Source of my .sig.

Another team tried it with Star Wars discs and coundn't reproduce the effect.

10? I think you mean 18.

That's the interesting part.

This is what engineering is about: meeting a need cost effectively. The point of a toy RC airplane is to have fun. Traditionally it was expensive fun that didn't last very very long before you crashed. Having fun for longer with less $$ outlay == better engineering.

Specifically: the demand curve half of the equation. The other half is the supply curve. A platform can have *no steam whatsoever*, but so few programmers that the salaries are reasonably high.

Consider Delphi programming. I see Delphi positions come up once in a blue moon -- it's not used much any longer. But those salaries run from $80K to $110K plus. Sometimes you see a Delphi position come up in the mid 40s, but I suspect they're government positions.

I've seen listings for COBOL or PoweBuilder programmers both in the $60K to $110K plus range. You can bet when a company offers $110K for a PowerBuilder programmer it's because it's having a hard time finding one.

July 20, 1969 was, possibly justifiably, the biggest national ego-validation event in human history. The problem was after that when it came to national achievement, our eyes were firmly pointed back in time. We no longer do things "because they are hard". We're more focused on cashing in on the achievements of past generations.

When you tell Americans we have a backward mobile telephone system, a technologically primitive electric grid and distribution system, and Internet connectivity that lags behind the rest of the developed world, the reaction is usually disbelief. How can that be? We put a man on the Moon -- although by now it should be "grandpa put a man on the Moon."

He was also a conspiracy theorist who had the money to indulge his paranoid fantasies.

He had the phones of his own employees tapped. He hired private investigators to spy on his friends and family, and to dig up dirt on friends of his children he didn't approve of. He went beserk when he found out the designer of the Vietnam Memorial was an Asian American, calling her racial slurs and hiring lawyers to harass the veterans who supported her.

This is a man who thinks that both the Carter and Reagan administrations conspired to hide the presence of hundreds of POW in Southeast Asia.

I often tell my kids "there's no kind of dumb like a smart person's dumb." It's a warning against arrogance. Smart people can get too used to being right when other people around them are wrong. But in truth there is a worse kind of dumb: rich person's dumb. That's because money can give ideas instant credibility with people in a way arguments cannot. There's a strong inclination in this country to idolize rich guys.

And from their numbers, it doesn't look like they're using a reasonable estimate for Chernobyl. There've been some ridiculous estimates out there from both sides, ranging from "only the couple dozen who died directly" to "millions".

One can look at the approximately 10% higher mortality rate within the exclusion zone to get a rough sense of the consequences, but without knowing demographics, it's hard to draw conclusions from that. Probably the best (peer-reviewed) analysis I've seen compared doses with the US military's mortality data from exposure to the nuclear bombings in Japan. You get a figure of about 4000 extra deaths with moderate confidence and 5000 with low confidence (the error bars can be in either direction). So very rough ballpark of 9k deaths, plus the first responders and the like.

Yes, even when you include things like that, nuclear's death toll is lower than coal, no question. But it's not as low as they make it out to be. Their bias is obvious.

The deadliest nuclear accident, Chernobyl, was caused by defense department testing.

Yep, nuclear disasters can happen from both man and nature. That's hardly a comfort. Will "defense department testing" cause the next major nuclear accident? Very unlikely. But there almost certainly will be a "next major nuclear accident" - we just don't know what form it will take. It's a "known unknown".

Whereas Fukushima was all user error?

No. But if you're going to include "dam-induced casualties from storms", then you should include "people spared from storms by dams" also, it's only fair. And thus hydro's death count would be strongly negative.

Perhaps it is possible to offset renewables in such a way that they can provide 90% of our power needs, but no one has ever done it.

Speak for yourself. I live in Iceland where over 99,9% of the grid is renewable (primarily hydro). 99,9% renewable baseload at that. There's even serious preliminary work looking into building the world's longest submarine power cable to export power to the UK.

Again, not saying that hydro is my preference - I've stated my preference above. Just pointing out that your claim is wrong.

(Concerning the power cable: I'd support if A) they'd only be adding geo plants and wind to meet the extra power need, and B) the government would tax the power sales to the point where the cable makes just barely enough profit to economically justify its existence... but I'm sure that A) they'd probably just dam up the highlands some more - who gives a rat's arse that we have some of the world's most abundant and cheap geo and wind power that could easily compete on the European market, hydro gives a tiny bit more profit margin!; and B) the government would hardly push back at all on power export royalties because, hey, JOBS! Jobs damming up the highlands!)

Because that's what they're paying you to do? Well, that and I hate getting called on the weekend. Last project I put that much effort into, we'd take the weekends in shifts and the programmer on duty was guaranteed to get a frantic call that the system was down again. So I went in, added some data structures, redesigned how the program was launched so that if a data file crashed it, that file would be moved out of the way so processing could continue, and fixed about 150 memory overflows. We went from several hundred crashes a month to maybe one or two on a bad month. And that one or two turned out to be a corrupt index in a SQL database. After about 4 months, we stopped talking about the on call rotation. For the next three years after that, until the project ended, none of us ever got a call on a weekend again.

I'd say that depends on where you live and what you bring to the company. Can you afford it if that developer leaves? If he tells you he's going, would you make a counter offer? What would that counter offer be? Personally I'm not inclined to accept counter offers because it shows me the company is only interested in paying me the least amount it can get away with to continue to retain my employment, and not my actual technical merit. If I'm made a counter offer, I'll ask why I wasn't given that to begin with before I walk out the door. I'm one of those technical people there's a shortage of, and I don't like to work for dicks. That's why there's a shortage of me at any particular company.

I guess I'll have to bite the bullet and get a BD burner soon, does anybody here have exp with using BD for storage? How are they holding up?

I have two BD-R drives. Much like with DVDs, I use a good quality media: pretty much all of the good DVD brands also make good BD-Rs, e.g. Verbatim. I store the discs in a cool, dry place away from sunlight (disc binders). After about four years I have had no problems reading any disc I have burned.

Blu-ray discs have two advantages over DVD. First is size: a single layer disc holds 25 GB, or approximately three times as much as a dual layer DVD. Dual layer discs hold 50 GB, or approximately six times as much as a dual layer DVD. This drastically reduces both the annoyance of burning (sitting at the computer swapping discs) as well as the amount of physical space required.

The second advantage, which I wish applied to other media as well, is the scratch-resistant coating. Due to the much tighter storage density as well as the thinner layer of plastic required to get the laser closer to the data surface, a scratch is more serious for a Blu-ray. To help with this, they use a much more durable plastic that does not scratch easily unless you are deliberately gouging the surface.

For commercial use, go with tape. For home use, I love my BD-R. A 50 GB BD-R disc holds plenty of data for a home user, is durable, and can last years under residential conditions.

We want things like roads and bridges and water and electricity, but we don't want to pay for them? The last major investment we made as a country was the Interstate Highway System, and we no longer understand the concept of investment or the idea of investing in infrastructure. The whole point of having a power network is that everyone doesn't need their own power generation capability, since that's expensive and a large electrical plant will be more efficient. But if you want a solid guarantee that your lights will be on at any given point, you're going to have to invest in your own generation capability. In the last three years I've had two outages that lasted more than 24 hours. The average outage where I live is between 1 and 3 hours.

While we're on the subject of investing in infrastructure, we've got a water crisis coming up very soon now. With undeniable climate change, a large part of the country is never going to have to enough water, while another large part of the country is always going to have way too much. I think we need an interstate highway system level project to move water around the country as needed. I think this will be vital for the well being of tens of millions of Americans over the next couple of decades, but no one is even thinking about such at thing right now.

Close, but your syllable count is a bit off. Something like this would work:

fuck ink jet printers
fuck all those fucking printers
i fucking hate them

Technically, though, you're supposed to have a connection with nature for it to be proper haiku. So maybe something more like

ink jet printer rests
at the bottom of the bog
piece of shit printer

What world do you live in where mine shafts allow objects to fall for hours, days, weeks, months, or years at a time?

And FYI, this "weak force" is the reason your muscles aren't atrophied and you're stuck to this ball orbiting the sun. It matters.

They did. But first off, to correct the GP: Concrete does not release CO2. It absorbs CO2 (slowly taking back the carbon that was released during the cement's creation). So this messed up their balance equation. Metabolism was supposed to consume O2 and make CO2, while photosynthesis was supposed to consume CO2 and make O2. But with the concrete locking up the CO2, the output of metabolism was being locked up and not being converted back to O2, so the O2 levels declined.

It's a simple oversight, but one that we're very lucky was made on Earth and not on, say, Mars. More foresight could have caught it, but there's always something that slips through the cracks. A number of other issues showed themselves, such as unexpected condensation adding rain to areas supposed to be rainless, less light than anticipated making it into the habitat, certain inspect species proving incompatible with the environment while others proving to be pests, so and so forth. They also had big problems with wild fluctuations in CO2 by time of day and season - they didn't have a massive amount of atmosphere to buffer it, so levels collapsed during the day and shot up at night. A lot of people complained that the project wasn't focused enough on the science, but I think they learned an awful lot of important things that could prove critical if ever trying to grow crops on another planet.

(The psychological aspects and how the crew split into two bitterly divided factions is also a real cautionary tale)

So anyway: after the first Biosphere 2 experiment was terminated, they sealed the concrete and started another one. But the second experiment was more doomed by politics than anything else. The on-site management was foreceably evicted by federal marshals. Former biosphere members broke into the facility so that the people inside could know what was going on outside (in the process, ruining the sealed environment). And then a couple months later the management company was dissolved. Altogether the second mission lasted less than half a year. It was a total disaster.