Posts by Chairman of the Bored 957 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Apr 2017
So I guess you didn't read the Chilcot report, eh?
What happened here I think is a case of looking for signal in the noise so hard, you can see anything you want to see. Washington and London were both hooked into the same bullshit feed ... from the same sources ... and asked each other for confirmation. And got it. Intelligence sharing is only a good idea if you've actually got something unique.
Proud veteran of Operation Enduring Cluster Fuck...
Actually I use OO's calc tool to manipulate enormous machine generated .csv files that cause Excel (any variant) to segfault and go down in flames. Hundreds of meg in a go? No problem, even on modest hardware.
For me, where OO really shines is the equation editor. Unlike MS Word you can compose complex equations without having to constantly bat your hand between keyboard and mouse. It's a beautiful design. Not as powerful as LaTeK, mind, but good enough for government work.
Where OO suffers is when you convert to and from the Microsoft file formats to the open formats; I waste far too much time re-doing PowerPoint graphics foo, redoing margins in Word, and so forth. Suspect it's a combination of differing font configurations between a Linux and Windows box, combined with non-standard or undocumented cruft in the MS file formats.
Old school hardware used to have those nice round cartridge fuses we remember... You know, with the little protruding knob you turn to pull out the offending blown fuse and battle short with a bit of copper wire...
When wired properly the tip is hot and the ring ends close to your fingers is the contact the fuse closes.
Found one on a rack that was not kwite right, and the ring was hot. It me up with 240V when I pulled the cartridge without due care. I was sweating in the hot air blast between the rack and wall and got a good, solid hit. Bounced between the rack and wall, slicing my arm in the process. I atoned through a blood offering to the UPS.
An elegant word coined by a government colleague some years back, before SGI got whacked:
Me: "How ya doin'? Are you going to buy that big SGI?"
Mate: "Nah, I'm in craptivity"
Me: ??
Mate: "You remember we bought the HP server farm? It's such a piece of crap that it has destroyed our support and maintenance funding lines. It also absorbs my planning and mission engineering lines, so I don't even have the resources left to do the market research needed to replace the POS or buy the SGI. I am captive to the crap. I'm in craptivity."
Absolutely! I agree it would be a stupendous and expensive task, which is why you will probably see ILS gradually replaced as a standard, but not for decades after any potential decision to do so. Unless people deliberately start crashing aircraft using combined ILS/GNSS spoofing. In that case, industry will drag it's feet, and it will take decades.
At least on the US what I see is some thinking that we can possibly eschew large, expensive airport systems for dependent broadcasts from the aircrafts' own nav systems. As in, ultimately replace primary and secondary radar with ADSB.
I think that's idiotic from a perspective of denial of service through ADSB jam/spoof, GNSS jam/spoof, ASAT attacks, truck bombs into GNSS ground stations, etc. But it's cheaper! Must be better!
At some point we might realize that a secure off board source of precision nav might be nice for landing. Given the need is decades out, the process should probably start now.
..sail on. But when I'm in New York or London... I like to talk to the cabbies and, you know, learn something about towns they are generally pretty proud of.
Simple really, if we treat each other like decent human beings we discover that - with some exceptions - we are surrounded by decent human beings and life goes better.
Thanks for the numbers and references. I didn't realize just how well the CNG can work, and I will look up the BMW report. In my part of the US much is made of hydrogen, but by and large that's made from NG.
Here is the Wikipedia page for the pumped storage facility. I try to get my brain wrapped around visualizing what it's like to move 850m^3 of water per second up or down a 380m head, but it's difficult
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Station
Other than the hot air blowing from the capitol, wind power is pretty minimal. Perhaps there is a play on biomass... The amount of bullshit the Pentagon produces per day is staggering, and the source is close to the point of load.
Seriously though, coal mining is not really a huge deal in Virginia. Now in West Virginia, that's a different story; just about the whole state is economically disadvantaged. Land is not particularly arable, terrain is just rugged enough to make infrastructure hard to build, no decent hydro to do something like a Tennessee Valley Authority play.
Virginia has two major nuclear power plants producing a fair percentage of base load. I think nucs are a little over 20pct of the installed generation but over 40pct of net generation. There is a 2+ GW pumped storage plant that significantly levels diurnal demand. ISTR Dominion wanted to expand one or both nuclear stations with new, safer capacity but backed off due to $ and opposition. So instead we will burn more coal, natural gas (*), and life extend much older reactors.
(*) Natl gas is a fine vehicle fuel, feels almost like a crime to burn it for stationary power
Get two small hobby motors, some plastic mirror you can cut into small circles to mount on the motor shafts, and a decent laser modules. Let each mirror bend the beam path through 90 deg, run up your motors and watch the lissajous diagrams form on whatever you point the rig at.
Bonus points for operation in smoke or fog.
Lose points for lasing aircraft.
It's a great kiddo project; definitely a weapon of mass distraction
@Kubla Can't-
Upvoted for making a very good point. I'm hoping the tree system is now closed loop. When I was younger I remember old growth forest being cut for paper and being replaced with stands of fast growing pine. I understand the economic reasons but was always saddened at the loss of the oaks and their kin.
Use case: if you work for a sociopath who is building his/her career by taking credit for others' accomplishments and contriving means to fire them and destroy their credibility...
...one small piece of armor is to print and have witnesses sign critical emails, product disclosures, and contract actions. And take your hard copy backup in a lab or other hidey hole that is secure. Do not take home, that's just leaving the hangman's rope lying around. Emails have a very strange habit of disappearing off of servers. Especially when your problem adult is banging one of the system administrators. And the CIO. Or so I've heard.
Each piece of paper may be small, but sometimes you need enough to cover your entire ass.
When I was doing some RF work, my team was bored and had access to a sizable 915MHz magnetron. Memory dims, but call it a 25kW source. Dangle CD in front of an open waveguide and ... The lights, sounds, and colors were most gratifying. And I DEFY you to recover any data off the remains.
I cannot remember if the 1.2M were more reliable than the 1.44M, but I can definitely understand your experience.
Right when I was trying to figure out what floppy to use, a weapon of mass distraction attack diverted my attention:
The Iomega Zip drives entered my life. The 100MB were crap and the 250MB were crap getting imploded to critical mass. We then "upgraded" to the Iomega Jazz drives... and Iomega itself failed soon thereafter. Trusting data to Zip was like shooting yourself in the foot on full auto.
You beat me to posting about the slide!
Here's some CD stupidity for you: had an office where the security officer decreed that ALL media shall be labelled according to it's sensitivity. Fair enough ... The team wrote classification levels on their CDs with sharpie markers. NOT GOOD ENOUGH thundered the security officers, "Thou shalt use media stickers!". So everyone dutifully put stickers on the CDs... And bustification ensued.
Back when I was younger lad making do with my little 3.5in stiffies, I worked for some rather frugal people who would scour the Earth looking for bulk quantities of cheap media.
I remember multiple lots of generic beige discs where the little sheet metal piece that covers the read/write aperture (stiffie's foreskin?) would break off inside the drive. We became quite adept at opening the drives to clean out the debris. It got to the point where my PS/2 had no screws installed, I could whip that bad boy out of my chassis in a flash.
What the staff never understood is how the firm thought it was saving money when so much labor went into fixing drives, and the stiffies themselves generally suffered from amnesia.
Typical lawyerly text. I like the intent, but the whole technical side of my brain keeps whispering the question, "In what way can one unambiguously or quantifiably determine a given UI is a dark pattern?"
Reminds me of the struggles the Supreme Court has had defining pr0n. Justice Potter Stewart tried to explain "hard-core" pornography, by saying, "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced... [b]ut I know it when I see it ..."
Paris because, the man saw it.
Go check out:
https://batteryuniversity.com/learn/
Granted this is absolutely not academic writing. Nothing at that site will help a materials scientist push the boundaries of chemistry and physics.
But the site is nevertheless a great example of technical writing. Written by humans, for humans, with the intention of making then more effective in employing technology. AI writers can put THAT site in their pipe and smoke it.
First of all, good on the dad for a job well done and handling the incident in a calm manner. I would have been tempted to perform a bit of vandalism, cyber or physical
The trick he missed is to see if the surveillance is active and aggressive. When I was working in a certain central European country, my colleagues and I had a fun playing find-the-cam in our hotel rooms. Clock radio and phone seemed common. TV bezel was just a given, just throw your jacket over the TV. When you had good reason to suspect, say, the dark circle on the clock face was not kwite right ... Call your mates over to show them a "really important document" kept just outside the probable field of view of the clock face. Oooh and ahh, then go out for a pint. On your return? Note the new position of the clock, phone, or whatever! Just like magic.
In the AirBNB I'd be curious to see if the smoke detector rotates to image fun times outside the FOV
Good times.
”All this smacks of an insider. Who else would have access to the signing key?"
Indeed. Smart money says you are looking for the recently separated employee who has an extremely nice house, hot car, good liquor and no debt... Along with no visible means of support.
One alternative explanation is that Asus' development environment has been pwned and modified for 'remote access'. If you're Asus' that is a pretty terrifying thought.
Pro tip... instead of spending hundred of pounds per meter for monstrous chunks of oxygen-free copper (hand oiled by Tahitian virgins), do what the pros do:
Use ribbon cable. All odd conductors one polarity, even conductors the other. Idea is ot minimizes inductance by getting the area of the Amperian loops as small as possible. Inductance is far lower for a given cost than going with a large pair of conductors. You can run a lot of power over a 50 conductor ribbon, I run 100W avg without hesitation. Heat dissipation works well because of the geometry. Connectors are almost too cheap to meter. AND the darn speaker runs lay flat in cable trays.
You're welcome!
When vehicle-mounted whip antenna collides with overhanging tree limbs, overpasses, and whatnot failure is definitely possibility.
I saw an fun test method: a 6x6 oak beam extends between two buildings at a known height. A whip antenna mounted on a HMMWV going at a max speed is crashed into it. One hell of a "whaaaap!" sound is heard! Repeat to failure, record number of cycles, document failure mechanism...
And gotten paid to do so! But it was my duty to do so, of course, all for the sake of making products that are Marine-proof.
Highly Accelerated Life Test / Highly Accelerated Stress Screening... when used properly and in an engineering paradigm that embraces failure is an extremely powerful tool for making products robust. The idea is to drive failures as fast as possible, learn, fix, repeat. Its like fuzz testing, but in the physical domain.
But I will admit its fun to take a one of a kind artifact and simultaneously give it 100g's of vibe on six axes, abuse its power supply input, and repetitively ramp it from -100DegC to 100DegC as fast as liquid nitrogen and cartridge heaters can take it. Parts fly off, smoke erupts, "unbreakable" boxes get a weird rattle to them software locks up. Good times!
Your reward us that you get to see products go from crap to bulletproof very quickly.
"That means academics are on the lookout for cheap, pure sources of the cannabinoids."
If they want the good s--t, they just need to go off campus. What you're looking for is usually behind frat row. Short haircut, souped up Honda product with really nice rims.
Do not under any circumstances do business with a guy in an American car. No matter how chill he looks, he's a cop.
Now for good crank, you gotta stay on campus and go to...
One place I worked in had an extremely nice flex-time policy. Great perk.
Unfortunately the flex time and dealing with civilians in general rubbed our new Great Leader the wrong way. He was a newly retired Marine who seemed to combine the aggressiveness of Chesty Puller with the ego of MacArthur.
So the story (perhaps apocryphal) goes:
GL: "We need some serious discipline here. People wandering in and out whenever they fscking feel like it... That's BS! Everyone will be at their desks at 0800 sharp..."
Deputy: "Sir... you do have the authority to order that. But what's going to happen is that everyone will just stand around the water cooler from 0800-1100 bitching about your policy..."
She told me a case where that happened. In Texas, but I need to ask her where.
Here is the deal: in the US, OB-GYN have a rough go of it because they get sued about once per year. Some of the cases are legit, but mostly its due to reality: birth defects sometimes happen. Its a tragedy for the child and parents but stuff happens. Usually the OB is sued.
One particular lawyer in TX apparently built a lot of his firm around suing OB's specifically. So the OB practices in his town refused to serve his pregnant wife, and she had to seek all pre-natal and delivery services elsewhere. So he sued every doctor. And lost, (Yesss!!!!)
Unless you discriminate against someone who can scream loud and long to the press, you can still refuse service in the US.
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