Re: Half an hour doing dishes is enough to make the small of my back burn
Well... you can. You just might end up getting to know your downstairs neighbours a little better than you planned to. ;)
3885 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2007
I'm glad that I entered my industry (Aerospace) after pranking had died out, as I've heard plenty of stories of things that had I been on the receiving end would not have left me a happy bunny. Hell, a lot of them were out right dangerous (although perhaps not thought so at the time - for example Skydrol, a hydraulic fluid, got used in a lot of pranks, but is now known to be awfully carcinogenic, and those pranks have probably led to more than a few cancer cases).
Still for me it's always been super clear, if something is for the entire team (chair football or races, cricket in the hall, etc) then it's all good. Anything that targets a single person is not on.
Just because someone laughs along, doesn't mean they're actually OK with what happened, and the risk of things escalating is just too high for my liking.
So things for the team go right ahead, things targeting one person, think again.
Just because some people made money by getting out at the right moment, doesn't mean they're not fools. Just lucky.
Occasionally people win big at the casino too. Doesn't mean they're not fools. There's a reason why the saying "The house always wins!" exists. Because the only people who win regularly at the casino is the casino.
Same applies in crypto. Although with worse odds than even the most crooked casino...
It's a simple trade-off of cost, weight, complexity, and useful life.
As it was already mentioned in the article InSight has already long overlived it's expected life, without needing a brush. So when you're designing for a set life and you can do that without adding yet another complex part, with it's own weight and cost, then naturally you leave it off. Every kilogram of weight on a Mars lander adds a massive cost, not least because you add about 20kg of fuel for each kilogram you want to send to Mars.
It would be nice to just leave the landers and rovers to run indefinitely, but the costs don't just end with launch. There are costs involved with collecting the data that the rovers and landers send back (such as the costs involved with co-ordinating first the satellites above Mars to collect the transmission from the surface, and then the costs of operating the deep space network to collect the throughput signals), there are costs involved in maintaining teams to process the information coming in, as well as storage costs for the data. Finally, there are costs in maintaining teams that can handle troubleshooting and over the air maintenance of the landers/rovers. Even where those people are primarily working other projects, taking them away to work temporarily on these lander/rover projects does come with a cost.
At some point, you just have to decide that you have all the data that you need and that the money is better spent elsewhere. InSight performed excellently, collected reams of excellent data, but was always going to slide slowly into the long sleep. It's done it's job for Mankind, now it can rest a bit... ;)
This is the World at her best. Making science and reason work for humanity not denying it!
Fixed that for you. ;)
InSight was a major multinational project. The Lander was from the US, the Seismometer was French, the Mole was led by Germany with a large Polish input, the weather station was from Spain. Universities in Switzerland, and Austria played their own parts in the site selection and data processing. I'm sure I've missed other places too. Not to mention within the teams themselves, where you can add dozens more nationalities. Our small Mole team based in Bremen, Germany featured Germans, Australians, Dutch, Greek, Polish, and Indian members at various times.
InSight really was a true multinational project, and greatly successful for it.
Hey, for $5 million a year, 1 year's salary in advance, and a guaranteed 1 year's salary golden parachute, I'll happily take the Patsy role and try and keep Twitter alive.
Since whatever CEO comes in, will probably be on similar terms, would you really expect it to be hard to find candidates? Perhaps finding good candidates, who are actually interested in making Twitter a good company, profitable and nice to work for. Well, yeah those are probably hard to find at the moment, but finding someone/anyone to take over as a Patsy will not be a problem. It's all about the "incentive"...
This feels like Musk's attempt at a "Get out of Jail free" card.
He appoints someone else to lead the company, and when it inevitably fails (probably due to Musk's interfering), he can point to the new CEO and say "See it didnt fail under my watch, it would have survived if I'd stayed on, but people didnt want me to stay...".
He's bitten off way more than he can chew, is realising it's going to cost him a lot more to make Twitter a viable concern (and with no chance to pay off the debt he saddled it with). He needs to rehire a ton of the Engineers he sacked, just to stop it falling over, but none of them will come back whilst he's in command, and if even they were willing to come back, they'll cost twice what they cost previously. So if he jumps ship now, and leaves the lead weight around some other poor saps neck, then when it all sinks beneath the waves, he can claim that everything was fine whilst he was on board...
First class Management Escape techniques in practice...
But just think all you Tesla shareholders, now Musk can come back, and I'm sure he'll be bringing all of his newly learned best management practices on Tesla too! I bet you're excited!
The simple take away from all this works two ways:
1) If your company is dead set against you joining a union, you very likely need a union, because they clearly are screwing you over.
2) if your workers are dead set on joining a union, then it's because they feel you're screwing them over, and probably are. If you don't want them joining a union, how about trying not to screw them over?
Whilst I'm sure Xi was greatly annoyed at Putin's timing of attacking Ukraine, whilst Xi was still basking in that warm Olympic glow, I'm, pretty certain the "backing" was along the lines of, "We'll support you now, and you WILL support us, when the time comes for us to attack Taiwan".
However, since Russia has proven to be about as effective as a Chocolate Teapot, and pretty much galvanised the West in a way that was probably unexpected. China and Xi are realising that, the "support" Putin can offer is worth about as much as Used Car Salesman's promises. I guess Xi is hedging his bets, he'll "support" Putin just enough to try to keep him in office, but not enough that if the Putin regime collapses that China will lose out too much. And when the cards do start tumbling down, blocking such high tech chips can let China join in and say "See, we prevented them getting their high tech stuff. We were helping to protect Ukraine too!!!"
Actually, I'm not reading anything about supply problems anymore. Germany says they are at 90% reserves capacity. There was a big concern at the start, but the delay in the deep winter setting in has allowed all of the western government's to get there shit together and get the supplies in.
I can't speak to the UK, but on continental Europe I'm not expecting any problems this winter...
You dont really understand the Problem, do you?
There is zero problem with energy generation capacity in any country in the western world. What there is, is a price problem. This initially was caused because of the justifiable decision to stop using Russian Oil and Gas, which was a major supplier of the fuel for power generation plants across the world. As nations scrambled for new supplies, then naturally prices went up. However, the majority of the price rise now is caused by profiteering, as by now, most Russian oil and gas has found new homes (in India and China), which means the oil and gas they previously purchased is being bought by western nations. As such prices should have returned to a much lower level. However, OPEC, and the oil companies are deliberately continuing to throttle supply to keep prices high and make obscene profits.
Governments should really do more about this, for example force North Sea oil, American crude, Canadian shale oil, Australian Gas, etc. to be sold, not at the world benchmark price, but at a reasonable, close to before the Ukraine War prices, and it would undercut the world market, and you would see prices collapse back to normal levels quite quickly. They wont though, because the oil companies have excellent lobby groups, and governments dont bite the hand that feeds them.
Still more electric cars wont have any effect on the amount of energy available to power your home and run your heaters. That's purely a price problem.
"CFO Claire McDonough told us that Rivian was prioritizing investments with the highest returns."
I consider the above a very telling statement. The Auto Industry, as a rule, does not work on high returns, they work on low margins, but high quantity. Mercedes would be no different. That Rivian chose to walk away from a partnership with Mercedes, which likely would have delivered solid, continual, yet relatively low margin revenue, in order to chase high return investments says quite a lot. Either their management knows nothing about the Auto Industry and they think they can try and position themselves to be a high return auto maker (note: They can't), or their financial position is even more precarious than feared and they NEED to chase the high return/high risk investments, just to survive a little longer.
Neither bodes well for the long term...
Wait a second? Was the article edited after jmch and I commented? I could have sworn what I read said MW!?!?!?! Hence my comments.
If not, that's a major reading failure from me (and jmch as well, i guess ;) ). But considering that two of us commented on MW, I'm going to go with an article change.
Ok, good to have the numbers now. Question answered! ;)
You raise a very interesting point about the actual energy used.
I, for one, would actually be very interested to know the Energy (in Joules) used by the lasers, and how much energy (again in Joules) was released by the fusion.
Using MW in this case is all well and good (and pretty standard), but Watts are an energy over time unit. So just as you say 300MW over 1ms is less energy then 3MW over 500ms.
The fact they havent mentioned this at all though probably means that the numbers look even worse, when done in absolute energy terms. Still it would be interesting to know.
Look, as much as I love shitting on the younger generations as well, face facts, things where not different with the older generations. It was just far less openly talked about.
Dodgy conman have existed since time immaterial. And they operated back in the old days with just as much impunity as they do today. There were always those who would shit on their neighbours to get a touch more power - how many corrupt cops, politicians, mayors, councillors, and other corrupt people in positions of authority existed 50 years ago. Probably more than there exist now. They happily lined their pockets with kickbacks, while ignoring the "little man" or the "community". The Police happily kept the Status Quo and enforced it irregardless of what the law actually said. A good beating, does wonders, no?
Priests happily abused kids, and those around them shushed it up and made it taboo to speak about. All those "good" people, who kept quiet and turned their faces away. Was that any less toxic than what exists now?
People feeling empowered, and wanting individual freedom is not in itself a bad thing. Huge numbers of people have been lifted out of lives of would-be drudgery, by being given just a little bit of belief that they can make something of themselves. Without that little bit of an uplift, we would still be in an age where a female doctor was considered a joke, a female politician (beyond a hereditary monarch) was unforgivable, and women should be in their place in the kitchen. And let's not get started on how minorities where treated. We now live in the most even society of all time, it's far from perfect, but at least it's progressing. Has the teaching on "Individual freedom's" gone too far, perhaps, but I'd still prefer it, to what existed in the past.
So take off the Rose-tinted glasses. The Past was not so different to today, and in soooo many cases was a lot frigging worse...
You dont seem to understand the whole extradition process. The vast majority of the world are willing to hand over people who are accused of committing crimes in another country.
Some countries wont hand over their own citizens (Russia for one). Some countries wont hand over people accused of crimes which arent a crime in that country, or for which they feel the accusation is political in nature, or where the accused face tortute or the death penalty if they are extradited.
But since none of that is relevant in this case, then why wouldnt the Bahamas hand over this Muppet?
I think Musk has had the first brain implant from his Neuralink company installed, but unfortunately it seems it had a virus in it and he's now been taken over by a Twitter chatbot!
Look at the evidence, sheeple! He never speaks in more than 120 letter sentences. When he does speak, much of it doesnt make sense. His replies when confronted by something not expected mirror a chatbot ("Weren't expecting this, were you?"). His primary method of communication these days is Twitter. He seems to have no memory of past words or deeds (I'm at war with Apple, I love Apple, I'm at war with Apple...). And he relies on Twitter polls to make management decisions.
Let's face it, this conspiracy theory has more evidence behind it then most of the crap peddled by QAnon and the far-right. So Wake Up Woke Sheeples - Musk is a Twitter Chatbot!!!!
According to BBC, SF has started an investigation into potential Building Code Violations at Twitter HQ now.
Musk has responded with a wonderful bit of Whataboutery - that the city should prioritise protecting children from the consequences of opioid drug misuse instead. Because you know that's the focus of the Department of Building Inspections... They should drop all that work, making sure people stay safe by keeping their buildings code compliant, and instead go protect children from drug misuse. Somehow. Yep I totally see how that works. You tell 'em, musky...
What a wanker. Chief Twit indeed...
it would be nice to see more detail on how the team managed to get any usable thermal conductivity data when its deep probe only penetrated to 40-50 cm rather than its target depth of 5 meters
Effectively, the entire Mole was a sensor from just behind the tip, almost to the rear end. Being 3-5m down (the goal) would have allowed much cleaner information to be collected, and allowed for some of the active testing, where the surface around the probe would be warmed up a little bit, and then it would be measured how long it would take to return to ambient. Being deeper would also have removed the seasonal (and day/night) variance in temperature to provide a cleaner reading.
However, it would seem that the Boffins have been able to use the other instruments data to filter out these (the temperature and pressure from the meteorological suite, the local soil composition (determined by the combination of the mole and the Seismometer - effectively, the Mole's hammer strokes could be measured in great detail by the Seismometer and thus a characteristic profile determined for the local area of the soil), etc.) to get good data. So top work those Boffins.
(from an Ex-Mole Team Member, but I havent been involved in the project since it left Earth - so just speculation based on what operations I know were planned at launch)
The doctrine is known as Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).
It's basically the only thing that has kept the relative peace between India and Pakistan for the last 30 years. It also kept the cold war, cold.
And has so far, proven effective at keeping us all alive. Then again I don't know for how much longer it will hold, as we seem to be getting more and more insane leaders in both democracies and autocracies. So I wonder how long it will be until sometime really jumps the shark...
Depressing thoughts for the day... I think everyone needs one of these - - - >
Sorry Jake, it was more than 20 years ago and I was merely a student and not involved in the installation in any way shape or form.
They definitely had people come in and replace all of the old button presses with new ones, but maybe they just spread the rumour that they had a dye spray in them and that was enough to stop people "testing" them.
A quick google hasnt found anything, but it seems to default to American style handles, and maybe we had something different in Australia back then. Sorry.
¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
The ones we had were not a fire pull, but a "break glass and push button" type. I assume the push button also acted as a spray release like a spray can, but I never tested it, nor saw the after effect. As I said, once they were installed, and everyone knew about them, no one was quite stupid enough to be willing to risk a $5000 bill just to see how effective the dye was...
Just for Info, you can buy such buttons that come with a die pack installed, that stains the hands and clothes of whoever presses the button.
My college at Uni (Halls of residence if you want), had a problem with drunken people hitting the fire alarm button, forcing a late night evacuation, the arrival of the fire brigade, and a massive bill (~$5000) for the college each time (apparently you dont get billed if it's an actual fire, which did happen once!).
They installed the die pack alarm buttons, and funnily enough the late night fire alarm presses stopped. People being aware that they will be identified, and face a $5000 bill, somehow seems to remove the "fun" factor of waking everyone up with a fire alarm.
So maybe such a device might help in your case. So long as you also advertise that the device carries the dye and they will be held responsible for unnecessary presses...
I dont know. Part b) seems like a definite BOFH action. Assuming the machine is well signposted as being completely off limits. Then trashing anything that gets inserted into it, seems more like the poor machine defending itself from an unauthrosied penetration... ;)
According to BBC, Apple spent $48 million on twitter advertising last year. That means he would need 6 million paying blue ticks to get that much money back, if Apple decide to pull their budget. Actually he would need 8.6 million with Apple and Google taking their 30% of the $8.
But I still dont get the logic. Advertising is effectively free money. Run an ad, pass Go and collect your money. Oh I forgot, make up metrics to show that your advertising is effective. That's really all there is to it, once you have a platform like Twitter. So why on Earth would you go out of your way to destroy that revenue? In the hope of replacing it with a paid for service? Where the internet is full of sooooo many examples where that has worked well... (note: that was sarcasm).
Well, I'd say I wish him well. But quite frankly I dont. He's acted like a spoilt child from the start, and it will be interesting to see how reality strikes him with the clue bat...
Sorry I just want to be clear, I meant in no way to condone or excuse the falsification of data by the junior researchers, whether they were supported or not. That really is unforgiveable.
Just that i can see how it would happen if no one is there to give them a good talking to if they even contemplated it...
It sounds to me like this was one application for funding that was sent out probably with dozens of others, with no one actually expecting it to get funded. When it did get funded, it was handed off to a couple of junior researchers, they were told to get on with it and not to bother management or anyone senior. Those junior researchers had problems, got no support, messed things up, and tried to cover it up. And this is what you get.
It doesnt look good on anyone at JAXA...
I havent downvoted you, but I have to assume you live in America (thought of course I could be wrong ;) ), as I've never had such a clause in any of my contracts in 4 different countries over the last 20 years (Australia, England, Sweden, and Germany). In each one I've either been paid overtime, or more commonly overtime hours go into an overtime bank, which I can use to take time off, or just work shorter days, when I feel like it. And No, bosses have no more right to refuse that, then they do the use of your holidays.
So on those rare occasions when I do have to work longer, I get that back by having extra days off. Same applies for my home office work, so at least, where I am (or at any of my old companies), the Company will certianly not be getting any freebie hours from me. And I'm saving a shed load of time from commuting, helping the environment by cutting my travels, and generally having a much nicer work-life balance. I certainly hope Home Office sticks around for a good while.
The only time I can see too much home office being a bad thing is for those fresh out of uni or school, as I know I picked up a lot from the older guys in the office. I find a lot of new starters are less willing to bother the "older guys" over teams or the phone, whereas they would be willing to ask them questions in person. That's maybe something that needs to be accounted for, but other than that, I think most people appreciate the extra work-life balance of hybrid working...
Wait, wait, wait... Your bank has physical branches??? And "one of many"!?!?! You mean there is more than 1 branch per 1000km²??? And let me just be clear here, they are not hidden in the cellar, with no lights, and no stairs, in a disused lavatory, behind a sign saying "Beware of the Leopard"?
No sorry, that doesnt sound like any bank I'm familiar with...
Apple, according to the BBC, was Twitter's largest Advertiser last year, spending something around €48 million on advertising on Twitter!?!
And he really wants to go to war with them? Normally, if you want someone to give you that sort of money, you'd be coming around with the roses and chocolates. Does he really think he can make anywhere near that level of free cash (lets face it that's what advertising cash effectively is!), from those stupid blue ticks? Or that by losing 30% to Apple, he'd be losing anywhere near that amount????
What a muppet...
It's a tad interesting that Binance helped spook the market around FTX exactly when they did, and then came in with an offer to buy them on the cheap. Coincidental, perhaps? Methinks she doth protest too much...
Still I guess even the Shark will spit out meat that is too rotten. I guess Binance took one look at FTX's finance realised that it was a house of cards, built on a sandbar, with a tsunami bearing down on it, and decided to get the hell away from it...
Actually IBM, would be the perfect example for what I'm saying. People still look at IBM's past and make the decision BASED on their PAST performance... Anyone looking at IBM's recent performance would run away screaming. People looking at Future non-Russian Yandex's past will runaway screaming...
Although I acknowledge the Beancounter mentality will win Future non-Russian Yandex more customers than you'd expect...
Even with a name change, it's going to be only the very brave or the very stupid that become one of their customers.
No one is going to trust that they have fully disentangled themselves from Russia, and at the very slightest sign of any contact back to Russia, the sanctions that come down will kill the non-russian party of the company flat.
Then again there are a lot of stupid managers out there, so who knows maybe they'll be fine...
How about sites implement basic rate limiting, and brute forcing becomes a non issue! 5 tries and the account is locked. Boom, so long as your password isnt one of the top 5 mentioned by Nordpass, you're clear.
Or if the site really doesnt like to lock accounts, then after 1 password fail 5 second lockout, 2nd fail, 10 seconds, 3rd - 30 seconds, and so on with an exponential curve. Again Brute forcing becomes a non issue after a few tries.
The whole extra long, complex passwords does not massively improve security, if you've implemented basic security against brute forcing.
That seems to be caused by a contractural dispute between Blizzard and the Chinese firm that acts as the Publisher there.
But no one seems quite sure if this is a case of:
- One side being overly demanding (both sides blame the other);
- A clash of personalities at the top (the CEO of the chinese side blamed a "Jerk" for all the problems - not exactly professional conduct anyway),
- Or that this is actually being driven by the Chinese Government - conveniently using a contractual dispute (exacerbated by their demands) to remove Blizzard from China.
It could be any or all of those things...