> General Relativity is built into the design - the time kept by the spacecraft is deliberately retarded (slowed) from their clock's proper time sufficiently to make the time sent from GPS match the proper time kept here on the Earth's surface.
The effect is apparently quite real, I found a clear explanation at http://www.astronomy.ohio-stat.... And it's fascinating: special relativity says the clocks would be slowed by their orbital velocity, but general relativity says clocks on earth's surface are even _more_) slowed by being deeper in Earth's gravity well.
I will point out that, technically, you don't have to have the science to explain the discrepancy: you can just measure it and admit the results are real You don't actually have to _understand_ the 38 usec/day speedup of the clocks to work with it, though it is apparently important to factor. And a noticeable discrepancy like that would be fascinating to try to explain _without_ General Relaitivity, so you've made a very good point.
> The GPS system (which requires a knowledge of general relativity to design)
Not so far as I can tell. It requires Newtonian orbital mechanics, Maxwell's equations for electromagnetic fields, very precise circuitry timing, and it is dependent on various quantum effects in subtle transistor design to make small. But there doesn't seem to be any core general relativity requirement. Accuracy losses from failure to handle the subtle orbital differences of relativistic rather than Newtonian orbits could be replaced by using more GPS satellites.
Making it _small_ enough with the computational power to put in a watch or cell phone may require more subtle quantum based chemistry and physics knowledge, but that hardly seems general relativity based.
For many portable devices, "self-healing" is a standard behavior. They're supposed to detect the strongest available and accessible wi-fi link, to select it automatically, and to switch transparently to or from that channel as it improves or degrades, and to incorporate locally provided authentication credentials with no user involvements.
Since most of the network problems for portable devices are, in fact, local and local configuration issues, it is completely reasonable to expect a portable that costs a week's salary to handle this correctly. The primary causes of wi-fi data failure are not magical and not very confusing, and can be dealt with locally on the portable device.
The "security" or staff health nurse should have keys to open gates or know whom to contact about keys. In the case in the original post, they had an emergency defibrillator which they were trained to use and applied to the temp worker. I'd challenge any ambulance not already on site to find the victim in the warehouse, get to the unconscious victim faster, to ensure that other staff were out of the way, and to provide a preliminary assessment and CPR any faster. From the original article, the company's on-site staff did a _very_ good job responding quickly and effectively.
I can verify that getting to the emergency location can be a problem in a number of large corporate worksites, and some sites do have competent personal who can get there _much faster_ with preliminary support, for electrical issues that may require shutting down power, for flooding, and even for CPR and other urgent medical issues. I applaud their efforts, and I've even been the helpful co-worker when an employee had a heart attack, and we got the victim to where the ambulance could help them immediately, shaving roughly 15 minutes off the time to the hospital for the patient.
However, calling "corporate security" first is also an opportunity to hide illegal immigrant workers, clean up the scene of unsafe conditions, get stories straight about any mistakes that may have triggered the accident, and limit employer liability, and to control the rumor mill. It can certainly be abused.
It';s potentially very useful for illegal immigrants, for drug addicts faking a medical record to get pain opiates, for fake billing by medical staff or insurance companies, for getting treatment for conditions your limited medical insurance is unwilling to provide for statistical reasons, and to obtain and and resell expensive medications on the black market.
I'm afraid it could. I just played "Thief", and was horribly disappointed at the sequel to the best stealth RPG games I've ever seen. Any game that gives you climbing puzzles, rope arrows, and _no way to use the rope arrows for the climbing puzzles_ is so scripted it's simply broken.
Such an agreement can include a significant lump sum of cash _precisely_ to provide compensation for being available, which helps make it an enforceable contract. That can especially include password information, critical technical contacts, passing along DNS management authority, or fleshing out documentation that seemed complete at the time of departure but was missing critical steps.
I've certainly seen such agreements, usually accompanied by a severance package of several months of pay, when the law required only that they receive vacation pay, and they're certainly not new. I even signed such an agreement a very long time ago during layoffs, since I'd trained the youngster who took over my core role and optimized myself right out of a job, and the severance package was generous enough to cover what I normally would have charged consulting fees for later. I did get a few calls later, especially when someone accidentally deleted my documentation and I pointed them ot the backups.
From that same experience, and from the success rates of women from all-women schools, it helps profoundly. The same occurred noticeably with blacks attending all-black colleges. The chance to excel, without the constant social pressure of the more "empowered" male population helped them speakout, learn to be assertive, and become leaders in their fields.
Blood sugar testing is already available from every pharmacy. I recently helped a colleague who'd left their diabetes supplies behind on a business trip, and I was startled to note that quite accurate glucometers are available over the counter for $20, and often on sale. The test strips are expensive, about $1//per test, amand many of them come in packs of 20 or so, and the lancet device that comes with the glucometer works works quite well.
We spoke, and when I mentioned some fatigue and weight gain, they suggested I test myself. It was straightforward and worked quite well: I was quite impressed, since I can remember diabetic children from my youth sampling the urine and getting results that couldn't indicate _low_ blood sugar, only _high_ blood sugar.
Even the old Ronco "Pocket Fisherman", an old staple of late night television advertising, could do an effective task against most drones at moderate range.
> What these "women only" courses and programs are saying essentially is that women are too fragile or delicate or sensitive to survive in the usual job/school environment, which is kind of insulting if you think about it at all.
From experience and various literature: there are many problems. A notable and well documented difference is the willingness of men to speak up more then women in mixed gender courses. Even a casual search shows plenty of references:
Didn't Disneyland and Disneyworld solve this years ago with rented guide bears, stuffed bears programmed with maps of the park and local guide beacons in nearly every area of their tourist parks?
No, I'm saying that theyre increasingly poorly distributed, and it's been getting worse for decades. There are companies where this is not true, but it's been very common in tech fields for the "leaders" to reap benefits outrageously higher than those who do the day to day work.
It's not "all employees". The largest employee benefits and salary are often grossly higher for the highest level staff than for anyone else, even for entire departments which they control, and the difference has effectively doubled in the USA over the last 35 years: the top 1$ of income earners now gather roughly 20% of all the income, and still have roughly 12% of all the income after taxes. Both are roughly double the 1980 figures.
> The specific activities involved in the computer you used to type your message require quantum mechanics.
So is basic chemistry, looked at closely enough. The idea that something cannot be created or functionally replicated because it's quantum mechanical is, I'm afraid, a nonsensical one.
Whether the complex interaction of state and process between a brain and its senses, between physical layout of neurons and ongoing biochemical interatctions, can be replicated to an electromechanical system seems unlikely in the extreme. Complex analog interactions are difficult to model precisely, much less replicate to the kind of essentially "digital" structure of modern computer systems.
A "force push" after a "git gc" is precisely the dangerous problem I've seen. The "git gc" is used to clean the local repository of dangerous commits with confidential information, or with bulky items that should never have entered the repository. The "force push" is then used to clear them from the central repository.
Keeping the data out and preventing accidental remerges from remote repositories can get awkward, it's true.
> For example, this weekend I'm fixing a mess where three different developers rebased and made every commit from the past two years appear as their own.
This is _precisely_ why projects need tags. git's history is more vulnerable to stupid changes than Subversion's.
> Then, a third developer got angry and did a force push to delete all of the files the other two changed.
And this is _precisely_ why github.com has a "do not allow forced pushes" option today. And again, it's why a project needs tags.
> Another problem is lack of obliterate. You just know one of those inexperienced developers is going to get mad at Git and maliciously commit passwords or copyrighted material or something else they shouldn't.
It doesn't take malice: it's a quite common problem: people commit testing scripts or configuration tools with hard-coded passwords all the time, and accidentally commit bulky binary content accidentally all the time. That's when a "force push" to a git repository is its most useful, precisely to clear this data.
The bulky files is also when a default ".gitignore" for any new repositories can be invaluable.
Yes, but I'd recommend _really strongly_ against either today. Both have considerable difficulty establishing disaster recovery or failover, and the tendency to set either of them up with the passwords stored locally in the user's home directory present profound security problems. And neither of them allow developers to make their own branches, and record their changes locally on their own systems, and submit them only when needed. The result can be a profound amount of clutter in the main repository, especially if anyone accidentally commits bulky binaries to a branch. CVS at least allows deletion of accidentally committed bulky objects: Subversion does not, not without extraordinary effort.
I'm afraid that building your own bug tracking systems from scratch, even with tools like Bugzilla or Bonsai or RT or any of the major toolkits, is a blackhole of support work. Git has proven _very_ good for developers, because it allows them to branch, and to merge, far more cleanly, with very good mechanisms to make a "pull request" and get code review, and much more reliable and verifiable GPG signed tags. For small private repositories, github.com has proven very robust and resilient, with very good tools for Wikis and bug reports and integration with build systems.
The only compelling reason I see to use Subversion today is the very, very good "TortoiseSVN" inteface for Windows users. "TortoiseGit" simply does not work well enough, and the X based GUI's aren't as good.
> It would take one engineer half a day to set all this stuff up on a spare machine, and you could try it out fairly quickly.
And it can take a full day every week to support just this one service, even in a small shop, with backup, high availability, bug fixes, security updates, end user support, and the hand management of user access and privilege management that is common to these small setups.
> And best of all, this setup is gratis as well as Free. This has worked really nicely for me in both an academic and a commercial environment.
I've unfortunately had to clean up from a number of "free as in beer" source control systems mismanaged over the long term.
> To be very clear: we are talking about an intermediate site that has themselves been hacked, rather than the origin of the attacks.
And they _will not_ cooperate. Even if their technical staff wish to, I'm afraid that if any manager or corporate attorney gets involved, the investigation will be sealed off and no more information shared. They may request a subpoena to to turn over information, but those subpoenas are very difficult to obtain, especially in a timely fashion while the attack is ongoing and the data most valuable.
Like Higgs bosons, which didn't exist until they were verified in a particle accelerator. They couldn't possibly have been involved in nuclear physics before then.
Fenman apparently wasn't teaching these students. How to handle such interest in students whom you do _not_ teach is territory that harassment guidelines try to pretend they've addressed without actually addressing. And it used to be quite common for male professors to marry female students, even female advisees in their own program. I know of at four such marriages that are at least 20 years old.
Slashdot Mirror
> Wow! Really sorry to say that sizeof(int) is 32 bits even on a 64-bit architecture.
Really, it's not. "int" varies depending on compiler and architecture. See below from www.unix.org.
http://www.unix.org/whitepaper...
It's precisely your kind of assumption from limited experience that breaks cross-compilation and multi-platform work.
> Propaganda is not journalism.
Not even on Fox "News" ?
> General Relativity is built into the design - the time kept by the spacecraft is deliberately retarded (slowed) from their clock's proper time sufficiently to make the time sent from GPS match the proper time kept here on the Earth's surface.
The effect is apparently quite real, I found a clear explanation at http://www.astronomy.ohio-stat.... And it's fascinating: special relativity says the clocks would be slowed by their orbital velocity, but general relativity says clocks on earth's surface are even _more_) slowed by being deeper in Earth's gravity well.
I will point out that, technically, you don't have to have the science to explain the discrepancy: you can just measure it and admit the results are real You don't actually have to _understand_ the 38 usec/day speedup of the clocks to work with it, though it is apparently important to factor. And a noticeable discrepancy like that would be fascinating to try to explain _without_ General Relaitivity, so you've made a very good point.
> The GPS system (which requires a knowledge of general relativity to design)
Not so far as I can tell. It requires Newtonian orbital mechanics, Maxwell's equations for electromagnetic fields, very precise circuitry timing, and it is dependent on various quantum effects in subtle transistor design to make small. But there doesn't seem to be any core general relativity requirement. Accuracy losses from failure to handle the subtle orbital differences of relativistic rather than Newtonian orbits could be replaced by using more GPS satellites.
Making it _small_ enough with the computational power to put in a watch or cell phone may require more subtle quantum based chemistry and physics knowledge, but that hardly seems general relativity based.
For many portable devices, "self-healing" is a standard behavior. They're supposed to detect the strongest available and accessible wi-fi link, to select it automatically, and to switch transparently to or from that channel as it improves or degrades, and to incorporate locally provided authentication credentials with no user involvements.
Since most of the network problems for portable devices are, in fact, local and local configuration issues, it is completely reasonable to expect a portable that costs a week's salary to handle this correctly. The primary causes of wi-fi data failure are not magical and not very confusing, and can be dealt with locally on the portable device.
The "security" or staff health nurse should have keys to open gates or know whom to contact about keys. In the case in the original post, they had an emergency defibrillator which they were trained to use and applied to the temp worker. I'd challenge any ambulance not already on site to find the victim in the warehouse, get to the unconscious victim faster, to ensure that other staff were out of the way, and to provide a preliminary assessment and CPR any faster. From the original article, the company's on-site staff did a _very_ good job responding quickly and effectively.
I can verify that getting to the emergency location can be a problem in a number of large corporate worksites, and some sites do have competent personal who can get there _much faster_ with preliminary support, for electrical issues that may require shutting down power, for flooding, and even for CPR and other urgent medical issues. I applaud their efforts, and I've even been the helpful co-worker when an employee had a heart attack, and we got the victim to where the ambulance could help them immediately, shaving roughly 15 minutes off the time to the hospital for the patient.
However, calling "corporate security" first is also an opportunity to hide illegal immigrant workers, clean up the scene of unsafe conditions, get stories straight about any mistakes that may have triggered the accident, and limit employer liability, and to control the rumor mill. It can certainly be abused.
It';s potentially very useful for illegal immigrants, for drug addicts faking a medical record to get pain opiates, for fake billing by medical staff or insurance companies, for getting treatment for conditions your limited medical insurance is unwilling to provide for statistical reasons, and to obtain and and resell expensive medications on the black market.
I'm afraid it could. I just played "Thief", and was horribly disappointed at the sequel to the best stealth RPG games I've ever seen. Any game that gives you climbing puzzles, rope arrows, and _no way to use the rope arrows for the climbing puzzles_ is so scripted it's simply broken.
> Real economies don't work that way.
It's not a one-to-one trade, because the immigrants charge less hourly but often require a great deal more training.
Such an agreement can include a significant lump sum of cash _precisely_ to provide compensation for being available, which helps make it an enforceable contract. That can especially include password information, critical technical contacts, passing along DNS management authority, or fleshing out documentation that seemed complete at the time of departure but was missing critical steps.
I've certainly seen such agreements, usually accompanied by a severance package of several months of pay, when the law required only that they receive vacation pay, and they're certainly not new. I even signed such an agreement a very long time ago during layoffs, since I'd trained the youngster who took over my core role and optimized myself right out of a job, and the severance package was generous enough to cover what I normally would have charged consulting fees for later. I did get a few calls later, especially when someone accidentally deleted my documentation and I pointed them ot the backups.
From that same experience, and from the success rates of women from all-women schools, it helps profoundly. The same occurred noticeably with blacks attending all-black colleges. The chance to excel, without the constant social pressure of the more "empowered" male population helped them speakout, learn to be assertive, and become leaders in their fields.
Blood sugar testing is already available from every pharmacy. I recently helped a colleague who'd left their diabetes supplies behind on a business trip, and I was startled to note that quite accurate glucometers are available over the counter for $20, and often on sale. The test strips are expensive, about $1//per test, amand many of them come in packs of 20 or so, and the lancet device that comes with the glucometer works works quite well.
We spoke, and when I mentioned some fatigue and weight gain, they suggested I test myself. It was straightforward and worked quite well: I was quite impressed, since I can remember diabetic children from my youth sampling the urine and getting results that couldn't indicate _low_ blood sugar, only _high_ blood sugar.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Even the old Ronco "Pocket Fisherman", an old staple of late night television advertising, could do an effective task against most drones at moderate range.
> What these "women only" courses and programs are saying essentially is that women are too fragile or delicate or sensitive to survive in the usual job/school environment, which is kind of insulting if you think about it at all.
From experience and various literature: there are many problems. A notable and well documented difference is the willingness of men to speak up more then women in mixed gender courses. Even a casual search shows plenty of references:
http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/h...
I've certainly seen this in my career in mixed gender training at all levels,and certainly seen it when training groups of younger staff.
Didn't Disneyland and Disneyworld solve this years ago with rented guide bears, stuffed bears programmed with maps of the park and local guide beacons in nearly every area of their tourist parks?
No, I'm saying that theyre increasingly poorly distributed, and it's been getting worse for decades. There are companies where this is not true, but it's been very common in tech fields for the "leaders" to reap benefits outrageously higher than those who do the day to day work.
> Distribute profits among all employees
It's not "all employees". The largest employee benefits and salary are often grossly higher for the highest level staff than for anyone else, even for entire departments which they control, and the difference has effectively doubled in the USA over the last 35 years: the top 1$ of income earners now gather roughly 20% of all the income, and still have roughly 12% of all the income after taxes. Both are roughly double the 1980 figures.
> The specific activities involved in the computer you used to type your message require quantum mechanics.
So is basic chemistry, looked at closely enough. The idea that something cannot be created or functionally replicated because it's quantum mechanical is, I'm afraid, a nonsensical one.
Whether the complex interaction of state and process between a brain and its senses, between physical layout of neurons and ongoing biochemical interatctions, can be replicated to an electromechanical system seems unlikely in the extreme. Complex analog interactions are difficult to model precisely, much less replicate to the kind of essentially "digital" structure of modern computer systems.
A "force push" after a "git gc" is precisely the dangerous problem I've seen. The "git gc" is used to clean the local repository of dangerous commits with confidential information, or with bulky items that should never have entered the repository. The "force push" is then used to clear them from the central repository.
Keeping the data out and preventing accidental remerges from remote repositories can get awkward, it's true.
> For example, this weekend I'm fixing a mess where three different developers rebased and made every commit from the past two years appear as their own.
This is _precisely_ why projects need tags. git's history is more vulnerable to stupid changes than Subversion's.
> Then, a third developer got angry and did a force push to delete all of the files the other two changed.
And this is _precisely_ why github.com has a "do not allow forced pushes" option today. And again, it's why a project needs tags.
> Another problem is lack of obliterate. You just know one of those inexperienced developers is going to get mad at Git and maliciously commit passwords or copyrighted material or something else they shouldn't.
It doesn't take malice: it's a quite common problem: people commit testing scripts or configuration tools with hard-coded passwords all the time, and accidentally commit bulky binary content accidentally all the time. That's when a "force push" to a git repository is its most useful, precisely to clear this data.
The bulky files is also when a default ".gitignore" for any new repositories can be invaluable.
> classic CVS or Subversion small team setup
Yes, but I'd recommend _really strongly_ against either today. Both have considerable difficulty establishing disaster recovery or failover, and the tendency to set either of them up with the passwords stored locally in the user's home directory present profound security problems. And neither of them allow developers to make their own branches, and record their changes locally on their own systems, and submit them only when needed. The result can be a profound amount of clutter in the main repository, especially if anyone accidentally commits bulky binaries to a branch. CVS at least allows deletion of accidentally committed bulky objects: Subversion does not, not without extraordinary effort.
I'm afraid that building your own bug tracking systems from scratch, even with tools like Bugzilla or Bonsai or RT or any of the major toolkits, is a blackhole of support work. Git has proven _very_ good for developers, because it allows them to branch, and to merge, far more cleanly, with very good mechanisms to make a "pull request" and get code review, and much more reliable and verifiable GPG signed tags. For small private repositories, github.com has proven very robust and resilient, with very good tools for Wikis and bug reports and integration with build systems.
The only compelling reason I see to use Subversion today is the very, very good "TortoiseSVN" inteface for Windows users. "TortoiseGit" simply does not work well enough, and the X based GUI's aren't as good.
> It would take one engineer half a day to set all this stuff up on a spare machine, and you could try it out fairly quickly.
And it can take a full day every week to support just this one service, even in a small shop, with backup, high availability, bug fixes, security updates, end user support, and the hand management of user access and privilege management that is common to these small setups.
> And best of all, this setup is gratis as well as Free. This has worked really nicely for me in both an academic and a commercial environment.
I've unfortunately had to clean up from a number of "free as in beer" source control systems mismanaged over the long term.
> To be very clear: we are talking about an intermediate site that has themselves been hacked, rather than the origin of the attacks.
And they _will not_ cooperate. Even if their technical staff wish to, I'm afraid that if any manager or corporate attorney gets involved, the investigation will be sealed off and no more information shared. They may request a subpoena to to turn over information, but those subpoenas are very difficult to obtain, especially in a timely fashion while the attack is ongoing and the data most valuable.
> Without proof, it never happened.
Like Higgs bosons, which didn't exist until they were verified in a particle accelerator. They couldn't possibly have been involved in nuclear physics before then.
Fenman apparently wasn't teaching these students. How to handle such interest in students whom you do _not_ teach is territory that harassment guidelines try to pretend they've addressed without actually addressing. And it used to be quite common for male professors to marry female students, even female advisees in their own program. I know of at four such marriages that are at least 20 years old.