"SkyNet becomes self-aware on (insert date). And in the panic, they tried to pull the plug."

Given the differences in design and intent, the similarities are remarkable.

I have a large number of embedded devices (mostly server manager cards or the like) that use java controls, and they generally don't have updates available, so the change to java security mandating a Permissions attribute in the manifest means I have a lot of entries in the java security exceptions list.

I don't particularly have a problem with java the language, but java plug-ins have become really painful.

Kids are astoundingly cunning in how they analyse things. Same with pulling out the "child safe" plugs in the wall sockets or working out how to open pill jars with supposedly child proof lids.

Good on the little tacker. I think this deserves a "LIKE A BOSS"...=)

Butt plugs and dildos = Gobbledygook? There's a joke in there somewhere. Maybe that she needs lessons in how to gobble something.

Unknown.

If the ECB pulls ELA, the Greek banking system goes belly up. Again, consequences unknown, but Deutsche Bank for instance didn't seem particularly stable during the last months, so the denial of any contagion risk might have been premature. Additionally, Draghi is tasked with maintaining the stability of the Euro and taking away Greece's last lifeline might just be too far out of his mandate, even for him. Keeping ELA up without increasing the limit will achieve the same result within days though.

If Greece fails to make its payment to the IMF tomorrow, it's at the discretion of Lagarde whether she pulls the plug. Info has been somewhat contradictory, but there should be a 30 day window before the board has to call it a default.

If a default is triggered this week, it's up to the ECB and the EC again. They have shown unwillingness to let things go bust, all the recent months of muddling through should be testament to that.

They cannot have a failed state within Europe without feeding right into the anti-European parties on both ends of the spectrum; they cannot throw Greece out of the EZ; they cannot revitalise the Greek economy without doing a 180 against their own ideology; they cannot let Syriza pull Greece out of the shit without encouraging Podemos. It's an impasse alright.

Should the Greek people vote against the proposal, a proposal that is no longer on the table, it'll be back to negotiations. Should they vote in favour of it, and should it still be available to them at that time in the first place, Tsipras might even get a majority for it in parliament, but Syriza will blow apart right then and there. The left wing cannot agree to further enslavement.

If, however, everything goes sour and Greece does indeed exit the EZ, introduce a new Drachma, the whole shebang, then we're in uncharted terrorities. The situation in Greece would deteriorate even further, given how much they rely on imports, especially of fuel. And the EU, already shaky from the tens of thousands of bodies floating in the Med, the falling standard of living for tens of millions and the sustained unemployment of an entire generation; this fecking union cannot turn the cradle of democracy into a failed state and survive. The governments might be ok with it, but the French people would rip this shit to shreds one way or another, and rightfully so.

I thought the symbols looked a bit like hieroglyphs..

In reality, it's just THE BEST, most creative way to tell isis to go fuck itself

..i think. Lmao.

Can't not wait! for that correction.

Hmmm. Well, I have a "low end" pc, and I've tried to play games on it, and was not impressed. Perhaps I should have done more investigation before I bought it, but I wasn't thinking 'game machine' when I did. Also, I have no controllers for it, and playing with the keyboard sucks ass! ;-)
Keep in mind, this setup on the video has over $4K in graphics cards alone, and is probably a $6-7K computer without the 3 TV's. With all that, it doesn't look better to me than last gen 3 screen games. (they should have chosen a different game IMO, I'm sure it does look way better when there's detail to display)

It's good that they're making them easier to set up, but it is still WAY more difficult than a console, which is plug and play. I still haven't gotten my PC to display properly on my TV without a cable across the room, and that's crappy.
I'm also disappointed that they tried to make the new consoles "media players" (crappy PCs). I wish they stuck with games and put it all into display features, but they didn't. I don't use the media features of my ps4 at all (except for Netflix, which my TV would do by itself if I set it up), they're a total waste.

Perhaps I'm stuck in a mid 90's mindset. That's the last time I built my own PC as a game rig. I had the full $250 thrustmaster setup, joystick and throttle with over 20 programmable buttons, and it was GREAT for descent and quake...but I recall being disappointed at how fast it was obsolete. Within 2 years I couldn't play newer games on it without stuttering....so I gave up on that. I can't afford to upgrade my memory and graphics card every 2 years, and motherboard and chip every 3.

I do recall a few games even on ps3 that could do the multiple display thing even at 1080i...I think motorstorm 1&2 (my favorite ps3 games) would do it, but you needed 3 ps3s to make it work. Today, you could probably do that for fairly cheap! What does a ps3 cost these days anyway? I must say, I didn't see anything that made 4K seem better. Motion blur looks the same at 1080 as 4K.

It is bullshit, but it's not a problem unique to Apple.

I've never owned a mac, but every goddamned Dell laptop I've used has had a subtly different charger, and they're mostly just a round plug!

As for usb-c for video, meh. People kvetched when they dropped the optical drive, the VGA port, etc. (Hell I remember people complaining on the windows side when laptops stopped having serial ports!) Technology moves forward... and Apple is known for pushing new techs at the expense of old ones.

Still can't believe they put a 480p camera on it, though.
Seriously, what is this? 2005?

Yeah, let's gather up all the people that push cats around and murder them. That is what I call justice. People who push cats around will DIE. And if a cat abuser doesn't die and is on life support -- pull the plug!

And if the cat abuser is a child -- build a time machine, travel back in time and chop off the cat abuser's dad's dick so he can't impregnate the cat abuser's mother. Child killing is NEVER ok, and neither is abortion, but chopping off a man's dick before the pregnancy begins is completely okay.

Any newer (< 10 years old?) TV is already digital, and you can just plug a digital antenna directly to it, no box required. If yours is older, you can get a free converter box coupon from the gov. Info found here....
http://www.pbs.org/digitaltv/converter_boxes.php

EDIT: Crap. I didn't read it. The coupon program expired in 2009. Sorry.

Since he mentioned that he replaced an old fan with a light, those run on 3 wires (white, black, red) plus ground (earth)- in order to turn the light and fan on/off independently. He must have reconnected those incorrectly in the ceiling. Now the hair dryer acting as a switch means that outlet the hair dryer plugs into is wired incorrectly, and is not a laughing matter.
Yes, he should call an electrician and avoid killing anyone.

How indeed.

Draghi's ECB has just made a move and I don't understand why. Come Feb 11th, they will no longer accept Greek bonds as collateral, effectively cutting off one of Greece's last two sources of credit. What remains is the Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA) provided to the Greek Central Bank, through which the entire banking system must now get most of its credit.

Why did they do it? Why now? I don't think it has something to do with the Advocate Generals opinion piece the other day, declaring the ECB's membership in the troika to be a conflict of interest and that fiscal policy is not to be used as a tool to influence poltical decision-making.

Could it be pure idiocy like the time they pulled to plug on Cyprus only to backpeddle shortly after? Or might they be trying to force a move on part of Germany and Greece? "Stop messing around and get your ducks in a row NOW." -- that sorta thing? Is it mere posturing of sorts, a shot across the bow of Greece?

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Edit #1

I really don't like this. It looks like disaster, smells like disaster and tastes like disaster. And it's entirely too close for comfort. Are they truly going to turn Greece into a failed-state over principle? The way they casually discuss the lives of nearly 11 million people, and the future of the European Union as well, is bone-chilling.
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In the meantime, Schäuble's meeting with Varoufakis went just as expected, reports indicate. Schäuble won't budge a bit. Negotiations with the troika are mandatory, and fiscal waterboarding must be resumed at once. There will be no compromise, not with him in charge. He'll push Greece off the cliff without blinking even once. Convictions worthy of a Templar, that one. Worth remembering that he admitted taking 100k in bribes from an arms dealer in '94 and still managed to become Minister of Finance. A living legend, just not the kind I'd prefer.

With regards to hyperinflation, most folks over here seem to have forgotten, or maybe they never learned, that Chancellor Brüning's austerity regime led to deflation in 1930-32, pushing unemployment to 23%. What followed was a massive influx in membership and infuence for parties at both ends of the political spectrum, similar to Greece. Except in our case, it wasn't the left (KPD) who won the elections in '32...

True story.

Went to the presentation at school, at night. All the boys went one night, the girls on another. Fifth and sixth graders, but my mom took me as a fourth grader, my brother went as a fifth grader.

After both of us had seen the presentation, my parents sat with us in the backyard. Asked if we had any questions.

I had one. "How does the sperm get across the bed? Does it crawl?"

They showed all the apparatus, but they never told us the delivery method!

My parents didn't answer then. My dad tried to tell me later. Always at dinner time, which was weird.

I learned by then that this was something not to be discussed (picked that up from my parents, clearly!) Dad would try to tell me, I would squeal and run upstairs.

My father is not a patient man.

One night, he leaned over and unplugged the toaster. "Gale, in electrical terms, this is the male and this is the female." And he plugged in the toaster.

I squealed and ran, but the info was transmitted.

Stupid Disney movie didn't tell us.

This was in 1963.

The world isn't static.
For example, the J-20, between its stealth capabilities and its ability to jam radar, significantly lowers the range of our BVR radar guided missiles, because our radar guided missiles can't track them beyond a given range.
So you have to get closer - ideally without moving into range of the opponent's missiles.

A Super Hornet (which BTW is an ~entirely new plane compared to the original hornet. It's not an 'upgrade' to an existing airframe.) can't move in closer without exposing itself to fire.

Furthermore, the F35's ability to get closer than conventional fighters makes it 'take point' for information gathering and transmitting data over the network.

Yes, the F35 is has a wasteful inflated budget in large part architected to throw money at political friends - but the vehicle does exist to plug a real hole.

-scheherazade

My post is not hyperbole, but actual personal observation.



You also have to factor in cost+ funding.

On one hand, it's necessary. Because you don't know how much something truly new will cost - you haven't done it before. You'll discover as you go.
It would be unfair to bind a company to a fixed cost, when nobody knows what the cost will be. It's mathematically unreasonable to entertain a fixed cost on new technologies.

(Granted, everyone gives silly lowballed best-case estimates when bidding. Anyone that injects a sense of reality into their bid is too costly and doesn't get the contract).

On the other hand, cost+ means that you make more money by spending more money. So hiring hordes of nobodies for every little task, making 89347589374 different position titles, is only gonna make you more money. There's no incentive to save.



F35 wise, like I said, it's not designed for any war we fight now.
It's designed for a war we could fight in the future.
Because you don't start designing weapons when you're in a war, you give your best effort to have them already deployed, tested, and iterated into a good sustainable state, before the onset of a conflict that could require them.

F35 variations are not complicated. The VTOL variation is the only one with any complexity. The others are no more complex than historical variations from early to late blocks of any given airframe.

The splitting of manufacturing isn't in itself a complication ridden approach. It's rather normal for different companies to work on unrelated systems. Airframe will go somewhere, avionics elsewhere, engine elsewhere, etc. That's basically a given, because different companies specialize in different things.

Keep in mind that the large prime contracts (Lockheed/GD/etc) don't actually "make" many things. They are systems integrators. They farm out the actual development for most pieces (be it in house contractors or external contractors - because they are easy to let go after the main dev is over), and they themselves specialize in stitching the pieces together. Connecting things is not difficult when they are designed with specified ICDs from the get-go. The black boxes just plug up to each other and go.

The issues that arise are often a matter of playing telephone. With one sub needing to coordinate with another sub, but they have to go through the prime, and the prime is filtering everything through a bunch of non-technical managers. Most problems are solved in a day or two when two subs physically get their engineers together and sort out any miscommunications (granted, contracts and process might not allow them the then fix the problem in a timely and affordable manner).

The F22 and F35 issues are not major insurmountable tasks. The hardest flaws are things that can be fixed in a couple months tops on the engineering side. What takes time is the politics. Engineers can't "just fix it". There's no path forward for that kind of work.

Sure, in a magic wonderland you could tell them "here, grab the credit card, buy what you need, make any changes you need, and let us know when you're done" - and a little while later you'd have a collection of non-approved, non-reviewed, non-traceable, non-contractually-covered changes that "just fix the damn thing"... and you'd also have to incur the wrath of entire departments who were denied the opportunity to validate their existence. The 'high paid welfare' system would be all over your ass.

-scheherazade