Here's a question: if you get fired, are you legally obligated to turn in your building keys? I honestly don't know and I think there are some interesting similarities.
Exactly the scenario I thought of. One policy says you can't disclose your passwords. Another that says more than one person should know a password for critical infrastructure.
So Childs puts a new router on the network, secures it with a password only he knows...
I'd lean towards Childs being in the wrong on that specific scenario. Not saying that is what actually happened, but it's almost plausible.
Are we getting too hung up on the password issue? Was his refusal to divulge the passwords what he's being found guilty of?
Or is it the fact that if he stepped in front of a bus, the city had no hope of being able to manage the network? My place of employment has "the password list" and it's known to more than one person. If the city allowed Childs to hold all the keys, they're pretty stupid. If they had a policy prohibiting that, I could understand why violating it could get you jail time.
If my boss asks me to do something, I generally do it. What if it violates policy? Well, he's more culpable than I am.
That's the thing. That network is more Childs' boss' than it is his... his boss has more responsibility to it. He wants the password, give it to him and document that you did so. When the network comes crashing down, it's more his fault than yours.... and you're not in jail. Hopefully.
So, unlike you or me, he didn't think of just returning it to the bar knowing that if the person had lost the cell phone, that would likely be the first place he'd come looking?
I'm still not convinced that this isn't a marketing ploy. I mean really, you get entrusted with the Next Most Awesome Device Ever, go out for drinks, show it off to your friends.... you wake up the next morning and you don't have it.
My wife has called bars, stores, restaurants, and cabbies to track down her crappy LG. You're telling me this guy never thought to call the bar the next day? Or that the bar sold it off before the guy could claim it?
I work for an electric cooperative. We have automated meter reading. Each night, each meter sends in the reading for the day. We're thinking about going hourly. We're actually part of a pilot project for demand response. As someone brought up in a previous post, these meters works wonders for outage management. We can now "ping" meters. A member calls in an outage, we ping the feeder he's off of and within minutes we pinpoint the piece of equipment that has failed.
I'm actually excited about a lot of this new technology because I can see where it's going and it's not all that big brotherish. I think the largest benefit to everyone involved is the increased ability to monitor consumption. As it is now, you use a bunch of power and only find out what you're getting billed for at the end of the month. Some people get surprised. Wouldn't it be neat to have an in-home display (maybe your thermostat) that shows your current (heh) usage by the hour? You can now identify which times of day you're using the most juice, things like that. And no surprises when you get the bill.
Demand response is going to be huge. As we run out of places to build dams of power plants we need to do better with what we have. The silliest thing is some unreal proportion of generation sits there idle until 5 pm when everyone gets home and turns the heat up and their TV on. That demand spike requires us to generate huge amounts of energy for just an hour or two and then the generators sit there are spin at idle until the next peak. So if you can make that peak not so sharp or not so high, everyone wins when it comes to the bottom lines. The utility is otherwise forced to buy peak power at a premium and forced to pass that cost on.
So now we're piloting a project where people's electric heat and water heater are hooked up via the "smart" grid and during a peak event, for 45 minutes, we set back their thermostat 3 degrees and shut their water heater off. So, for that barely noticeable impact on a person's life, everyone gets savings. It's also a ton better than rolling blackouts or brownouts.
I honestly think the project as it is is a pretty hard sell but I envision hourly pricing data sent down the wire to a consumer's smart appliances. You want to do a load of laundry and when you push the start button on your drier is says "Currently $0.16/kwh. If you wait 2 hrs, power will be $0.12. Start now or wait?" Leave it in the hands of the consumers. Give them the correct up to date knowledge to make good choices.
But you can't get from here to there without the baby steps. You need to start collecting a ton of data on people's usage. You need to know where and when your peaks are. You need to be able to predict them. You need to be able to interact with the consumer. Gone are the days of your dumb meter, and thank God for that. I realize some of the growing pains aren't that great but I think it will pay off in the long run.
I hated math. Math leaves a sour taste in my mouth still.
My brain isn't comfortable working with "abstract" numbers. I loathe sitting down and "doing" math. It was many years later that I realized that I don't mind math and can actually be decent with it if I have a real problem to solve and I can apply my logic to it. Numbers with context in real life are fun.
I think I would have been one of the ones to benefit from less formalized instruction in my early years. Had I started learning formal math later, perhaps it would have been easier for me to get since I wouldn't have developed a prejudiced view.
Has this been voted into law as the summary and title suggests?
Or is this a proposal that us Washingtonians get a chance to contact our representatives about and make sure they understand how important it is to us?
I like representative democracy. It sometimes works.
The terminology in evolution discussions is usually pretty confusing. "Evolution" strictly means changes to a species over time but a lot of people confuse that with the mechanism that causes those changes: natural selection.
So when all the right wingers argue about "evolution" with the left wingers, they're actually arguing about natural selection. Evolution is a fact. Species change over time. The pseudo-argument is over what causes those changes and the prevailing theory is natural selection.
The ones criticizing Avatar for being unoriginal aren't speaking concisely. It's true, as you say, that there is very little originality in movies these days. The messiah story has been done over and over...
But you can rehash old stories in interesting ways. That's where Avatar fails, I think - beyond the pretty pictures, there is nothing compelling about the movie.
I could use 20 times the amount of processing power Cameron used and recreate a colonoscopy on a huge scale and also in intimate detail. It might look tremendous but at the end of the day, you're watching a freaking colonoscopy.
They could have made Avatar a 30 minute short to show off the crazy effects and that would have been fine. The people dazzled by bright shiny objects would be happy and the rest of us wouldn't have to suffer through throwaway characters in a tortuous plot.
You know, that was my first comment to my wife after the movie. "Floating mountains? Seriously? Do they just have a different set of physics and gravity there?"
She rolled her eyes and said something about how if you can't suspend your belief for a movie, you're hopeless with a movie like that.
It's true. I just can't take crap like without an internally consistent set of rules. Avatar had big problems that way.
But the most frustrating thing was with all the power to create a realistic looking alternate world, we get instead a weird looking wolf, a weird looking rino, a weird looking pterodactyl, a weird looking human, a weird looking horse.
Alien worlds used to look like that in movies and TV shows because they were fricking dogs and humans in make-up. Star Wars actually did it best with making truly weird aliens (cantina scene, etc. not really main characters) and they did it with puppets and prosthetics. And here Avatar's writers have a completely blank slate to start with and they come up with that crap?
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a question: if you get fired, are you legally obligated to turn in your building keys? I honestly don't know and I think there are some interesting similarities.
Exactly the scenario I thought of. One policy says you can't disclose your passwords. Another that says more than one person should know a password for critical infrastructure.
So Childs puts a new router on the network, secures it with a password only he knows...
I'd lean towards Childs being in the wrong on that specific scenario. Not saying that is what actually happened, but it's almost plausible.
Are we getting too hung up on the password issue? Was his refusal to divulge the passwords what he's being found guilty of?
Or is it the fact that if he stepped in front of a bus, the city had no hope of being able to manage the network? My place of employment has "the password list" and it's known to more than one person. If the city allowed Childs to hold all the keys, they're pretty stupid. If they had a policy prohibiting that, I could understand why violating it could get you jail time.
If my boss asks me to do something, I generally do it. What if it violates policy? Well, he's more culpable than I am.
That's the thing. That network is more Childs' boss' than it is his... his boss has more responsibility to it. He wants the password, give it to him and document that you did so. When the network comes crashing down, it's more his fault than yours.... and you're not in jail. Hopefully.
Obviously, the entire jury is batty. That's the only explanation.
Or maybe we're missing something.
Right... there's no way Google could ever come out looking like a good guy.
"We let our users choose what to download."
Hmmm...
Exactly.
I'll get an iPhone if I want Jobs dictating what I get according to his tastes. Since I don't, I got a Droid and I can get (or not get) what I want.
That is also a very good point. I would certainly be calling my phone if it was lost.
So, unlike you or me, he didn't think of just returning it to the bar knowing that if the person had lost the cell phone, that would likely be the first place he'd come looking?
I'm still not convinced that this isn't a marketing ploy. I mean really, you get entrusted with the Next Most Awesome Device Ever, go out for drinks, show it off to your friends.... you wake up the next morning and you don't have it.
My wife has called bars, stores, restaurants, and cabbies to track down her crappy LG. You're telling me this guy never thought to call the bar the next day? Or that the bar sold it off before the guy could claim it?
It was formerly legal to make rights on red without stopping first?
I'm glad they changed a ridiculous oversight like that.
Sorry, late to the party.
I work for an electric cooperative. We have automated meter reading. Each night, each meter sends in the reading for the day. We're thinking about going hourly. We're actually part of a pilot project for demand response. As someone brought up in a previous post, these meters works wonders for outage management. We can now "ping" meters. A member calls in an outage, we ping the feeder he's off of and within minutes we pinpoint the piece of equipment that has failed.
I'm actually excited about a lot of this new technology because I can see where it's going and it's not all that big brotherish. I think the largest benefit to everyone involved is the increased ability to monitor consumption. As it is now, you use a bunch of power and only find out what you're getting billed for at the end of the month. Some people get surprised. Wouldn't it be neat to have an in-home display (maybe your thermostat) that shows your current (heh) usage by the hour? You can now identify which times of day you're using the most juice, things like that. And no surprises when you get the bill.
Demand response is going to be huge. As we run out of places to build dams of power plants we need to do better with what we have. The silliest thing is some unreal proportion of generation sits there idle until 5 pm when everyone gets home and turns the heat up and their TV on. That demand spike requires us to generate huge amounts of energy for just an hour or two and then the generators sit there are spin at idle until the next peak. So if you can make that peak not so sharp or not so high, everyone wins when it comes to the bottom lines. The utility is otherwise forced to buy peak power at a premium and forced to pass that cost on.
So now we're piloting a project where people's electric heat and water heater are hooked up via the "smart" grid and during a peak event, for 45 minutes, we set back their thermostat 3 degrees and shut their water heater off. So, for that barely noticeable impact on a person's life, everyone gets savings. It's also a ton better than rolling blackouts or brownouts.
I honestly think the project as it is is a pretty hard sell but I envision hourly pricing data sent down the wire to a consumer's smart appliances. You want to do a load of laundry and when you push the start button on your drier is says "Currently $0.16/kwh. If you wait 2 hrs, power will be $0.12. Start now or wait?" Leave it in the hands of the consumers. Give them the correct up to date knowledge to make good choices.
But you can't get from here to there without the baby steps. You need to start collecting a ton of data on people's usage. You need to know where and when your peaks are. You need to be able to predict them. You need to be able to interact with the consumer. Gone are the days of your dumb meter, and thank God for that. I realize some of the growing pains aren't that great but I think it will pay off in the long run.
I hated math. Math leaves a sour taste in my mouth still.
My brain isn't comfortable working with "abstract" numbers. I loathe sitting down and "doing" math. It was many years later that I realized that I don't mind math and can actually be decent with it if I have a real problem to solve and I can apply my logic to it. Numbers with context in real life are fun.
I think I would have been one of the ones to benefit from less formalized instruction in my early years. Had I started learning formal math later, perhaps it would have been easier for me to get since I wouldn't have developed a prejudiced view.
I see what you did there... and it hurts my brain. It's too early.
If they weren't doing something like this, I'd wonder what the hell was wrong with them.
Has this been voted into law as the summary and title suggests?
Or is this a proposal that us Washingtonians get a chance to contact our representatives about and make sure they understand how important it is to us?
I like representative democracy. It sometimes works.
Well, if they did that then they wouldn't be subversive now, would they?
I'm sorry but you're proving the grandparent's post brilliantly.
The terminology in evolution discussions is usually pretty confusing. "Evolution" strictly means changes to a species over time but a lot of people confuse that with the mechanism that causes those changes: natural selection.
So when all the right wingers argue about "evolution" with the left wingers, they're actually arguing about natural selection. Evolution is a fact. Species change over time. The pseudo-argument is over what causes those changes and the prevailing theory is natural selection.
Or as I like to call him: Dennis Miller
The ones criticizing Avatar for being unoriginal aren't speaking concisely. It's true, as you say, that there is very little originality in movies these days. The messiah story has been done over and over...
But you can rehash old stories in interesting ways. That's where Avatar fails, I think - beyond the pretty pictures, there is nothing compelling about the movie.
I could use 20 times the amount of processing power Cameron used and recreate a colonoscopy on a huge scale and also in intimate detail. It might look tremendous but at the end of the day, you're watching a freaking colonoscopy.
They could have made Avatar a 30 minute short to show off the crazy effects and that would have been fine. The people dazzled by bright shiny objects would be happy and the rest of us wouldn't have to suffer through throwaway characters in a tortuous plot.
You know, that was my first comment to my wife after the movie. "Floating mountains? Seriously? Do they just have a different set of physics and gravity there?"
She rolled her eyes and said something about how if you can't suspend your belief for a movie, you're hopeless with a movie like that.
It's true. I just can't take crap like without an internally consistent set of rules. Avatar had big problems that way.
But the most frustrating thing was with all the power to create a realistic looking alternate world, we get instead a weird looking wolf, a weird looking rino, a weird looking pterodactyl, a weird looking human, a weird looking horse.
Alien worlds used to look like that in movies and TV shows because they were fricking dogs and humans in make-up. Star Wars actually did it best with making truly weird aliens (cantina scene, etc. not really main characters) and they did it with puppets and prosthetics. And here Avatar's writers have a completely blank slate to start with and they come up with that crap?
Oops, I was trying to mod you funny but accidentally hit "Overrated".
Commenting to undo.
It's scary that you're almost proud of that fact.
We're not climbing out of this mess?
Things are getting worse?
Who is your dealer? I want some of what he's selling.