yes I realize that face to face communication is preferable to you, however your revisionist history makes it difficult to do my job,

StrangeCaptain · 2012-05-24T21:15:43.309242+00:00

We have that policy in my shop. It gets ignored because the people who should be submitting the tickets are too fucking stupid to figure out how to formulate a request intelligibly. I wish I were exaggerating.

Just today I spent 25 minutes going back and forth with a guy for the following information:

The location of the files to be delivered onto the recipients (Share and path)
the names of the recipient servers.
where the files should go.

He never did manage to correctly convey this information, and I'm aware of this. But I gave him only what he asked for... in writing. Was this a dick move? Yes. But some people refuse to learn any other way -- so my whole department is now on "We give you only what you ask for" policy. You ask for a directory to have the execute bit revoked? Done. (And don't come bitching when suddenly all your scripts and shell sessions break. You were warned and went over my head rather than listen to the guy who is paid to know this stuff. You earned this.)

StrangeCaptain · 2012-05-24T21:08:42.118170+00:00

I live in a single-party consent state.

StrangeCaptain · 2012-05-24T18:39:39.753528+00:00

Forward through Google Voice. Record all calls. Get voice-to-text transcriptions. I'm doing this.

radioplayhouse · 2012-05-24T18:37:14.504631+00:00

You... I like you. Can we be friends?

Kikiritzz · 2012-05-24T13:54:02.780698+00:00

Guy: Hey honey!! Wanna do a rape scene?

Girl: NO!!

Guy: That's the spirit!!

anislitim · 2012-05-24T02:40:42.660957+00:00

All we wanna do is...

Killmehardkissmelong · 2012-05-23T18:18:57.114436-07:00

Species 'A' does not, in the span of one generation, become species 'B'. That is just not how speciation occurs. Thanks :)

Speciation events are more about the isolation of one population from its parent population through some means than they are about the manifestation of new characteristics within a population.

Mutations over time accrue additional characteristics within a species until some major event occurs which separates your subpopulations which contain non-homogenous mixtures of the genes that species contains. These separated subpopulations then have a different local average of their sets of genes, and will therefore have different characteristics from one another.

So you never get a "first" chicken; you get a family of critters that intermingles with chickens until one day something happens that causes the chickens to stop hanging out with the rest of the family.

DrJulianBashir · 1 day

You're missing the point. They have to document what they did to get their info to demonstrate it was a legal thing to do.

DrJulianBashir · 1 day

If they broke someone's legs to get the password it would not be admissible. The source of information matters. Now, nothing is stopping them from lying and saying "we guessed right."

DrJulianBashir · 1 day

I wish things were still a thing.

amstarcasanova · 2 days

Private companies do what their owners want. Including go into bankruptcy if needed. Maybe if you shut up and paid attention to the clues dropped on your head you wouldn't be in "Hi, I'm a dumbass! Mommy dresses me!" territory right now.

amstarcasanova · 2 days

Jeffrey likes turtles.

(This is now a non-sequitur thread right? You know, where we respond with wholly irrelevant crap for no justifiable reason?)

amstarcasanova · 2 days

Actually the making money part is just to make getting to Mars feasible. Check out SpaceX's owner's (Elon Musk)'s retirement plans.

amstarcasanova · 2 days

They just will never be able to afford the research that NASA does

That's true and untrue. Their research targets are different. NASA wants reproducible as possible to ridiculously stringent specifications and documentation as per government standards. SpaceX et al want cheapest possible given safety minimums. These are different goals and it shows in costs.

Moreover; NASA has been standing in the way of lunar industrialization for several decades. The mineral and energy wealth available on our nearest celestial neighbor is literally sufficient to make multi-millionnaires of every last human being on the planet. This is serious business. And our government has been impeding it since the nuclear anti-proliferation treaty in the late 50's.

Mind_Virus · 2 days

Within 100 miles of any international access point. Including international airports. Not just the border.

chaneen · 2 days

My roommate has two dogs. I have three cats. One of the dogs is (probably) a pure pit. Street rescure. Sweetest animal in the world; just a total affection-sponge. Except for one tiny little issue; and was clearly abused in his previous life. Very under-socialized. Still doesn't know how to handle the cats -- but initially he had pretty strong cat aggression.

Until one day my 'main' cat decided she was going to change all that. (Her name, by the way, is "Amai" -- which is the Japanese word for 'gentle' or 'sweet natured'.) I came home from work and discovered the dog doing the death throw shaking of the head, with a blanket. Then I noticed that one of the folds of the blanket was calico-colored... and I started flipping out, screaming murder at the dog, thinking he was killing the cat. I see his face is covered in blood, and then as I'm yelling the cat goes carooming off to hide under an oversized chair. Ignoring the dog, I go to check on the cat.

She's perfeclty fine. With one exception; she's missing one of her back paws' claws.

Finally it begins to dawn on me -- "Where did all that blood come from?" I go back to look at the dog... and his entire face was just covered in gouge after gouge. He wasn't 'death shaking' -- he was trying for dear life to get this ten-pound ball of ZOMGMAKEITSTOPHURTING off of his face.

My calico cat, lil' miss sweetness herself, beat the everliving shit out of my 70lb pit-bull. Who had cat-aggression. HAD. She now lords it over him constantly; my roommate lets the dogs sleep with her on her bed. Amai will jump up on the bed just to steal the pit's spot on the bed. (I'm not kidding; I've watched this happen. She bullies the poor dog.)

Your St. Bernard got off easy, yo.

nomdeweb · 3 days

2. No, which is why we make new algae.

|sigh| -- you're not getting it. There's biochemical reasons why they don't. You can't just wave that away with "and then magic happens".

3. I'm aware, and that's good. My original plan was submersible plastic greenhouse things floating in the ocean with ballast.

... that is just... insane.

4. Not really, we're just using the surface.

"And then magic happens".

7. Energy? It's net energy positive [...]

No, it's not. This is insane.

[...] "I'm just colonizing fixed areas of ocean surface with semi-permeable membranes.

Okay, here's the deal. You clearly are having problems of scale. Let me put this into perspective for you.

In 2010, the human race's fossil fuel consumption caused the offgasing of approximately 9 Billion tons of CO^2. Let's be generous and say that a single gallon of water's worth of algae could -- universally -- sequester a full pound's worth of CO^2. (This is an insanely high amount of sequestration which is unrealistic of any strain currently existing. In other words; I'm allowing for genegineered superbugs.) That would require 18 trillion gallons of water. Algae are only effective at growing for about 1 inch's depth to any optimal standard, so that means 213 square inches (213 cubic inches per gallon to 1 inch's depth == 213 square inches) per gallon.

That's 18,000,000,000,000 gallons * 213 inches == 3,834,000,000,000,000 square inches. There are 4,014,489,600 square inches per square mile. That's 955,040 square miles. NOT taking into account equipment overhead nor accessways for maintenance of your algacultures, etc., etc., etc..

We're talking over 120 gulfs-of-mexico (~8,000 square miles). Just to balance what we were using in 2010.

There are, simply put, better ways. I mean, consider the devastation to the world's biomass should we attempt to implement such a strategy.

Any moron can say an idea is stupid, do you have a better one? That is the only real measure of a mind.

Incorrect. If a proferred solution would do more damage than good, doing nothing is preferable to it. Your solution would do more damage than good; my 'better alternative' thusly is simply nothing at all.

nomdeweb · 3 days

1) Water evaporates, requiring replenishment.

2) The industrially-useful algae don't thrive in salt-water.

3) Synthetic organisms are adaptively unfit compared to feral/fallow strains. This requires isolation, treatment, purification, etc, etc, etc. This is in turn wasteful of water. (Brack/grey gets dumped. Pure gets kept.)

4) These would all require solutions to the problem of algal density in water depth.

5) You also need means of handling the precipates. While, yes, you can reclaim much of this water, it would have to be repurified before being reintroduced to the system.

6) Sheer volumes involved -- transport of fluids sufficient for geoengineering-relevant levels of CO² sequestration via microalgae is "serious fucking business." Even if we allow pure seawater.

7) Then there's the question of the energy necessary to run all these systems and equipment in order to successfully sequester in the volumes discussed.

Seriously, this idea is stupid. Which is why it was investigated and dismissed before you probably ever even heard the word "algae".

brae00 · 3 days

Lots of students who need supplemental income in these parts. Might not quite be ideal but it'd certainly work. Plus, if your ex gets on the ball, those could be her days with the kids.

nomdeweb · 3 days

Water consumption's still your killer. There are better strategies already being explored.

You are quite correct in the "never stop thinking" -- but the thing is; thinking the same ideas once they've already been disconfirmed by the evidence is wrong. Find new thoughts, man.

nomdeweb · 3 days

Problem worsened. Algae are great -- potentially -- for biomass of liquid hydrocarbons but for sequestration they are basically useless given our needs. Especially if we consider water consumption volumes per unit volume CO^2.

nomdeweb · 3 days

The reason is water. Insufficient ratio of roofs to houses to cover it all. What you don't realize is that while individual people engender relatively little CO2 emissions, our industrial output is immense. Simply immense. We talk about oil for CO2 emissions but the simple truth is that coal is responsible for well over 80% of it.

That being said; plants only temporarily sequester, and use huge amounts of water to do so. But that's actually one of the arguments for terra preta. The artificial tree concept is one of many meant to sequester globally relevant volumes of CO2 in durable media.

brae00 · 3 days

You any good w/ NOC hours? (12-hour shifts, 3/4 days per week. The hours are shitty but at least that would cut down a lot on daycare costs since it'd be fewer days). If so, there's a number of tech recruiting firms out there that are looking. Otherwise you might try looking into Freelancer.com or Odesk or other similar sites (ratracerebellion I've heard of too) and see what they have for supplementing your income.

nomdeweb · 3 days

Scientists have done exactly that. Trouble is, it's an energy-in process. Check out "artificial trees" as a google search term for more.

nuktl · 3 days

One of the reasons I dislike the IEET is that its 'journalism' is reiterating uncritically claims made by sites they tend to agree with. Take for example that $800,000 claim. They link to the Huffington Post; which itself links to a BBC (UK) article when iterating that claim.

That BBC article makes no mention whatsoever of Ms. Lukyanova. None whatsoever. It references a completely different woman when discussing that price point.

IConrad

TROPHY CASE

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Inciteful Comment 2010-03-26

IConrad

TROPHY CASE

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