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12:06 PM
@Ram I said, if the actual function that is occuring was identified, more asumptions could be made about the method that would be used, or even where a person might have placed that in there.
 
"Our home-grown British racists are much nicer than those filthy Continental racists."
uhm. # FAIL!
Is software de-skilling programmers? http://bit.ly/1aDN6cy Good question, some strong evidence
 
Ram
@Psycogeek yes, you are 200% correct.
 
user58869
@Hennes sometimes i think that the internet can deskill, why remember anything when you can just look it up
 
Let me answer that once I Google for the correct spelling of my answer (which is best viewed in 800x600 with true colour)
2
 
@Hennes need de-skilled programmers :-) I was thinking (oh no) about that this week . back when all programs were high end programming . . . etc. There was only the need for some great programming (way less programs). Now they need 350,000 programs any way you can jam them out ther door.
Before anyone is soo deeply skilled , they are put to work, pumping out stuff that makes money.
 
12:26 PM
IF suddenly this world decided they needed a complete space armada. and to travel regularly to other planets, that would mean i get a job as a rocket scientist :-) Duhoy , we gonna have funz now.
 
12:37 PM
youtube.com/watch?v=fvR9uRLOeNc Dont worry though, I will work out the bugs in the next download.
 
12:49 PM
God, all this "SE vs. @ChatBotJohnCavil" issue is deeply ridiculous!
That's the kind of reasoning that leads to those labels "you have to open this package before eating these peanuts" or "please don't use this microwave to dry your cat".
(Not that the issue here is a legal one, but the weird reasoning behind it is similar)
 
@ThatHelpVampireGuy: microwaves are perfectly fine ways to dry a cat.
 
Hey did you hear they sent a cat and a dog into space. Some people were really upset that they sent a dog.
 
@JourneymanGeek Idiomatic expression maybe? Here "microwaves" and "microwave ovens" are the same thing. Just as "Xerox" is not a company, but a term for "photocopier".
The US has it too: the 3 states of matter in English are "solid", "liquid" and "gasoline".
4 mins ago, by Journeyman Geek
@ThatHelpVampireGuy: microwaves are perfectly fine ways to dry a cat.
...says a dog.
 
Gasoline is called "plasma" in the rest of the world ;-)
 
@Hennes Wow! There are gasoline-powered TVs! Who'd imagine 21st century is so steampunk?
 
1:03 PM
I would not mind microwaving some dogs. Especially one which likes to bark for hours at an end on most days. If its owners sit next to it in the microwave oven then I am even happier.
21st century is sparkplug powered!
 
@Hennes aim your wi-fi at them and laugh evily to feel better about it.
2
 
I suspect that they are not home at the time.
And I really hope they get better at training dog/pets/kids.
 
Hi guys
 
@ThatHelpVampireGuy Sililariries: In movies TVs exploded when hit by gunfire. Cars explode at random when they hit a curb or fall down in a ravine. Both are plasma powered.
 
@Hennes Is the character on the 1st panel wearing only a belt over her chest or have I been exposed too long to weird anime?
 
1:09 PM
Hi Jeb. Welome to the Super User channel. I am not a bot.
9
@ThatHelpVampireGuy Not really, but I could tell without looking at or knowing earlier comics
 
I am need to re-install my wifi driver, I am unsure how to find out which driver I need. I
Here is what I have found so far
 
Step 1. Find out which card you have
(This is well described in several posts on the Super User site)
 
Just kidding. The way it is drawn, and being b&w, makes it seems that way. But again, I can't draw even stick figures right.
@JebediahKerman Step 2: find the manufacturer's website and download the drivers for your SO
 
Screenshot blocked due to lots of external links. Some flakey one
I mean: Doubleclick.net? DIE DIE DIE
 
Sorry I'd like to help much but my connection here is worse than a dial-up modem using 3G while sitting on a snail
 
1:13 PM
Can you find out the device id?
Use this as a guide:
0
Q: Cannot find ECS 945GCT drivers

SunSkyI reinstalled windows xp sp3 In device manager I have two yellow marks: - PCI Simple Communication Controller - SM Bus Controller CPU-Z says my MB is ECS 945GCT-M2 chipset i945G. I visited so many sites to find the drivers - no success. Any help, pls.

(assuming windows. if OS X, BSD, linux or something else please state the OS)
 
here is a screen shot
I see 4 in the list
PCI\VEN_1814&DEV_5390&SUBSYS_F0511814&REV_00
my best guess
I found this
I have no idea which driver I need
 
PCI vendor ID: 1814. So it is a DLINK card
On your page I only see one match:
 
@ThatHelpVampireGuy precisely ;p
 
@JebediahKerman match? in that same section there select "device matching ID" and mabey that shows the One item ?
 
Following the precise link I see an image of a PIC(e) wireless NIC
Aslo, sorrt, ralink, not dlink. Faulty human autocorrect
 
1:25 PM
that looks like it already has the drivers automagically installed
 
Chip Number: RT5390
Chip Description: Ralink RT5390 802.11b/g/n WiFi
Notes: http://ixbt.radarsync.com/Download.aspx?locid=1437493
 
there should be a ! next to the device if it wasn't
 
@Hennes is that the newest driver
 
No, that look s like version 3
But eh device name seems to be Ralink RT5390 802.11b/g/n WiFi Adapter
 
@JebediahKerman: if it hasn't been asked already... where is this device?
is it part of a laptop or a desktop? is it built in or an addon?
 
1:26 PM
in my desktop
builtin
 
HP desktop?
 
the version of the link is 3.01.13.0000
 
In which case search the HP website on that name and get Ralink RT5390 802.11b/g/n WiFi Adapter -> h10010.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/…
 
my dekstop already has 3.01.16.0000
 
1:27 PM
yup, in those cases, even where the 'ralink' driver is newer, the OEM's own driver may be a better bet
 
okay thanks
will igve the hp one a shot
reboot
 
I finally managed to leaver the solar system with a ~ $6000 spaceship.
Lucky Mom and sun slingshots. Darn.
waits for the "your Mom is so big, you can get a gravity assist from here" jokes.
 
1:36 PM
boop
asked a question ;p
 
its been ages since my last one
 
good stuff, KSP
 
@JourneymanGeek actually, you always need a joojoo...
 
Also, poor widow. When did you die?
 
1:38 PM
@Braiam: this is not too bad
 
I cannot for the life of me build an orbitable rocket to attach the heavy orbiter to
Any tips?
 
oh, I never even tried that.
 
user image
2
thats all you need
 
I am mostly about ultra low cost probes
Though I use too many boosters (2) for good efficiency
 
use ion rockets, in space
 
1:42 PM
i tank (the 800), one efficient low trust engine (which can ont lift the tank when it is over ¾ full), two solid boosters, one top with solar, bat, guidance, parachute
Boost for 12 or 29 seconds to 7km and very high speed (too fast for earodymoics)
Dump boosters. Acend speed slowly drops from 400 to 100m/sec, then pick up again
 
2seconds to get to a altitude of 7000m?
 
Tip over at 12km to 30 degrees
12
 
do you use mechjeb
 
Need to look it up. Time until booster burn out
Yeah, but figuring out max path on my own is part of the fun
As is the math. E.g. when do you burn at perioapsis? And why ?
Why can the same fuel give you more energy down in the gravity well ?
Etc etc
(Answer: kenetic energy is based on v squared while potential energy is not).
As to the damn ion thing. I never have enough power for it
Not even with a trio of heavy power sources
 
That photo up top about the boosters gave me some inspiration :P Off I go..
Hey, Cavil's here
Has his controversy been sorted? Does he still greet?
 
1:57 PM
I think the greets have been turned off
 
Bob
Ya.
MSO consensus seems to be "let them do whatever normal users can":
18
Q: What should be the limits for chat bots interacting with regular users?

Mad ScientistThere is a controversy about a certain chat bot in some chat rooms. The one major disagreement is about the bot greeting new users in chat. Some users argue that this is helpful to explain the chat room rules to new users and make sure they actually notice them, while others argue that bots shoul...

but AFAIK the SE team hasn't withdrawn their 'no auto-greet, period' decision
I'm also rather amused by this comment:
This might be true for a room as big as the main room for SU, but it works pretty well and does a lot of service in smaller rooms like the one the bot originated in — Jan Dvorak 16 hours ago
Considering the room in question has many times the activity of this room...
also, nice greeting @Hennes :P
 
hm. any moddy folk around? the blog editor room needs unfreezing
 
Bob
@JourneymanGeek @jokerdino seems to be usually active around this time?
 
I only see @OliverSalzburg on the userlist, but he's greyed out
 
2:22 PM
@vedantchandra Depends on what you mean by sorted.
Did I get what I want? Nope. Did I bow down to SE's authoritarian rule, in order to keep the bot here in some capacity? Yep.
 
lol
@allquixotic: for what its worth, I hope they reconsider
 
Power to the people (where the people are us, not the rest).
 
Bob
@allquixotic ...you're up early!
 
Also, all animals are equal.
 
Bob
or maybe I just lost track of time
hrm
 
2:27 PM
@Bob not really, just in a little early
 
Bob
!!status
 
@Bob Command status learned
@Bob I'm alive!
 
would've been in much earlier if not for an accident
 
Bob
o.O
 
I didn't have the accident; I just got delayed on the beltway by it by about 20 minutes
 
Bob
2:28 PM
Ah.
 
freaking people... you should be forced to pay everyone for the extra gas they have to spend idling past your accident when you cause one
and the time they wasted
 
Bob
Well, it's not always a driver's fault.
 
and they should have a cop sitting there pulling over and writing tickets for people who get in the left lane when they see a sign that says "LEFT LANE CLOSED AHEAD" (which is apparently driverese for "speed down the left lane as fast as possible to get around all the people who are doing the right thing")
@Bob unless one or both drivers lose control of their vehicle, at least one of the two drivers had made some error in order to cause the accident... and to be honest, I don't believe that cars randomly accelerating or deciding to make a sharp turn into a vehicle in a neighboring lane is a very common thing
 
Aye. That is the one place I speed up to block people who do that.
 
Toyota had the unintended acceleration problem with their ECUs, but they've been recalled and fixed
 
Bob
2:31 PM
@allquixotic It does happen - not an absolute zero chance (that Toyota debacle...)
Also, poor road maintenance, etc., plays a part.
 
yeah, but there's an accident on this road about 4 out of 5 days of the week... I think it's poor road design (the shape, size, number of lanes of the road, and the fact that lanes constantly come and go) but not poor maintenance
 
@JourneymanGeek sup
 
Fuckers... Had I not reassembled laptop before taking it back, I would end up 1 2GB module less. I had hopes for Dell's service though.
 
seriously though, if you merge into a lane and you didn't see the vehicle there and you cause an accident, that's your fault -- at least in the US, the driver is absolutely responsible for being able to see other vehicles around them and not hit them
he ends up having his insurance pay for the damage to the other guy's car, but he never has to answer for the thousands of gallons of fuel and wasted productivity that he caused for all the people who get stuck in traffic
 
I hope they didn't fuck up anything else...
 
2:34 PM
Road maintenance seems to vary per country.
Over here it is good. Same in Germany.
 
Bob
@allquixotic Very hard to quantify.
 
And both countries sell cars which stay oin good contact with the road.
 
Bob
@Hennes Or by state, especially in larger countries.
 
The US seems to have a lot of poor roads and 'mushy' suspension dto deal with that.
 
a bumpy road isn't going to cause an accident, either, and there are no problems with the paint on the road very clearly delineating the lanes, and the main highways and interstates get repaved every year or two
 
Bob
2:35 PM
Even LGAs if it's their job.
 
Which feels 'weird' when you drive a US car over here.
 
over here, road maintenance quality is directly related to the level of government that funds it
interstates, funded by the federal govt, are top notch
intra-state highways, funded by states, are OK (at least here) but not great
 
Ah. good to know.
 
local neighborhood roads, funded by counties, are horrible and never ever get repaved for their entire lifespan
 
Bob
@allquixotic I've been on a few roads with barely-visible (badly faded) lines. And I'm still a new driver (so "a few" is actually a farily significant proportion).
 
2:36 PM
you're lucky to have potholes fixed
 
@Sathya thanks
 
@Bob that's one thing that I only ever see in parking lots (faded lines); roads around here don't seem to have that problem... I don't know if there's a law about it, but there might be, maybe some law requiring them to re-paint the lines every so often
 
Bob
The major highways are normally fine in that respect, thankfully.
 
they certainly don't have any qualms about not repaving local roads for an extremely long time (if ever), but the repainting is common and roads are often closed for repainting
 
Bob
Oh, they do repaint them now and then, but a couple seem to be ignored for a little too long.
 
2:38 PM
they'll repaint lines on state roads 10 or so times before repaving them, because it's a lot cheaper to put down new lines than to chew up the old layer of asphalt and lay down a new one
thankfully, state highways also get pretty good pothole repair
I was on a federal interstate where the accident was though, that road is in fine condition except for one overpass that has tons of potholes that have been poorly repaired so it's bumpy (and the accident was miles away from that)
 
Bob
Oh yea, the newly resurfaced roads feel glorious, but they're rare :(
 
@allquixotic: they tend to dig up and patch roads nowadays :/
 
the smooth ride on a new road is pretty comfortable
 
/me misses the good ol days when they planned this sorta thing, then repaved the ENTIRE section of road
 
they're doing a ridiculous amount of construction on that federal highway though
 
Bob
2:40 PM
Yea. Most often it's maybe one out of three lanes resurfaced in 100m stretches.
 
most of it has to do with old overpasses built in the 60s and 70s that are crumbling
 
Bob
And the rest of the road is ignored.
 
as one of our US Senators put it, (approx quote), "we can either give them the funding to repair our critical state infrastructure, or we can spend even more to clean up the debris and pay damages to the families who lose their loved ones when these bridges and overpasses inevitably fail"
so now they got the funding and every half-mile is a lane closure and cranes and dump trucks and dust and portable generators and noise
 
Maryland has a ridiculous number of small bodies of water (small streams and lakes and rivers and so on) that require bridges, and then our roads have so many of those clover leaf designs that interchange between two intersecting highways, so we have lots of overpasses and bridges
@JourneymanGeek the accepted and most upvoted answer by Shog9 on the MSO post basically says that bots and users have the same rules, and if X behavior of a bot is "annoying" (it's not clarified to whom, or how many people need to be annoyed, etc) then it is unacceptable and has to be removed
I assume the prevailing sentiment will be "if SE employees say it's annoying, then it's annoying, irrespective of what the community might say"
 
2:47 PM
@allquixotic: heh, pretty much
I'm still pretty confused by all this
and I have a feeling I'm missing a lot of the context behind the decision
 
that kind of rule is open to a ridiculous amount of abuse; someone could (rightly) bring up a post on MSO complaining about an SE employee being "annoying" even if they just say something like "ha ha that's funny" and go on a long tirade about why that's annoying, and of course SE will ignore it, and they'll look like the bad guy for being bias, even if the OP didn't really have a case to begin with
it could go on and on and on... when you make a guideline or a rule that says "you can't be X" and the "X" is so completely open to interpretation that pretty much everyone will have a different view of whether a given behavior is X, and then you say "our opinion is the only one that matters", you're essentially just collapsing the rules to "we exclusively determine what is acceptable behavior, and you're just going to have to accept that"
that's a far cry from the community-governed premise of the site
IDGAF about the auto greeting, to be perfectly honest
I give a fuck about the way SE is treating its community compared to its founding principles
and that's what will continue to piss me off long after the dust has settled, and that's what is much more likely to drive me away from this community permanently at some point
 
:/
(I half suspect if I leave, its either cause I got bored, or I had another breakdown)
lucky the latter seems unlikely
 
maybe people from other countries don't get as hot under the collar about sticking to principles or freedom of expression or that sort of thing, which is why I seem to have been chastised for my outrage at this decision by several people from, say, India, where conformity is highly valued (I'm claiming this from several years' experience working with people from there, that's the only reason I pointed it out)
but we USAians were raised to be outraged at behavior like this by organizations with power or authority, especially when they go against their founding principles -- which is why so many of us are angry at our government now
 
@allquixotic: I totally get that
 
and SE is basically a mirror image of our government, a microcosm, doing the same type of thing but on a smaller scale
 
Bob
2:55 PM
I really wish we had a way to, I dunno, stay in contact if we ever leave, whether by choice or circumstance.
 
@allquixotic I get that too though I really disagree with your analysis on the US.
 
you have my email bob-man
that's one way to stay in contact
 
(though, despite being singaporean, I think authority needs to have its nose tweaked, and its tail tugged, just to keep it in line)
 
i always check it
 
Bob
@allquixotic Ya, but it's not quite the same as a chatroom :P
(in other words - back to thinking about setting up IRC :P)
 
2:56 PM
lol
I've run my own servers in the past
 
I have to say though that while one SE dev acted in a very cavalier fashion, extrapolating from that to infinity seems a bit extreme. Lets see how it goes first.
 
the JS Room People are writing a Node/HTML5 chatroom client/server architecture to replace their room, but it's still in the very early planning stages
if they end up going open beta with it, I'll definitely try and bring some of us over and make a "RA2" over there
@terdon well, a different SE employee reacted much more pragmatically and community-friendly, which gave me hope, but I think the guy who ultimately made the decision is a higher up
 
(I might, when the irc server that some friends (and a guy I occationally have issues with) of mine are forking off unreal gets usable)
@allquixotic: kinda like victorychat?
 
Bob
@terdon That "one SE dev" was not exactly acting alone. As far as we know, this has the approval of the SE team as a whole, and they're doing nothing to dissuade that notion.
 
@JourneymanGeek idk, but it's pretty cool from the mockups so far
 
2:58 PM
@allquixotic as far as I know, there has been no decision. At least none has been posted on the relevant meta posts. The guy who complained was just a dev.
 
@Bob not only that, but the other community managers seem completely unwilling to even touch the topic of the way that the other guy handled the situation
@terdon yes, but an employee of Stack Exchange, regardless of their position, irrevocably overrides any diamond mods or even an infinite number of community voices protesting against their decision -- it doesn't matter whether they're a dev, or the guy who mops their floor
 
@Bob I've seen no evidence of that. There was one dev and then one community manager who was more reasonable. Apart from that, only Shog commented and he was also quite reasonable.
 
that's the way the site has been set up
@terdon except that Shog's answer conveniently happens to agree perfectly with the decision made by the dev
 
I know, but notice that the end result is that Cavil is still here and you removed the greeting voluntarily(ish)
 

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