Checking "yes, I have" does not automatically remove you from the clearance pool. Answering "Yes, I currently do" likely will though. I know several people with TS that answered yes. Not as huge of a deal as you might think.
The current background check (on everybody who works at a federal facility - not just JPL) are pretty lenient:
You have nothing to worry even if you are a regular pot-smoker, or were convicted of not paying your taxes, or committing any car-related offense short of vehicular manslaughter. I mean - Assault, Harassment, Forgery -- none get you into column "C"....
JPL is a division of Caltech. JPL employees have a contract with Caltech and receive a paycheck that says Caltech. Much of the funding comes from NASA (but by no means all of it and the proportion has been shrinking), but the employees at JPL are not civil servants and they are not NASA employees.
Add to this that the people at JPL never signed a contract that said that there will be background checks (but now there are, suddenly, and they're a requirement for continued employment) and you might see where the uproar is coming from...
Except over a very narrow frequency range, microwaves, even in high concentration, are harmless.
This statement is false.
No range of the electromagnetic spectrum is "harmless" when you illuminate a person with thousands of gigawatts of it.
There's no point in collecting energy on the moon if the total amount is no more than what you can collect with a solar panel on the roof yourself right here on earth.
What do you think your cell phone transmits when it's right by your head?
Until you have learned the difference between a hundred milliwatts and large numbers of gigawatts, you are advised to stay away from any kind of electronics equipment. It's for your own good; Trust me.
At the risk of saying something stupid or blasphemous: why offer something that requires "writing some scripts"?
If the OP wanted to "write some scripts" s/h/it could have done all the neccessary work with a couple foreach...cp...end. Or, hey, rsync.
I am suspecting the OP is wondering whether there isn't something out there that "just kinda works" and only needs intervvention in case of a conflict.
Knowing well that this will definitely be considered blasphemy: I've been using Window's "briefcase" system since Win98. It does "kinda work". Most of the time. And requires work when there's a conflict. Which appears to be what the OP is looking for. Given that the OP doesn't seem to want to just go that route, the question appears pertinent what s/h/it is looking for that Mr. Gates briefcases can't/won't do...
Please correct me where I have misread, but in all your verbosity you seem to have made two statements:
- One cannot quantify the sysadmin job
- You're better at it than some
To my (non-MBA) eyes, these two appear in contradiction. If one cannot measure/quantify how well a sysadmin is doing his/her job, then one cannot claim that one is doing a better job than the other. Thus one might as well hire the cheapest guy. If, on the other hand it is supposed to be possible to say "you're doing a better job than joe" then there must be something measurable, observable, something that can be put into a number and that number differs for you and joe (in such a way as to make yours the better number).
I admit I have no idea how to measure the quality of a sysadmin. If my stakeholders forced me to (I.e. my boss said "quantify what your IT dudes are doing") I would go to my sysadmins and say "please give me numbers that show how well you're doing". Because the alternative is pulling something out off my ass -- and neither my superiors nor the people who work for me would like that.
Last I checked, the word "teen" meant that there were some thirty-something women trying desperately to pretend to be younger by pouting, sucking on a finger nail and wearing their hair in pig-tails. I'm not sure whether you can actually get porn that shows anybody under ~25, but if so I'm pretty confident that it won't be labeled as such...
I'm more worried about all 16 yearolds having [...] computers that are smarter than they are.
Most 16-year-olds already have computers that are smarter than they are. Heck, when I was 16 we had Atari-400s and I'm pretty sure most of us were less smart than that...
I'm curious how a massively parallel box of these (say twenty or thirty) would stack up in terms of (1)power, (2)price and (3)performance to those Core2 or AMD64 behemoths.
I keep thinking that I don't really need a quad- or eight-core cpu of the current generation; I need only one, maybe two high-powered core/s. Having another ten or twenty or so smaller processors to offload stuff onto would be much more useful.
And if you think any of that is going to change by electing Democrats, you've got another thing coming.
That's one of those statements that "aren't even wrong".
If you want to change the status quo, you'll have to elect people who are opposed to the status quo. As it turns out, all of these are Democrats to the last man/woman. You are right, that they are certainly not any large fraction of the democrats, but wherever you find someone who actually recognizes and opposes the current slide into faschism it turns out to be a Dem.
99 out of 100 senators were for the Patriot act. The lone dissenter: a Democrat. That level of thing
It is true that a vote for a Dem is by no means a vote against faschism. But at this point a vote against the Democrats is a vote for fashism.
Intelligent and well educated citizens ought to be able to possess weapons up to (and beyond) tactical nuclear weapons.
I.e. Americans need not apply. Surely you will agree that people who continuously elect those governments you consider so incapable of handling weapons can not be considered "intelligent and well educated", right?
I've not encountered this with Linux, FreeBSD or OpenBSD.
OK up to here
I've not encountered it with OS X either, [...]
As this appears to be news to you: OSX is "Linux, FreeBSD or OpenBSD". There is no distinction between the pieces of software you have already named and the one you are trying to make out as somehow different from them.
There is no such thing as a "mac" anymore. There's PCs running Windows, PCs running Linux, and PCs running some form of BSD. That's it. Mac lost the OS wars. Renaming some entirely different piece of software that is running on an entirely different piece of hardware "MacOS" is the thinnest of pretenses of any kind of continued existence.
[...] if I happen to find a vehicle capable of mind bending acceleration, insane top speeds, and great gas mileage, I'll buy it over a vehicle with the first two qualities, but not the third. Great example, a late model sportbike: 120ish horsepower, 160ish MPH top speed, and 40+MPG. And it's fun to ride.
"Late model", eh? My XS-11 is a 1979 model -- it was released at 95hp, 138mph, 45mpg stock. After-market exhaust, air filter and a bit of futzing with the carburetion gets me to 112hp, 143mph, quarter mile from standstill in 11.6 sec at still 45mpg. In a 28 year old motorbike.
You want to know why Detroit tanked? Because they're still not where Yamaha was almost 30 years ago.
Pity they have a photo of Syndrome and his Zero-Point Energy device as an example at the top. Doesn't help anyone to take them seriously surely.
OK, so the Casimir effect is simply a property of the quantum vacuum. It is a resut of there being nothing. These "reseachers" propose to replace that vacuum with a material that was carefully chosen for its electromagnetic properties. Hey, that's all fine and dandy but then your so-called "levitating" object is simply an object that is sitting on top of a crystal of some sort.
With all due respect, but that ain't levitation. That's an object sitting on another object. A feat that I'm sure I have accomplished in my own life before -- and I didn't even need an object of negative index of refraction to do it.
I would go one further ans say that it is the boundaries that define a community. Something that is totally open isn't a "community" at all. What would it mean for some group to be a community if there is nothing and nobody that is not a member of that community?
Opening up the social networks might be an ideal for a completely open society, but our society isn't grown up enough to be that open yet.
No. Even in the most ideal of open societies, I would still want to be allowed to form circles around certain topics. When I log into my arts community, I want to know that I'm surrounded by fellow artists who understand what I'm getting at when I speak of a particular effect that some software was never intended to do. I do emphatically NOT want a bunch of retarded computer geeks tell me that I merely have to reformat my hard drive, install a completely different OS and use this particular specialized software in order to generate that effect.
Likewise, when I log into my fellow-nerd community, then I want to know that my subtle pun on the fine structure constant is actually understood. It would be completely wasted on a horde of uneducated Joes.
Even my network of drinking buddies, which is about as "open" as a social network can be (show up, get plastered, be a member) should retain sufficient limits for us to decide that we just don't want to hang out with some given person. That dude that showed up to that party and started shouting racist crap when he was drunk - I'd rather not have him show up at the next party. I think we all made that known to him, but he didn't quite give me the impression of getting it.
There are social networks that are filtered by virtue of their nature - my circle of co-workers is necessarily composed of certain hardware wonks simply because of the nature of my employment. For all the other ones, I'd prefer to maintain a certain amount of control over who I associate with.
(Incidentily, I consider Facebook "wide open". It's not exactly hard to get an account; it's not exactly hard to join some network. And what is Myspace if not the widest open social networking side possible?).
I read about this man several years ago and his claims to have accessed some incredible information about exotic anti gravity, free energy and aliens. What really didn't make a whole lot of sense to me, is if he had in fact done this, and accessed information on fantastic technology that is being withheld that could help us solve our energy crises for instance, he did not keep any record of his finding or any proof at all.
Before you embarrass yourself much further with that train of thought consider this: if this kind of information existed and was real, you wouldn't have read about it. You wouldn't have read about this McKinnon guy either. Neither would've anybody else. There wouldn't be any "extradition hearings" and similar nonsense.
I'd say the guy appears to have found a way to cash in on his sudden popularity. And so he milks it a little more by tacking on whatever he can to become even more popular.
Back in the sixties there was the claim that if anything was going to follow monkeys (i.e. us) it would be Otters. Flexible, intelligent to the point of using fairly complex language, skilled at using stone tools, highly adaptable.
I guess spending 90% of the day submerged in water is going to make for nice radiation protection as well.
I sure wish those goons would show up at the house down the street from me that is occupied by 4 illegal alien families, and deport them for not having the right visa...
If you know that there is a crime being committed, then YOU are obligated to report it. If you know that they are illegal and you do not report them, then you are a criminal for obstructing justice.
If you don't know that they're illegal, then you have just accused people of being criminals for no reason better than their heritage.
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The current background check (on everybody who works at a federal facility - not just JPL) are pretty lenient:
http://editthis.info/images/jpl_rebadging/a/ab/S uitability_Matrix_mods.pdf
You have nothing to worry even if you are a regular pot-smoker, or were convicted of not paying your taxes, or committing any car-related offense short of vehicular manslaughter. I mean - Assault, Harassment, Forgery -- none get you into column "C"....
It isn't.
JPL is a division of Caltech. JPL employees have a contract with Caltech and receive a paycheck that says Caltech. Much of the funding comes from NASA (but by no means all of it and the proportion has been shrinking), but the employees at JPL are not civil servants and they are not NASA employees.
Add to this that the people at JPL never signed a contract that said that there will be background checks (but now there are, suddenly, and they're a requirement for continued employment) and you might see where the uproar is coming from...
This statement is false.
No range of the electromagnetic spectrum is "harmless" when you illuminate a person with thousands of gigawatts of it.
There's no point in collecting energy on the moon if the total amount is no more than what you can collect with a solar panel on the roof yourself right here on earth.
What do you think your cell phone transmits when it's right by your head?Until you have learned the difference between a hundred milliwatts and large numbers of gigawatts, you are advised to stay away from any kind of electronics equipment. It's for your own good; Trust me.
...and which person, group, corporation, government or other institution would you trust with a huge, high-powered microwave gun pointed at you 24/7?
just asking
At the risk of saying something stupid or blasphemous: why offer something that requires "writing some scripts"?
If the OP wanted to "write some scripts" s/h/it could have done all the neccessary work with a couple foreach...cp...end. Or, hey, rsync.
I am suspecting the OP is wondering whether there isn't something out there that "just kinda works" and only needs intervvention in case of a conflict.
Knowing well that this will definitely be considered blasphemy: I've been using Window's "briefcase" system since Win98. It does "kinda work". Most of the time. And requires work when there's a conflict. Which appears to be what the OP is looking for. Given that the OP doesn't seem to want to just go that route, the question appears pertinent what s/h/it is looking for that Mr. Gates briefcases can't/won't do...
Please correct me where I have misread, but in all your verbosity you seem to have made two statements:
- One cannot quantify the sysadmin job
- You're better at it than some
To my (non-MBA) eyes, these two appear in contradiction. If one cannot measure/quantify how well a sysadmin is doing his/her job, then one cannot claim that one is doing a better job than the other. Thus one might as well hire the cheapest guy. If, on the other hand it is supposed to be possible to say "you're doing a better job than joe" then there must be something measurable, observable, something that can be put into a number and that number differs for you and joe (in such a way as to make yours the better number).
I admit I have no idea how to measure the quality of a sysadmin. If my stakeholders forced me to (I.e. my boss said "quantify what your IT dudes are doing") I would go to my sysadmins and say "please give me numbers that show how well you're doing". Because the alternative is pulling something out off my ass -- and neither my superiors nor the people who work for me would like that.
Last I checked, the word "teen" meant that there were some thirty-something women trying desperately to pretend to be younger by pouting, sucking on a finger nail and wearing their hair in pig-tails. I'm not sure whether you can actually get porn that shows anybody under ~25, but if so I'm pretty confident that it won't be labeled as such...
Most 16-year-olds already have computers that are smarter than they are. Heck, when I was 16 we had Atari-400s and I'm pretty sure most of us were less smart than that...
I'm prepared to shoot teens for the sheer heck of it.
I'm curious how a massively parallel box of these (say twenty or thirty) would stack up in terms of (1)power, (2)price and (3)performance to those Core2 or AMD64 behemoths.
I keep thinking that I don't really need a quad- or eight-core cpu of the current generation; I need only one, maybe two high-powered core/s. Having another ten or twenty or so smaller processors to offload stuff onto would be much more useful.
which is of course exactly what I wrote.
Nice troll, though.If I wrote exactly what you're sayin there and I'm a troll then...
That's one of those statements that "aren't even wrong".
If you want to change the status quo, you'll have to elect people who are opposed to the status quo. As it turns out, all of these are Democrats to the last man/woman. You are right, that they are certainly not any large fraction of the democrats, but wherever you find someone who actually recognizes and opposes the current slide into faschism it turns out to be a Dem.
99 out of 100 senators were for the Patriot act. The lone dissenter: a Democrat. That level of thing
It is true that a vote for a Dem is by no means a vote against faschism. But at this point a vote against the Democrats is a vote for fashism.
I.e. Americans need not apply. Surely you will agree that people who continuously elect those governments you consider so incapable of handling weapons can not be considered "intelligent and well educated", right?
OK up to here
I've not encountered it with OS X either, [...]As this appears to be news to you: OSX is "Linux, FreeBSD or OpenBSD". There is no distinction between the pieces of software you have already named and the one you are trying to make out as somehow different from them.
There is no such thing as a "mac" anymore. There's PCs running Windows, PCs running Linux, and PCs running some form of BSD. That's it. Mac lost the OS wars. Renaming some entirely different piece of software that is running on an entirely different piece of hardware "MacOS" is the thinnest of pretenses of any kind of continued existence.
And sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
If that were true, it wouldn't matter where you were, as long as you were still in the universe.
...and What happens in the universe, stays in the universe.
"Late model", eh? My XS-11 is a 1979 model -- it was released at 95hp, 138mph, 45mpg stock. After-market exhaust, air filter and a bit of futzing with the carburetion gets me to 112hp, 143mph, quarter mile from standstill in 11.6 sec at still 45mpg. In a 28 year old motorbike.
You want to know why Detroit tanked? Because they're still not where Yamaha was almost 30 years ago.
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ulf/levitation.html
Pity they have a photo of Syndrome and his Zero-Point Energy device as an example at the top. Doesn't help anyone to take them seriously surely.
OK, so the Casimir effect is simply a property of the quantum vacuum. It is a resut of there being nothing. These "reseachers" propose to replace that vacuum with a material that was carefully chosen for its electromagnetic properties. Hey, that's all fine and dandy but then your so-called "levitating" object is simply an object that is sitting on top of a crystal of some sort.
With all due respect, but that ain't levitation. That's an object sitting on another object. A feat that I'm sure I have accomplished in my own life before -- and I didn't even need an object of negative index of refraction to do it.
I would go one further ans say that it is the boundaries that define a community. Something that is totally open isn't a "community" at all. What would it mean for some group to be a community if there is nothing and nobody that is not a member of that community?
Opening up the social networks might be an ideal for a completely open society, but our society isn't grown up enough to be that open yet.
No. Even in the most ideal of open societies, I would still want to be allowed to form circles around certain topics. When I log into my arts community, I want to know that I'm surrounded by fellow artists who understand what I'm getting at when I speak of a particular effect that some software was never intended to do. I do emphatically NOT want a bunch of retarded computer geeks tell me that I merely have to reformat my hard drive, install a completely different OS and use this particular specialized software in order to generate that effect.
Likewise, when I log into my fellow-nerd community, then I want to know that my subtle pun on the fine structure constant is actually understood. It would be completely wasted on a horde of uneducated Joes.
Even my network of drinking buddies, which is about as "open" as a social network can be (show up, get plastered, be a member) should retain sufficient limits for us to decide that we just don't want to hang out with some given person. That dude that showed up to that party and started shouting racist crap when he was drunk - I'd rather not have him show up at the next party. I think we all made that known to him, but he didn't quite give me the impression of getting it.
There are social networks that are filtered by virtue of their nature - my circle of co-workers is necessarily composed of certain hardware wonks simply because of the nature of my employment. For all the other ones, I'd prefer to maintain a certain amount of control over who I associate with.
(Incidentily, I consider Facebook "wide open". It's not exactly hard to get an account; it's not exactly hard to join some network. And what is Myspace if not the widest open social networking side possible?).
I read about this man several years ago and his claims to have accessed some incredible information about exotic anti gravity, free energy and aliens. What really didn't make a whole lot of sense to me, is if he had in fact done this, and accessed information on fantastic technology that is being withheld that could help us solve our energy crises for instance, he did not keep any record of his finding or any proof at all.
Before you embarrass yourself much further with that train of thought consider this: if this kind of information existed and was real, you wouldn't have read about it. You wouldn't have read about this McKinnon guy either. Neither would've anybody else. There wouldn't be any "extradition hearings" and similar nonsense.
I'd say the guy appears to have found a way to cash in on his sudden popularity. And so he milks it a little more by tacking on whatever he can to become even more popular.
Back in the sixties there was the claim that if anything was going to follow monkeys (i.e. us) it would be Otters. Flexible, intelligent to the point of using fairly complex language, skilled at using stone tools, highly adaptable.
I guess spending 90% of the day submerged in water is going to make for nice radiation protection as well.
Actually, at Caltech the ratio is about 70:30
And it's about 50:50 by weight...
...and I always feel welcome there...
If you know that there is a crime being committed, then YOU are obligated to report it. If you know that they are illegal and you do not report them, then you are a criminal for obstructing justice.
If you don't know that they're illegal, then you have just accused people of being criminals for no reason better than their heritage.
And that is indeed racism.