Yes, it is. What you meant to say was, "I find it unlikely that anyone would offer me what I consider my home and experiences to be worth."

Fair enough, but it amounts to the same thing under the present discussion. Of course someone could conceivably offer me enough money that I would gladly take it and buy my own private Caribbean island. I won't hold my breath on RDS offering me $100M for my 3Br cape in the middle of nowhere, however.


Please be more clear with your wording in the future. Blatant trolling like the above does no-one any good.

My wording perfectly communicated my intent, although I will admit to a bit (and just a bit, not anything over the top) of hyperbole - Though make no mistake, people do exist who wouldn't voluntarily sell at any price. I certainly wouldn't go so far as to call my comment "trolling", though - I meant every word of what I said. People bought out under eminent domain seizures - Or in this case, under "oops we turned your block into a hazardous waste dump, collect your $300k checks on the way out of town" conditions don't get compensated for their emotional investment in their property. Simple as that.

You want "fair" compensation, or the closest thing we can get to it? Every time we hear about one of these minor disasters, the CEO's family homestead gets bulldozed and turned into high-end luxury housing for everyone displaced. CEO doesn't have enough land? Work through the entire board until everyone has a new place to live. Of course, that would often fail because the soulless CEO finds it more convenient to live in a series of condos scattered across the world, but we can at least try to demonstrate to these scum why I wouldn't sell my home for twice its appraised value.

There's a video of someone asking astronomy graduates from an Ivy League university what causes the phases of the moon and the seasons, and most cannot answer.

And I graduated from a state school known for its quality engineering programs with a degree in CS, and half my graduating class could barely write HTML, much less actually code.

Unfortunately, the reality of a modern college education has become more a matter of opportunity than actual rigor. I would love to see colleges failing out half their freshman classes - except, that ignores the reality of the modern college as a business rather than an institution of higher learning. Bad for business, having a reputation for "firing" the majority of your clients.

Make no mistake, you can still get a lot out of a college education - I like to believe I took full advantage of my time there. But you can also get by with an insultingly high GPA (we can't just "pass" them, every precious little snowflake deserves A's, dontchaknow) just by showing up.

That said... I have trouble believing that astronomy graduates can't visualize how the steadily changing angle from which we view a 50% illuminated sphere gives rise to the appearance of "phases"... The light half of it shadows the dark half, and we see part of both from a sideways perspective.

I answered your actual question. Now, you' seem to be mocking it, based on how my answer does not apply to a question you did not ask

Fair enough. I should not have mocked your answer, and I apologize for doing so.

I thought it clear, though (from my subject, if nothing else), that I asked my original question rhetorically. I simply don't find that even remotely an acceptable answer.

Anyone exposed to the oil, or with property damage, will be compensated.

"Home" does not count as fungible.

The value to me of the place I've chosen to settle down far exceeds its market value. Yeah, great, they destroyed some houses and will pay for them plus a few grand extra as a "nuisance" fee; except they didn't destroy "some houses", they destroyed a neighborhood.

You can't just pay me off for my sunny spot on the back deck where the light hits just so, filtered between my favorite trees. You can't just pay me off for the trails I've made in the woods behind my house, or all the time I've spent learning those woods and enjoying them. You can't just pay me off for the squirrels I've trained to take peanuts right from my hand while sitting in that aforementioned favorite sunny spot. You can't just pay me off for needing to move away from my neighbor who I consider a close friend, or pay off his kids who love coming over to play with the cat.

Now... I would agree with you completely if the issue at hand involved individual property owners voluntarily selling a right of way across their yard to random oil companies, knowing that an accident could eventually occur. Except it doesn't work like that, and that explains why we hold these parasites to a higher standard of safety. They apply to the government for permission to steal that right of way for a pittance under eminent domain, they dot all their "i"s and cross all their "t"s to have the right people look the other way... And then they expect us to just live in the shadow of their stellar record of safety and caring about the environment?

FUCK THAT. They can damned well pay to put in pressure shutoffs every hundred feet.

For the same reason we don't put firewalls after 100 feet of network cabling. It's expensive and likely to _create_ more failures than it prevents.

Great analogy, because just like water or crude, bits on the wire leak out when a failure occurs and make a mess of everything around them. Man, I'll never forget the sticky mess I found myself in when a backhoe came through the top wall of the server room and took out a densely packed cabling tray. Bits up to my waist within minutes, just awful. ;)

Ironically, though, your answer does more to promote the idea than discredit it - Because, we do put routers between network segments and firewalls at each end-point, and no more fine-grained points of (virtual) compromise really exist.

Backhoes notwithstanding.

Why don't pipelines like that have passive shutoff valves every hundred feet or so, such that if the pipeline suddenly looses pressure, the valve closes and no more oil can escape than already made it into that section?

We've had those for water pipes in our homes for decades to keep the house from flooding in case of a burst. And filling your basement with water does a hell of a lot less damage than filling your basement with crude.

Of course, we all already know the answer to that. The same answer GM didn't give congress last week; the same answer we always have when talking about health and safety tradeoffs: Money.

Pre-cooking food at low heat for a period before slapping it on the grill can cut down the time needed to cook it as well as limit how much burnt material is produced.

Except, by doing that, you've ruined the whole reason we barbecue things - Because we want that thin outer layer of charring.

Yes, we have plenty of ways to cook foods without forming PAH, acrylamide, or the other carcinogens-of-the-week. We could boil everything. We could microwave everything. We could bake everything on low heat while basting to keep the surface moist. Those will all pretty much prevent the formation of all the nasty chemicals we worry about in our barbecued foods. They all take less effort than barbecuing, too - A typical cookout basically requires someone manning the grill continuously to cook up a steady flow of burgers and hotdogs; vs throwing 10 lbs of dogs in a big boiling pot and having enough cooked to feed a small army in under ten minutes.

We grill things over open flame because all those nasty carcinogens make it taste better. Simple as that.

TFA contains no actual information, just an assertion that the interaction between poorly-described models of "biological" systems might kinda possibly maybe make them money because the world needs car door key fobs, or something like that.

Deep.

Seriously, this looks like a solution in need of a problem - And worse, a "solution" that breaks a critical aspect of existing functionality, namely, "human readability".

Instead of making note of a few key points in the message, this will require taking a picture of the screen just so you can "automatically" Google the meaning of an unintelligible pattern of dots. WTF, guys, in what world do you consider that an improvement?

It also ignores the reality of Linux's dominant niche - Not as end-user desktops where poor widdle grandmas might get confused by all that technical information; but rather, as servers-on-the-cheap. And where do servers live? In the server room. I don't know about how your company does things, but many (including mine) don't allow cameras in the server room, and that includes cellphones. And I don't even work for any sort of especially high-security company.

If you really want to make panics more intelligible, just reduce them to the few items of useful information they actually contain - No stupid register dump, no stack trace, no list of a dozen maybe-related-but-almost-never-really modules. List the type of panic, the faulting module, and just the top of the call stack. That alone provides the level of detail most people can do something about - "Looks kinda like that new video driver blew up, better roll back and see if the problem goes away". Anything more than that only matters to kernel devs, and for that, we have debugging and verbosity command line options they can set.


TLDR: If, by default, a panic scrolls a 40x25 text screen, you've failed. Adding the requirement of a smartphone and internet connection only makes it worse.

Cough. Your freedoms end where other's begin. Cough.

So far, virtually all the discussion on this topic has centered around the rights of the victim. I apologize for responding to you personally, but you have the most visible post continuing the "wrong" discussion here. :)

The problem here has nothing to do with whether or not we should condemn the concept of "revenge" porn, but rather, whether a website should bear liability for content posted by a third party. That should scare the hell out of all of us, liberal or conservative, pro-porn or feminist, rich or poor.

Look beyond porn for the implications of this - Should Amazon bear criminal liability for allowing a joking review that says "this blender turns lead into gold" to remain? Should Yelp need to fact check every single review of some rat-trap motel or suffer liability for defamation? If a blogger dares to criticize Italian or French judges for their sham of a legal system, should Wordpress' CEO (or given what I just said, Dice's CEO) go to prison? And those don't even get into the issue of search engines, where literally everything on the internet can show up - Do we really expect Google to bear the burden of making sure no one has posted something incorrect or illegal on the entire internet?

If so... Goodbye, Internet (at least in the US - Which still effectively means "Goodbye, Intenet"). Section 230 means more than a loophole for pesky websites to intentionally look the other way - It makes the entire concept of public participation in a shared discussion possible.

So you mean, he didn't admit to a variety of felonies in public?

Shocking.

Are all the childless people really making more of a difference? I didn't know that clubbing, going to the movies, and trying to get laid really was that effective at motivating political reform!

We also vote, and have the disposable income (that in your case goes to crap like paying for all those antibiotics you keep ruining as placebos to treat viral ear infections) to contribute to our preferred candidates. And hey, the USSC actually just raised we mere humans to the level of corporations as far as "money as free speech" goes!

That said, let's not get sidetracked by the breeder-vs-DINK arguments. We have one very simple, fundamental problem with getting scientifically-literate people in office:

None run.

We have, as a nearly unanimous pool of candidates, complete fucking morons (with nice hair, oh and "ironically" enough, a median net worth in the eight digits). So whether we vote for Tweedle-dee (D) or Tweedle-dum (R), we still all lose.

Hackathons are great, but there are easier ways to find jobs.

No, actually, I would very much have to disagree with that.

I got my first job out of HS (over two decades past, now) in a "hackathon" for a scholarship with a bonus summer internship (which evolved into a "real" job once I graduated, though I earned that part, it didn't come as part of the package).

Although I eventually moved beyond that job, I have honestly never gotten another job that easily since then. And suffice it to say, having won that scholarship and internship, I have a reasonably impressive resume.

If you can actually code well, "hackathon" style contests let you prove it, simple as that. No stupid psych questions that HR forces interviewers to ask, no stress on whether to dress up or down to "fit" to corporate climate at your target company, no "you match our listing perfectly but we really meant to hire someone internally and just posted the ad to meet funding-requirement-X". Just show off your skills, and call it good.

If, however, you can kinda sorta do some things with computers at your Uncle's company... Don't bother, and invest in a better suit..

You want to know how to make ads acceptable?

Permanent incognito/private browsing mode + Adblock + Ghostery + click-to-play + DNT (yeah, you all ignore it anyway) + a vanilla user agent. Make them the default for every browser.

Marketers take heed: Ads no longer server the purpose they once did. Every time you manage to sneak a clever ad past my technical defenses, you piss me off about your product/company/campaign.

You want to get my to buy Pepsi? Advertise for Coke. Simple as that.

If you were asked to do something then fucking do it. Any sticker shock is the CTOs problem to explain.

In spirit, I agree with you.

In practice, I write two kinds of in-house app on a regular basis - Integrations, and reports (yeah, I know, reporting doesn't generally count as an app, but compiling the data that goes into them behind the scenes very much does). How exactly do you move an integration that hits two (or more!) local servers, which may well contain sensitive (even in the PCI/PII sense) data, to "the cloud"? And for reporting, the task sounds simple until you ask "reporting on what?" Unless you want response times measured in hours or days, that would includes a hidden requirement that I also build a complete mirror of my local data warehouse in the cloud. Even ignoring the cost of that much storage, bandwidth rapidly becomes an issue when talking about trying to keep hundreds of gigs of data as close to realtime-fresh as possible.

So no, you can't always just "fucking do it". The FP likely understands that, and simply hopes to use price as an argument rather than patiently explain to his CTO why playing "Buzzword Bingo" doesn't make a viable long-term IT strategy.