Exactly. Maybe they don't see the bigger picture? Maybe we don't properly motivate with these examples?

If engineers fail at their job, people die. Chemical plants explode, medical devices fail, airplanes crash and burn. How much more impact on society can you have?

I think the problem is the job is too far removed from the feels. You don't have personal direct impact.

And sometimes the conditions are not conducive to family life. I have students starting with a four year degree making over $100k. But they spend lots of time in the gulf on oil rigs. Sometimes people make different life choices.

I know it will never work, but open-standards for stuff is what we really should shoot for.

Email and web were successful because anyone could run servers on the protocol.

Chat was starting to move that way, but nobody seems to use chat anymore. Text or FB message or instagram or twitter.

Social media is all privately controlled and that is bad for us all.

Reader. They had the best RSS reader. It even had decent social functions if you were into it. And they killed it.

I have too much stuff in google docs, but I realize I need to move away from them and never trust the cloud with mission critical anything.

I had a student talk with me about Adderall abuse on campus.

He said it worked great, he could study all night but retention long-term was limited.

He also said he stopped taking Adderall off-script because it made him suicidal.

Whatever happened to coffee?

4,300 over eight years in a city the size of Baltimore is not that big a number. 1-2 a day in a city of 600,000 (metro of 2.7 million) may actually be on the low side of what you would expect.

But hey, math class is tough. OUTRAGE!

I would assume the "church" is still doing good charity works of some sort, even if the optics are bad.

And the "toys" can somewhat be justified. Everyone needs to get around, so a preacher needs a car. A preacher in a giant church has more resources (and obligations) to get around, so maybe a big car (and a driver?) could be justified if they are actually going around ministering.

And a jet seems crazy, but these groups become large national (multinational?) organizations that have members and locations and ministries all over the country. Again, if they have resources, why not let them have a jet if they are doing good works? Now if they only use it to jet to the Bahamas every weekend...

As in many things, the real answer is "it depends."

You are correct that a H-1B cannot get a SCI clearance, however the company can get around this in two ways, namely by getting them an LAA (Limited Access Authorization - which is a sort of provisional clearance for foreign nationals that can do anything below Secret level clearance) or they can get a DSP-5 license, which is a waiver for "exporting" classified information. In this case, the export is to the H-1B group working in their company.

Finally, the more common way is to use H-1Bs as code monkeys to work on every non-classified sub-system, or to generate databases, algorithms, and networks for processing non-classified data in the same format as the classified data will be using down the road. This lets them do all the coding without ever exposing them to anything that requires a clearance.

I live in an IT community stacked with defense contractors who know every trick in the book to get around limitations. Especially the kind that lets them line their pockets with more of that sweet, sweet government contract money.

H-1B visas only have to be paid the local market average, not the company average. So you can have high-paid employees and still pay the H-1Bs squat. I worked for 10 years in contract work and that's exactly what all the contract companies were doing. They'd hire in H-1Bs at *exactly* the local salary for the city as reported in the prior year's Fortune or Forbes magazines.

When they were in place, they would never get raises or reviews, and if they complained, they'd pull the visa and have them on a plane home that afternoon. I even had the joy of seeing an H-1B (in the cube next to me) brought in at $54K, but on his first paycheck he got $45K equivalent salary. When he called the company HR department, they responded with, "We are not responsible for typographical errors on your offer letter." When he got angry, she said, "If you don't wish to continue at the rate, I can issue your plane ticket and have security take you to the airport." So he sat and took an illegal $9,000 pay cut because he didn't really have an option.

H-1Bs are used as indentured servants, especially by contracting companies who turn around and bill them out at $50-$60 an hour to other companies. They're pure profit centers.

Oh, and when that company hit hard times, they very illegally cut every non H-1B worker from the contractor payroll.

I've been at three contracting companies that used that identical technique. They hire some citizens to establish a pool so they do lip service to the law about hiring local, then they bring in a gob of H-1Bs at half the price, then they dump all the locals. They end up with pure H-1B work forces, and depress the local economy. I've even seen defense contractors turn away TSI Clearance people in favor of H-1B visas at a discount, because they'd rather pay the $5K for the clearance and $50K for the H-1B than hire a qualified citizen who might earn $80K.

See, that's how it depresses the salaries in the whole market. If I can get headcount "A" at $55K, I'm not going to pay $60K for headcount "B". Most management feel that every STEM person is functionally equivalent. Then they wonder why so many projects fail.

I worked with three H-1B visa "programmers" who had "degrees" from a university in India that doesn't exist. Who in America is going to check that the university has a history or background? These guys laughed about how their "university" was just a guy who ran a business back in New Delhi where you paid the equivalent of about $20 and he paid a bunch of women to pose as university registrars that would answer the phone and confirm your "degree".

One of them hadn't even finished high school, much less college.

Yes, all these stories are anecdotal, and while I could give you the names and places of most of these guys (the ones I remember, anyway) the point I'm trying to make is that the system is being abused from both sides. It's broken, and it needs to be fixed. Tell me, would CEO's be so in favor of it if we had H-1B visas for CEOs?

What do you mean by SMS clients? Do you mean SMS integration?

I have email and chat. Why would I want SMS to get crippled messages or limit myself to a phone platform?

Google Hangouts does chat and video chat and snapchat image type stuff.

It is multiplatform, unlike Factime or SMS messaging. Not sure if Whatsapp has a PC/Mac client.

I have had messaged delayed for some unknown reason on occasion. But overall, it is very solid.

No, a "troll" is someone who persists in a contrary position, no matter if they are proven wrong. If they cannot defend their position, they simply move to a new position while claiming they were "not answered" or that "wasn't the question they asked." Trolls will also claim that a response was given that was never made. You have engaged in all this behavior.

My first posting said quite clearly that the explosions at Fukushima were not inside the reactor but inside the building that housed it. I cannot make it simpler than that. Your willful ignorance as to the difference between those two is stunning.

When you raged that there was no difference, I tried a simple analogy, which you then criticized as not the same thing. This is the "not answered" claim.

I then proceeded to give another example, more simple than the analogy, namely "The explosion spread zero material." You then claimed this was impossible, and that I was now claiming the explosion was in the reactor. There was no possible way to read the answer that way, but that's the way you read it. This fulfills the "response given that was not made" troll logic.

Finally, I laid out, with scientific documents backing me, the difference between a pressure explosion from burning hydrogen and a true detonation explosive, and showed why the reactor vessel would have suffered no damage from the low overpressure at Fukushima.

In response, you claimed I was saying Fukushima was a "perfectly run site" and I was "endorsing nuclear power." This perfectly fulfills the "Not what I asked" and the "response not given" troll meme.

You have called me such wonderful names as "Coder Boy", "idiot", and "fucking stupid." You might note that, other than the now proven "troll" moniker, I did not use any such epithets towards you, even when you created a false dichotomy of "Saying it was perfect is either being an idiot or pretending to be one in the hope of tricking others..."

At this point, since you were the one who added the word "perfect" to the conversation, I'd almost agree with that statement, since I made no such claim. I merely said that the main cause of the Fukushima Daishi disaster was a lack of accessible backup generators.

It's interesting to note that the Fukushima Daini plant, a mere 11 miles away which had waterproofed generators survived the earthquake and tsunami without major incident because it was able to maintain cooling through the disaster, even though it was hit by the same earthquake and same 14.5m tidal wave. It uses the same BWR4 reactor cores as the Fukushima Daishi plant. Both plants SCRAMmed their reactors moments after the start of the earthquake, but F. Daishi lost all of its diesel generation capacity in the tidal wave. F. Daini did not. That was the critical difference.

So, as I said in the other message. I only pursued this chain to see just how far down this rabbit hole you'd go. I see now that there's no bottom. I'm sure you will reply to this so you can have the "Last Word" in the conversation. Enjoy it, because at this point you are Macbeth's, "poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage". Tell us your final tale.

Five times I explained to you that the hydrogen did no explosion damage to the reactor. I have restated over an over as to why this is the case. I have corrected your misinformation repeatedly about the nature of what happened.

In return you have claimed that I said things that I did not say. You have mis-read or simply ignored information I've presented, including links to supporting data. You have created arguments out of whole cloth and resorted, even in your first message to ad-hominem attacks.

I've kept this up only because I wanted to see how far you would go trying to defend your invalid position. I am, frankly, amazed at the depths you have plumbed.

I've looked at your history and found claims that you are everything from a material engineer to a rocket scientist at SpaceX. Every one of your messages follows the same form of ad-hominem and shaky science. You attack science in dozens of threads and are almost always wrong, or simply throwing "verbal hand-grenades" into conversations.

Everyone who has bothered to follow this thread this far is quite clear about what happened. You are stubbornly denying it. And then calling me childish. If I've acted in any way childish, it was only because I was trying to talk down to your level of understanding. Yet even that has failed. That leaves only willful ignorance as your modus operandi. In that case, further discussion is pointless.

Searching grandparent message chain for denial of subsequent meltdown and leakage of radiation through coolant leaks... Not Found.

Searching grandparent message for word "perfect".... Not Found.

Searching grandparent message chain for endorsement of nuclear power.... Not Found.

Searching grandparent message for endorsement of Fukushima Daishi as a model-run site.... Not Found.

Searching grandparent message for argument against the "explosion" at Fukushima Daishi 1, 3, and 4 being a core-related explosion releasing radioactive material to the environment... Cohesive argument found - the reactor was not involved in the explosive gas release at Fukushima Daishi site.

Searching parent message for straw-man arguments, off-topic commentary, misinformation, changing claims, claim that issues were not addressed, false dichotomies, and misquotes... FOUND FOUND FOUND FOUND FOUND FOUND FOUND.

Troll factor of dbIII... 99.97%

Thanks to this page I can tell you your friend was in at most a 2.4 PSI overpressure situation, which is more than adequate to break bricks (2-3 PSI), without causing eardrum rupture ( > 2.4PSI). So there's your "Hydrogen Explosion" overpressure.

RDX, which is a real explosive, detonates at 25 times the speed of sound, or about 8500 m/s. It devolves about 900 liters of gas per kilogram during detonation, creating overpressures close to the detonation center that can exceed 3000PSI, which will reduce concrete to dust and melt metal to slag through compression heating.

This versus the H2 + 2O2 --> 2H2O reaction where three liters of gas at STP become 2 liters of gas, which expand to about 200 liters because of heating to 2800C (100:1 expansion). The flame speed of hydrogen/oxygen is about 50 m/s maximum. The expansion of the gas pressures the container until something breaks (a few bricks in the wall, some windows, or in the case of Fukushima Daishi, the failure of some corrugated metal siding and roofing materials.) Then the pressure escapes into the environment, and no further damage is done.

This is the difference between something burning, like a HydrOx reaction, and something exploding. This is what you can't seem to grasp here. There was an "explosion" in the colloquial sense that a surrounding building was rapidly disassembled. But in the pure physics sense, there was a contained burn that ruptured its container. The H/O reaction may seem fast in our everyday experience, but in the realm of explosives and explosions, it's moving at a snail's pace.

The BWR3/4 reactors were designed for operation in excess of 1000PSI operating pressures - in fact, the primary coolant loop in the U.S. PWRs typically runs at 2250PSI. Meaning that your "EXPLOSIONS" (caps doesn't make it true) wouldn't have had the slightest effect on the reactor or the coolant loops.

Additionally, the corrugated steel outer walls would have failed at a 2 PSI overpressure, which they did. Again, because this is a burn (deflagration) and not an explosion (detonation) there would be no point in the process where the reactor would have been exposed to a higher pressure than 2-3PSI in the containment building.

Much like putting a garbage bag filled with hydrogen/oxygen on a bank vault inside a glass building, you blew out all the windows, but you're no closer to the money.

So, again, there might be someone out of their depth in their conversation, but it's not me.

To mis-read what I wrote to that point shows your ignorance. Your "friend" was inside the hydrogen explosion and escaped unharmed. The reactor was inside the hydrogen explosion and escaped unharmed. Everyone else who reads this understands it. Your willful mis-reading to try to make your story stand up crosses into the pathetic.

The only "fuckup" at Fukushima, other than the lack of backup emergency generators for cooling, was having a 9.0 earthquake strike a reactor designed to survive an 8.0 earthquake. The fact it survived as well as it did shows not a failure of engineering, but a survival of 10 times the destructive energy it was designed to withstand.

A "materials engineer" should realize that.

I say again, "Troll".