Those are very relevant examples of the British police incompetence resulting in dead citizens. The thing is... there are four of them, and they occurred in a period of twice as many years. Even if you add up all of the fatal British police shootings since 2000, including ones that were 100% justified, in self-defense, and recorded by the ubiquitous cameras, you will still come to about one tenth of the lowest estimate of police shootings in the US for one year.

The Brits can go years without any fatal police shootings, and the total times service weapons are discharged is usually in the dozens per year. For comparison, last year, there were four fatal police shootings in the US county (no 'r') in which I work. Two in the one where I live, plus a possible bloodbath, in the town were I live, which was avoided because some brave policemen decided to disregard procedure, by rushing and disarming a suspect instead of opening fire on him and his friends.

If anything, I have been amazed at the videos in which British cops subdue maniacs who are waving various weapons around. Make a Google search. You will find videos of literally dozens of cops spending a good portions of an hour in ultimately successful attempts not to kill people who in the US would be getting a bellyful of lead within seconds.

I'm not even going to argue whether it's a good thing that these policemen and policewomen are risking their lives to capture those people. I'm not going to say that I would want the cops in my town to act like British cops. But it is a fact that British style policing results in a lot fewer lethal shootings that ours, per capita.

Thanks for answering! I guess we pretty much do the same thing, except that we draw the line between programming skills and CS fundamentals in a slightly different place :-)

OTOH, I've interviewed quite a few people with degrees but only very shallow coding skills (no real understanding of pointers or debugging), and who still didn't have strong fundamentals in computer science.

It's not that I doubt you, but how do you catch that? I am actually asking, not being facetious.

By the time I invite someone for an interview, I have looked at their resume, and I have had them answer a few questions that are supposed to tell me of their CS grounding OR of their command of google and their ability to wade through bullshit.

At the interview, I mostly talk about their projects and give them short task that tell me about their programming tasks. I certainly expect to notice if an applicant isn't comfortable with pointer arithmetics, or has never wondered about character set representation, for example.

But their understanding of CS fundamentals? Sure, I try to see whether they come up with the test answers on their own, or looked them up, but for the rest... Unless you are counting basic algorithms and complexity, you need time to see how well grounded they are. And if they lack the programming skills, I will let someone else investigate their CS credentials.

Of course, a CS graduate who does not know how to program is a worse candidate for a programming job than someone with a few projects under his belt.

But I have to say, I have very little experience with CS graduates who do not know how to program. Every single Course VI (EE&CS) person whom I knew in college had serious programming chops.

No, I never took a programming class (I TA'd two) but it was because I felt I was a hot-shot programmer going in. Every summer I would take a project that would pay in the 15-30K range, and mostly, it would be finished before the first day of classes. Most of my friends had internships, and those were programming jobs. I very much doubt they were learning the basics on the job, either.

Many of my classes (computer vision, distributed computing, etc...) assumed that we had working knowledge of C (maybe C++) They all had final projects that could not be approached, let alone completed without serious programming skills.

As for those who felt that they needed to learn a language, they were classes for that, as well. I am not saying that there aren't people who graduate with a CS degree without having even basic programming skills, but they seem to be the exception to me, not the rule. Hell, every category has its fuckups. But in my experience, it isn't CS graduate without programming experience vs high school graduates with programming experience. It's programmers with or without a college degree. And frankly, for programming jobs, I tend to hire both. I also happen to spend hours explaining some basics to the ones without a CS degree. In the long run, they may become just as good as the ones with a degree, but they sure do not command the same salary. And it is fair: in general, they take more training.

Actually, in August, I had to recommend a book to one of my guys, and answer his questions about it. He had tried to implement a commit/roll back mechanism without any theoretical background, and had made a mess out of it. No big deal. He was smart enough to learn.

I do not know about actors, but as far back as a dozen of years ago, one of my friends from college was composing music for her robot musicians. Look up Christine Southworth, one of the co-founders of Ensemble Robot... ... or just google it: https://www.google.com/search?q=emsemble+robot+christine+southworth

Yeah, it's a plug, but it's not for myself, and anyway, it's another nail of that persistent meme that MIT girls are ugly.

This is exactly what's going on. The company I work for had this problem, at one of our warehouses (not AT&T, different provider, probably subletting from someone).

The warehouse manager threatened his local rep with a law suit, they laughed at him. The company lawyer mentioned a class action law suit, they fixed our billing the same month.

When we had to renew, the new contract spelled out that they will bill us for the 'resulting' traffic. It got signed without anyone from my department getting asked, but the funny thing is, months later, they are still billing us the old way i.e. without the overhead.

As for the original poster - check your contract. If you have not agreed to pay for their internal overhead, you will get amazing results if you remind them that they are overcharging thousands of customers, and that they can be on the hook for millions, when a lawyer agrees to take the case for a percentage. If you have agreed to pay for the overhead... I doubt there is much you can do.

By the way, I am an IT director ,not a lawyer, so don't go blindly follow my advice, either.

You are kidding, I hope.

Unless you are running an e-mail server on your own home network, of course it counts against your data cap.

The file is encoded, transmitted to an e-mail server somewhere else, and stored there until your e-mail client retrieves it.

A 10M file can easily count as 60M against your cap, depending on the encoding your client uses. x3 for the encoding, and x2 for the transmission.

I certainly hate this post.

Headline ending with a question mark? Check.
Big image that insists on occupying the whole screen! Check.
Self-promoting claim of being the first, when there was evidence of something not being quite right with the Standard Model as early as the 90s? (I'm no physicist, but I read it on Slashdot)
And finally, there is no new data. They are setting up an experiment, which will not bear fruit for years.

Let see.

Did viable Space Plankton drift from outer space to the ISS as it was orbiting Earth, and just happened to be DNA-identical to the one that has been living (and maybe evolving) in Earth's seas?

Or was Sea Plankton carried by the wind to the hold of the vehicle carrying these components up from cape Canaveral?

Oh, my... so hard to decide which is more likely.

Your idea sound great on first glance, but less so on second.

" If there is no safe escape route, it should not be moving"

This would not work, for the simple reason that there is no way to safely move on most roads, if you assume that everyone else is a malevolent actor, waiting to slam into you as soon as you place yourself in a position from which you cannot avoid him.

We all try not to get into situations where someone else's mistake will doom us. But we assume that most people are sane and will try to avoid accidents. Sometimes, we see that a particular car behaves dangerously, and we start planning our moves with the assumption that this particular actor may create problems. You cannot do that for everyone, or you will be paralyzed.

An automated car will assume that the car driving in the opposite direction on that two lane road will NOT swerve at the precise wrong moment when collision will be unavoidable. And most times, it will be a good assumptions, especially if the other car is also automated, and in good working order.

But some times, the other car will blow a left tire, or the other driver will have a heart attack and lean on the wheel. And an accident will be about to happen.

At this point, the automated car will have to do something. It will have very little time to react - more than a human, maybe, but it will have a lot less information.

I know that the huge object at the corner of my exit is an inflatable truck advertising for the Ford dealership, and that it is sitting on flimsy tubing frame covered with a plastic shroud. My automated car would not know that, and for it, it will be just an immobile object that it has to avoid.

With an automated car, all objects would be of three types - immobile objects, moving objects controlled by an known automated driver, all other moving objects. (It would be nice to have a category "Safe to hit", but there would be one in the foreseeable future, unless it is mandated by law that things get labeled that way)

When a collision is imminent, the car should try to avoid hitting anything. If it cannot, it will have a fail mode, which I bet dollars to donuts will be "Maintain heading and reduce speed". Why? Because that is the safest setting in many situations, because it is what you want everyone else to do, and because it is easy to mandate it by law. Car manufacturers and insurance companies will both want it, and guess what? They are the one who will be able to afford politicians, not the navel gazing ignoramuses like the author of the damn article.

Not quite true.

First of all, your arms mobility is already quite restricted, even by a simple breastplate. Vertical ridges and bulges in the middle of your chest or belly do not additionally hinder your mobility all that much.

Second, all armor is a compromise between protection and mobility, so some loss of mobility is acceptable. Bulges in the right places can deflect blows away from vital areas. Ridges make the armor stronger, and better able to distribute impact. This is the theory, and practice seems to confirm it.

And third, try google. You will see tons of pictures of historical armor, and you will notice that vertical ridges from neck to groin are common in all periods, and that a bulge over the plackart is often seen in late period armor. And before you claim that it's for the wearer's beer gut, remember, the plackart goes over another armor layer, one that does not have the bulge. It is for deflection.

The few comics I read are mostly Humanoid/Vertigo, so I'm not familiar with the original armor... But if it is any less practical than the armor displayed on that screen, it must consist of a funnel channeling all blows to the heart of the wearer.

Lets see.

Openings between the helmet and the shoulder pads, to divert blows to the neck. That gorgeous hair must flow!

Pauldrons coming short of protecting the shoulders. Can't hide too much skin!

Armpits completely exposed. Those curves must be seen!

Boob mounds channeling blows towards the center of the chest. What's the point of having a female character if you're not going to draw boobs?!

The stomach is completely exposed. Even the cloth has a belly window, to make sure that no attacker has any doubts about the entrails being vulnerable.

Frankly, it is sickening that anyone would call this travesty practical... Female armor should looks like male armor, with slightly different proportions, to account for different shoulder/hip/chest ratios. Once the padding is on, most of the differences are smoothed over.

Expensive and late period armor that can afford the added weigh would have a single bulge on the chest - to divert the blows, not two to channel them where they would do the most harm.

This is not the first time the United States does something similar, i.e. has the authorities in country A apprehend someone who is not accused of anything there, expel him from A without notifying the country of origin, and 'somehow' have US officials waiting to arrest the 'expelled' individual on 'international' ground.

US lawyers have consistently explained that this is somehow very different from illegal extradition/kidnapping which is explicitly condemned by the UN. It only looks the same. And I very much doubt the States are the only ones doing it. The Brits and Russians have done the same.

Is it a travesty of justice? Meh, I'm not a lawyer. Is it an example of the strong getting what they want? Hell, yeah!

The only thing that makes this interesting is that the Russians will raise a more stench than usual, because the arrested individual is more than just a 'paysan'.

I am not buying the universal solvent theory, because even accounting for the salts in the water, it would take hundreds of years for most plastics to dissolve.

The bacteria theory is more likely, because I remember reading something about bacteria living in trash dumps, and supposedly breaking down plastic. I do not remember a followup, but it's still more likely than the above. The problem is, this does not necessarily result in harmless components being the end result.

Here's another theory that I consider more likely: algae and barnacles attach themselves to plastic objects, and eventually sink them out of sight. Not as perfectly conductive to happily singing "La-la-la" and dismissing all worries, but hey, if you wish, you can just come up with more comforting theories, like "Magical pink narwhals are spearing the floating plastic, and melting it in underwater volcanoes to build underwater cooling systems to fight global warming".

My salary is below 150K. We're an aftermarket automotive manufacturer, and times have been better.

Last year, I declared 170K from programing projects.

I billed anywhere from $110 to $350 per hour for side projects, and I prefer negotiating for payment upon completion rather than having to give an estimate, and charging per the hour. Many customers prefer it this way, are ready to just pay 5-10K to get something done, and do not really care how long it takes me, as long as I'm done before they need the results This is especially true for companies who are forced to migrate from one application to another, and who do not want to pay a new service provider to transfer old data to the new system, but still want to be able to access it.

It takes a fraction of a weekend to write a program to pull the data from a ADP payroll database, a Kronos timekeeper system, a Business Works Accounts Payable module, a Solomon Ledger, etc... transfer it to MariaDB and throw together a few reports that can answer 99% of the client questions about their past history.

Service providers easily charge 50k+ for stuff like this. Big companies pay without a second thought, but privately owned shops balk. And people in the same industrial parks talk to each other... to the point that I simply do not have the time to take all the lucrative projects that come my way. (Or the inclination, really. Computer vision and game AI is what really gets my attention nowadays.)