Yes, but the existing planes are constantly updated. Military planes are not like commodity cars, which get build once and only receive new wipers every now end then. The airforce plans to use them for decades. Also, the insight gained will influence the next generation of fighters.
Useless knowledge -- the era of meathauler fighters is already over, at least here in the West.
Are you measured by abandoned tickets? Then tickets will get resolved, even if they don't reasonably deserve to be considered resolved. You will get things unnecessarily classified as "unable to duplicate", "insufficient information", etc.
I experienced a form of this phenomenon just this afternoon, albeit not in an IT environment...
I went to Bank of America to (proudly) close my accounts, having moved to a smaller and thoroughly more moral bank. The customer service rep figured it out right away when he saw that my six ~18-year-old accounts now all had zero balance, and zero activity for the past month. So we start closing. He is doing the keyboarding and mousing while I am watching the screen.
At a certain point in the process of closing each account, the rep is required to give the reason for account closure. In the popup list of reasons are some very relevant choices: 'Service' and 'Competition' sprang out as the correct choices. He chose 'Misc', and for the sub-reason chose 'Bank of America Consolidation', whatever the hell THAT meant.
It was then that I knew there had been a memo from headquarters, probably last month, that said "We know people are closing their accounts. Management wants to make sure that the reason is NOT people leaving in disgust, headed to our competitors." And so now the CEO can stand up and say "We've only lost 1% of our accounts to the competition!"
Just this afternoon that happened, right in front of me. I almost laughed out loud.
Good. glad to see that some VP did the smart thing for once and cut the middle managers instead of the people who actually get the work done.
It is deliciously ironic that you would take a swipe at "middle managers" in this conversation about metrics.
The only way to eliminate middle management, is for upper management to utilize metrics in order to evaluate lower management. There is no time for hands-on management and evaluation with a keen eye in one of these vaunted "flat organizations" with no middle management. And so lower management quickly realizes that their jobs and bonuses depend on the metric, rather than on quality or long-ranged action.
After that, the company is humped... but by then, the "aggressive VP" who wiped out middle management has collected his bonus and moved on.
Losers realize this simple fact, instantly think of several ways to game the metric, then don't do it figuring that "obviously" the decisionmakers realize the metric is horribly broken. Then they get laid off. Winners spend hours, days, or weeks coming up with one way to game the metric, pat themselves on the back for being so clever, and do it. Then they get promoted, eventually to a position where they come up with metrics of their own.
It's not just IT. Our entire society has converted over to metrics. An easy example comes to mind: the stock market versus a company's quarterly performance. Another set of particularly nasty examples is found in our justice system: police officers evaluated by their number of citations, prosecutors by their number of convictions, prisons by their dollars per inmate per day.
I get the financial impetus to switch to metrics. Where it used to be one skilled manager overseeing per 5-7 employees, it can now be one schmuck manager with an Excel spreadsheet overseeing 30 employees.
I even get the psychological impetus. Numbers give us that all-important feeling of certainty, and at low cost too... while the traditional alternative requires legwork, mindwork, judgment, contemplation, and mistakes.
But it's wrecking our society.
Yes.
The attack can be stopped using their Protected Mode. Versions that ship with the protected mode will not be addressed to specifically mitigate this attack until later, with Adobe recommending everyone turn on protected mode to protect them in the mean time.
Whether or not that's a reasonable reaction is a whole different question.
Meh. Just switch to a security-conscious web browser like Opera. It lets me browse with plugins (acrobat, flash, java, etc.) disabled, cookies disabled, javascript disabled, and send-referrer disabled. I enable them on a site-by-site basis. Opera handles it natively and beautifully.
You people still using 20th-century web browsers are in serious peril.
No, since when you establish the vibrations you don't know in which one it occurs. So while you could establish vibrations in a distant diamond (or particle), at least theoretically, you never know when you do so which one is actually vibrating. When they set it up, they used 1 photon that could travel and strike either diamond, creating the vibrations. Without measuring the photon's path, they didn't know which one it hit and therefore which on would be vibrating. This caused the entanglement.
Close. The entanglement is created by the fact that the photon COULD HAVE chosen either one. Because the photon was not observed in such a way that it had to collapse into particle-ish behavior, the photon never had to choose which one to hit. Therefore, each crystal was AND was not hit by the photon. They only 'decide' who took the photon when the rest of reality (e.g. an observer, or an interaction with another incident particle) needs to know exactly who took it.
...of a problem that was first noted in the mid 1980s and termed "electronic smog" but the most general term is RFI and dates back as far radio systems in general. Not only do signals interfere with each other, but signals will interfere with ANY electronic device where pins or wires are capable of acting as a dipole.
RFI doesn't even require a pin or wire to be a dipole -- RFI works just as well against a single pin acting as a monopole, since the device's case is almost certainly grounded and so can act as the other pole.
Because the "smart" part of the meter is the part where it gives the utility company (and the powers that be) the ability to monitor in real-time what you've got running and at what times, along with the ability to take control of heating/cooling of a residence away from the consumer.
Why would any company want to do that? Why would anyone want to take control of your heating/cooling? What could anyone possibly gain by doing that? Aside from not being able to charge you more money for using your heating?
Or is it you're just paranoid?
The daily peak power load in the south can be laid at the feet of air conditioning. Likewise for the daily peak load in the north for heating. Peak load is what compels states and utilities to con$$$truct more powerplants. If they can just get peak load down, average load can go way up, and it's all gravy to them.
According to TFA, the smart meters will do more than that. They are intended in the medium term to allow power control within the house. So that the meter can signal to, say, the freezer that power demand is particularly high, and if it could hold off consuming power for a while it would be appreciated.
Yes, that is the selling point used to win over the ballast into allowing those things on their houses.
Information also flows upstream. That information will be used to prove you guilty. It will not be available to you for use in proving yourself not-guilty.
I have seen the phenomenon with my own eyes. Houston has a red-light camera system, but civilians have not been told that it also logs license plates. "Authorized users" can remotely access the system in order to find out which intersection a particular license plate last crossed. It is used to track people down, usually for arrest.
That, in a nutshell, is why I have no particular interest in web applications I do not myself host. Aside from the vast privacy implications, you are totally at the mercy of the provider. A standalone, self-sufficient client with the option of web storage and/or sharing, fine. All of my work on a box run by someone who doesn't even have any contractual or regulatory obligations? No thanks.
Yep yep.
Remember when knol was first introduced? It was supposed to be a "verified wikipedia", written by experts. Those experts (you, me, anyone) were to spend a lot of time, effort, and domain knowledge in writing high-quality articles... and in return we would receive a per-click royalty. This would incentivize the creation of actionable content that would something something revolutionize something synergy something leverage.
I remember thinking through the subjects for which I am credible authority, and considering whether to produce some knols in order to develop a bit of side income. I very seriously considered it... and judging from some of the knols I've seen, lots of other people went all the way.
Now we see how it all ends up. Just like the DRM game ended up. "Oh, sorry users, but this quarter we have decided that the project isn't profitable. Or we just hired a new VP and he's shaking things up. Or whatever. We're closing it down, so f*** you and your investment, you're just an externality."
I will now NEVER, EVER contribute content to a for-profit enterprise. Be it amazon reviews or knols or sidebar markups or whatever, that's it, I'm done.
No doubt that there are some Hams who have gone silent key still on the rolls, but most of their registrations will expire after no more than 10 years. And the dead certainly don't account for many of the new registrations (except perhaps in Chicago).
It doesn't work that way. A license expires after 10 years, but renewal is free and practically effortless, so everyone renews forever. The number of ham licenses will therefore always be "at an all time high" because of the ratchet effect created by free renewals.
My father has been a ham since the 1960s, but hasn't touched a radio in three decades.
Although I prefer Maemo since it seems to be the least soul sucking OS around, Android is also quite nice once you install a few odds and ends to clean up the advertising mess - though you need hardware that can be rooted. Applications like DroidGuard, AdAway, LBE Privacy Guard, or similar will put a halt to anything trying call home or get in your way.
Sorry to yank off your warm fuzzy blanket, but if you carry a cellphone and use it to make calls, your privacy is exactly bupkis because the cellular companies are already inside your kimono...
Your physical location is already tracked real-time, and accessible to people whose career advancement requires wrecking your life (law enforcement). Whereas all Google et. al. want to do is sell you stuff you want, or sell your information to other people who want to sell you stuff you want. They know where you are and they will use that information to prove you guilty -- but not to prove you not-guilty.
Your social connections are also already logged vis-a-vis your call logs, MMS logs, and email records, again accessible to people who are incentivized to get convictions without any primary concern for guilt or innocence. Whereas Google and friends just want to figure out which commercials to show you.
You act like someone on board the Titanic, who is so utterly intimidated by the prospect of sinking in the arctic that you lock yourself in your room and obsess about how to prevent the waitstaff from spilling a drink on you. You are worried about all the wrong things.
They come down with stomach acidosis, and they will only live about six months once the corn diet begins.
Posting this kind of absurd fiction only helps discredit the very real problems caused by overfeeding with grains. A six-month death sentence?
The problem began with New Deal-era crop subsidies. Naturally, every progressive treats government power like violence (if it doesn't work, just use more of it) and instead of removing the subsidies, they want to tax the meat or corn and thus continue to cause hardship.
I agree that crop subsidies are teh stupid, but the corn health problems are real. In addition to acidosis, corn-fed cows have problems with liver failure from (corn) aflotoxin concentration, as well as founder and ulcers. It's not a secret either, just do some googling.
Now, in the US, there is supposed to be a clear separation between classes of antibiotics used on animals and those used on people, although this is more porous than we might like to think. There are however no guarantees that other countries have the exact same divisions. Moreover even assuming that this is the case, it deprives us humans of the effectiveness of certain classes of antibiotics which might prove useful in the future.
That principle was abruptly defenestrated under pressure from the agricultural sector. Even the very precious vancomycin, a "last line of defense" against multiple-drug-resistant pathogens, is being fed to cows now.
The alternative is expensive beef. Antibiotics are needed in order to fatten cows on corn. The alternatives are all much more expensive, but at least they are compatible with a cow's stomach lining. Unfortunately that would mean doubling the price of beef. If that happened, then the ballast would be shrieking at their congressmen within the hour ("McDonalds sez they hafta raise the price a'burger by two dollar!"), and boom, we're right back to corn.
The problem of antibiotic use in animals falls into the class of long-term abstract hazards that democracies cannot solve. Democracy can solve only those problems that are concrete and short-term painful.
And farmers pretty much feed all of their animals antibiotics because it's easier? cheaper? than only feeding it to animals once they're sick (in general it's a lot harder to tell when an animal is sick than a human). Or at least that's my understanding, I could be wrong.
Modern industrial cattle operations feed cows corn because calorie-for-calorie it is the cheapest food available for cows. The problem is that cows evolved to eat grass, not grains, so their stomachs aren't suited to it. They come down with stomach acidosis, and they will only live about six months once the corn diet begins.
While they are alive, they get infections via the stomach ulcers. So antibiotics are mixed into the corn to somewhat protect the stomach at least long enough for the cows to get obese for market.
I didn't choose the word 'obese' lightly. Industrial cows are literally obese, which is why their meat is so fatty. Fatty meat is easier to cook, and us dumb Westerners have been trained to prefer fatty meat ("nicely marbled").
If the aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it. -- Stanley Garn
