Freefall

Ah, right. You can't just load all the images in order if the user isn't reading from the beginning.

Correct. That's why I need an index.

Yeah, and loading all images at once for the page gets a wee bit insane.

Schlock strips are around 100 Kb nowadays (although they were more lightweight in the beginning, lets ignore that for the moment).
Sure that isn't much.
Except you have over seven thousands of the bloody things^note Sundays counting as three.
That reaches up into hundreds of megabytes, which is NOT what you should be doing with your page.

edited 19th Jul '15 1:18:39 PM by Adannor

So who's gonna keep Clippy?◊

Raibert's got a point. If Clippy ever gets reactivated, I'd expect some sort of AI-box situation happening.

EDIT : wait, the AI-box experiment has a very different setup. Disregard this comment.

edited 19th Jul '15 5:57:06 PM by Aetol

Sam

@sixthhokage 1:

Thank you. That is exactly what I needed.

I imagine that the point that the chief will make is that he cannot be certain that everything is secure on the EU front. He doesn't know if the problem with Ecosystems Unlimited is contained because Kornada currently is. In the current situation, the police have not been compromised; EU has been. It makes sense to secure the robot where things are not compromised.

This is, of course, is that we don't actually know if EU is no longer compromised. Kornada is being held by the police, of course, and so far as we know, he's the head of the plot. But two things. One, we don't know if he actually was the head, or was just tricked into thinking he was (Kornada would make for a useful patsy, after all). Two, we actually don't know if anyone under Kornada, otherwise Beneath Suspicion, suborned any of the process for themselves (what if some clever programmer caught on to what Kornada was doing and inserted code to take the money before Kornada could?).

I'm not necessarily expecting any of that to be true, but the possibility is more than enough reason for me to think the police should secure Clippy.

Also, is it me, or does Raibert seem to have an obsession with power and control? This strikes me as a repeat of him demanding direct order access to Florence. It strikes me as worrisome.

Yes, Raibert has control issues. He's a company man, through and through, thinking first of the potential for harm/embarrassment to EU. He is basically decent, but his loyalty to his company is a constraint on his ability to act morally.

^^ I don't think it's "obsession" as much as it's his ass on the line if Charley dances the Foxtrot, since he's apparently a senior member of EU (at least on Jean).

Anyway, I'm hoping that this week there's a bit more detail on what EU's actual status is on Jean, compared to the planetary government. I don't think it's as simple as "Government overrides company", when said company is the reason there's a human-habitable planet for the government to rule in the first place.

edited 20th Jul '15 6:57:32 AM by Nohbody

I had the impression that he was EU's top dog on Jean but he still has to answer to the home office. Also I thought the company was the government and that the Mayor was just an employee. Or is that more a defacto rather than de jure thing.

Well, he may be the top dog in Ishihara's absence. It's hard to say. We haven't seen anyone higher, but Raibert is definitely a "hands-on" kind of guy, making him seem lower on the totem pole than he may really be.

^ You have seen some of the idiots employed there, right?

Fighteer is just applying one of the subtheories of The Peter Principle. The Peter Principle, of course, states that an employee in an organization will rise to their level of incompetence. One of the corollaries to this principle is that work is accomplished by people who have not yet risen to their level of incompetence.

Logicaly thinking, based on the fact that Raibert is accomplishing work, he therefore hasn't reached his level of incompetence - this would suggest someone lower ranked, based on the Peter Principle.

This exactly. That Raibert is accomplishing useful work indicates that he has not been promoted out of his competence zone. Therefore, either he is hypercompetent (in an organization full of idiots, this may be a case of Conservation of Competence), or there's someone higher than him (and, by inference, less competent) calling the shots.

The Peter Principle means it's easier to retire a screw-up than to punish them◊.

edited 21st Jul '15 10:54:59 PM by FuzzyBoots

I'll be fine with him being given a golden parachute, if they kick him off a plane with it for his attempted genocide.

I expect that even after being let go by EU Kornada will still have other problems to face.

Kornada is stupid enough to cause a lot of harm if he's quietly let go. This decision, should it be carried through, will come back to bite EU.

edited 22nd Jul '15 5:20:15 AM by Fighteer

Well, not to derail this into a discussion of the Peter Principle and hierarchology, but no, the Peter Principle doesn't cover golden parachutes at all. I could dig up my old copy of the collected Murphy's Laws to see which law does, eventually. I mean, I know it's around somewhere.

But in all seriousness, Raibert manages to straddle the line between being part of the problem and part of the solution. I think he's so far into the problem that he can't see the forest for the trees - like somehow thinking giving Kornada a bunch of money to go away is the best option.

Oh, God, it hit me... what if Kornada knew that EU's likely response if he failed was to just give him a ton of money to go away? He'd either get filthy rich from Gardener In The Dark or get filthy rich from EU trying to sweep it under the rug (or possibly even both!). That oily bastard was two Spanners In The Works (namely, Flo and Sam) from pulling off a Xanatos Gambit. That weaselly little bastard.

I think that would require him to be more intelligent than a particularly dim sack of flour.

He doesn't have to be particularly smart, just particularly clever. Admittedly, this would be some Keyser Söze-level deception, but it occurs to me that it is somehow possible.

I doubt it but it's not impossible Clippy thought of it.

Making an example◊

Too bad for Kornada that the Chief is good at showing Raibert why his way is better.