Posts by DNTP

Re: Side note

Impacted by an asteroid, I think, implies far less agency than using the word "battered" at all.

Other possible verb choices: Pasted, Creamed, Knockwobbled, Titsup-rendered, Aggro-twittered, Kinetically-challenged, Bolided-to-bollocks.

Re: please do

Scientific papers automatically come with spoilers, they are called abstracts. Some of them even have an even shorter spoiler before the abstract called a summary. This is because scientists are all huge geeks who actually secretly read spoilers on everything and then run around going "no spoilers! don't ruin it for me!"

The difference between "tolerable" and "optimal" conditions for doing anything is telling yourself "it's not an emergency, let's wait and get a better result tomorrow"

Re: Orbiting the object?

16 Psyche isn't a small object until you start comparing it with dwarf stars. It represents ~1% of the total mass of the asteroid belt and is iron-rich, meaning that it is very dense for its geometric dimensions. Therefore, relative to its radius it has a significantly larger gravitational sphere of influence than a water/carbon/silicon body of either similar mass or similar dimensions.

Re: Money's for a good cause

Jonathan 27: I'm not against contractors and free agent contracting; I'm against companies that classify people performing employee duties as contractors. I'm against companies that insist that their workers are employees, up until the point they get their tax forms and its a 1099 instead of a W2. I'm against situations where companies give workers none of the legal protections of employees, while enforcing restrictions that no actual contractor would tolerate.

Re: Why linux cheap?

Because a budget computer that can run modern Linux smoothly and functionally, will provide a convincing simulation of autoerotic asphyxiation after experiencing a Windows 10 install.

Re: Weird place to start

The sex toy industry doesn't have an army of lobbyists in DC constantly screaming for deregulation. Also a lot of our politicians think they can score 'morality points'.

Doesn't make an excuse for having horrible security practices in the first place. I guess it's not the government's business if people die in chemical factory disasters, as long as we're adequately regulating harmless consensual private activities between adults.

Re: call a screwup CEO up to the office

Twitter, or possibly the Republican party.

Not necessarily that intelligent

There's a difference between technical intelligence and common sense, and let's just say that in young people through all recorded history- one of those things has been uncommon and the other vanishingly rare.

Re: There's very little wrong...

There's a joke around my place that if you give 3 researchers an analytical task, you'll get a huge Excel VBA macro, a dozen bash scripts, and something bizarre in Perl. None of it will be comprehensible to anyone other than the creator, let alone the IT department who knows nothing about biology, and somehow bits of it will be deployed in production anyway.

Re: limited availability on Linux/OSX

Bioinformatics is like that also. A lot of our older instrumentation is Windows-only and under support contracts that probably would not be concordant with VM's, and many third-party licensed applications are Windows exclusive.

That said all the open source stuff that we also depend on is heavily oriented toward Linux/POSIX. This actually causes problems with training since working here is often the first time that some of the younger generation has ever used a non-Windows PC.

Companies providing modern next-generation sequencing equipment and the computers to run it have also taken a giant step away from Windows dependency and I can say professionally that this is a great benefit towards support, reliability, and development.

Re: Why Login Password

Control... Intimidation... Harassment... Just Because They Can... pick one or all.

The fun part is, even if the traveler is completely compliant, the Bordies still can refuse to let them in based on what they see on someone's profile. Giving them discretion like this will surely be a huge success, much like the TSA's "attempts" at racial behavioral profiling, keeping people from accidentally bringing dangerous things onto planes, strip searching terror watch list babies, and basically everything they do.

When the directors see news like this, every IT person working for them becomes suspect. Suddenly they are mandating key loggers, remote-wipe capability, cameras in every office, RFID location tracking, and pretty soon even the most Lawful Good employees start to feel they have legitimate complaints against their company.

Re: annoy them

I probably fix stuff better when irritated. "I'll show them! I'll show the world how to do it! And then they'll regret... umm... not asking me to take a look at it the previous time so I could fix it quickly and efficiently which is the reason they pay me in the first place?"

Re: Top Notch Prison Training

Its typical American prison-for-profit management mentality:

1. Treat people (prisoners and rank-and-file employees) as animals

2. Internalize that they are not dealing with real people

3. Cut every kind of service and security to maximize profit

4. Shocked, shocked to find that thinking human beings can defeat their lemur-proof security systems

Re: Second/Third law

And finally, the Asimov Uncertainty: Given that the probe is observed to accept the instructions that lead to its destruction, is it being governed by the First Law as described above and performing the inference internally without needing Dr. Calvin's explanation, or is it simply following the Second Law and there really aren't sentient beings living on Saturn?

Re: Palestine yellow scorpions

That's not really a thing you have a choice about sleeping next to, it's more the outcome of a series of bad decisions such as "Why am I living here at all?" and "I wonder why they told me to check the bedsheets first?"

A single conventional forklift is more dangerous than either of those. Forklifts are primarily destructive forces of destruction that have been vaguely accepted by industry for their incidental capacity to lift things.

Technically it's not a railgun, it's a particle beam cannon.

But instead of, like, protons or helium nuclei, the particles are stars.

Re: Dos that count

Yes

Now tell us how you feel about <BLINK>

Re: Portals to Narnia

Discovering a portal to Narnia on your own time would be considered company property.

What one person might call a gateway to a magical realm, their company would call "we can stop paying annual chemical disposal fees!"

Re: paying for something you weren't getting

Once I paid $12 for an Eagles album on CD thinking I was going to get music.

Re: RE: Large crack visible near cliff edge (image)

Ironically, if you walked off the edge of a cliff on that comet, you would have enough time to comically look down and realize there was nothing under your feet, before you perceived you were falling.

Re: He'll Go Far

Yeah he should have been a little more proactive beyond simply changing the password to something that didn't use the B or N keys. If that were one of my staff, I'd laugh about it and then be like, "But seriously, do a more complete job next time."

Especially since the user is just immediately going to open another ticket about a broken keyboard, that the tech or his colleagues are going to have to address.