Slashdot used to be a safe site to visit, it never made noise when you didn't want it to, making it the go-to site for quiet, in-office news aggregation.

Not anymore. I just had to mute my laptop due to a slashdot auto-playing video advert.

Cuireann mé marc ar an lÃ. CuimhnÃm.

The legal impossibility of a Christian polity in America is formally declared in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The so-called 'free speech' and 'free exercise' clauses of the First Amendment are purely secular mandates. They are a rejection of the Catholic notion of the common good, mandating that there be no restraint whatsoever on things that damage souls and ultimately destroy the State itself. They grant as lawful precisely what many popes have called unlawful: unconditional freedom of thought, of speech, of writing, and of worship -- as if these were so many rights given by nature to man. The language of the First Amendment reflects the Protestant-borne, Enlightenment-bred faith of the deistic Framers in the ability of unaided human reason to define and sustain liberty apart from Trinitarian Truth; that is, without a cooperative effort by the Church and the State. Thus, all manner of violations of natural and divine law, including the "right" to murder children in the womb, and the coming "right" to "marry" someone of the same sex, are found lurking in the secular mandates of the First Amendment. The true Church foresees these errors. Oddly enough, the Secular State itself will not be able to endure its own mandates.

nettin_pure seems to have stopped updating his journal. Sad; it was a constant in a changing Slashdot. It will be missed.

In any case: Happy birthday, nettin_pure. I hope the day has been a very good one. LÃ breithe sona duit!

I was just asked, on a comment, to prove that I was human.

I am logged in to slashdot.

This is a test to see if I can post in my journal without becoming anonymous.

Things that were not explained adequately upon conversion from CW to ICE.

1. Bonuses- it was thought by my management that QPB applied to all blue badge employees including ICE. If I had known I wasn't going to get bonuses, I would have asked for higher base pay.
2. Vacation Time- MUST be taken while still an employee, and unlike what the recruiter who wrote my job offer told me, cannot be used to extend your final week. Any unused vacation time will be lost at end of contract, by policy. In addition, apparently you lose it at the end of the year, I really should have taken WW52 off, then the sting would not be so bad now.
3. ICE as a stepping stone to full employment at Intel is a lie. I couldn't get anybody, despite spending many hours on networking, to give my resume a second look. I even learned a new tool in this contract that is internal and can only be used at Intel and is completely worthless outside of Intel. No matter, I've had many interviews outside of Intel, and will land well, but I'll keep this in mind the next time I am tempted to take a short term contract at Intel.
4. Being a blue badge, if you are ICE, still means you're treated more like a resource than like a human by human resources. Many policies are used to reverse decisions that your manager, who is working more closely with you, has made.
    

Software Project Management At Intel in non-software divisions

1. Brooks Law is almost unheard of at Intel. Hardware Managers think that all software projects can be completed in less than six months, and therefore throw contingent workers at the project. Since software estimates, in general, are 75% engineering and 25% new science, they are wildly inaccurate. When the project inevitably fails to be complete in the first six months, the temptation is to break Brook's Law by adding more contingent workers. The time to ramp up CWs on the project of course exceeds the time to complete the project if you kept software engineers working for more than 18 months at a time.
2. Agile or Waterfall- Pick one and stick to it. This crazy combination used on software projects in hardware divisions is ridiculous, as is the general lack of written requirements.
3. It's hard to hit a moving target- input data integrity must be respected. If you don't have input data integrity, then there will be bugs. Bugs add complexity. Bugs make software estimates inaccurate. Lather, rinse, repeat.

On the new diversity initiative

1. There is no link between surface appearance and how a person thinks, or how capable they are. None at all. While this makes the apparent racism of the past a mistake, this also makes modern affirmative action programs equally racist and invalid.
2. There is no link between religion, sexual orientation, or disability and how a person thinks, or how capable they are. Such factors should not enter into hiring or promotion decisions at all, and when they do, that is what Intel needs to eliminate from the system.
3. There IS a link between certain forms of mental illness and the ability to innovate. Since mental illness affects the brain directly, having somebody with a well controlled mental illness on your team increases diversity of thought, which leads to innovation.
4. I believe that the uncertainty surrounding the diversity initiative was a part of my failure to convert to FTE. Not necessarily outright discrimination against a white male, and due to my autism I fall into one of the protected groups anyway and HR is well aware of that. But I believe the way the diversity initiative was announced, and the weeks of confusion surrounding it before BK finally clarified his position, coming at the same time I was trying to convert to FTE, meant that I had a harder time of trying to get my resume noticed and find open, externally advertised jobs for my skillset.

Final Thought and contact info

While my search to convert to FTE at Intel has failed, my external search has succeeded. I have at least one, maybe two job offers in hand; I will likely be back to work sometime between March 25 to March 30. This posting will be crossposted to Inside Blue before I leave Intel. Comments section below is open.

 

Jeb Bush is the candidate for Republican Primary Voters who want to vote for a less masculine version of Hillary Clinton.

Speaking of Hillary... KFC has a new "Ready For Hillary For Lunch!" promo - you get a box containing two huge thighs, two small breasts, and a left wing. You have to bring your own server though.

Barack Obama completed his NCAA bracket. Joe Biden completed the NIT bracket. In it, he has the Dallas Cowboys beating Manchester United in the Final game.

As many of you know, I'm an avid reader - books, blogs, even the cesspool that is comments on news stories.

One thing that I've seen a lot of lately is the typical canard that "the Spirit of God left the Catholic Church centuries ago".

If that were true, my dear protestant brethren (and I'm not being sarcastic, you guys are dear to me, I just want you to come home to the Catholic Church), then please explain to me how:

The Episcopal Church, The Anglican Church, and now the Presbyterian USA church, along with some Lutheran Churches and some Methodist churches are coming out and blessing same sex "marriage".

This completely flies against Scripture.

It's a little ironic to me that the "Sola Scriptura" crowd is ignoring wholesale chunks of Scripture to be politically correct.

The Great Apostasy has begun.

This is great news! I'm totally serial. No, really, I'm super serial you guys.
I know he needs to keep looking for Manbearpig, but c'mon, he's already tried and failed to illegally overthrow the Government once, why not again? I'm super-duper serial.

EXCELSIOR!

Bill's last set of answers, and my answers to his answers
 
>>1. The only reason to run the gas engine under 25 miles an hour [â Typical residential speed limit] should be for recharging and generating, period. EV mode only at low speed.

>And Toyota may have started out planning on along those lines, but may have gotten focus group research that indicated people preferred a little more acceleration.

Which is weird, because when you put the two electric motors working together, you have MORE acceleration than the gas engine alone. 104 HP vs 70 HP.

>>2. An expert mode should be available wherein "creep ahead at stop" is disabled

>Having switched to owning only manual transmission cars, I only miss that on a metered freeway onramp, that's uphill. I imagine it's added behavior when in electric-only mode, to simulate a slush box, so not sure how it could be universally defeatable. There's no "neutral" on those smug little cars?

There is, it just doesn't auto-engage. The default is creep ahead (and yes, it's electric- it is quite obvious that your gas engine has stopped and it's in stealth mode- which makes it even more dangerous for say, a pedestrian in the cross walk in front of you, no warning roar of the engine as the car speeds up to 8mph slowly).

>>3. Cruise control should also be able to be set by a numeric keypad, and should be able to handle values lower than 23.

>That's an awesome idea, rather than having to bring the car up to the desired speed manually. But I wouldn't be surprised if it's the government disallowing the latter.

It certainly gets them more speeding ticket revenue in 20mph and 15 mph zones. That, and thanks to the "delayed reaction" in the CAN of the prius, I can never seem to hit the correct speed. Always 1mph off, either above or below. And why does slowing down below 23 erase the register, forcing a manual reset, instead of disengaging alone?

>>4. Sport mode should be available that disengages the traction control and enables all three motors for acceleration (you can get the second half of this in a gen2 by angrily stomping on the accelerator, it takes a second to engage, but you suddenly go from 34 HP to 174 HP as the second electric and the gas motor kick in).

>Why would a Prius owner want this?

Ice, sand, and mud. Thanks to the traction control the way it is, and the standard modes, it is impossible to get more than 34hp to the wheels in the first second of travel; and in addition to that, if there is any wheelspin at all, that 34 goes to 0 hp real quick and a little light blinks on to tell you that your transmission is disengaged. A sport mode would enable both drag racing and off road abilities that the prius currently lacks.

>>5. Finer resolution than 5 minutes on the average MPG consumption graph.

>>6. Ability to download trip data onto an SD card.

>Likely never, directly. Companies want your personal info to go to "the cloud" first, so that they can mine it and monetize you further.

I'd even accept an upload to the cloud if I could get fine resolution consumption and the ability to diagnose my driving habits after the fact. The big change in driving a prius isn't so much the technology, it's the feedback given about your fuel consumption, and it occurs to me more feedback is better.

>>7. If gas tank 20% full and battery 20% full, hibernate mode on computer if accidentally left on and wheels are not moving. Right now if you tried to use a Gen2 prius as a backup house generator, you run the risk of bricking the system, unable to boot computer, unable to add more gas, must drag onto a flatbed and tow to Toyota to use their fancy charging system to bring the car back to life.

>I guess you're saying these cars have no under-hood starter battery like ICE vehicles, that's user-swappable with a replacement from any auto parts shop. And I guess neither can these cars be jump-started, simply by using another vehicle (with a battery of equal or greater cold cranking amps). Wow.

More of an in-the-trunk starter battery that is only good for booting the computer system. If you run out of gas *and* the high voltage battery goes totally flat the most you will be able to do is boot the computer, the high voltage battery is needed to spin M1 to be the starter motor (M1 does triple duty- it's a 34 HP electric motor that does the initial acceleration, serves as a generator, and also serves as the starter motor for the gas engine- and it runs off the high voltage battery; M2 is a 70 HP electric engine that can also double as a generator, and then E1 is the gas engine that can send power to the wheels, to M1, to M2, or to all three- quite a complex computerized transmission runs it all). So there would be good reason to provide a hibernate mode that would allow a Prius to be parked for more than three weeks.
I suspect that a plug-in conversion and/or a Gen4 plug in prius is the answer to that last problem- if you're feeding off the grid regularly, there's no need for the gas engine to generate power to begin with.

I don't agree with the hyperbole, but it's the biggest Science Scandal of the last 30 years or so.

Someday, my children will mock the Climate Change Chicken Littles much the same way I mock the "Today is just a space between ice ages" Global Cooling morons of the 1970s.

Even then, the arguments were largely the same.

"Even if we're wrong, it's too big to risk. Shouldn't we do SOMETHING? After all, IT'S FOR THE CHILDREN."

... and the "solution" then is the same as it is now -- more State control of individual lives.

No thanks, count me out.

Jeb Bush

Jeb supports amnesty for illegals, supports Common Core, and will likely raise taxes. Jeb is also a believer in the mythical deity sometimes called "Global Warming" or "Climate Change" (or "manbearpig", junior Al Gorean!).

Nope.

If the GOP is dumb enough to nominate Jeb, they will convince me to finally leave the Republican Party. I suspect they'll convince a number of other Tea Partiers to leave as well.

If Jeb is the nominee, I will vote for either the Constitution Party Candidate or write myself in.

Go ahead and tell me that not voting for the GOP is a vote for the Democrat -- I don't care. If the nominee is Jeb, who could tell the difference anyway?

Ben Carson

Not my first choice, as Mr. Carson has said before that he's not sure anyone needs a semi-automatic rifle in the suburbs. He's since walked that one back, but regaining my trust is something he'll have to do.

If Dr. Carson is the GOP nominee, I would vote for him, but I probably won't vote for him in the Primary.

It might be fun to accuse people who don't support Carson of being racist, but I already know how the left will spin that one -- that Dr. Carson is not a "real" African-American since he's off the liberal plantation.

Chris Christie

No. See Jeb Bush, as Christie is cut from the same amnesty / common core / manbearpig cloth. If it's Christie, I vote 3rd Party.

Ted Cruz

He hasn't announced, though if the Primary were held tomorrow and he was running, he'd (as of right now, but things can change) would get my vote.

Carly Fiorina

I will never vote for a Pro-Infanticide candidate. Abortion is evil, period. If the GOP Nominee is Fiorina, I vote third party.

Mike Huckabee

Forgetting that Huckabee

+ isn't very intelligent
+ raised taxes in Arkansas
+ furloughed a criminal who claimed to "find Jesus" who later killed 4 police officers

No, Actually, I can't forget that. Add Suckabee to the list with Jeb and Fiorina.

Sarah Palin

Realistically, she has no chance as the liberal hate machine has done a lot of damage to her. However, I'd vote for her. I don't, however, believe she's running.

Rand Paul

I wanted to like this guy... but he's inherited some of his father's crazy. I like that he's anti-drone in US skies.. and there's other things I like about him, but his foreign policy is a deal killer for me to support him in the Primary.

However, Rand Paul would get my vote over the Democrat in a General Election.

Rick Perry

The only knocks I have against Perry are that he supported in-state tuition for illegals and had 12 years to secure the border and didn't. He's soft on amnesty for illegals.

Yes, he's currently indicted, but that's a complete joke and he'll be found not guilty. The Governor has the (state) constitutional right to threaten a veto. The liberal hate machine will use this to try and torpedo him, but considering he's selling T-Shirts with his mugshot on them, using it as a way to promote the fact that the unhinged left (though is there really any other kind of lefty?) hates him, so I don't think it'll sink his bid.

Perry's my #2 choice behind Cruz right now, and realistically he'd be my first choice since I don't think Cruz is running for President, and I think Perry is.

Too bad it's not Greg Abbott, the current TX Gov. Abbott is terrific.

Marco Rubio

Marco claims to be against illegal immigration, but then casts votes for amnesty. Get lost, Rubio.

However, since he doesn't (to my knowledge) support the abomination that is Common Core, Rubio's nomination would not cause the GOP to lose my vote.

Rick Santorum

Santorum is as big of a nanny-state supporter as Michael Bloomberg. Go away, Rick.

Still, if Santorum is the nod, I don't hate him enough to vote third party.

Scott Walker

Scott Walker is soft on amnesty, and has been dialing back his opposition to Common Core. Find a spine, Walker. Walker at this point would be my number 3 choice, if he's the nominee, I could live with it. I'd rather have Cruz or Perry.

What the Popes really say about socialism.

Well, my employer decided to let me go , so after all these years of paying into the system, I figured the system owes me a little something back now. So I went in and put in all my information into healthcare.gov. Turns out I am not eligible for assistance, and the premiums are going to comprise 47% of the income from my wife's job. According to the information I read, assistance is only available for those that make between 100% and 400% of the poverty level, and we make less than 100% of the poverty level, so we are not eligible for assistance, nor are we eligible for tax credits.

Interestingly enough, we previously made between 100% and 400% of the poverty level, but we also were not eligible for assistance or tax credits back then either.

I can only conclude that nobody is eligible and all of the extra money that is being taken by various avenues to pay for Obamacare is being stolen by someone or many someones rather than being doled back out to those in need.

My wife is looking for a Wifi network security camera for the daycare. Ideally, we want one that we can set up an account on a remote server with a username and password that we share with parents.

Anybody have any suggestions?