and biodegrades nicely and promptly and is even vaguely "green" and "natural" depending on how crosseyed you look at it. Oh, except for that annoying little trivia fact that it is quite water soluble and utterly slaughters fish if even a tiny amount gets in their water before it biodegrades. Big Ooops.
It will look nothing like the computer "maid" on "The Jetsons."
Who thought that had anything to do with it? I think it's time that we as a culture realized that Rosie is decidedly not what people think of when they hear the word "computer."
What if annual security training was mandatory for all the IT staff connected with law enforcement IT equipment -- just like weapons training is mandatory for all law enforcement officers. This includes the CIO [if they have one], the city manager, the systems architect [whichever poor IT technician is erroneously saddled with this responsibility], and all law enforcement officers who access this data.
Let me guess, somebody with the proper political connections would make a lot of money by "training", but there would be no improvement in results?
Obviously do both. Its an accumulation of little artifacts not one individual artifact. You could have fun and maintain every other building and let every other building decay, plus or minus the collapse footprint.
Slashdot Mirror
As in, high risk of genetically modified bacteria escaping the lab and turning every carbohydrate it finds into fuel oil?
Hilariously, "fuel oil" already is a moderately short chain length carbohydrate. We're not exactly talking about turning lead into gold here.
The stuff that comes out of the ground has both longer and shorter chain contaminants, and usually some icky stuff like sulfur compounds.
The stuff that comes from sunflower seed plantations generally has too high of a melting point.
The refinery polishes up the major specs, filters out the icky stuff, adds some detergents and hi-pressure lube so the fuel pumps in the car last longer than a year, and off it goes to quickiemart or whatever to be sold.
A good friend of my father had one of those weird (for the usa) diesel cars and he drove around with a gallon jug of some particular vegetable oil, as its "good enough to get him to the next diesel pump" and perfectly safe in a crash (other than slipping hazard, I guess). Not recommended by the manufacturer for long term use due to lack of detergents, weird viscosity, and bioreactivity, but good enough to prevent freezing to death in a blizzard or whatever.
Signed, your friendly neighborhood chemist.
or go unload the dishwasher
You do THAT to your girlfriend while she's washing dishes?!
Considering most slashdotters traditionally live in their mom's basement, its actually a bit creepier than that.
Certainly it will not be free.
Getting rid of OTA tv will make life interesting for the local stations, since there won't be any local transmitters. That makes the concept of must-carry status a bit fuzzy on the cabletv.
Honestly, I would not miss endless daytime springer reruns and 4 hours of infotainment-psuedonews talking about cookie recipes and live onsite coverage of rain, snow, and wind. Oh and hot and cold temperatures too.
There is a lot of money tied up in local TV stations, which will have a lot to say about this topic, certainly a lot more than we will get to say...
Or is this just because we all keep getting older, the oldest are dying and the youngest are learning to use a computer?
The old quote used to be that young people always think their generation was the first to invent sex and music, and I guess we have to add "use computers" to that list.
Anyway, the management always says, "Well, how do I know if people are working if they're not in the office?" The answer is simple
tell them if you can't be trusted to work at home, there's no need to carry a pager/cellphone/laptop for after hours work. That instantly shuts them up.
There is not a manager out there whom "knows" if you'll be working when an automated page goes out at 2am, but they love the idea of you working at home at 2am regardless.
Either way its a win, either no more on call, or you work at home.
The other solution is sandbag it on a regular basis. Boss gets a call every day at 7am explaining how you got a page at 10pm and had to work 8 hours thru the night, will now get some sleep and see you tomorrow (unless you get another page at 10pm from your cooperating coworkers and carefully written perl and cron scripts of course). Not that I'm admitting anything here...
So, the point of the rant is, How in Hell do you expect me to concentrate on my work with no opportunity for peace and quiet?
They don't. Seriously! Those in charge believe thinking is only for execs in the offices. This is a strong indication of a dying company. Update the resume, don't want to be the last one out.
Managers need offices to focus on their planning, so a true office is a must.
First huge mistake, is thinking managers are the only employees whom need to focus, or plan, and the peons need not concern themselves with this "thinking" thing.
Not all jobs are conducive to this and many companies don't even trust their employees enough to allow it.
And the same moron companies will demand the employees be on call 24x365 and work all freaking night long at home. Work at home, sure dude, great idea from 5pm to 9am, every night if we can force you, but from 9am to 5pm you can forget it.
Maybe having your own space is bad for your morale, because then you'd have to do your own work, but for me, having my own defined space where I can concentrate without interruption, increases my morale by about 1000%.
Only your morale? It measurably increased my productivity by 1000% (accurate to about 2 sig figs only)
Nothing quite like concentrating on the mysteries of a regex or some insane control flow and then getting to hear someone yelling about yesterday nights football game.
Ah but there's no reason to "investigate" office workers in great detail, since the boss is theoretically watching their every move like a hawk (ha)
On the other hand those lazy work at homers need to document every bathroom break in triplicate on carbonpaper forms for obvious reasons.
Thats why "work at homers goof off more"
in a company the size of yahoo, i can't imagine that laying off 400 will really bring them to profitability.
If you assume an all in cost (not just salary) of $100k/employee; that's an annual saving of $40mil. It may not balance the books but it is a start. Anybody know YAHOO's cash flow last year?
Hit finance.yahoo.com for YHOO and they list over thirteen thousand employees (can't possibly be correct? what could they all be doing?) and lists an annual revenue of $6B although I can't imagine where that came from... all from banner advertising? And miraculously they are currently profitable?
Compared to GOOG they have about half the employees yet only a quarter the revenue.
Is Yahoo even relevant with anything anymore? They shut down their own search, they shut down geocities, no one really uses portal sites anymore and they don't make any hardware or provide services. The only thing I can think of is email, which is also is far away from popularity of gmail and hotmail. What do they even do?
Oh, they have a dying instant messenger (unless its already gone away?), a web based group system (can't be too hard to run) and at least used to have a decent photo sharing site.
I figure they have enough work to keep about 100 actual front line productive employees busy, and maybe 150 back office fluff, figure they should have about 250 full time seats. Depends how effective they are at outsourcing and contracting... Is the guy whom scrubs the toilets a yahoo employee or a contracted cleaning agency employee, etc. I have worked at multiple companies about that size that did things of similar complexity and scope.
The problem is if 4% of their workforce is 100 people, thats about 2500 employees.... So about 90% have to go.
Real gaming, also known hardcore gaming
Wow. Real men don't eat quiche? Look, I used to be heavily into PC gaming, to the point of having a popular Quake site* and being published on Planet Quake. But man, your comment is elitist to the point of silliness.
That's like saying "real golfers play golf every day". It's an absurd statement.
Agree completely with you, read the line directly above:
Its framing the question by careful selection of description to get the answer you want. It has little relationship with reality of course.
This yields an interesting idea... what Happens if the DoD decides to classify the US Constitution top secret?
Step away from the bong...
I suppose then... no members of the military will be allowed to read it;
False since we'd all inherently have a need to know, having taken an oath to obey it when we enlisted. I assume the officers have some similar oath with similar language. If you're legally required to know an order, its not illegal to know the order.
Dont forget the virus scanner guys have a pretty good system to create and distribute a new virus signature file in hours. But I have it on good gossip from someone whom should know, that it takes the feds endless months to distribute updates to their "classified data scanner". And someone responsible for that, is very embarrassed about that failure, and doesn't want it to become a public issue, hence any reaction, no matter how apparently stupid, to prevent that situation.
What this says to me is that the bonehead air force nutjob who instigated (and any who approved!) this has abso-bloody-lutely no idea what-so-ever how the internet works!
But he apparently does know how a virus scanner works, and how that general class of technology could be applied to detecting leaks of classified documents.... Probably the guy is not as dumb as you seem to think, just hemmed in on all sides by some old technological choices...
Agreed. My knee-jerk reaction is the same as others, but from someone in the military's perspective, it's better they not read something they aren't supposed to.
Yeah like 1984 or "Animal Farm", uh huh. (as an ex-serviceman, I roll eyes)
Its actually way the heck simpler. Here is the procedure, or so I am told from an unnamed prior service ex coworker from years back, whom could very well have been lying. Then again its pretty freaking obvious although no one on /. has mentioned it (because its so obvious?)
There exists a file that the M.I. group make of "safe" quotes from classified documents. By safe quotes, I mean if it were released no one would be in trouble. So if the classified document were "Pojut did not know what the grep command did as of Tuesday December 14 21:19" the spooks would release a file containing lines like "did not know what the grep command did" or "Tuesday December 14 21:19". His name would be a bad idea. Lat/Lon would be a bad idea. Telephone number would be a bad idea. Long phrases of meaningless management trendy buzzwords BS would be great. Certain project codewords inside long spans of otherwise unnoteworthy text would be great. Extremely specific timestamps would be great. Certain combinations of technical manual titles would be great.
Now that file goes thru about X number of human reviewers whom have the job of trying to reverse engineer and figure out that grep line is about "Pojut" or whatever. Its a tedious manual analysis project that burns an unholy amount of time, but you have to do it to protect your people. The assumption is we can break our file better than they ever could. There are of course reported metrics and (unofficial) bonuses and punishments for this would process, often involving the purchase and consumption of large amounts of alcohol, etc. Eventually, after infinite staff meetings and signoffs, maybe in 6 months, you get a grep file thats already a year out of date, but is believed safe.
You can also set up some crypto on this such that no one really knows whom redacted a line, but you know its redacted. Its kind of complicated and he didn't get into this. He compared it to some digital cash scheme of detecting double spending that frankly I didn't care enough about to remember, oh well, but this way you could hide the fact that you hid the data, if its so super secret you can't admit that it doesn't exist, or something weird like that.
Anyway, so you get the file then you randomly apply parts of the grep file to randomly selected DOD property and look for the results. Kind of like a virus scanner. Also if an outright crook gets busted for something else, you run the grep file against it to see if they've been involved in other activities. And you scan captured information from the enemy to see what they know about us.
Its actually a little more complicated than that. What if you hashed the grep lines, and compared them a seemingly infinite set of hashes of subsets of the questionable document... Assuming the hash function works, you could post those freaking hashes on wikileaks and no real info would be released, in theory... You distribute a list of hashes for each specific length of raw text. But, you get the general idea even without this extra frosting on the cake. You can also set up an oracle where you more or less upload something (raw or the hashes) to an intranet page and essentially magically get either a red light or green light, "refer it up the ranks" or "who cares".
Occasionally you'll get a false positive, in this case you found a genuine noob whom can not run "man grep" and the occasional /. comment that happened by luck to be at the same timestamp. No problemo. The key is using such long and complicated grep strings that this rarely happens. But it burns an unholy amount of time to feed back to an analyst to verify the noob is just an uninteresting noob and the coincidental post is unrelated to the "real" cla
Everything stable that isn't one of the monoisotopic elements
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoisotopic_element
Weight is dependant on acceleration due to gravity and mass. An atom would weigh more on Earth than it would on the moon.
Not relevant. Theres nothing chemists love more than STP standard temperature and pressure. Extending that to "we're going to define all our weights as being in a 9.81 m/s2 grav field" is to be expected from that crowd (which I was/are almost a part of)
Wait until you learn about the various gas laws, and start posting to slashdot that they are all wrong because a mole of gas "on the moon" would take up a heck of a lot more than 22.4 liters.
I don't think there are any constants in nature.
We humans just like to perceive them as such, so it makes our calculations a whole lot easier.
Also, those same calculations show that some things, like proton mass, speed of light, gravitational constant, a couple others, have to have remained constant within a very large number of decimal places in order for old stuff to have changed the same way new stuff changes. More decimal places that we usually have sig figs to measure stuff, so by sig figs rules, have to treat them as constant, its not just an "easier" thing.
For your average chemical engineer bucket chemist, small changes in atomic weight are going to be statistical noise.
how is it the VFX that are ruining movies?
Allocating all the funds towards "yet another explosion" instead of ... well virtually all other expenses.
The short version is that the stuff propagates very easily through the environment and is toxic to bees even in very low doses.
Could be compared to Rotenone which is an absolutely fantastic spectacular garden beetle pesticide that is mostly harmless to humans and biodegrades nicely and promptly and is even vaguely "green" and "natural" depending on how crosseyed you look at it. Oh, except for that annoying little trivia fact that it is quite water soluble and utterly slaughters fish if even a tiny amount gets in their water before it biodegrades. Big Ooops.
It will look nothing like the computer "maid" on "The Jetsons."
Who thought that had anything to do with it? I think it's time that we as a culture realized that Rosie is decidedly not what people think of when they hear the word "computer."
I was always hoping for "Cherry 2000"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092746/
What if annual security training was mandatory for all the IT staff connected with law enforcement IT equipment -- just like weapons training is mandatory for all law enforcement officers. This includes the CIO [if they have one], the city manager, the systems architect [whichever poor IT technician is erroneously saddled with this responsibility], and all law enforcement officers who access this data.
Let me guess, somebody with the proper political connections would make a lot of money by "training", but there would be no improvement in results?
Obviously do both. Its an accumulation of little artifacts not one individual artifact. You could have fun and maintain every other building and let every other building decay, plus or minus the collapse footprint.