The BD-5 will always be there, even when the last one is scrapped or hung-up in a museum, as inspiration to the young future aerospace engineer. RIP Jim Bede. Not a perfect airplane guy, but always pushing to make things better for aviators while others went with the mainstream flow.

Well, don't despair - others have taken inspiration from the BD-5J and created their own version.

The only difference is it might actually be flyable.

Often, employees can get the WORST of both worlds...if they are hired as a W2 employee of the contracting house (usually the prime) of a federal gig. Yes you get some benefits, but you don't get the pay and freedom of a full blown contractor.

OTOH, the employer has to pay payroll taxes of the employee, there's paid time off, etc. And well, the person doesn't have to seek out work when the contract's running out (because of the way things work, an independent contractor has the obligation to seek additional work to provide "independence" - you cannot have your contract renewed over and over again otherwise you can get classified as an employee.

All that is why contractors are paid more money - because instead of benefits and perks, all that is cashed out. You take time off - you don't get paid, so you're paid more to compensate for that. The contracting company doesn't pay payroll taxes on you - that's now your responsibility, etc.

Of course, the downside is you're cashing out your perks. If you're taxed at 25%, that means your paid time off is now taxed. So instead of taking 8 hours off, you got cashed out 8 hours, and effectively were paid for 6 hours.

It's good that Google's autonomous cars haven't caused any accidents, however the bigger question is if there was a human driver in those situations, would any of them have been avoidable? I try to keep an eye on vehicles coming to a stop behind me when I'm stopped, which is something the Google cars may not be programmed to do (or even have rear-facing sensors to detect that at all). I'm sure these vehicles are safer than a good many drivers on the road, but they can only react and respond in ways they were specifically designed for.

May be avoidable if you're a top-tier driver who leaves sufficient gap ahead of you for such things (my driving class taught me to leave a 3-4 car gap between you and the car in front, narrowing it as traffic builds behind you), so you have the ability to maneuver - either changing lanes or simply using it as absorption space in a crash (or moving forward a bit to give a bit more distance for the guy behind to stop).

But you're talking top tier drivers. Average Joe probably will be just on their phone not looking out for traffic, ahead or behind. And most drivers don't pay attention to their rear view mirrors while stopped, either - if not on their phone, they'll just be looking ahead at the light.

And given an accident like this, it's even harder to debate as it appears people don't even look far enough ahead while driving.

I'd be curious to see how it responds to really weird northeast conditions like a snow squall or black-ice. Or my personal favorite, when it's really snowing and you need to make sure you're stopped in a good spot that you can get traction once you can start moving again

The problem is that people drive entirely way too fast - when conditions are bad, you don't want to go fast. Especially in snow and ice - changing your velocity (accelerating or braking) is hazardous and should be avoided.

Autonomous cars also have a greater sense of slippage than humans - tires work because the road doesn't move underneath them - and anyone with basic physics knows the coefficient of kinetic friction (slipping) is lower than the coefficient of static friction. What that means is the instant you detect slippage, you stop powering that wheel because once it slips, it will continue to slip - you have to slow down the wheel until the speeds match again.

It is one situation where sometimes the automatic "creep" is actually useful since creep is typically slow enough that you can get going. And you shouldn't be driving to fast anyways because stopping will require an equally gentle slowdown. Too many people try to do regular speeds and that's what leads to issues.

You have got to be kidding. Yes, those cars were easy to work on, they had to be as they required constant service. Ever wonder why all the 'service stations' became 'mini-marts'? Because new, electronically-controlled, cars no longer provided the steady cash stream that all that mechanical crap did.

I remember when I was a kid in the 60s that a big part of the family vacation budget was 'get the car ready.' Going on any trip of more than a few hundred miles meant 'major tuneup' - points, plugs, distributor cap, rotor, idle adjustments, etc. And of course it had to be done ahead of time, because there was a fairly good chance that something would not be right and it would have to go back.

My current car has 102K miles on it, and the only service it has ever required is fluid and belt changes.

Exactly.

Today's modern car got to be "twist and go" - you insert key, twist, and car is running. Doesn't matter if it's -40C or +40C (let's say -40F to 100F).

Hell, you can even put the wrong octane gas and it'll still work! (if it needs premium, you can put in a tank of regular and it won't kill itself from knock/preignition). The computer handles it just fine. And while not wholly recommended, normal consumer level cars that say they need mid-grade often run just fine on regular (I won't do it to say, a BMW, but a Toyota or Honda? Sure).

Plus, starting the car after it's been running for a while doesn't result in vapor lock.

And let's not forget all things mechanical are perfect, for more than one automatic transmission has needed recall because a hole was 1/32" an inch too small. (The hole was in the control unit - a mechanical computer, if you will).

In fact, if you want to "go back to the good old days" take up flying. Small piston single engine planes are purely all mechanical for the most part - the spark's done by magnetos, even. You manage the carburettor (some have fuel injection, but it's continuous, always spraying fuel), the mixture, etc.

And many pilots are anticipating the day when instead of all that, they have a simple throttle and the rest of that stuff is managed by a computer (FADEC - Full Authority Digital Engine Control) - two of them for redundancy.

Hell, with something as "complex" as a servo-controlled throttle has gotten rid of annoyances like stuck throttle cables.

The modern car is actually very freaking reliable. You won't believe how far some people will actually run them - they will buy a 25 year old car for $1000 and literally run it into the ground - oil changes? Well, they'll dump a quart in every month of so. Check engine light? Been on for 10 years, if it hasn't burned out yet. Yeah, it doesn't perform as good, the transmission is laggy and all that, but even a simple tune up costs more than the car's worth.

They have to have them manufactured, shipped and installed in all of their locations and then there is the conundrum of plugging the equipment in, too. Do they order vacuums with special plugs? Replace the plugs on COTS vacuums?

Actually, until recently, most appliances in the UK were terminated in pigtails. You had to buy your own UK plug and wire it up yourself. (And it was taught in school how to wire a plug properly).

So technically, the COTS appliance would do absolutely squat since the line cord is provided as a pigtail anyways.

And while yes, you may need to "develop" a plug, there actually are plenty of existing plugs - using Australian plugs would suffice - the voltage and frequency is the same, and the angled pins would foil it. Or use one of the many North American ones (I think we have spinning locking ones that work at 240V that won't fit a standard 2 prong plug).

Then again, they are rather proud of their plug. And their ability to wire a plug.

Indeed. Facebook had HTML5 video enabled on mobile for some time but until recently, the desktop page was still using Flash.

Well, a certain mobile platform pretty much ensured mobile platforms won't have flash. And that certain platform is also somewhat of a target for facebook as well.

Though, on the topic of flash killing... why is it YouTube has no problem serving up HTML5 video to Firefox, but Chrome (on the same machine) insists that YouTube must use Flash? Yes, the machine is old, but Firefox can play HTML5 video from YouTube and Chrome cannot?

Truckers shouldn't use google maps anyway - they don't provide legal truck routes. There are other applications out there like ALK PC Miler that provides truck routes based on verified truck routes, height and weight limits, etc.

Guess what? Truckers are like you and I.

Truck-capable GPSes are available, and expensive as heck. Many even let you enter the size of your rig so they will not plan routes where the clearance is lower than your height.

Of course, most truckers don't realize that and assume it's just another way to screw them out of money, so they avoid them and go for the "free" solutions. Because free is good, time is money, and GPS units are all the same... right?

No one is researching the bias leading to 99% male construction workers, or garbage men.

Apparently a woman thinks you're wrong. So wrong she started a company creating a working clothes line for women. Specifically, she worked in the mining industry and was forced to put on the standard safety equipment. Which works great for men, but not so much for women (notably, using the facilities requires taking it all off).

So the fact she's able to create a clothing line for working women and build a company out of it (she expanded to better work wear for men, too) shows there's actually demand and the numbers are there.

And why it there are so many women in tech in the past, famous ones at that?

I think the real truth is that IT is the new "construction worker". And despite IT workers supposedly being "more intelligent" or "skilled" or even "meritocracy", they just have poor social skills and in general are just boors. Talking to the computer, the computer doesn't care about etiquette, manners, or other things, so you can grunt and make racist and sexist and other jokes with impunity. That's probably the real truth, and we don't want to admit it because we LIKE it that way. Sort of a "no girls allowed" clubhouse.

Greed isn't a question of absolute amounts. It's about having more than others, whether or not you can actually use/consume/enjoy it. It's about status and power -- limiting what others can have so that you get to have something special.

Of course, a sane person will care little about status. If your neighbour has a faster computer, you can still be a better programmer, which is something no amount of greed will ever take away.

And that's why Star Trek's replicators will cause a ground-shift in economic thinking.

I mean, so you have a faster computer today. In 5 minutes, I can have one just as fast as yours out of a magic machine.

That's the thing - "things" are effectively infinitely replicable. You want gold? Ask the machine to make it for you. But you having 100lbs of gold doesn't mean I can't go and do the same. So now having more "stuff" is really an exercise in futility because what you have, I can get easily.

And that's what changes the greed equation significantly - because what you have, others can as well.

Greed works when others can't have what you have. I have a 200ft yacht, you don't, therefore "I'm better than you".

But geez, if you can get a 200ft yacht easily, then my 200ft yacht is kind of pointless.

About the only thing that's not easily replicable is things that are not "stuff", like knowledge. But you better keep that on your own, because otherwise anyone else can look it up too.

That actually happened here - one government corporation recently came under FOIA discovery, and their FOIA procedure was to post all requests fulfilled on a public website.

So naturally, the FOIA requests came in, and the results were well, made public.

The news agencies made such a loud noise about it and filed lawsuits all about it, to the point where the company stopped putting the data up for 24 hours.

While the intention was to foil FOIA requests, I always felt that putting the results up immediately was the proper way to do it, not trying to hide it so someone else can make big bucks from it. We the taxpayer paid for that too.

Funny, that's exactly what contractors do. I was a contractor for 4 years at a desk where I had to show up in exact hours, attend OIG presentations about sexual harassment and child pornography on business systems, and of course was not allowed to post on Facebook where I work.

Then more likely you weren't a contractor. You were an employee treated as a contractor.

It's why tax agencies are scrutinizing employment contracts because there are a bunch of differences between a contractor and an employee. And simply calling an employee a contractor doesn't make them one - there are many things a contractor is free to do, and tax agencies look to that.

In other words, most "contractors" are really working in an environment where the employer is just screwing them over - they aren't real contractors.

Uber's probably looking at the same as well - paid indentured servant perhaps? I mean, it isn't that hard to make them real independent contractors - you just have to run the risk that half your Uber drivers might also work for Lyft and competitors. Binding them to Uber and making them follow Uber's way is closer to employee than contractor.

I did not choose the SSDs. They came with the industrial panel pc and were marketed as industrial grade.

Yeah, that'll be the problem.

"industrial grade" is typically code for "industrial temp" and they just pick whatever crap meets that requirement. And knowing that you probably want that, the controllers are probably full of bugs.

I'd actually trust the good consumer version of the SSDs than the buggy industrial ones where the technology dates to before Intel SSDs made them good.

We've improved things a lot -SSD failure on power loss is generally limited to the cheap non-name brand crap or they have built in power protection, speeds have exceeded what SATA can do, etc.

Heck, sometimes what's inside those "industrial ssds" is probably just a CompactFlash type card which have poor speeds and so-so reliability.

By far the biggest failure among dozens of SSDs deployed is power failure induced loss, and it was rare. We did limit ourselves to good quality SSDs from Intel and Samsung. The data loss happened when the owner dropped his laptop while it was on and it shattered into many pieces. (Laptop was a write-off, as well). But the SSD was recovered by a secure erase.

In an industrial environment, I can see sudden power loss crapping out the SSDs - no one takes the time to properly shut down the PC, and industrial SSD vendors typically don't follow the advancements in SSD technology that's happened in the past few years.

The problem is how to judge expertise on a resume.

So certifications get you past the HR filter.

Only then do you get to talk to someone who (in theory) knows programming/whatever enough to evaluate your actual expertise.

So, what is it worth to get past that first hurdle?

Well, you bypass HR.

HR is only if you're really just starting out and have no clue how to get started. If you're in secondary school, start making friends and visit job fairs held there. Especially the ones where the companies are interviewing on the spot because it's real employees (not HR) looking over the resumes and doing the interviews.

And after that, make sure you're keeping tabs on people as they join and leave because these people will form your network, and networking gets you at those jobs that aren't listed. And using your network means you're bypassing HR. Plenty of hiring is done word-of-mouth and there are even hidden jobs posted publicly to meet HR rules.

You skip the HR filter, and you get involved with someone who can champion your cause and push your candidacy forward.

it's an usb ethernet dongle.

True, but it's actually a USB power adapter with a Ethernet port on it. The USB-Ethernet adapter is in the power aadapter and the single USB cable goes to the Chromecast.

So it's not a dinky adapter dangling from your Chromecast (and slowly unplugging it if your HDMI ports are the wrong orientation), but it accepts Ethernet at the power adapter and asingle cable goes to the Chromecast. Quite elegant a solution, really.