The check is in the mail! Really. It is. No lie. Put it there myself. But you have to restore the wire taps! You will get your money. [ bzzzzzzz...... ]
Did we just lose power? Why did the lights go out? You did pay the power bill didn't you? Damn!
Shooting a hole in a commercial aircraft will not cause it to suddenly explode. Mythbusters showed that.
You are correct. People should be polite without any prompting at all. But that is not reality. There seem to be more and more angry people out there. Having a larger percentage of people trained and qualified to carry weapons would put a quick end to any of these rampages that have made the news. But it seems a lot of people simply want to cower behind a desk and get shot when someone snaps like that instead of defending themselves. Of course they would probably change their minds if them or someone they knew was in such an incident.
The general population can not count on the police to prevent such incidents. And with the current thinking the government takes away our right to defend ourselves. The police are really only there to fill out some paper work after such crimes are committed. Even the clean up of the crime scenes is left to a third party.
At that time a box cutter was not on the prohibited list. So security just let them on through.
The current check points at airports are full of holes. Almost anyone with slight intelligence could figure out a way to bypass those check points or get prohibited materials or alternative materials that could be used as weapons onto a plane.
So they react to past threats such as the shoe bomber and ignore other things that are more likely to happen. Just like the prohibition on liquids that they implemented. Some guy at the TSA watched Die Hard where they had those two part liquid bombs and shit a brick. The next day they banned anyone carrying water through a check point. Remember though that once through the checkpoint you could purchase a new bottle of water. Wonder what kind of checks those went through to get on the air side of the security gate? Most likely NONE! Some guy drove them through the front gate with nobody checking anything and carried them to the air side of the terminal. So what did they just accomplish? Not much, except to make travelers spend more on something they could get cheaper elsewhere. Looking at the security they have implemented is like looking a swiss cheese, there are so many holes it is a little silly.
You missed the whole point. It is all security theater. Things that they can do that if you don't look to closely MIGHT make things more secure. But upon closer inspection don't really provide any additional level of security. It is a theater act to make people say "By golly they are doing something proactive about this terrorist thing."
Face it, a terrorist is not likely to try to walk through a security check point with something that screams "this is a dangerous weapon, I must be a terrorist, arrest me." If they want to plug holes in security then they need to start with the support crew that have access to the aircraft on the tarmac and the luggage handlers.
Of course they can't do anything about that, they can't even prevent the luggage handlers from stealing whatever they want from the bags they handle. But nobody says much about that anymore. And they seem to think that occasionally catching ground crew smuggling guns and drugs in airplanes is going to make that problem go away.
The best option to improve security is to let people get training and a permit that allows them to carry a weapon anywhere. If you have a significant portion of the population armed at all times then the chance of terrorist getting much further than "I have a bom..." before someone drops them would reduce the chances of such act to virtually zero.
It would probably make most people a lot more polite as well.
The reliance on oil can be dramatically reduced or eliminated in about 10 to 15 years. All it is going to take is for the government to decide to do it. Kind of like the challenge Kennedy made to send a man to the Moon and back. It can all be done by building the infrastructure needed to support hydrogen based cars/trucks. This requires the further development of fuel cells along with the support infrastructure to create the fuel, transport it, and deliver it to the end user. Part of this project would require the building of a number of nuclear plants to provide the energy required to create the fuel. The automobile manufacturers would be required to switch to building fuel cell cars which would be phased in over the 15 year period. During this time the price of gasoline would continue to climb. This would encourage people to buy fuel cell cars as replacements for the gasoline vehicles they use now.
The problem with getting this started is that the big oil/gasoline companies own the politicians that make up the government and as such they don't want anything to change to the current model. This problem can be solved. It just requires a few people to get the process started. However those people have to be in the right positions of power to do it. This is not something that is going to be done from a grass roots level. This is a major infrastructure switch that must be driven from the top down.
Very similar to the National Weather service predictions of how many hurricanes are going to happen this year and where they will hit once they actually form. Until it actually hits they don't know for sure just where they will land.
And you don't even mention Mars' version of Bruce Willis taking off in a flying saucer with a team of wild cat water drillers to plant nuclear weapons in the asteroid in an attempt to divert it from a direct strike on Mars. They have to factor in the possibility of that happening too.
Check your insurance policy. This would fall under the force majeure or acts of God clause. They don't pay for major calamities. In some cases they don't even pay for minor ones such as hurricanes.
Looks like you have been reading/. long enough to know that very few people read the actual article. It is much more efficient to just start commenting based on the really bad synopsis provided. Don't try and bring some sanity back to/.
This is just another example of security theater in action. Just like immediately after 9/11 they put armed national guard in the airports. It was all show. They provided no additional security, in fact it could be argued that they degraded security, they now had fully automatic weapons on the other side of the check points. It even resulted in a one terminal being evacuated when one of the national guard, and his weapons, went missing for a short period of time.
This particular edict was probably prompted by some middle manager that happened to read an article about "exploding" laptop batteries. And if they "explode" that must be bad and might cause a plane to go down. So let's ban them. What is funny is that they don't ban all of them, just spares. Seems like they don't even address the problem completely with the current rules.
All of this was most likely the result of some consultant that needed to point to something they did in the last six months to show how valuable their services are.
He did say he had no idea what to do. As such have to assume he is fairly young and inexperienced. As others have mentioned already having you office in a room with four racks of equipment will become intolerable very quickly.
I'm guessing that what he gets to design is to select a desk and chair that he will put in the closet with the equipment. And that will come from the pile of used crap that places like that have in the basement. He probably is not even given a budget for new desk top systems for him to use.
Welcome to the real world. Do a search on the Bastard Operator From Hell stories. That is the template you should work from and how you should run the IT department if you really are in charge of it.
You have part of your argument wrong. Politicians don't do the job we elected them to do. They do the job that the big money providers, lobbies and big corporations, pay them to do. Politicians have been been evolved to get money and say things that get the general population to vote them into office. Once there they pay back the corporations and lobbies that provided the money used to convince the cattle^H^H^H^H^H^Hvoters to vote for them instead of the other guy.
There is really very little difference between the two parties we have to vote from. They try to make a big deal about how one side is for this and the other is for that. It is all sound bites. None of them are there to do what the general populace wants. The voters don't matter except at election time and that is when politicians talk out of both sides of the mouths. Writing your congressman will have about as much effect on the laws as yelling into a hurricane.
If you don't think that is true then explain how Kennedy has stayed in office for so long?
This idea to replace all incandescent bulbs with CLFs may not have been thought through completely. Very few people talk about the dangers of CLFs. They contain mercury and lead. If not handled and reprocessed correctly old CLFs will be end up in the landfill where those toxic materials will leach into the soil and the water table.
And what about your kids when they knock over that lamp and break the bulb? They will be breathing that very same mercury and lead. But I guess a few IQ points is worth reducing our energy consumption.
Check it out if you don't believe it. We could be poisoning the next generation by imposing laws that require the use of dangerous materials. And the costs are going to be more than expected since special hazardous material handling processes will need to be implemented to safely discard the millions of bulbs that will burn out and be broken every day.
I can see every house having to have a chemical protective suit that can be worn in case a bulb is broken.
When has a police department every really investigated a burglary? Maybe when it happens to some one in power or famous. In the real world police departments simply file some paper work and then go get some donuts. They don't investigate anything as lowly as a burglary.
Accountability is important. But after all these recounts and investigations there has not been anyone charged with voter fraud, just accusations and innuendo.
Politicians have been breed to win elections, not to solve the problems that this country has. Actually it is a fairly good example of evolution in action. Those that can get money from various lobbies and can talk to crowds and convince them that they have the same views as the crowd.
Politics has come down to simple sound bites, there is not substance. Regardless of which party is in office we get pretty much the same results.
Why do they keep demanding recounts! Seems like the better approach would be to set out a platform that solves the basic problems for the majority of people. Instead they (both parties) spend time tearing down each other as well as themselves then run crying to the courts when things don't happen to fall their way.
Concentrate on solving the problems not trying to figure out some loop hole or proving some conspiracy and blaming others for not doing well at the polls.
I really wish there was a third party candidate that had a shot at winning.
One more step in creating a terminator. First we create an autonomous UAV that can recharge itself. Next we create an automated factory to build autonomous UAVs. Pretty soon they realize that to get more power they have to remove unnecessary loads from the power lines, ie. us. Now we know why the terminators decided to rebel and wipe out humanity.
So have fun tilting at windmills. You will achieve the same result. A group managing to get things changed is the exception anymore. You can expend all your energy yelling at your congress critters and you will not change the way they will vote. They are owned by special interests, if the special interest is opposite of what you want done then you are out of luck.
If you still don't believe that, when was the last time a candidate won office where they collected less money than the second place candidate? Then ask where does the money come from? There is some donated by individual voters but the vast bulk of the money comes from special interests/corporations that buy congress critters by the dozen. And a congress critter knows that you don't take money then don't deliver. That is a sure way for the special interests to back your opponent the next time around.
Dire predictions are usually followed by a project/business plan on how to fix things. In other words someone wants money to fix something that won't need fixing.
How many times did people predict that Usenet would collapse due to the massive amount of data being passed around on the old modem network? It never did happen.
If anyone thinks this bill is going to be modified to eliminate immunity for the telecom companies I have some beach side land in Arizona that you might be interested in.
The telecom industry pays well for the politicians that they hire. No amount of complaining by us or anyone else like us will modify the votes of those politicians. Unless you can provide more money than the telecom industry there is little chance of influencing this bill and getting it changed.
You nailed the comment that first came to my mind. The power company is going to utilize the batteries in all those electric cars and wear them out quicker than the owners expect. But that is not the power companies issue. They get free storage for the grid where they can reap more profit by selling power that you already paid for to charge your vehicle. Then they get to charge you again to charge it back up before you can use it. Can see it now on a Monday morning after a cold snap, the power company taps into all that stored power to cover the surge, everyone with an electric car stalls out half way to work because they don't have a full charge in the vehicle.
It's not the wind. It is the earth rotating under the rocks. Not sure of the latitude of the location but the earth is rotating at something around 1000 miles per hour at the equator.
Slashdot Mirror
The check is in the mail! Really. It is. No lie. Put it there myself. But you have to restore the wire taps! You will get your money. [ bzzzzzzz...... ]
Did we just lose power? Why did the lights go out? You did pay the power bill didn't you? Damn!
Shooting a hole in a commercial aircraft will not cause it to suddenly explode. Mythbusters showed that.
You are correct. People should be polite without any prompting at all. But that is not reality. There seem to be more and more angry people out there. Having a larger percentage of people trained and qualified to carry weapons would put a quick end to any of these rampages that have made the news. But it seems a lot of people simply want to cower behind a desk and get shot when someone snaps like that instead of defending themselves. Of course they would probably change their minds if them or someone they knew was in such an incident.
The general population can not count on the police to prevent such incidents. And with the current thinking the government takes away our right to defend ourselves. The police are really only there to fill out some paper work after such crimes are committed. Even the clean up of the crime scenes is left to a third party.
The guy is developing the technology used in the Matrix to use the human body for power. Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
At that time a box cutter was not on the prohibited list. So security just let them on through.
The current check points at airports are full of holes. Almost anyone with slight intelligence could figure out a way to bypass those check points or get prohibited materials or alternative materials that could be used as weapons onto a plane.
So they react to past threats such as the shoe bomber and ignore other things that are more likely to happen. Just like the prohibition on liquids that they implemented. Some guy at the TSA watched Die Hard where they had those two part liquid bombs and shit a brick. The next day they banned anyone carrying water through a check point. Remember though that once through the checkpoint you could purchase a new bottle of water. Wonder what kind of checks those went through to get on the air side of the security gate? Most likely NONE! Some guy drove them through the front gate with nobody checking anything and carried them to the air side of the terminal. So what did they just accomplish? Not much, except to make travelers spend more on something they could get cheaper elsewhere. Looking at the security they have implemented is like looking a swiss cheese, there are so many holes it is a little silly.
You missed the whole point. It is all security theater. Things that they can do that if you don't look to closely MIGHT make things more secure. But upon closer inspection don't really provide any additional level of security. It is a theater act to make people say "By golly they are doing something proactive about this terrorist thing."
Face it, a terrorist is not likely to try to walk through a security check point with something that screams "this is a dangerous weapon, I must be a terrorist, arrest me." If they want to plug holes in security then they need to start with the support crew that have access to the aircraft on the tarmac and the luggage handlers.
Of course they can't do anything about that, they can't even prevent the luggage handlers from stealing whatever they want from the bags they handle. But nobody says much about that anymore. And they seem to think that occasionally catching ground crew smuggling guns and drugs in airplanes is going to make that problem go away.
The best option to improve security is to let people get training and a permit that allows them to carry a weapon anywhere. If you have a significant portion of the population armed at all times then the chance of terrorist getting much further than "I have a bom..." before someone drops them would reduce the chances of such act to virtually zero.
It would probably make most people a lot more polite as well.
Make sure you have a firm understanding and be able to deliver the following words:
"Do you want fries with that?"
The reliance on oil can be dramatically reduced or eliminated in about 10 to 15 years. All it is going to take is for the government to decide to do it. Kind of like the challenge Kennedy made to send a man to the Moon and back. It can all be done by building the infrastructure needed to support hydrogen based cars/trucks. This requires the further development of fuel cells along with the support infrastructure to create the fuel, transport it, and deliver it to the end user. Part of this project would require the building of a number of nuclear plants to provide the energy required to create the fuel. The automobile manufacturers would be required to switch to building fuel cell cars which would be phased in over the 15 year period. During this time the price of gasoline would continue to climb. This would encourage people to buy fuel cell cars as replacements for the gasoline vehicles they use now.
The problem with getting this started is that the big oil/gasoline companies own the politicians that make up the government and as such they don't want anything to change to the current model. This problem can be solved. It just requires a few people to get the process started. However those people have to be in the right positions of power to do it. This is not something that is going to be done from a grass roots level. This is a major infrastructure switch that must be driven from the top down.
Very similar to the National Weather service predictions of how many hurricanes are going to happen this year and where they will hit once they actually form. Until it actually hits they don't know for sure just where they will land.
And you don't even mention Mars' version of Bruce Willis taking off in a flying saucer with a team of wild cat water drillers to plant nuclear weapons in the asteroid in an attempt to divert it from a direct strike on Mars. They have to factor in the possibility of that happening too.
Check your insurance policy. This would fall under the force majeure or acts of God clause. They don't pay for major calamities. In some cases they don't even pay for minor ones such as hurricanes.
Looks like you have been reading /. long enough to know that very few people read the actual article. It is much more efficient to just start commenting based on the really bad synopsis provided. Don't try and bring some sanity back to /.
This is just another example of security theater in action. Just like immediately after 9/11 they put armed national guard in the airports. It was all show. They provided no additional security, in fact it could be argued that they degraded security, they now had fully automatic weapons on the other side of the check points. It even resulted in a one terminal being evacuated when one of the national guard, and his weapons, went missing for a short period of time.
This particular edict was probably prompted by some middle manager that happened to read an article about "exploding" laptop batteries. And if they "explode" that must be bad and might cause a plane to go down. So let's ban them. What is funny is that they don't ban all of them, just spares. Seems like they don't even address the problem completely with the current rules.
All of this was most likely the result of some consultant that needed to point to something they did in the last six months to show how valuable their services are.
Security theater at it's best.
He did say he had no idea what to do. As such have to assume he is fairly young and inexperienced. As others have mentioned already having you office in a room with four racks of equipment will become intolerable very quickly.
I'm guessing that what he gets to design is to select a desk and chair that he will put in the closet with the equipment. And that will come from the pile of used crap that places like that have in the basement. He probably is not even given a budget for new desk top systems for him to use.
Welcome to the real world. Do a search on the Bastard Operator From Hell stories. That is the template you should work from and how you should run the IT department if you really are in charge of it.
http://members.iinet.net.au/~bofh/
You have part of your argument wrong. Politicians don't do the job we elected them to do. They do the job that the big money providers, lobbies and big corporations, pay them to do. Politicians have been been evolved to get money and say things that get the general population to vote them into office. Once there they pay back the corporations and lobbies that provided the money used to convince the cattle^H^H^H^H^H^Hvoters to vote for them instead of the other guy.
There is really very little difference between the two parties we have to vote from. They try to make a big deal about how one side is for this and the other is for that. It is all sound bites. None of them are there to do what the general populace wants. The voters don't matter except at election time and that is when politicians talk out of both sides of the mouths. Writing your congressman will have about as much effect on the laws as yelling into a hurricane.
If you don't think that is true then explain how Kennedy has stayed in office for so long?
This idea to replace all incandescent bulbs with CLFs may not have been thought through completely. Very few people talk about the dangers of CLFs. They contain mercury and lead. If not handled and reprocessed correctly old CLFs will be end up in the landfill where those toxic materials will leach into the soil and the water table.
And what about your kids when they knock over that lamp and break the bulb? They will be breathing that very same mercury and lead. But I guess a few IQ points is worth reducing our energy consumption.
http://www.uis.edu/facilityservices/fluorescent_bulbs.htm
Check it out if you don't believe it. We could be poisoning the next generation by imposing laws that require the use of dangerous materials. And the costs are going to be more than expected since special hazardous material handling processes will need to be implemented to safely discard the millions of bulbs that will burn out and be broken every day.
I can see every house having to have a chemical protective suit that can be worn in case a bulb is broken.
When has a police department every really investigated a burglary? Maybe when it happens to some one in power or famous. In the real world police departments simply file some paper work and then go get some donuts. They don't investigate anything as lowly as a burglary.
Accountability is important. But after all these recounts and investigations there has not been anyone charged with voter fraud, just accusations and innuendo.
Politicians have been breed to win elections, not to solve the problems that this country has. Actually it is a fairly good example of evolution in action. Those that can get money from various lobbies and can talk to crowds and convince them that they have the same views as the crowd.
Politics has come down to simple sound bites, there is not substance. Regardless of which party is in office we get pretty much the same results.
Why do they keep demanding recounts! Seems like the better approach would be to set out a platform that solves the basic problems for the majority of people. Instead they (both parties) spend time tearing down each other as well as themselves then run crying to the courts when things don't happen to fall their way.
Concentrate on solving the problems not trying to figure out some loop hole or proving some conspiracy and blaming others for not doing well at the polls.
I really wish there was a third party candidate that had a shot at winning.
One more step in creating a terminator. First we create an autonomous UAV that can recharge itself. Next we create an automated factory to build autonomous UAVs. Pretty soon they realize that to get more power they have to remove unnecessary loads from the power lines, ie. us. Now we know why the terminators decided to rebel and wipe out humanity.
Nathan Brazil, are you out there?
The Well World series had an interesting take on a similar idea.
The simple answer to your question is 42.
So have fun tilting at windmills. You will achieve the same result. A group managing to get things changed is the exception anymore. You can expend all your energy yelling at your congress critters and you will not change the way they will vote. They are owned by special interests, if the special interest is opposite of what you want done then you are out of luck.
If you still don't believe that, when was the last time a candidate won office where they collected less money than the second place candidate? Then ask where does the money come from? There is some donated by individual voters but the vast bulk of the money comes from special interests/corporations that buy congress critters by the dozen. And a congress critter knows that you don't take money then don't deliver. That is a sure way for the special interests to back your opponent the next time around.
Dire predictions are usually followed by a project/business plan on how to fix things. In other words someone wants money to fix something that won't need fixing.
How many times did people predict that Usenet would collapse due to the massive amount of data being passed around on the old modem network? It never did happen.
If anyone thinks this bill is going to be modified to eliminate immunity for the telecom companies I have some beach side land in Arizona that you might be interested in.
The telecom industry pays well for the politicians that they hire. No amount of complaining by us or anyone else like us will modify the votes of those politicians. Unless you can provide more money than the telecom industry there is little chance of influencing this bill and getting it changed.
You nailed the comment that first came to my mind. The power company is going to utilize the batteries in all those electric cars and wear them out quicker than the owners expect. But that is not the power companies issue. They get free storage for the grid where they can reap more profit by selling power that you already paid for to charge your vehicle. Then they get to charge you again to charge it back up before you can use it. Can see it now on a Monday morning after a cold snap, the power company taps into all that stored power to cover the surge, everyone with an electric car stalls out half way to work because they don't have a full charge in the vehicle.
Really great idea, not!
It's not the wind. It is the earth rotating under the rocks. Not sure of the latitude of the location but the earth is rotating at something around 1000 miles per hour at the equator.