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.

Top Gear is in ruins as the Beeb has suspended Jeremy Clarkson #FreeJeremyClarkson

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.

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?

I was doing some research for a project and happened back here. Hello slashdot.

Find me on Twitter, or put dot com after my user name.

One of the funny (tragic?) things is that my son and I traveled to Paris and bought tons of bandes desinnees including ones by some of the cartoonists that were murdered by terrorists today.

I stand with them.

Your right to claim blasphemy ends when you set foot outside the mosque.

I never steal media, and I don't like to download media either. I want to own my content, including the shiny disc that it came on. I don't want my software phoning home someday and due to some issue, like the company going belly-up, I suddenly can't play my game that I fully paid for.

But I saw a deal on Steam that seemed too good to pass up. There was a Tropico 4 Collectors Bundle with about 12 different downloads, all for $9.99. I already have Tropico 4, bought and paid for at my local Best Buy. And I have played through all the scenarios, so the downloadable content would be a nice change of pace. This seemed a reasonable price for 12 packages, so I went through the hassle of creating a steam account, verifying my identity, typing in all my payment information, telling them not to save it, and then, here comes the final payment page. $39.99. Excuse me? You lure people in by saying it costs, $9.99, and then on the final page, you say $39.99, with a little asterisk saying (some items have changed price since place in your cart)? Well, that seems unconscionably underhanded and slimy.

When I go back to the main page, it now shows $39.99 for the bundle. How do they do this, I wonder? Do they record it by IP address and present the lower price to people who have not looked at it before? Or do they just offer it for the lower price and as soon as someone tries to buy it, they up the price for everybody? It seems to come up as $39.99 for all my devices now, but they are all on the same cable modem, so they may appear to the outside to be coming from the same address.

Well, I have learned my lesson. Never trust a downloadable software company. Always buy a physical disc installation media.

So, while I can't admit what I may or may not have done in detail myself, one of the most interesting things at Christmas was finding out my dad was indeed part of the precursor to the NSA, confirming what my mom had thought.

Life is fun.

Well, after spending thousands of dollars worth of my time last year in getting healthcare setup for my family, I was notified that my premium, which had gone up by 50% last year when I signed up for ObamaCare, has gone up by 50% again.
So I tried to login using my password from last year, but it wouldn't take it. Apparently they think it is a good idea to expire passwords every 90 days for a site that people will use once a year.
So I had them send me a link to create a new password. Well, I still can't get in. It says I didn't answer the security questions correctly that I set up when I started the account. Well, that would be because I didn't set up any security questions when I started the account, so naturally I woulnd't know the answers. Also, one of the questions is "name a significant date in your life?" Well, it won't take dates as input.
So off to another year of spending thousands of dollars worth of my time just to get into this site, where they will probably show me that my current option which is now three times what I paid 14 months ago, is probably the lowest cost option now. Strangely my salary has not risen by a factor of three to keep up with the increase of Obamacare premiums. Why can't we go back to the cheap coverage that I had before Obama started this fundraiser for the insurance companies?

It's a pretty standard trope, but one that libertarians do not seem to believe can possibly exist. And it is a blind spot in economic justice in the United States of America.
 
 

The Lion and his Fellow Hunters, By Aesop
Once, a lion, a fox, a jackal, and a wolf went hunting. They caught a stag and killed it, and quartered the meat. "This quarter," said the lion, "is for me, as I am the King of Beasts. And this quarter is mine as the arbiter of the spoils. The third quarter is mine because of my part in chasing down the stag. And as for the fourth â" well, I'd like to see any of you dare to put so much as a paw on it." The other three animals were bitterly disappointed, but they slunk away, unwilling or unable to fight for their share of the meat.

Just because you help a lion doesn't mean he'll share.

 
So remember boys and girls, just because you help a rich man to run his business, does not mean he'll share the profits with you. Which leads us right back to an entirely Different Leo and his successors.

Anyone still lurking around this place? I see several people are still active here.... quite a huge pile of names I have not seen in a long long time.

It seems to be begging the question to demand acceptance of the prerequisites of the requirement to agree not to disagree. These prerequisites form a model of what it means to be rational. I'm not sure if they are the best possible model, or even if they work. This includes the hypothesis that a system is only efficient if and only if it has a model of itself, and the semenatic, syntactic forms, and (trustable) media that are acceptable to each of us. So, in short - it is reasonable to expect come to agreement with rational agents except about rationality itself. There it isn't necessarily a question of whether you agree or not, but a matter of how rationality can even work. A matter of tweaking the model to allow greater truths to be perceived between multiple agents. So, the #1 way to get out of any disagreement is to look at this model, or the idea of a model in general.

this guy is clearly NOT a mathematician, but if he was:
 
You have 4 wives on earth. Each one of those wives has 70 black eyed virgins for you in paradise. Each one of those black eyed virgins has 70 servant girls. That is 19,884 women for you to have sex with in paradise.
 
But it gets worse. Each one of those women has been given YOU by Allah for a term of 70 years. That means you will be having sex, nonstop, from the time you die for the first 1,391,880 years you are in paradise. You're going to need eternity from then on just to rest up from that.

Look, I have an iPhone 5. I've owned iMacs, Mac SE, and my first software I paid for was for the Apple II+.

But I'm not that impressed today.

A watch? Why? Who wears those things? Just look at your phone.

Pay by phone? That was around in the 1980s in Japan and South Korea.

Seriously, what's next, Apple VCRs and Shoulderpads?