Posts by Notas Badoff

Re: Wrong mustelinae

So it should have been "microwaved marten" instead of "warmed weasel"?

"They live again!"

An older friend of mine, a professor elsewhere in CaCa-land at the time, was tear-gassed by the state police on the orders of a certain ex-actor then governor named Reagan. Seemed the students on campus were getting uppity.

Don't tell me PR agencies can't rewrite history so well that an arch-nazi-conservative can't move on to bigger and better accomplishments.

They'll get her on nepotism, agreeing under the table to skip all the other stuff she shouldn't have done and they should've noticed to begin with. Phoo.

Re: Simple question

Please go back to the phys.org discussions threads.

After being pleased at another nice science news site besides sciencedaily.com, I made the mistake of reading a couple article comments threads. It was as entertaining as loading the LHC with trucks and anti-trucks and seeing what spurts out at meeting points. Oh dear, hard science attracts soft brains!

Between the lyings

People will always say they want to improve situations, especially if they don't have to do anything of substance about it. This is just PR positioning, as they want people to not notice how they are currently making the situation worse.

Instead, notice that this 'proposal' has a built-in time lag. Get those kids courses and training so that we could employ them years from now. Notice the word 'could', as in, if there were a million applicants, they could choose what to pay the fraction they deign to use.

In the meantime, keep those H1B workers flowing. Since we don't have the 100K's prospects, we can't be bothered with the 10K's unemployed available now.

Gee I wonder if recently there haven't been articles about how if NHS had 50K applicant doctors per year that things would go so much better for them. NHS that is.

Onward march!

I think it was only today on another topic that someone mentioned "The Marching Morons". Do note the reference to 'lemmings' and the 'solution'.

Ahhh....

the reason for the expression "shits and grins" ?

Agreeing (but quietly)

The first question I teasingly ask new parents after a couple months is "introvert or extravert?" Often they don't even know what I'm asking. Explaining, it hopefully gets them to think about their treasure as a distinct personality that might differ from their own tendencies.

I sorely miss the opportunities to watch over someone's shoulder as they tackle something they are currently having problems with. Very often, while exploring their difficulty and helping them, I am rewarded with seeing a useful technique or hearing an eye-opening tidbit I've not encountered before. We both get a reward!

But as an introvert I can't mosh with everyone/anyone more than a couple hours a week. I do need the space, the distance, and the quiet, to work. (After hours is when I can relax, yes?) If this becomes labeled antisocial then that will be 'extreme' programming.

Not yet experiencing it full-on, I can still see how useful it might be, in metered measures. After all, command sequence 'xp' is shorthand in Vim for swapping adjacent characters, a very useful trick. Swapping seats working through a conundrum has to help shake out new directions...

Re: One small problem....

Hello, "future threat", yes? That is, we have already seen this asteroid aforehand, it's passed by this time, but its future path has been well-characterised enough that we can tell that N+1 or N+m orbits from now that it and the earth will definitely intersect.

So no use for the new guy on the block introducing themselves with a "mind if I barge in?", but useful for something we've gotten a whiff of and don't want plopping onto our couch.

But for all that, making sure that whatever much smaller pieces still will intersect with earth have been christened with eau-de-Pu doesn't thrill me.

As someone else here suggests, send a thruster up and shove the whole thing into a safe orbit. That is applicable for many more cases, such as asteroids that haven't yet passed by cuz they're gonna hit first time up at bat. Go for the more general case rather than the special case mooted here, okay?

There's form at Alexandria, and the results are the same...

though the 'cause' might change from time to time. Two 'oopsies' during Roman wars, religious intolerance (or was it really politics?), then religious conquest (or was it politics and booty?).

Knowledge needs to be as infectious and as easily spread as a virus. Then maybe we'll eventually become immune to plain stupidity.

Well "The plans are going to sound crazy, but it should at least be entertaining" would never have been said by a NASA spokesperson! I think I like the plain call to adventure by these folk. We'll all be chewing nails at manned launch time, but for the meantime hoorah!.

Re: How is this different?

Not sure, as this mention doesn't say how often underlying things will be updated, or where the accompanying utilities need to be located. We'll need to wait and see how the implementation actually helps us.

I also have been relying on grep, diff, (gnu)find, etc. through Cygwin and have for forever. Together with node.js, I haven't had to rely on MS development tools for ages. Hence, still smiling while coding.

Re: Nice to redo.

The way I figure it, Microsoft finally realized that any effort at porting to another OS, would also afford another opportunity to recheck for old flaws in the software. Nothing like "a linux bod touched the code?!? Retest everything, cuz something will be wrong!" And lo and behold, there will most likely be - from years and years ago.

And so those missing features will be the ones they realize were full of poots that need to be winkled out first, just as soon as they can re-understand the code.

synergy/syndoche/schenectady!

Re: No one forced her to take the job

You didn't read any of the background behind this before opining, did you? Everybody expects to be tossed around a bit at first in a new job. In her case she found herself trapped in that "we're testing your loyalty" position far beyond reasonable expectations. With no job progression possible, even after the hard work expended, *then* it was obvious the situation was impossible.

According to your last line, unemployment for life is the better road? Nice.

Means and goals

Was reading yesterday about Taft the American president, who later was Taft the Supreme Court Chief Justice. One comment about him was on the order of questioning how anyone who could be so unsuccessful as a president could then turn out to be an excellent Supreme Court member/leader.

Individual people can be entirely unfit for particular positions. You can have praiseworthy goals, but if you care not about the existing organizational dynamics and politics, those goals will sink out of sight while everything becomes about _you_ (at least as the opposition will frame it).

Focus on people as the means to any goal. Forget about them and you can forget your goals!

Re: Simulate the System

BOFH Stardate 56844.9

"That's here? The local system? Does it have enough capacity for our cloud? We have a lot of data, and it's growing!"

"Well, if you really need more capacity, I know a company named Bok can supply just the cloud you need. The storage density keeps increasing over time with no additional charges."

"Sounds great! Any drawbacks?"

"Mmmm, the network latency is longer than we're used to..."

Re: " I'm already looking at tunnelling my home connection through a dedi in a DC "

umm, DC = data center, as in any old data center anywhere?

O

Is that what she does in her soundproof bathrooms, cackle?

Re: Blade Runner

No, it would not be funny.

But I do predict a new urban 'sport' of flash-piling in-demand landing spots with stationary junk - trash cans, cars, park benchs, signs, etc. - forcing the 'autonomous' brain to choose between obeying the passenger repeatedly bonking the "land where I said" button vs. landing with load noises and unable to take off again vs. running out of juice and landing quite suddenly anyway. I'm sure the random taxi driver will be quite amused at the autocar deciding a taxi roof was the best choice to land with flat batteries.

Re: plutonium little boy?

If it was an above-ground test their harvests this year will be even worse than last. And China would be rather wroth, and they need China really badly. But no, they copied the pictures, yes? Korea: our accomplishments are better than real!