@Farhan The medical industry has a special claim to suck - everyone wants you to not kill people, but nobody can agree exactly how they want you not to kill people :-P

how many hours did CNN already dedicate to the new report?

jacc.gov.au/media/releases/2014/june/…

Heh. I actually think I get CNN as a part of my cable package. Never watched it though. Probably some dumbed down "international" version though, so you don't get to see all the crazy.

@falstro I would not know, I think that is the same worldwide. In 2008 I had to watch all the electoral campaign coverage.

@Federico I like the drifted area size comparisons. Gives you an idea of how f#@!ing huge the ocean is...

everything looks small on a map

@falstro I loved those as well

"But we have sonar, and radar, and satellites for crying out loud, how hard can it be to find a pinhead sized object on an area the size of... frickin half the contiguous united states??"

or the entirety of W-europe

Meh, no flying today. Tank was empty (last guy landed on fumes, that's the kinda guy that will have no fire at his crash site) and so was the fuel pump.

@falstro Too bad. I didn't know that Germans throw away the planes once they run out of gas.

@Farhan Humm?

@falstro Why couldn't you refill?

@Farhan pump was empty?

Ah. Bad luck.

When you said fuel pump, I thought you were talking about something in the plane.

yup

@falstro What planes you have ratings for?

@Farhan ah, no. The self serve fuel pump, the one we all take for granted somehow contains unlimited amount of fuel :)

@Farhan I have a SEPL PPL, and a german "ultra light" (pretty much LSA if I understand correctly)

I've been checked out on the Diamond DA20-A1 "Katana", the Socata TB10 "Tobago" and the Aerospool WT9 "Dynamic", although it's been a while since I flew the dynamic.

@falstro Cool. You don't like high wings?

@Farhan Don't know. Never been in one :) The local flying club has a Cessna 150, but I don't plan on becoming a member. I could get a check-out on a Ikarus C42, but to be honest, I prefer aircraft with a little more weight :)

@voretaq7 do you recycle backup tapes where you work? Like, you don't have backups older than x monts a'la IRS?

When I worked as a sysadmin, we had a logarithmic scheme: 6 tapes for monday-saturday got reused weekly, the sunday was the "week" tape, week 1 through 3, week 4 was the "month" tape january through november. Then a tape a year for nine years, than a decade tape; although that one had never been used yet in the time I worked there. That's 40 tapes for a century worth of data while still having backups every day.

Its nice when a question you posed a while back finally nets a popularity badge and then you notice its the #1 google return for likely search terms :)

@casey which one?

I have 3 now, but the latest one is the 709 ride question

@casey Does Google looks at the # of views of a question before putting it at the first spot in search results?

@falstro Our backups are on virtual tape, they're cycled every 3 months. There's a separate retention policy for emails (they're archived on the server essentially "forever", and that archive goes to tape every night)

@Farhan I don't think google cares about views on a particular question. They rank us more based on our reputation for good links.

In other words, the google algorithm tends to discover that when people search for something, and then click on a SE page, they usually don't come back and click on any more results - meaning they found what they were looking for.

@voretaq7 what's virtual tape?

@BretCopeland Fancy way of saying "fixed-size files"

(ours are 2GB, to theoretically fit on DVDs)

Germany and the US both advance

stupid focus-follows-mouse

:)

@voretaq7 what did ya write? Your password? ;)

Or profanity? :D

Not mutually exclusive I suppose ;)

@falstro the screensaver password for my workstation

which isn't profane :)

(this is why I use a different password to unlock my screen than for anything else :P)

For those who missed it, Google cardboard is pretty much pure genius

developers.google.com/cardboard

@falstro I would say that's old technology, but since the origins are ca. 1860s perhaps "ancient technology" would be better