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Well Mr. Hollan, you are a liar. Thanks the the AC above who graciously posted a link to the incident of your father's death, in your own words, it appears that your father died suddenly of an undiagnosed medical condition . He died of this condition even after taking advantage of the Canadian healthcare system to sucessfully fight cancer.

In other words, it would not have mattered if this condition struck your father in Canada, the US or any Libertarian Utopia you care to dream up - there was simply nothing that could have been done to save him. It was too late when the doctors found out what had happened to him. Your father's death was unavoidable and not the fault of any particular healthcare delivery system in place in Canada.

I am very sorry to read of the way in which your father died. It was painful and it was a tragedy. I feel for you and your family, especially your mother. I can see from your posts that this grief has torn you up, and destroyed you to the point that you are lashing out at the very system that actually saved your father from cancer only a few short years earlier.

Mr. Hollan, get some help. The bitter bile you spew will not bring your father back and not destroy the people you believe killed your father, it will only destroy you. Please seek counselling before it is too late.

Well, during my undergrad years at an unnamed university...oh what the hell...The University of West Georgia, I worked in the ITS department on campus which was responsible for all the applications in our internal system called Banner (a big freaking waste of money for an Oracle Forms application..but that's another discussion for another day).

Anyway, my role was to prepare reports for various people around campus. For example, if a student organization required a given GPA for membership, their faculty advisor could request a report of all students meeting the criteria.

The thing that most amazed me when I started working there was the complete lack of respect for people's social security numbers and birthdays. Any professor on campus could get pretty much any information he or she wanted.

Even more brazen than this activity was the infrastructure on campus. Every user ran their applications over a telnet session. Yes....telnet. I demonstrated to my boss how easy it was to run a packet sniffer and catch social security numbers as they went across the wire..but all my concerns fell on deaf ears. I also showed them how SSH could be used as a direct replacement for telnet but again...no one seemed care.

I then wrote a letter to the editor of the University's only newspaper describing the lack of respect for peoples' personal information, but the letter was never published. When I e-mailed the student editor and asked why my letter wasn't published, she said she was asked by the administration not to run it.

I graduated in 99 so I'm not sure if any changes have been made. I would love to know.

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Here is one of the images - it shows the pumpkin with the linux penguin carved into it. Pumpkin

Hm. And here I thought that it was 1024^3.

Dear Sir,

I am so happy to help your ignorance!

Systeme Internationale clearly indicates that the "Giga" prefix denotes multiplication factor of 10E9.

If you're the G=1,000,000,000 measurement school, then it should be 4,700,000,000 as you say, or 4.3GB in the 1024-base units, as I think a parent poster indicated.

Dear Sir,

My school is called Systeme Internationale.

... a while back. Right from their site:

"Although the general public often seems surprised when librarians don't fit their pre-conceived image, the profession has celebrated its own differences for years. Librarians are funny, irreverent, interesting, and often radical people. Though popular culture includes considerable library material, it often ignores those on the fringe."

PDHoss

I am 16 and have had a constant struggle in school to find courses that were challenging or that seem useful to me in the long run. I think of myself as above average and rather intelligent and I'm sure you're the same.

Do you find yourself continually frustrated? Feeling held back by courses designed to help the lowest common denominator, or a general public that doesn't possess the skill level you do? If so, what do you do to keep yourself from becoming bitter and infuriated?

My solution was to find a different school; early college admissions. (Insert shameless plug here)I highly encourage other students who feel like I have to check out the program here.

Is US becoming the first nation in the world to be dominated by options wielding technocrats? Or are the elite merely waiting for their life-extending biotech rah-rah while
- 50% of the world are still impverished
- a large majority don't even have a phone
- computers are useless because they can't read
- baby boomers waiting for the massive transfer of wealth and anticipate living off the tax-sweat of the next generation of the young
- can't afford health care much less the exotic drugs the pharmaceuticals charge to recoup R&D (plus hefty margin) costs (nothing like a captive market)
- still waiting for the US to pay off its $6 trillion dollar debt while addicting third world nations and various corrupt governments to a consumer lifestyle they can't afford

Yes, it's nice getting 6 figure salaries designing the next smart sweatshop sneaker and worrying about biobabble. I'd like to point out a little newspaper article that caught my eye when a reader ask her son (serviing in the East Timor Peace Keeping Forces) what the people over there would appreciate as a present from her and he replied that for the Timorese, Xmas is a sacred period for celebrating with kin and giving thanks for their delivery, not the credit-draining consumerism exercise it is here in the US. For what merit is technology without the moral sense to apply it wisely? Too often we see the glitter of a holy grail without realising the price. DDT, nuclear research, exploration spread exotic weeds, monocultures, derivative based capital flows, all had consequences beyond those intended by their creators. I just hope the Internet makes the human race as a whole a lot more prepared for the next technology wave than historical economic evidence. In particular read up on the past just to see how economic development has been derived from the struggles of various self-interests (of which OpenSource is yet another saga). Read up on books like Carl Sagan's "The Demand Haunted World" just to realise how much the average citizen is fascinated by superstition (its scary when more people believe in a live Elvis than a dead God). Will biotech be any different? Hopefully we will have developed a better sense of moral ethics by then to guide our decision making.

LL