Reasons for CFL short lifespans
on
Port-A-Nuke
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· Score: 1
1) Frequent power cycling. CFLs will last much longer if they get lit up and left alone than if they are turned on and off every few hours. The older ones were worse in this regard than the newer ones.
2) Wrong installation orientation. In the tiny type on the packaging, CFL's often say "to be installed base down" or base up. Lifespan will be GREATLY reduced if you put a base-down bulb in a ceiling fixture, or even a sideways fixture.
3) Timer-triggered fixtures. CFL's require a jolt of juice to fire up the ballast and create the spark that then sustains the glow. Many timers provide a current ramp that doesn't quite meet this demand (the power gets there eventually, but not all at the start). Many CFL's say on the packaging, "not to be used with automatic timers" for this reason. Those that are timer-OK cost more, natch.
Dr. Evil refers to "a solution looking for a problem."
I beg to differ. My wife has a back injury that makes it excruciating for her to ride in a car (at least in my little Volvo), but she can stand for a half hour at a stretch. She's on way too much pain medication to consider driving her pickup (someone would end up pancaked for sure) and so the result is that she's housebound until a) the boredom outweighs the pain she knows will result from a trip to the store, and b) I'm home to drive her there. To her a Segway represents FREEDOM AGAIN. It's a half mile to the nearest large store--she would never be able to stump that far with her cane, but she COULD zip down on a Segway and back up the hill again. Those granny power scooters someone referred to are a far inferior solution to her problem: they cost at least three times as much, and they don't maneuver nearly so well.
All we need now is the right lottery ticket...
Re:I'm sick of seeing this stupid argument!
on
Attack of the Clones
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· Score: 1
In the same way, a politician breaks no laws if he sells out his principles and does exactly what some tobacco company tells him to do. Breaking a trust which is not backed up by a contract is something anyone technically has a right to do.
Actually, the politician in your example IS breaking a law and can be removed from office for it: he could be recalled by the voters or booted out by his peers in the House or Senate. And there are other forms of trust which are backed up by law even when there is no contract. Parents can be prosecuted for failing to provide adequate care and support for their children. Caretakers for the elderly or incompetent can be sued for breach of trust if they plunder assets instead of providing care. Public employees (including members of the armed services, and your politician) swear oaths to uphold the laws, and those oaths are considered binding. Society is bound by customs as well as by contracts, and law enforces them both, so there is NO right to do whatever the hell you please as long as you haven't signed a contract that limits your actions.
Then the rich guy plundered the site he discovered, smuggling priceless architectural treasures out of Turkey, then selling them to the highest bidder.
That's not quite how it went. Leaving aside the fact that archeological treasures are much simpler to smuggle than architectural ones, Heinrich Schliemann (the rich guy in question) actually donated the stuff to museums, and also later repaid the government of Turkey.
But he was also rather a bad archeologist and may in fact have brought the "treasures of Troy" into the country with him. With 160 people working the Troy site, it's a tad strange that Schliemann was the only one to locate anything valuable. See this link for details.
By golly, I'm not the only one here who's played SimEarth! That's exactly what it took to win the scenario of creating an atmosphere on Mars. Well, except for the fact that the game has machines that create oxygen from nothing, and machines that generate plant life...
No, I'm saying that UPS was heavily unionized and that the folks working there were mostly goons. No causation is stated, but you can assume some if you want something to be annoyed about.
You're also right about the power of bluff--the one time I had to use small claims court, the defendant was an individual with few assets besides a good credit record, and he paid up to avoid having a judgment entered against him. I wish I'd thought of it sooner. But if he hadn't caved in, I was prepared to take revenge in place of repayment.
My next-cube neighbor was a UPS grunt for a few years, and he confirms that "heavily-unionized goons" is a very accurate description. He actually said the shipping part of the company was run by the Mafia, like most shipping in the US (this was in New Mexico in the 70's). UPS management is incredibly repressive (he'd rather clean toilets for Safeway than work for them again), hostility and stress are every bit as bad as other posters have said, and employee theft is rampant.
I can think of only two problems with this. First, the original author is in Canada. He would probably be able to file in Florida because the damage was discovered there, but he'd have to get there first.
Second, once you win in small claims court, it's still up to YOU to collect (at least here in Oregon). So you've paid to file and taken time off work to go to court--now you have to hire a collection agency too. Pretty soon you've paid out as much as you could possibly hope to get back.
A better (or at least cheaper) solution might be to write directly to the president of UPS and gripe about the runaround. Couldn't do any harm, and nothing else seems to have helped.
My partner used to do onsite shipping/receiving for an environmental lab, handling samples which were often liquid and frequently hazardous, and which have mandated hold times. She told me the lab's policy was to use nothing but Fedex for outgoing and prepaid Fedex for incoming, because not only were damaged/lost samples a common occurrence, (despite being shipped in sealed coolers the size of a piano bench) but also UPS' internal tracking was terrible and their on-time delivery guarantee was worth less than the paper it was written on. It was cheaper to prepay Fedex to deliver incoming samples than to call the client, explain that the hold time had expired while the sample was mistakenly sent to Texas instead of Oregon, and ask for them to resample and resend. That was in 1996-1998 inclusive.
So why is it that music artists, employed by their employer (RIAA member) get so upset at losing the ownership of the work they do?
Because even when they are done writing it, they are expected to go out and perform it over and over and talk about it in interviews. They can't just go on to the next assignment, they are tied to their entire previous body of work by the fans who still want to hear it and the record company that requires them to perform it to keep sales up. It's like you being required to recite your code at every weekly open mike night in the company cafe', and having people come up to you in the hallway with printouts for your autograph.
There's also the personal aspect that goes into creating music--it comes from the artist's life and experiences, and can be as personal as a letter, so giving up legal ownership of it is like giving up legal ownership of pieces of your own past. You can't simply hand it off and forget about it. I grant you that this doesn't apply so strongly for manufactured artists like N'Sync, but most musicians are not so separate from the stuff they sing/play and yet ALL of them are endangered by the work-for-hire interpretation.
Hope you're not talking about the state of Oregon, where Trojan Nuclear Power Plant operated successfully for 17 years of its 20-year license term, closing down only when costly material replacement was looming (steam generator tanks with cracks in them). Perhaps you're thinking of WPPSS plants 4 and 5? Those were shelved after plants 1 through 3 ran so far over estimate that the Washington Public Power Supply System realized they could NEVER make back their costs over the expected operating life if they went ahead with the last 2. There's a reason that acronym is pronounced "Whoops".
Jenny, who has relatives and friends who worked at Trojan.
Good for you. Now follow that line of thinking to its logical conclusion, and avoid girls like the plague. Leaves more for me...
Re:No Balrog in book 1--SPOILERS
on
Behind the Scenes
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· Score: 5, Informative
Jackson has kept the names of the books the same, but altered the story somewhat. He's also keeping the movies more nearly the same length than the books are (go look at your paperbacks and you'll see that The Two Towers is by far the thinnest). There is more background being shoehorned into the first movie than we found in the first book, and to keep the movies relatively the same length some of the action we read in FOTR is appearing in the movie TTT.
From TheOneRing.net:
The character of Rosie will be expanded slightly, in order to allow us to see the origins of her relationship with Sam before his departure from the Shire....
Also, events that were told through flashbacks in the books will have to be told visually in the movies, such as the defeat of Sauron during the Second Age, Isildur's death, Gollum's history with the Ring, and Gandalf's imprisonment by Saruman at Isengard.....
the first film in the trilogy will apparently feature flashbacks that will familiarize audiences with the history of the Ring, and it is safe to assume that any flashbacks of this type will include a summary of the story of The Hobbit.
Gandalf explains Gollum's history at the very beginning of FOTR and describes Sauron's defeat at the Council of Elrond, IIRC, so both of these added scenes will appear in the FOTR movie. The explanation of Bilbo's history with the Ring will probably also occur in Hobbiton at the start, so the movie version of FOTR has lots of added material. No wonder there wasn't room for Tom Bombadil.
Not a dead man story either, but the longest email delay I ever heard of. I was working in Portland, OR and sent a mail to a friend working at another branch of my agency in Corvallis, OR. You can drive from one city to the other in 2 hours, but this email took 8 MONTHS to arrive. She called me when she got it to see if everything was OK: I had written about a relationship problem, and in the intervening time had married the lady I was writing about.
We joked about there being an email black hole in DC (all our agency's mail went through the DC central office), but never really had a good explanation.
With Linux, customers "end up being in the operating systems business," managing software updates and security patches while making sure the multitude of software packages don't conflict with each other," Miller said.
Whereas with Microsoft, customers end up being in the system support business, managing software updates and security patches (after yet another vulnerability has been revealed by yet another widespread exploit) while hoping that someone else has made sure the multitude of software packages don't conflict with each other. What was his point again?
Have the autopilot disengage again on contact with the tower? Allow pilots to override based on security codes simultaneously entered from multiple points in the plane? (That would at least make hijackings require larger, more detectible groups). Or tower and autopilot autonegotiate landing pattern and route? We have the technology for this, too.
Of course, then you have the problem of someone spoofing the tower's address and hacking your autopilot...OK, still a few issues here. But we already HAVE the proximity warning for ground and mountain collisions: right now it just issues an audible warning to pull up, and quiets down when the collision is no longer imminent. That could be easily modified to pull up FOR YOU only when needed.
part of the reason the fire at WTC was so devistating was that the do-gooder environmentalist whackos stopped the use of asbestos from being used to fireproof the steel columns which supported the structure.
Oh please. Asbestos is used to stop a fire from spreading by consuming flammable materials in the support structure. In the WTC fires, the airplanes contributed so much fuel that nothing further was needed and the internal fires suppression system was overwhelmed. Steel is already non-flammable, so fire would not (and DID not) actually climb the structure due to lack of asbestos. What caused the columns to fail was burning jet fuel heating them to over 1200 degrees, at which point steel stops acting like a friendly familiar metal and behaves more like finger jello. Asbestos wouldn't have put out the jet fuel, so its presence wouldn't have kept the buildings up.
There is nothing you will learn by working in a CS team in college.
Nonsense. You will learn a great deal about people, about teams, and if your professor has designed the projects well, about group self-organization, progress monitoring, upward reporting, and how to motivate or cover for the less-able and less-motivated.
My university has a 2-class series (covering 6 months) in which you and your teammates get a one-paragraph project description and must
research the subject until you understand the problem,
learn on your own to use the tools you will need to solve it, and
actually build the thing.
Some projects were hardware, some were simulations, some were pure software. The single most valuable part of this course was that we had to write one-page weekly progress reports saying what we had gotten done that week and what we would be doing the next week. Next most valuable was that we had to maintain project notebooks with our data, training materials, those same progress reports, and meeting notes from team meetings (format was specified).
Note that I have NOT said the project itself was valuable--my team couldn't even get most of the separate parts of our simulation to compile individually, much less work together, and I know from many hours in the lab that most of the other teams didn't finish either. What we were learning was the basics of project management and good team behavior. Sure, my team had to make up the gap when 1/4 of our number went missing early in the first term. And our meeting notes reflected the three who remained trying to take up the slack. Progress reports came back with notes that we were spending too much time planning, or critiquing our meeting management skills, or suggesting areas that needed more (or less) emphasis, just like a GOOD manager would do. I haven't used Verilog once since that class, but I've written plenty of progress reports and kept many a meeting from veering into a rathole, using the skills I learned back then. In 6 years of bachelor's and master's studies it's the one I remember most clearly and use most often.
Too many people don't know how to use a computer and call (harass) the computer companies tech-support for the most minor of issues.
Too true. My son is finishing his 3rd week of training this week, which makes him a full-fledged customer support rep next week. For DSL. Now he's my kid, so I know he knows his way around the hardware (he was replacing drives himself at 14), but he doesn't know TCP/IP as well as he thinks he does, he can't realistically support anything but Win9X, and he knows zip about actual signaling (aka what all those pretty colored wires in the RJ45 plug are for). But he'll probably be a pretty good support rep anyway, because only one caller in 100 will need any of that info. They have told him in his training that the #1 most common question is "Where is the Any key?" and I believe it. Jenny
Now is the time for Intel to use all of its' financial muscle to crush AMD once and for all.
Not a good idea for Intel. Having superior market share and a near-monopoly is a better position to be in than having complete market control, genuine monopoly, and all the oversight and restrictions that go with them. Intel actually licensed designs to AMD for manufacture back in the early days (1960's and 1970's) so that they could compete for government contracts which required a 2nd source for critical parts. (This info from the book "Inside Intel"). Go ahead and buy Intel stock (make my stock worth something, please!) but don't expect to see that Intel is buying AMD's Dresden facility any time soon.
between 1960 and 1990 the accidental death rate from firearms fell almost 150%
Say what? A drop of 100% would be from [more than zero] to zero. A drop of 150% would require that people be accidentally brought back from the dead by firearms.
I agree with you about not blaming legal owners of firearms or crypto for the actions of illegal owners of either, but your innumeracy makes me suspicious of your other statistics. JennyWL
Ease up--the WW2 reference just places the writing in time. Katz isn't saying the story is based on the war in any way.
On the other hand, I have often read that the descriptions of the swamp that Frodo and Sam crosses to reach Mordor and Mordor itself owe a lot to the battlefields of World War I. You got anything on that?
"Oh we are stealthy Green Toupees, skulking nights and sleeping days..."
That's a radar image of cloud cover over New York, not explosion or heat. Compare this shot from farther south: "hot" colors only indicate lots of particulates, which is probably true every day over New Jersey. More true today than usual in New York, sad to say.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Frequent power cycling. CFLs will last much longer if they get lit up and left alone than if they are turned on and off every few hours. The older ones were worse in this regard than the newer ones.
2) Wrong installation orientation. In the tiny type on the packaging, CFL's often say "to be installed base down" or base up. Lifespan will be GREATLY reduced if you put a base-down bulb in a ceiling fixture, or even a sideways fixture.
3) Timer-triggered fixtures. CFL's require a jolt of juice to fire up the ballast and create the spark that then sustains the glow. Many timers provide a current ramp that doesn't quite meet this demand (the power gets there eventually, but not all at the start). Many CFL's say on the packaging, "not to be used with automatic timers" for this reason. Those that are timer-OK cost more, natch.
Dr. Evil refers to "a solution looking for a problem."
I beg to differ. My wife has a back injury that makes it excruciating for her to ride in a car (at least in my little Volvo), but she can stand for a half hour at a stretch. She's on way too much pain medication to consider driving her pickup (someone would end up pancaked for sure) and so the result is that she's housebound until a) the boredom outweighs the pain she knows will result from a trip to the store, and b) I'm home to drive her there. To her a Segway represents FREEDOM AGAIN. It's a half mile to the nearest large store--she would never be able to stump that far with her cane, but she COULD zip down on a Segway and back up the hill again. Those granny power scooters someone referred to are a far inferior solution to her problem: they cost at least three times as much, and they don't maneuver nearly so well.
All we need now is the right lottery ticket...
In the same way, a politician breaks no laws if he sells out his principles and does exactly what some tobacco company tells him to do. Breaking a trust which is not backed up by a contract is something anyone technically has a right to do.
Actually, the politician in your example IS breaking a law and can be removed from office for it: he could be recalled by the voters or booted out by his peers in the House or Senate. And there are other forms of trust which are backed up by law even when there is no contract. Parents can be prosecuted for failing to provide adequate care and support for their children. Caretakers for the elderly or incompetent can be sued for breach of trust if they plunder assets instead of providing care. Public employees (including members of the armed services, and your politician) swear oaths to uphold the laws, and those oaths are considered binding. Society is bound by customs as well as by contracts, and law enforces them both, so there is NO right to do whatever the hell you please as long as you haven't signed a contract that limits your actions.
Then the rich guy plundered the site he discovered, smuggling priceless architectural treasures out of Turkey, then selling them to the highest bidder.
That's not quite how it went. Leaving aside the fact that archeological treasures are much simpler to smuggle than architectural ones, Heinrich Schliemann (the rich guy in question) actually donated the stuff to museums, and also later repaid the government of Turkey.
But he was also rather a bad archeologist and may in fact have brought the "treasures of Troy" into the country with him. With 160 people working the Troy site, it's a tad strange that Schliemann was the only one to locate anything valuable. See this link for details.
By golly, I'm not the only one here who's played SimEarth! That's exactly what it took to win the scenario of creating an atmosphere on Mars. Well, except for the fact that the game has machines that create oxygen from nothing, and machines that generate plant life...
No, I'm saying that UPS was heavily unionized and that the folks working there were mostly goons. No causation is stated, but you can assume some if you want something to be annoyed about.
You're right, I forgot he'd moved.
You're also right about the power of bluff--the one time I had to use small claims court, the defendant was an individual with few assets besides a good credit record, and he paid up to avoid having a judgment entered against him. I wish I'd thought of it sooner. But if he hadn't caved in, I was prepared to take revenge in place of repayment.
My next-cube neighbor was a UPS grunt for a few years, and he confirms that "heavily-unionized goons" is a very accurate description. He actually said the shipping part of the company was run by the Mafia, like most shipping in the US (this was in New Mexico in the 70's). UPS management is incredibly repressive (he'd rather clean toilets for Safeway than work for them again), hostility and stress are every bit as bad as other posters have said, and employee theft is rampant.
I can think of only two problems with this. First, the original author is in Canada. He would probably be able to file in Florida because the damage was discovered there, but he'd have to get there first.
Second, once you win in small claims court, it's still up to YOU to collect (at least here in Oregon). So you've paid to file and taken time off work to go to court--now you have to hire a collection agency too. Pretty soon you've paid out as much as you could possibly hope to get back.
A better (or at least cheaper) solution might be to write directly to the president of UPS and gripe about the runaround. Couldn't do any harm, and nothing else seems to have helped.
My partner used to do onsite shipping/receiving for an environmental lab, handling samples which were often liquid and frequently hazardous, and which have mandated hold times. She told me the lab's policy was to use nothing but Fedex for outgoing and prepaid Fedex for incoming, because not only were damaged/lost samples a common occurrence, (despite being shipped in sealed coolers the size of a piano bench) but also UPS' internal tracking was terrible and their on-time delivery guarantee was worth less than the paper it was written on. It was cheaper to prepay Fedex to deliver incoming samples than to call the client, explain that the hold time had expired while the sample was mistakenly sent to Texas instead of Oregon, and ask for them to resample and resend. That was in 1996-1998 inclusive.
So why is it that music artists, employed by their employer (RIAA member) get so upset at losing the ownership of the work they do?
Because even when they are done writing it, they are expected to go out and perform it over and over and talk about it in interviews. They can't just go on to the next assignment, they are tied to their entire previous body of work by the fans who still want to hear it and the record company that requires them to perform it to keep sales up. It's like you being required to recite your code at every weekly open mike night in the company cafe', and having people come up to you in the hallway with printouts for your autograph.
There's also the personal aspect that goes into creating music--it comes from the artist's life and experiences, and can be as personal as a letter, so giving up legal ownership of it is like giving up legal ownership of pieces of your own past. You can't simply hand it off and forget about it. I grant you that this doesn't apply so strongly for manufactured artists like N'Sync, but most musicians are not so separate from the stuff they sing/play and yet ALL of them are endangered by the work-for-hire interpretation.
Jenny, occasional singer
Hope you're not talking about the state of Oregon, where Trojan Nuclear Power Plant operated successfully for 17 years of its 20-year license term, closing down only when costly material replacement was looming (steam generator tanks with cracks in them). Perhaps you're thinking of WPPSS plants 4 and 5? Those were shelved after plants 1 through 3 ran so far over estimate that the Washington Public Power Supply System realized they could NEVER make back their costs over the expected operating life if they went ahead with the last 2. There's a reason that acronym is pronounced "Whoops".
Jenny, who has relatives and friends who worked at Trojan.
Good for you. Now follow that line of thinking to its logical conclusion, and avoid girls like the plague. Leaves more for me...
Jackson has kept the names of the books the same, but altered the story somewhat. He's also keeping the movies more nearly the same length than the books are (go look at your paperbacks and you'll see that The Two Towers is by far the thinnest). There is more background being shoehorned into the first movie than we found in the first book, and to keep the movies relatively the same length some of the action we read in FOTR is appearing in the movie TTT.
....
From TheOneRing.net:
The character of Rosie will be expanded slightly, in order to allow us to see the origins of her relationship with Sam before his departure from the Shire....
Also, events that were told through flashbacks in the books will have to be told visually in the movies, such as the defeat of Sauron during the Second Age, Isildur's death, Gollum's history with the Ring, and Gandalf's imprisonment by Saruman at Isengard.
the first film in the trilogy will apparently feature flashbacks that will familiarize audiences with the history of the Ring, and it is safe to assume that any flashbacks of this type will include a summary of the story of The Hobbit.
Gandalf explains Gollum's history at the very beginning of FOTR and describes Sauron's defeat at the Council of Elrond, IIRC, so both of these added scenes will appear in the FOTR movie. The explanation of Bilbo's history with the Ring will probably also occur in Hobbiton at the start, so the movie version of FOTR has lots of added material. No wonder there wasn't room for Tom Bombadil.
Tolkien geek
Not a dead man story either, but the longest email delay I ever heard of. I was working in Portland, OR and sent a mail to a friend working at another branch of my agency in Corvallis, OR. You can drive from one city to the other in 2 hours, but this email took 8 MONTHS to arrive. She called me when she got it to see if everything was OK: I had written about a relationship problem, and in the intervening time had married the lady I was writing about.
We joked about there being an email black hole in DC (all our agency's mail went through the DC central office), but never really had a good explanation.
With Linux, customers "end up being in the operating systems business," managing software updates and security patches while making sure the multitude of software packages don't conflict with each other," Miller said.
Whereas with Microsoft, customers end up being in the system support business, managing software updates and security patches (after yet another vulnerability has been revealed by yet another widespread exploit) while hoping that someone else has made sure the multitude of software packages don't conflict with each other. What was his point again?
(at least for US domestic calls), you never dial a 3 or 6 (for example) for long distance
You do if you're calling long distance to area code 360, which is southwest Washington State.
How would a plane equipped suchly ever land?
Have the autopilot disengage again on contact with the tower? Allow pilots to override based on security codes simultaneously entered from multiple points in the plane? (That would at least make hijackings require larger, more detectible groups). Or tower and autopilot autonegotiate landing pattern and route? We have the technology for this, too.
Of course, then you have the problem of someone spoofing the tower's address and hacking your autopilot...OK, still a few issues here. But we already HAVE the proximity warning for ground and mountain collisions: right now it just issues an audible warning to pull up, and quiets down when the collision is no longer imminent. That could be easily modified to pull up FOR YOU only when needed.
part of the reason the fire at WTC was so devistating was that the do-gooder environmentalist whackos stopped the use of asbestos from being used to fireproof the steel columns which supported the structure.
Oh please. Asbestos is used to stop a fire from spreading by consuming flammable materials in the support structure. In the WTC fires, the airplanes contributed so much fuel that nothing further was needed and the internal fires suppression system was overwhelmed. Steel is already non-flammable, so fire would not (and DID not) actually climb the structure due to lack of asbestos. What caused the columns to fail was burning jet fuel heating them to over 1200 degrees, at which point steel stops acting like a friendly familiar metal and behaves more like finger jello. Asbestos wouldn't have put out the jet fuel, so its presence wouldn't have kept the buildings up.
Nonsense. You will learn a great deal about people, about teams, and if your professor has designed the projects well, about group self-organization, progress monitoring, upward reporting, and how to motivate or cover for the less-able and less-motivated.
My university has a 2-class series (covering 6 months) in which you and your teammates get a one-paragraph project description and must
- research the subject until you understand the problem,
- learn on your own to use the tools you will need to solve it, and
- actually build the thing.
Some projects were hardware, some were simulations, some were pure software. The single most valuable part of this course was that we had to write one-page weekly progress reports saying what we had gotten done that week and what we would be doing the next week. Next most valuable was that we had to maintain project notebooks with our data, training materials, those same progress reports, and meeting notes from team meetings (format was specified).Note that I have NOT said the project itself was valuable--my team couldn't even get most of the separate parts of our simulation to compile individually, much less work together, and I know from many hours in the lab that most of the other teams didn't finish either. What we were learning was the basics of project management and good team behavior. Sure, my team had to make up the gap when 1/4 of our number went missing early in the first term. And our meeting notes reflected the three who remained trying to take up the slack. Progress reports came back with notes that we were spending too much time planning, or critiquing our meeting management skills, or suggesting areas that needed more (or less) emphasis, just like a GOOD manager would do. I haven't used Verilog once since that class, but I've written plenty of progress reports and kept many a meeting from veering into a rathole, using the skills I learned back then. In 6 years of bachelor's and master's studies it's the one I remember most clearly and use most often.
Too many people don't know how to use a computer and call (harass) the computer companies tech-support for the most minor of issues.
Too true. My son is finishing his 3rd week of training this week, which makes him a full-fledged customer support rep next week. For DSL. Now he's my kid, so I know he knows his way around the hardware (he was replacing drives himself at 14), but he doesn't know TCP/IP as well as he thinks he does, he can't realistically support anything but Win9X, and he knows zip about actual signaling (aka what all those pretty colored wires in the RJ45 plug are for). But he'll probably be a pretty good support rep anyway, because only one caller in 100 will need any of that info. They have told him in his training that the #1 most common question is "Where is the Any key?" and I believe it.
Jenny
Now is the time for Intel to use all of its' financial muscle to crush AMD once and for all.
Not a good idea for Intel. Having superior market share and a near-monopoly is a better position to be in than having complete market control, genuine monopoly, and all the oversight and restrictions that go with them. Intel actually licensed designs to AMD for manufacture back in the early days (1960's and 1970's) so that they could compete for government contracts which required a 2nd source for critical parts. (This info from the book "Inside Intel"). Go ahead and buy Intel stock (make my stock worth something, please!) but don't expect to see that Intel is buying AMD's Dresden facility any time soon.
Jenny
between 1960 and 1990 the accidental death rate from firearms fell almost 150%
Say what? A drop of 100% would be from [more than zero] to zero. A drop of 150% would require that people be accidentally brought back from the dead by firearms.
I agree with you about not blaming legal owners of firearms or crypto for the actions of illegal owners of either, but your innumeracy makes me suspicious of your other statistics.
JennyWL
Ease up--the WW2 reference just places the writing in time. Katz isn't saying the story is based on the war in any way.
On the other hand, I have often read that the descriptions of the swamp that Frodo and Sam crosses to reach Mordor and Mordor itself owe a lot to the battlefields of World War I. You got anything on that?
"Oh we are stealthy Green Toupees, skulking nights and sleeping days..."
That's a radar image of cloud cover over New York, not explosion or heat. Compare this shot from farther south: "hot" colors only indicate lots of particulates, which is probably true every day over New Jersey. More true today than usual in New York, sad to say.
Numenaster