I think the only difference is that many critics by and large could be "influenced" directly by studios either by outright bribery or by favors, etc... whereas a crowd sourced type critique is more difficult to squash. Boo hoo.
I always thought Russian would prefer Clinton. If you put aside the Russian misogyny, it makes more sense to me to install a leader who is predictable that you can manipulate than someone that is unpredictable and you don't know wtf they are going to do on any given day...
On one hand it would be nice if a country like the US took a leading role as an example to the rest of the world...
On the other hand all of these accords, agreements, etc... are a bit ridiculous in that the biggest contributors to pollution like China, India, Russia, etc... will never agree to any of it anyway making the whole thing rather moot, and additionally even if they did, or a bunch of other countries do, there is nothing really to stop them from doing whatever anyway... People talk about legally binding etc... but these are independent NATIONS that can and will do whatever is in their best interests. You only have to look are previous historical examples of these things to see nations not meeting their targets etc...
I think it is mostly for ease of use than anything else.
I used to be involved with some legislation that had some very flexible wording around it. It was a nightmare to actually use. Certain individuals needed to be vetted as to their qualifications, work experience, background, education, etc... while those engineers that belonged to the association did all the vetting for you. In the end after years of having to deal with that (with no staff or resources to do it or managers willing to sign off on the responsibility should something go wrong), the wording was changed to "engineers".
This isn't a slight against you or that you are any less qualified, it is just because it is easier to administer, as you are basically outsourcing all the vetting and the responsibility to the association.
He is effectively "practicing" engineering if he is giving professional advice on an issue while referencing that he is an engineer, which is what he is being called on.
If he just said, I have a technical background and think your traffic lights are crap, no one would care. However he said something like I'm an engineer and in my opinion your traffic lights are crap, to which the association basically said, ahhh actually your not, because you aren't licences, haven't paid your dues, and fsck off, and here is a fine for your trouble and being a jerk about it all, to which this guy was like ohhh my free speech etc... bs. I guess it serves the association right for being petty about it all (i.e. fining the guy, they could have just dismissed him) as I bet they regret it now for all the trouble it's caused.
Same applies to say an unlicensed doctor, or an unlicensed lawyer. There are reasons why licencing exists. Accountability for ones actions being one of the primary ones.
I may not be a Doctor, but I'd recommend some rino horn for your sore thumb, and perhaps some tincture of ham. No because you are not PROFESSIONALLY a Doctor, so you cannot give that advice, and yes it is illegal to do so and call yourself one. Similar for a Lawyer, or an engineer, or any "profession". Yes there are those that skirt that definition and rules, which is why their associations (the BAR, the College of doctors, the engineering association, etc...) try to come down hard on those that do, to protect the INTEGRITY of their profession. Because if they don't anyone can say anything, and it will be a mess. What the court has to decide is if this bums rights to bitch and complain about a traffic light is more important than that (which it might be, who cares really)... Honestly I think the association made a mountain out of a molehill, and I bet they are regretting everything now that this has blown up in their faces legally.
That is like having someone with a Doctorate in Women's Studies operate on you to remove your spleen because they are a "Doctor".
Not all engineering degrees are the same. Not all Engineers are qualified to do all "engineering" work. Do you want a civil engineer to do your electrical work, or an electrical work done by a civil engineer?
Also he is a "Software Engineer" which in many circles is not actually considered a real "engineer". At best it might mean they may adhere to a specific code of ethics and conduct... maybe. In most areas (also in this case) unless you pay your dues and belong to your association, you lose the right to call yourself an engineer.
I think the judge is just waving his hand here to get at the crux of the argument to say, "OK OK for the sake of argument you are an fracking engineer, and you can make engineering kind of noises, wtf are you getting on about these traffic lights and why is it such a big deal to you and the association?"
Seems like every time the TV news needs a graphic for hacking they use the Fallout one... I find that hilarious and it makes me feel a bit smug all at the same time, win win!
I also wonder what type of communication exists if any between "multiple interceptors". Presumably they are smart enough not to shoot each other down. Also given say a swarm of MIRV's and say a swarm of interceptors, what prevents all the interceptors going for the one warhead, rather than trying to sort out which one goes where. Would be an interesting piece of code should it actually exist...
Well it is 1 for 1 or 100% for ICBM's.... Though that is a ridiculous test sample... though at the same time it isn't like ICBM and their launches are just laying around either.
But no, not all that reassuring I'd say still. Also I'd argue that intercepting an ICBM is likely harder than "other type of target missiles", so I wonder if they have improved it by that much, or if they just got lucky. Also depends on how they run the test. Kinda cheating if you know exactly when and where the missile is coming from I'd say...
I guess this means that the government has solved all the other problems it has if it has time to deal with the "problem" of transgender bathrooms.
That is my take away. Not only is this not really a "problem", but even if you could argue through some arcane way that it was, it certainly isn't a large problem. In fact it is in the grand scheme of things an infinitesimally small problem that only impacts very few people in society, and those impacts are pretty low.
Priorities seem to be a bit out of wack. I'm not trying to demean the importance of social issues, but many times they seem to get the ire and the coverage, and the time, when there seem to be so many much larger, more important, much more impact to not only more people, but in a much more significant way. But as I said, it is good they are finally dealing with the transgender bathroom issue, as surely it means they have solved all the other larger issued plaguing society.
I've been with the same organization for some time, so I get a fair amount of vacation now. However where I work we are allowed to rollover up to one full years worth of vacation. As a result I never use all my vacation really. I keep rolling it over more less to keep the maximum amount allowed available. I do this for three reasons.
1) Is perhaps I'd like to take a big trip or more vacation some year, that way I have the days available to me, 2) I know if I were to be laid off, they would have to pay out my vacation time, which would give me a nice cash buffer to work with should that ever happen, and 3) I figure all things being equal, should layoffs occur and management be considering laying off employee A who they don't have to pay out, or employee B who they would have to pay out many thousands of dollars, they are probably going to layoff employee A. Particularly if layoffs are to do with saving money (which is usually is), and management is rewarded for finding said savings (which they probably are)...
Anyway not really sure if #3 is a thing, but it makes sense to me.
I think generally backups are badly managed. I don't think most management sees them as all that critical. I suspect admins likely get tired of trying and just go with the flow after awhile.
In all my years professionally I've only ever really needed enterprise backup (i.e. not my desktop etc...) twice (Oracle DB). Both times it was useless. The first was a scheduling issue where the last backup that was done was 9 months old which is really unacceptable. In that case we had to use some complicated data harvesting from log tables (which fortunately we had in this instance), though some data was lots due to format differences. The second time apparently the backup process was broken, and it was under maintenance to fix it, for a month, but no one decided that it might be a good idea to tell anyone, so when we deployed a new version of an application into production which caused a number of data issues, the last good backup was 3 weeks old, meaning we had to get creative with the existing data and live with the rest putting it on users to manual confirm a couple weeks worth of possible changes.
Anyway from my own experience whenever it's been needed, it's not there. Personally I think I am way more fastidious about my backups, but there seems to be a thing about corporate culture, and perhaps the idea of risk management and passing blame and responsibility off on somebody else..
You forgot a big one. Real Estate agents, who in many places have a monopoly or at very least a large advantage over the entire housing market, both yours and they other guys, are both highly incentivised to make housing as expensive as possible, and to keep people buying and selling as much as possible because they each make about 3% off whatever that value is during that transaction...
On a house that say costs 100,000 that is only about 3k, however on a house that is 800,000 that is 24,000$ for that one transaction (x2 for both agents!), so there are a lot of real estate folks getting rich right now...
It will be a lot sooner if no one is buying houses. Most boomers have their house has the primary investment. When one of two things happens, the housing market is going to probably make a very large adjustment. 1) Boomers won't be able to sell their houses for the money they need for retirement, and 2) Interest rates will go up and those people that put themselves into extreme debt to buy a house will not be able to afford them anymore, pushing more housing on market.
While I'm not sure when any of these things will happen, and there will be a lot of momentum to prevent it from both home owners, real estate folks, and government, eventually it will, and I don't think it will take until 2035 until it does. Also I'd say that most of those boomers won't be living in those houses until they die at 80, most will either downsize or go into group living well before then.
One thing I found useful about Firefox, at least at work was established extensions like Firebug. As you mention it is also better with html5 which is a requirement for some of the apps I need to use.
I hate IE at work, period. I use it for certain applications because I have to. Part of the problem is that corporate has it so locked up, and restricted, mostly so it can support some legacy systems we have, that it is useless for much of anything else.
I use Chrome for general browsing. I've recently found that it is starting to also introduce some interesting apps as well. Unfortunately their store is all locked down by corporate so it is useless for that at work, but good for home however.
At home I generally use Chrome. I started out using IE after I upgraded to Windows 10, but had some recurring issues with it, and eventually moved to Chrome. When I had Windows 7, I used both Chrome and Firefox though I am not sure I really had a huge preference of one over the other. Firefox seemed a bit more robust, but also a bit more bloated...
First off on the topic, I don't think it is all that surprising, but would add that it isn't just "Security staff", but essentially all IT staff not in a direct support roll. It happens to me all the time, and for the most part I'm happy to oblige if I can. It only becomes annoying when I have other priorities or pressures, and so-and-so wanders by and wants me to figure out his printer problem or something when I should be testing a corporate application for bugs on a deadline.
Second I do have a limited support role for some specific applications, and as a result I submit a LOT of tickets. Not only because I need to for myself in a development capacity, but also on behalf of some users with certain problems. Anyway as you call it "pass the buck", I typically refer to it as the "blame game", it is easily the number one thing that makes things take about 10,000% longer than they should, but also ends up with a lot of "resolved" tickets for unresolved problems.
One in particular I had this year (and indeed I went through the whole BS process last year with a similar result), was essentially complaining about the testing environment for a particular application we're doing development on. Under a lot of pressure to test the bejuses out of it to ensure nothing gets into production, however this is "challenging" by the fact that the environment runs about 25 times slower. So a test query that might take 7 seconds on DEV or on PROD takes about 3 MINUTES on the stupid testing rig. Now multiply that by hundreds of test cases. It is absolutely brutal, and testing certain things becomes very difficult if not even very reasonable to do within the time frames of the project. Anyway I have no idea why it is so slow, and as mentioned, it has been this way for awhile now. It isn't like it is 25% slower or something like that, the difference is astounding and hard to simply say attribute to only old hardware or something. Also for reference, this is an older legacy system, which should probably run pretty good on just about anything seeing as it was designed to initially run on hardware from the 1990's...
Anyway so after I get thoroughly frustrated, I decide to give it a try to get someone to do something about it. So I start the whole process as I am required to do with a stupid IT help desk ticket... First it is required to get escalated a bit, as it isn't something one of their first line staff is used to dealing with. Then the blame game starts. The data centre hardware guys blame the application and the code, who blame the DBA's and the DB structure, who blame the network people, who blame the security people, who blame the middleware folks, who blame the vendors of VM, who blame the hardware, who blame the DB optimization, who blame... etc... What basically happens at each juncture a bunch of emails are flying around, I'm usually called to do performance testing and testing and testing at each point (all of which ends up being exactly the same), the ticket itself gets "resolved" and "re-opened" multiple times because some group decides that they are done, and it just continues and goes on, and eventually in the end nothing actually happens. Which at a certain point I just make sure my management is aware of the issue, and the fact that I can only reasonably test to a certain point given the circumstances, that all the various IT parties have been made aware of the issue, did nothing, and as such are willing to accept the risk, that should something get into a production setting that I couldn't test for, the blame for that falls directly on the low performance of the environment and the lack of support that it has... Bitter much I know. Anyway I know I will run into this again next year, and the year after that, etc... until they probably replace everything and start anew with a different configuration.
Another issue other than the blame game is "partial" tickets, where part of a ticket will get done (say installing some software), but the second part of the ticket (say creating a user account) doesn't.
Sorry to use a trivial sporting analogy but it really comes down to available pool. I think most reasonable people will agree for the most part just about anyone can do anything given an equal amount of opportunity and talent.
That said, there is a reason why if the Canadian men's hockey Olympic team played the Italian one, that they would destroy them by a very generous ballpark 10 times out of 10. There is also a good reason (apart from rules) why no one in Italy would have a hope in hell of making said hockey team. Heck if you wanted to make this a gender analogy it would be an even more egregious divide, as about the only team in the world close to the Canadian's Women's team would be the USA, no where else is even remotely close.
What I am getting at in a very round about way is that their is a reason WHY Canadian's are so good at hockey, in particular the women, two reasons in fact. Neither of those reasons being that somehow Canadian's are more say genetically disposed than say the poor Italians I'm picking on (Only using Italy as an example as they actually fielded a hockey team when they hosted the winter Olympics).
Reason #1 is the pool of players from which to draw from. So many people are INTERESTED in hockey in Canada, that the minor leagues have probably well over a million players to pick from. All things being EQUAL, if Italy has say 5000, who do you think are going to be the most best most qualified candidates? That's right the Canadians just by the numbers. How interested a person is to say hockey is controlled by a whole host of factors... To be nice to the Italians out there, you could probably reverse the above for say soccer for example.
Reason #2 is the amount of resources dedicated to the endeavor. Canada in one way shape of form dedicates a tremendous amount of money to hockey. In the form of facilities everywhere (usually tax funded) in rinks and arenas in every little community, to education and training programs, to associations and teams supporting competition, etc...
Anyway to expect say the Canadian hockey team to allow an Italian on the team, simply because it is only full of Canadians is absurd (as is my analogy I know). If they are really looking at expanding diversity, the way to do it is analyse reasons #1 and #2 and see what can be done about that. However the "players" themselves are not the ones to be asking to do anything. As a last thought, at a certain point for some "sports" it either doesn't make sense to try, or if you do, it is understanding that it is going to have limited or diminishing returns. That isn't to say impossible, Jamaican bobsled teams and all...
First off I am a proponent of nuclear power, so this won't come as a surprise. I will agree with you, that when you take in the total lifecycle of the nuclear option, it is much more expensive than what some proponents might say. The most daunting component being the construction costs, and the length of the initial construction. Does the math make sense? Currently right now in the short term, probably not, no. That is largely because energy is pretty cheap by historical standards. In the longer term, it does make sense, and it isn't all about the economic "math" either.
Bottom line is base load and what options there are available. Right now, and into the foreseeable future in the next couple of decades, both Germany and Switzerland will be taking advantage of buying nuclear power from France due to their proximity. Looking at the Switzerland vote, it is basic NIMBY on a local scale, however it is wholesale national NIMBY by depending on France for base when renewables fall short. Both likely augment locally with gas plants as well, however without disposits of their own they are then dependent on largely imports from Russia. So there political issues at play as well.
I do see opportunity for decentralized renewables and storage, however on the national scale that is going to take a lot of time to build up the infrastructure. Perhaps that is what they are eventually gearing up for, however in the meantime they might be putting themselves in energy risk depending on what happens in the somewhat near term. What I see as the unfortunate outcome is that there has been lost opportunities to improve upon conventional (i.e. decades old) nuclear technology which may have produced smaller better nuclear systems, but largely that development has stagnated due to all sorts of factors such as fear, but also just cheaper commodities pricing, and looking for short term solutions for long term problems.
Considering there is supposed to be a "World" government, and there had been no indications of a radical shift of that make up, one would think that there would be vastly more Chinese and India crew members simply by the numbers. That said, perhaps it can be explained away a bit in that the HQ of Starfleet was somehow positioned in SF, but even then, not a lot of Mexicans on the crew either. Considering all these are US TV shows, and the demographics today, one would think they might throw in some Latin Americans or something if for nothing more than to cater to a larger audience.
However the jerk in me wants an episode where top brass at Star Fleet need to save some money (or credits, or resources or whatever) due to the conflict with the Klingons or something, and replace all the crew with Indians, and how that all turns out...
Also no Canadians? Give me some stereotypical Canadian (space)hockey lovin', lumberjack, apologist! "Oh is he some sort of alien?" "No, he's just Canadian..."
Slashdot Mirror
I think the only difference is that many critics by and large could be "influenced" directly by studios either by outright bribery or by favors, etc... whereas a crowd sourced type critique is more difficult to squash. Boo hoo.
I always thought Russian would prefer Clinton. If you put aside the Russian misogyny, it makes more sense to me to install a leader who is predictable that you can manipulate than someone that is unpredictable and you don't know wtf they are going to do on any given day...
On one hand it would be nice if a country like the US took a leading role as an example to the rest of the world...
On the other hand all of these accords, agreements, etc... are a bit ridiculous in that the biggest contributors to pollution like China, India, Russia, etc... will never agree to any of it anyway making the whole thing rather moot, and additionally even if they did, or a bunch of other countries do, there is nothing really to stop them from doing whatever anyway... People talk about legally binding etc... but these are independent NATIONS that can and will do whatever is in their best interests. You only have to look are previous historical examples of these things to see nations not meeting their targets etc...
I think it is mostly for ease of use than anything else.
I used to be involved with some legislation that had some very flexible wording around it. It was a nightmare to actually use. Certain individuals needed to be vetted as to their qualifications, work experience, background, education, etc... while those engineers that belonged to the association did all the vetting for you. In the end after years of having to deal with that (with no staff or resources to do it or managers willing to sign off on the responsibility should something go wrong), the wording was changed to "engineers".
This isn't a slight against you or that you are any less qualified, it is just because it is easier to administer, as you are basically outsourcing all the vetting and the responsibility to the association.
I'm a Doctor. Here take this drug.
He is effectively "practicing" engineering if he is giving professional advice on an issue while referencing that he is an engineer, which is what he is being called on.
If he just said, I have a technical background and think your traffic lights are crap, no one would care. However he said something like I'm an engineer and in my opinion your traffic lights are crap, to which the association basically said, ahhh actually your not, because you aren't licences, haven't paid your dues, and fsck off, and here is a fine for your trouble and being a jerk about it all, to which this guy was like ohhh my free speech etc... bs. I guess it serves the association right for being petty about it all (i.e. fining the guy, they could have just dismissed him) as I bet they regret it now for all the trouble it's caused.
Same applies to say an unlicensed doctor, or an unlicensed lawyer. There are reasons why licencing exists. Accountability for ones actions being one of the primary ones.
It is about PROFESSIONAL accountability.
I may not be a Doctor, but I'd recommend some rino horn for your sore thumb, and perhaps some tincture of ham. No because you are not PROFESSIONALLY a Doctor, so you cannot give that advice, and yes it is illegal to do so and call yourself one. Similar for a Lawyer, or an engineer, or any "profession". Yes there are those that skirt that definition and rules, which is why their associations (the BAR, the College of doctors, the engineering association, etc...) try to come down hard on those that do, to protect the INTEGRITY of their profession. Because if they don't anyone can say anything, and it will be a mess. What the court has to decide is if this bums rights to bitch and complain about a traffic light is more important than that (which it might be, who cares really)... Honestly I think the association made a mountain out of a molehill, and I bet they are regretting everything now that this has blown up in their faces legally.
That is like having someone with a Doctorate in Women's Studies operate on you to remove your spleen because they are a "Doctor".
Not all engineering degrees are the same. Not all Engineers are qualified to do all "engineering" work. Do you want a civil engineer to do your electrical work, or an electrical work done by a civil engineer?
Also he is a "Software Engineer" which in many circles is not actually considered a real "engineer". At best it might mean they may adhere to a specific code of ethics and conduct... maybe. In most areas (also in this case) unless you pay your dues and belong to your association, you lose the right to call yourself an engineer.
I think the judge is just waving his hand here to get at the crux of the argument to say, "OK OK for the sake of argument you are an fracking engineer, and you can make engineering kind of noises, wtf are you getting on about these traffic lights and why is it such a big deal to you and the association?"
That looks vaguely like "hacking" in Fallout...
Seems like every time the TV news needs a graphic for hacking they use the Fallout one... I find that hilarious and it makes me feel a bit smug all at the same time, win win!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Bravely leading from behind like all leaders should! :)
I also wonder what type of communication exists if any between "multiple interceptors". Presumably they are smart enough not to shoot each other down. Also given say a swarm of MIRV's and say a swarm of interceptors, what prevents all the interceptors going for the one warhead, rather than trying to sort out which one goes where. Would be an interesting piece of code should it actually exist...
Well it is 1 for 1 or 100% for ICBM's.... Though that is a ridiculous test sample... though at the same time it isn't like ICBM and their launches are just laying around either.
But no, not all that reassuring I'd say still. Also I'd argue that intercepting an ICBM is likely harder than "other type of target missiles", so I wonder if they have improved it by that much, or if they just got lucky. Also depends on how they run the test. Kinda cheating if you know exactly when and where the missile is coming from I'd say...
I guess this means that the government has solved all the other problems it has if it has time to deal with the "problem" of transgender bathrooms.
That is my take away. Not only is this not really a "problem", but even if you could argue through some arcane way that it was, it certainly isn't a large problem. In fact it is in the grand scheme of things an infinitesimally small problem that only impacts very few people in society, and those impacts are pretty low.
Priorities seem to be a bit out of wack. I'm not trying to demean the importance of social issues, but many times they seem to get the ire and the coverage, and the time, when there seem to be so many much larger, more important, much more impact to not only more people, but in a much more significant way. But as I said, it is good they are finally dealing with the transgender bathroom issue, as surely it means they have solved all the other larger issued plaguing society.
There is a joke here somewhere where you can buy the concept of an 18 core cpu and Intel will send you a picture of it...
or..
That it will be released 1 core at a time over the next 18 months...
Personally the best thing I've seen out of Star Citizen are the "commercials" for some of the ships lol!
Until they come up with Ultra Turbo Boost Max next year and then Ultra Turbo Boost Max Extreme the year after that... :)
I've been with the same organization for some time, so I get a fair amount of vacation now. However where I work we are allowed to rollover up to one full years worth of vacation. As a result I never use all my vacation really. I keep rolling it over more less to keep the maximum amount allowed available. I do this for three reasons.
1) Is perhaps I'd like to take a big trip or more vacation some year, that way I have the days available to me,
2) I know if I were to be laid off, they would have to pay out my vacation time, which would give me a nice cash buffer to work with should that ever happen, and
3) I figure all things being equal, should layoffs occur and management be considering laying off employee A who they don't have to pay out, or employee B who they would have to pay out many thousands of dollars, they are probably going to layoff employee A. Particularly if layoffs are to do with saving money (which is usually is), and management is rewarded for finding said savings (which they probably are)...
Anyway not really sure if #3 is a thing, but it makes sense to me.
I think generally backups are badly managed. I don't think most management sees them as all that critical. I suspect admins likely get tired of trying and just go with the flow after awhile.
In all my years professionally I've only ever really needed enterprise backup (i.e. not my desktop etc...) twice (Oracle DB). Both times it was useless. The first was a scheduling issue where the last backup that was done was 9 months old which is really unacceptable. In that case we had to use some complicated data harvesting from log tables (which fortunately we had in this instance), though some data was lots due to format differences. The second time apparently the backup process was broken, and it was under maintenance to fix it, for a month, but no one decided that it might be a good idea to tell anyone, so when we deployed a new version of an application into production which caused a number of data issues, the last good backup was 3 weeks old, meaning we had to get creative with the existing data and live with the rest putting it on users to manual confirm a couple weeks worth of possible changes.
Anyway from my own experience whenever it's been needed, it's not there. Personally I think I am way more fastidious about my backups, but there seems to be a thing about corporate culture, and perhaps the idea of risk management and passing blame and responsibility off on somebody else..
You forgot a big one. Real Estate agents, who in many places have a monopoly or at very least a large advantage over the entire housing market, both yours and they other guys, are both highly incentivised to make housing as expensive as possible, and to keep people buying and selling as much as possible because they each make about 3% off whatever that value is during that transaction...
On a house that say costs 100,000 that is only about 3k, however on a house that is 800,000 that is 24,000$ for that one transaction (x2 for both agents!), so there are a lot of real estate folks getting rich right now...
It will be a lot sooner if no one is buying houses. Most boomers have their house has the primary investment. When one of two things happens, the housing market is going to probably make a very large adjustment. 1) Boomers won't be able to sell their houses for the money they need for retirement, and 2) Interest rates will go up and those people that put themselves into extreme debt to buy a house will not be able to afford them anymore, pushing more housing on market.
While I'm not sure when any of these things will happen, and there will be a lot of momentum to prevent it from both home owners, real estate folks, and government, eventually it will, and I don't think it will take until 2035 until it does. Also I'd say that most of those boomers won't be living in those houses until they die at 80, most will either downsize or go into group living well before then.
One thing I found useful about Firefox, at least at work was established extensions like Firebug. As you mention it is also better with html5 which is a requirement for some of the apps I need to use.
I hate IE at work, period. I use it for certain applications because I have to. Part of the problem is that corporate has it so locked up, and restricted, mostly so it can support some legacy systems we have, that it is useless for much of anything else.
I use Chrome for general browsing. I've recently found that it is starting to also introduce some interesting apps as well. Unfortunately their store is all locked down by corporate so it is useless for that at work, but good for home however.
At home I generally use Chrome. I started out using IE after I upgraded to Windows 10, but had some recurring issues with it, and eventually moved to Chrome. When I had Windows 7, I used both Chrome and Firefox though I am not sure I really had a huge preference of one over the other. Firefox seemed a bit more robust, but also a bit more bloated...
First off on the topic, I don't think it is all that surprising, but would add that it isn't just "Security staff", but essentially all IT staff not in a direct support roll. It happens to me all the time, and for the most part I'm happy to oblige if I can. It only becomes annoying when I have other priorities or pressures, and so-and-so wanders by and wants me to figure out his printer problem or something when I should be testing a corporate application for bugs on a deadline.
Second I do have a limited support role for some specific applications, and as a result I submit a LOT of tickets. Not only because I need to for myself in a development capacity, but also on behalf of some users with certain problems. Anyway as you call it "pass the buck", I typically refer to it as the "blame game", it is easily the number one thing that makes things take about 10,000% longer than they should, but also ends up with a lot of "resolved" tickets for unresolved problems.
One in particular I had this year (and indeed I went through the whole BS process last year with a similar result), was essentially complaining about the testing environment for a particular application we're doing development on. Under a lot of pressure to test the bejuses out of it to ensure nothing gets into production, however this is "challenging" by the fact that the environment runs about 25 times slower. So a test query that might take 7 seconds on DEV or on PROD takes about 3 MINUTES on the stupid testing rig. Now multiply that by hundreds of test cases. It is absolutely brutal, and testing certain things becomes very difficult if not even very reasonable to do within the time frames of the project. Anyway I have no idea why it is so slow, and as mentioned, it has been this way for awhile now. It isn't like it is 25% slower or something like that, the difference is astounding and hard to simply say attribute to only old hardware or something. Also for reference, this is an older legacy system, which should probably run pretty good on just about anything seeing as it was designed to initially run on hardware from the 1990's...
Anyway so after I get thoroughly frustrated, I decide to give it a try to get someone to do something about it. So I start the whole process as I am required to do with a stupid IT help desk ticket... First it is required to get escalated a bit, as it isn't something one of their first line staff is used to dealing with. Then the blame game starts. The data centre hardware guys blame the application and the code, who blame the DBA's and the DB structure, who blame the network people, who blame the security people, who blame the middleware folks, who blame the vendors of VM, who blame the hardware, who blame the DB optimization, who blame... etc... What basically happens at each juncture a bunch of emails are flying around, I'm usually called to do performance testing and testing and testing at each point (all of which ends up being exactly the same), the ticket itself gets "resolved" and "re-opened" multiple times because some group decides that they are done, and it just continues and goes on, and eventually in the end nothing actually happens. Which at a certain point I just make sure my management is aware of the issue, and the fact that I can only reasonably test to a certain point given the circumstances, that all the various IT parties have been made aware of the issue, did nothing, and as such are willing to accept the risk, that should something get into a production setting that I couldn't test for, the blame for that falls directly on the low performance of the environment and the lack of support that it has... Bitter much I know. Anyway I know I will run into this again next year, and the year after that, etc... until they probably replace everything and start anew with a different configuration.
Another issue other than the blame game is "partial" tickets, where part of a ticket will get done (say installing some software), but the second part of the ticket (say creating a user account) doesn't.
Sorry to use a trivial sporting analogy but it really comes down to available pool. I think most reasonable people will agree for the most part just about anyone can do anything given an equal amount of opportunity and talent.
That said, there is a reason why if the Canadian men's hockey Olympic team played the Italian one, that they would destroy them by a very generous ballpark 10 times out of 10. There is also a good reason (apart from rules) why no one in Italy would have a hope in hell of making said hockey team. Heck if you wanted to make this a gender analogy it would be an even more egregious divide, as about the only team in the world close to the Canadian's Women's team would be the USA, no where else is even remotely close.
What I am getting at in a very round about way is that their is a reason WHY Canadian's are so good at hockey, in particular the women, two reasons in fact. Neither of those reasons being that somehow Canadian's are more say genetically disposed than say the poor Italians I'm picking on (Only using Italy as an example as they actually fielded a hockey team when they hosted the winter Olympics).
Reason #1 is the pool of players from which to draw from. So many people are INTERESTED in hockey in Canada, that the minor leagues have probably well over a million players to pick from. All things being EQUAL, if Italy has say 5000, who do you think are going to be the most best most qualified candidates? That's right the Canadians just by the numbers. How interested a person is to say hockey is controlled by a whole host of factors... To be nice to the Italians out there, you could probably reverse the above for say soccer for example.
Reason #2 is the amount of resources dedicated to the endeavor. Canada in one way shape of form dedicates a tremendous amount of money to hockey. In the form of facilities everywhere (usually tax funded) in rinks and arenas in every little community, to education and training programs, to associations and teams supporting competition, etc...
Anyway to expect say the Canadian hockey team to allow an Italian on the team, simply because it is only full of Canadians is absurd (as is my analogy I know). If they are really looking at expanding diversity, the way to do it is analyse reasons #1 and #2 and see what can be done about that. However the "players" themselves are not the ones to be asking to do anything. As a last thought, at a certain point for some "sports" it either doesn't make sense to try, or if you do, it is understanding that it is going to have limited or diminishing returns. That isn't to say impossible, Jamaican bobsled teams and all...
First off I am a proponent of nuclear power, so this won't come as a surprise. I will agree with you, that when you take in the total lifecycle of the nuclear option, it is much more expensive than what some proponents might say. The most daunting component being the construction costs, and the length of the initial construction. Does the math make sense? Currently right now in the short term, probably not, no. That is largely because energy is pretty cheap by historical standards. In the longer term, it does make sense, and it isn't all about the economic "math" either.
Bottom line is base load and what options there are available. Right now, and into the foreseeable future in the next couple of decades, both Germany and Switzerland will be taking advantage of buying nuclear power from France due to their proximity. Looking at the Switzerland vote, it is basic NIMBY on a local scale, however it is wholesale national NIMBY by depending on France for base when renewables fall short. Both likely augment locally with gas plants as well, however without disposits of their own they are then dependent on largely imports from Russia. So there political issues at play as well.
I do see opportunity for decentralized renewables and storage, however on the national scale that is going to take a lot of time to build up the infrastructure. Perhaps that is what they are eventually gearing up for, however in the meantime they might be putting themselves in energy risk depending on what happens in the somewhat near term. What I see as the unfortunate outcome is that there has been lost opportunities to improve upon conventional (i.e. decades old) nuclear technology which may have produced smaller better nuclear systems, but largely that development has stagnated due to all sorts of factors such as fear, but also just cheaper commodities pricing, and looking for short term solutions for long term problems.
Considering there is supposed to be a "World" government, and there had been no indications of a radical shift of that make up, one would think that there would be vastly more Chinese and India crew members simply by the numbers. That said, perhaps it can be explained away a bit in that the HQ of Starfleet was somehow positioned in SF, but even then, not a lot of Mexicans on the crew either. Considering all these are US TV shows, and the demographics today, one would think they might throw in some Latin Americans or something if for nothing more than to cater to a larger audience.
However the jerk in me wants an episode where top brass at Star Fleet need to save some money (or credits, or resources or whatever) due to the conflict with the Klingons or something, and replace all the crew with Indians, and how that all turns out...
Also no Canadians? Give me some stereotypical Canadian (space)hockey lovin', lumberjack, apologist! "Oh is he some sort of alien?" "No, he's just Canadian..."