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Comment Re:Why is this news? (Score 1) 443

dead red laws

I see Virginia is listed. I wish there had been such a thing back in the 80s. I sat for what seemed like 5 minutes on rt. 50, waiting for a left turn arrow. It was mid-day so there was very little traffic (it's a parking lot during rush). I had at least 1/4 mile line of sight, maybe more. I honestly thought the signal was broken, and that's what I told the cop who was either behind me or camped under a tree where I didn't see him. There was no arguing on the spot, and it's the only time I ever went to traffic court, where the excuse didn't fly either. But hey, at least the 70 year old half-blind lady who caused an accident got to keep their license. I learned a lot of lessons that day.

To this day, I also wonder if that cop was dicking with the signals to make his quota.

Comment Re:Schedule some days as offset days (Score 1) 265

Actually that 80 hour a week guy will quit without notice really fucking the company.

Hell I took my vacation time left and called in sick for the last days I had in my sick bank while I worked at my new job.. the day I was supposed to be back at my old job I walked in at 8 am dropped my badge and keys on my bosses desk and said, "I quit, hope you can hire the 3 guys you will need to replace me quickly." I had informed HR that I was quitting in writing that morning at 7am when they got there.

It screwed them over hard, really hard. I got a call from the VP begging for me to come back with a 30% pay increase 2 hours after I walked out the door. I said he doesn't have enough money in the world for me to work there anymore, I wished them luck replacing me.

Funny thing, 6 months later the 2008 crash happened and they closed up for good.

Comment Re:Puppet. (Score 2) 265

Just having a proper IT infrastructure works even better.

Patch and reboot secondary server at 11am. everything checks out, put it online and promote it to primary. All done. Now migrate the changes to the backup, Pack up the laptop and head home at 5pm... not a problem. Our SQL setup has 3 servers we upgrade one and promote it, the upgrade #2 #3 stays at the previous revisions until 5 days have passed so we have a rollback. Yes data is synced across all three, worst case if TWO servers were to explode, we will lose 15 minutes of data entry.

I NEVER do late at night or weekend maintenance anymore. Servers are dirt fricking cheap to not have redundants always running and ready to drop in.

Comment Re:Buy Surge Protectors (Score 4, Interesting) 78

99% of the surge suppressors you can buy at stores are useless crap that simply use a $0.29 MOV to shunt a voltage spike. they will do NOTHING to stop most real problems that come in on data lines and NOT power. Those things are designed to stop surges from your vacuum cleaner, your furnace and AC, and the industrial building down the street.

We have customers whine every thunderstorm asking why did their $9.95 surge suppressor not stop lightning damage... It cant, in fact you can not buy anything on this planet that can stop a close or direct lightning hit.

I have seen lightning blow up electronics that were unplugged and sitting in the cardboard box. getting a hard strike 8 feet from the south wall where all the gear was going to be installed. Every single device was fried when we opened the boxes and hooked it up.

Comment Industry being destroyed! (Score 1) 78

"they calculate that the economic impact of geomagnetic damage must amount to several billion dollars per year."

We can not tolerate this economic disaster hitting the very low profit insurance industry! WE shoud act and demand congress solve this issue by blowing up the SUN to eliminate these solar geomagnetic storms.

Comment Re:Wish I could say I was surprised (Score 2) 178

In the UK, university research departments are assessed base on the Research Excellence Framework (REF, formerly the Research Assessment Exercise [RAE]). Each faculty member is required to submit 4 things demonstrating impact. These are typically top-tier conference or journal papers, but can also be artefacts or examples of successful technology transfer. The exercise happens every four years, so to get the top ranking you need to write one good paper a year. The only incentive for publishing in second-tier venues is meeting other people who might lead to interesting collaborations.

Comment Re:Wish I could say I was surprised (Score 1) 178

Reproducing work is often a good thing to set for first-year PhD students to do. If they reproduce something successfully, then they've learned about the state of the art and are in a good position to start original research. If they can't reproduce it, then they've got a paper for one of the debunking workshops that are increasingly attached to major conferences and that's their first publication done...

Comment Business search sadly broken (Score 1) 132

Business search is sadly broken in many ways. Whenever I google for a service that I actually need, there are dozens upon dozens of sites at the top of the results. No doubt they're all SEO'd there. When you follow the links, what do you get? A boiler-plate script along the lines of $foo is an experienced contractor in $bar who serves the $locality area. In fact, he does nothing of the sort if he even exists.

The surveillatizing industry does a fantastic job of tracking us and shoving shit-ads at us for stuff we don't want.

And yet, when I'm searching for a service that I ACTUALLY WANT TO PAY FOR, I have to deal with all this dreck.

I figure it must be click-bait, since I've clicked on it because it's misleading. I have a couple ad-blocking methods running concurrently, so I almost never see 3rd party ads there; but I can't imagine what other motive there would be to provide absolutely useless boilerplate like that.

BTW, I guess you could extend this out even further to say that many things other than searching for a business are broken by click-baiters.

Take any question, really. "Who won the 1950 World Series". And although I haven't tested this yet, I'm willing to wager somebody has a site out there that will tell you something like, "The 1950 World Series is available on eBay. Click here to learn more about 1950 World Series products, etc..."

The AI that does this shit is usually pretty smart, but sometimes you get gems like, "The best cleaning products for your World Series".

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