As an aside: the default payment level for AutoMan is US minimum wage, and there is no built-in provision for differentiating wages based on the country of the worker.

Relevant - a related but different approach: AutoMan, a language for programming with people: http://www.automan-lang.org/

AutoMan is a platform for integrating human-based and digital computation. It allows programmers to "program with people", which appear to the programmer to be ordinary function calls. AutoMan automatically handles details like quality control, payment, and task scheduling. It is currently implemented as a domain-specific language embedded in Scala (a language that runs on any machine with a Java Virtual Machine), and uses Amazon's Mechanical Turk as a backend.

Technical paper at http://www.cs.umass.edu/~emery/pubs/AutoMan-UMass-CS-TR-2012-013.pdf, to appear at OOPSLA 2012.

(Disclaimer: I am one of the authors.)

...exhume his skull, embed gems into it, and put it on a table. That would really screw with those in the know.

/yes I know the Tomb of Horrors jokes are getting old.

..was the operation runner named "Peggy"?

..isn't this how executives expect to be treated, even though they're not the necessarily smartest ones in the company?

So what's their excuse? Special treatment occurs in the workplace all the time.

...is this a fancy way of saying a transactional system? Just say it then!

Nice to see that the paper author reads Slashdot :)

Are these two options mutually exclusive?

You don't think when Columbus came to America he was afraid for his life? That most of the actions of the consequent European conquerers came from fear? That the safest course of action was the conquest, and oppression of an entire continent of people? The burning of the Mayan Codecs. The dividing and conquering of the Aztec, and Incan empires. Religious conversions. Enslavement. Genocide. And, where applicable, the conscious spreading of disease among Native Americans.

So you were using Bitlocker instead of EFS then, right?

You already carry five of the six devices you'd need: five bank cards. The sixth device is a card reader.

Neither of the banks I use require me to use the card reader to log in, but both require it to actually do anything important (send money, etc).

I have two card readers (both banks sent me one) so I keep one at home and one at work.

The thing is, a lot of us don't care that much about Open Source. Sure, there's a lot of fondness for the little guy, but personally I find it hard to get my knickers in a twist when someone violates the GPL. The source code that they based their changes on is still available. If the violators didn't use GPLed code in the first place we'd not be in a better position.

There's a bunch of fallacies in that:

1) You don't need exotic types of propulsion. You just need a lot of time. We're likely a matter of a half dozen decades from molecular manufacturing, and substantially increasing lifespan. The two together are all that's needed for *us* to colonize the galaxy. (And if you doubt that, think of a list of problems with it, and then ask yourself what a mastery of genetics and molecular engineering would do for all of those problems.)

2) Ask yourself what reason we'd have, in that scenario, to need weapons any more potent than what we've got now. You assume the aliens would.

3) We rarely spot fairly large mile-plus asteroids before they actually pass us. What makes you think we could spot even MASSIVE spacecraft with any warning?

 

Sorry, but in what weird society is a credit card an ideal over actually non-customer-raping alternatives?
Credit cards are by their very design made to fuck you over. There is no such thing as a credit card that doesn’t.
If you do digital payment, do it right. If you do money, do it right.
Hell, half the reason the US economy is so bad for people, is the money system behind it. For which credit cards — the concept of giving you imaginary money and taking back more than there is actual money, to get free work from you without you noticing ” are an essential part.

Credit cards? No thanks. I won’t ever in my life take a credit. And if I can, I’ll avoid imaginary money (e.g. €) altogether.

I didn't see any mention of them taking any samples for culture to identify any potential bacterial infection. Of course, there are some bugs that are more prevalent down there than others, but with all the antibiotics they are throwing at you, I would hope that at some time they would have gone for more than just a textbook course.

And this probably already occurred to you, but I'll say it anyways. Going back to a previous antibiotic course isn't necessarily a bad thing. If you go first with drug A, then drug B, you could actually find that drug B makes a more permissive environment for the bug that was previously hindered by drug A. Hence you need to go back to drug A to finish off the first bug. And of course you probably know that drug-drug interactions can be enormously bad, so they probably needed to give you drugs A and B separately.

At any rate, I hope someone is doing the proper microbacterial work on you as you go through this. Otherwise they may be only making better bugs (in your nuts no less) and flushing money (and time) down the toilet.

Wrong. SP2 still needs SATA drivers. Some of the OEM discs don't - Dell, for example, has integrated Intel SATA drivers with at least their SP3 discs.