Thank you for answering. I am aware of the research benefits from Federal grants: I worked on such a project myself -- one of these where you have papers and patents but where the real interesting stuff is presented in Tempest-shielded conference rooms under Need to Know. And of course there was ARPANET.
Nobody in his right mind will contest that some very good projects came out of *grants*. These are not *subsidies*. The difference is that subsidies go to a general fund, allowing universoties to spend money as they want and indulge into luxuries such as staff that they can't really afford and department for which enrollment doesn't justify the budgets. Once you're in that trap, you are condemned to forever please the providers of subsidies.
That's very different from having students and staff on a time-limited grant for a specific work.
That story is a very good example of why Federal subsidies are a poisoned gift. An entity starts accepting money from Washington. It starts living above its means. Then D.C. can force the entity to toe the line on whatever matter the lobbyists du jour have sold to Congress, otherwise, no more free money!
Federalization of education is not a good idea. Power should be closer to the universities. Tuitions should reflect actual costs.
Besides, providing more funds to the universities has only resulted in jacking up tuition costs. I don't see an increase in degree quality or research results.
We need the universities to get their snout out of the Fed feeding trough. If all Fed funds were cut, more liberty and responsibility would result, which is always a good thing.
This is BS. The violent crime reduction is due to the decrease in disco music, everybody knows it, and the correlation is just as strong as for leaded gasoline. Stronger even. Less Travolta-wannabe dancers, less thumpa-boom noise, less crime, that's a no brainer. At least, works for me. It takes seriously bad rap to be half as annoying as 70s disco.
Why, take me for instance. I am positively humid-eyed when I hear Abba nowadays. But when "Dancing Queen"c ame out in 76, I stopped liking it after the 175th time it was played in a week. At the 203th time, I went berserk and killed anyone wearing a bell-bottom around me. My analyst understood me and got me outta jail. Later, he died of a coke OD. These days, you cannot pull that kind of crap anymore. Less analysts, less dummy judges. And the coke-head massively died. They often were violent, you know.
Seriously, most of the ambiant lead comes from pigments and inks, especially downwind from incinerators. That's why ambiant lead did not decrease much after leaded gas was phased out.
Oh, and in the 70s, jailing violent criminals was indeed considered "unprogressive", which resulted in less of them being locked up. Naaah, cannot be a factor.
So let me get this straight: In order to solve a mere inconvenience (traffic), the lawmakers in the USA's capital are instauring a police dragnet that would be the envy of North Korea.
And this is the enlighted government of an enlightened nation? For crying out loud, are these people nuts? How crazy can these control freaks be?
I don't think that the problem needs such a grossly invasive measure.
Oh, and BTW, the sex industry already provides inflatable dolls with a resistor mesh under the surface that provides a pleasing, uniform skin heat. They just need a car adapter, and voila, the IR cameras are fooled. So I guess Congressmen and other pervs have nothing to fear.
That's what I thought, thank you. This confirms my opinion that this judgement is insane. The margins in the telecom business are often smaller than this. Vonage has to increase its prices proportionally or go out of business.
This has been going on for years.In 2005, a user of the spamgourmet disposable web site address reported that he was getting spam advertizing stock scams to an address he created exclusively for Ameritrade. Moreover, the user ran a *nix version on his PC and was very careful, so a leak on his end was unlikely. Ameritrade first denied, then compensated him. That was only the start. Since then, many reports surfaced showing that Ameritrade has an email leak problem.
It was only logical that the leak wasn't limited to email addresses.
Meanwhile, Ameritrade denied that their system was compromised. For instance, a spamgourmet user attempted to contact Ameritrade but got nowhere, so he complained about Ameritrade to the BBB. That woke Ameritrade up. They finally answered the user, while denying any breach in their systems:
We received correspondence from the Better Business Bureau about your Ameritrade account.
I wanted to follow up with you about the Spam e-mails you received. I apologize for the delayed response and understand any frustration you may have experienced in this matter. Although we have been unable to determine the exact cause of the Spam, I wanted to inform you of what we do know.
We thoroughly reviewed our systems and data sent to third parties with access to e-mail addresses and found no misuse or compromises of any of our systems or storage mediums for e-mail addresses. Additionally, after further review of our systems, there is no indication that your account information held with Ameritrade has been compromised. Please be assured that we regularly contract leading edge security firms to conduct network and application penetration tests to test the security of our network and web presence. We also employ a staff of full time employees solely dedicated to Information Security.
In the light of their recent admission, this translates into: "Our staff was utterly clueless and couldn't find a Trojan if it hit them in the balls with a brick. This contractor guy ran a newfangled thingie called a "rootkit detector" and whaddya know, it lit up like a Christmas tree. He saod your data got pwned. So there."
The only arguments that will prevail here are money. So give a presentation to your management and tell them this:
Support: Even MS is now selling support for Linux. Get a screenshot of their SuSE offer on their web site.
Costs: Anti-virus, worms, reinstalls and phone support cost about $3000 per seat and per year in an MS environment. That's support costs for helpdesk only. Now factor in lost productivity for whoever is in the seat.
"Free cannot be good" argument: ask them how much they paid for their razor. Wasn't it free? Doesn't the company make money on the blades? Well, IBM gives open-source software and makes money by selling boxes and service. Their shareholders aren't complaining: services around open-source offers are now a very significant portion of their income. Same for a lot of companies. And what about all that software that MS gives for free?
Productivity: Show off Eclipse (as screenshots). Show that it's more elaborate than Visual Studio. Explain that buggy MS tools = lost productivity, missed deadlines, lost money.
A criminal bureaucracy will just harass you until they get what they want -- your money generally. Once they have your money and you're broke, they'll just make sure you toe the line, but otherwise they'll let you be because they recon they cannot get blood from a turnip. It's called a kleptocracy and it's very common now and in History. You are more than welcome to practice warfare against them because it's fair game to try to throw down a dictatorship of thugs.
But the absolute worst nightmare is a bureaucracy of well-meaning weenies, always concerned about your own well-being, sometimes genuinely. Those won't stop harassing you, ever. They know what's good for you. They know you're too dumb to survive without them. And they know that they need to constantly babysit you from cradle to grave. There is no way to get them to stop. You cannot throw money at them to have them leave you alone, because they want you to be happy. Of course, they'll make you miserable. They are the nannycrats.
We are clearly in that case here. And you know the cinch? When nannycrats get ousted, they are surprised, nay, shocked that people don't want their overbearing, crushing attention.
Beware of people who want to make you happy in spite of yourself. Gimme a thug anytime over a nannycrat.
SOX is lke a full employment act for auditors. This law makes it extremely difficult for a start-up to go public and launch an IPO (Initial Public Offering). As a result, the number of IPOs has dropped dramatically, in favor of merger and acquisitions. But M&A are only a musical chair game among pre-existing stockholders, and do nothing to spread the economic growth of companies among new shareholders.
The big winners here are institutional investors and executives with fat stock-options. The loser is Joe Public who is deprived of a chance to bid a few hundred bucks on the next Google.
In short, SOX doesn't just make auditors richer. It also concentrate the wealth in fewer hands.
Well done, Mr. Sarbanes. Now tell me again, with a straight face, that you care about the small people. I need a good laugh today.
I found no study on the effect of cosmic radiations on film, but there are many about their effect on electronic components. I am going to assume that a radiation hit that is detrimental to components is detrimental to film.
IBM did a study, long ago, on the effect of background radiation and cosmic rays on electronic component reliability. They found that high-altitude places such as Denver, Co. were getting an order of magnitude more Single Event Upsets (that is, one solar/cosmic ionizing particle trickling into a CMOS circuit) than sea-level locations. They also found that the atmosphere was en efficient shield and that most of what remained at sea level was Nth-generation particles from a cascade of events triggered by the initial high-energy protons. See http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/401/ogorman .pdf.
Best practice is to shield machines in 50 cm (20 in) of concrete. They noted that 3 floors of concrete buildings offered sufficient protection.
Caveat about some materials (especially ceramics) that contain radionucleides.
Bottom line, put your films in a radon-free basement, and since they chemically decay, put them in as low a temp as they can withstand.
The only thing that could affect it is when precious metal thieves replace it with a wood block. At the rate metal is stolen in Europe, it could already have been swiped. We are at the point where highway signs are stolen and sold by the pound, sorry, the kilogram.
I am using the latest Firefox 1.5. I went to the demo page : http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/ifsnatch/ . The first test shows that it is possible to rewrite the content of an iframe. That is rather dangerous in situations involving trusted messages.
The 2nd demo was supposed to snoop on the keyboad, but it invoked a pop-up, which was immediately blocked by the pop-up blocker. So unconfimed as far as I know. However, the demo page did open a CNN.com page.
Anyone has better "luck" to demo the keyboard snooping?
But concerning the show, do you think that the character of Dr. Balthazar was plausibly portrayed in the series? (I guess it's a yes). If so, it's just me then...
Also, when one of your main characters is supposedly a genius, aren't you supposed to write him as such, instead of having him emote, think and act like a slightly retarded teenager? The writers obviously didn't think so, and that has really riled me up.
True. I read in WWII history books that US authorities very liberally doused DDT on civilians in Europe, notably in Italy, to make sure that they would stay vermin-free. See, when your house lies in rubles, showers can become a problems, especially during Winter. And since fleas are a vector for many epidemic diseases...
As far as I know, Italy didn't see an increase in cancer mortality in cities that were sprayed. Now, the stuff might have side effects on animals, but let me tell you: after visiting Africa and seeing the effects of insect-borne diseases with your own eyes, you start wishing that DDT was still around.
One remark, though: do not underestimate people you disagree with, especially politico. Remember that the image they project has nothing to do with their actual personality. Underestimating them, calling them "morons", lulls you into a false sense of superiority.
You're much better off suspecting them of ulterior motive sthan ascribing their actions to stupidity.
Hey, I'm sympathetic to the protesters. Once, I was manning a stand at a computer show, and I walked out when the mayor of the city showed up among cameras and flashes. I waiting for him to be gone. But notice that I ignored him, I didn't gve him control of the whole show. So I understand the motives, but I do believe that the stategy is misguided.
For the boycott to be successful, it will have to be complete. We'll see. If the boycott is not complete, LinuxTag will be Schaeuble's event, And if it fails, nobody among politicos know what Linux is anyway. It's OSS in Germany that will be hurt, not the Minister who couldn't care less. That's what I am afraid of.
When LinuxTag opens on May 30th, we'll see if the protester's strategy was successful.
That's just a politician who wants to generate PR by attending an event that contains lots of buzzwords ("this Linux thingy and these computers and technology, that's trendy, let's attend"). But he doesn't own the LinuxTag. By staging a boycott, the German OSS crowd gives him a de facto ownership of the event.
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Thank you for answering. I am aware of the research benefits from Federal grants: I worked on such a project myself -- one of these where you have papers and patents but where the real interesting stuff is presented in Tempest-shielded conference rooms under Need to Know. And of course there was ARPANET.
Nobody in his right mind will contest that some very good projects came out of *grants*. These are not *subsidies*. The difference is that subsidies go to a general fund, allowing universoties to spend money as they want and indulge into luxuries such as staff that they can't really afford and department for which enrollment doesn't justify the budgets. Once you're in that trap, you are condemned to forever please the providers of subsidies.
That's very different from having students and staff on a time-limited grant for a specific work.
I hope I cleared any ambiguity.
That story is a very good example of why Federal subsidies are a poisoned gift. An entity starts accepting money from Washington. It starts living above its means. Then D.C. can force the entity to toe the line on whatever matter the lobbyists du jour have sold to Congress, otherwise, no more free money!
Federalization of education is not a good idea. Power should be closer to the universities. Tuitions should reflect actual costs.
Besides, providing more funds to the universities has only resulted in jacking up tuition costs. I don't see an increase in degree quality or research results.
We need the universities to get their snout out of the Fed feeding trough. If all Fed funds were cut, more liberty and responsibility would result, which is always a good thing.
Less lead in gasoline leads to less crime?
This is BS. The violent crime reduction is due to the decrease in disco music, everybody knows it, and the correlation is just as strong as for leaded gasoline. Stronger even. Less Travolta-wannabe dancers, less thumpa-boom noise, less crime, that's a no brainer. At least, works for me. It takes seriously bad rap to be half as annoying as 70s disco.
Why, take me for instance. I am positively humid-eyed when I hear Abba nowadays. But when "Dancing Queen"c ame out in 76, I stopped liking it after the 175th time it was played in a week. At the 203th time, I went berserk and killed anyone wearing a bell-bottom around me. My analyst understood me and got me outta jail. Later, he died of a coke OD. These days, you cannot pull that kind of crap anymore. Less analysts, less dummy judges. And the coke-head massively died. They often were violent, you know.
Seriously, most of the ambiant lead comes from pigments and inks, especially downwind from incinerators. That's why ambiant lead did not decrease much after leaded gas was phased out.
Oh, and in the 70s, jailing violent criminals was indeed considered "unprogressive", which resulted in less of them being locked up. Naaah, cannot be a factor.
So let me get this straight: In order to solve a mere inconvenience (traffic), the lawmakers in the USA's capital are instauring a police dragnet that would be the envy of North Korea.
And this is the enlighted government of an enlightened nation? For crying out loud, are these people nuts? How crazy can these control freaks be?
I don't think that the problem needs such a grossly invasive measure.
Oh, and BTW, the sex industry already provides inflatable dolls with a resistor mesh under the surface that provides a pleasing, uniform skin heat. They just need a car adapter, and voila, the IR cameras are fooled. So I guess Congressmen and other pervs have nothing to fear.
That's what I thought, thank you. This confirms my opinion that this judgement is insane. The margins in the telecom business are often smaller than this. Vonage has to increase its prices proportionally or go out of business.
Is the 5.5% to be taken off the income (sales) or off the profit? That's quite not the same.
This has been going on for years.In 2005, a user of the spamgourmet disposable web site address reported that he was getting spam advertizing stock scams to an address he created exclusively for Ameritrade. Moreover, the user ran a *nix version on his PC and was very careful, so a leak on his end was unlikely. Ameritrade first denied, then compensated him. That was only the start. Since then, many reports surfaced showing that Ameritrade has an email leak problem.
It was only logical that the leak wasn't limited to email addresses.
Meanwhile, Ameritrade denied that their system was compromised. For instance, a spamgourmet user attempted to contact Ameritrade but got nowhere, so he complained about Ameritrade to the BBB. That woke Ameritrade up. They finally answered the user, while denying any breach in their systems:
In the light of their recent admission, this translates into: "Our staff was utterly clueless and couldn't find a Trojan if it hit them in the balls with a brick. This contractor guy ran a newfangled thingie called a "rootkit detector" and whaddya know, it lit up like a Christmas tree. He saod your data got pwned. So there."
Noo! NOT TEH PURPELLL! PLEASE!
Ye gods, these weapon designers have minds of pure evil.
Hey, no fair paraphrasing my brilliant insights! Who does that Lewis guy think he is? :-)
Nice to see that I agree with a quotable philosopher.
A criminal bureaucracy will just harass you until they get what they want -- your money generally. Once they have your money and you're broke, they'll just make sure you toe the line, but otherwise they'll let you be because they recon they cannot get blood from a turnip. It's called a kleptocracy and it's very common now and in History. You are more than welcome to practice warfare against them because it's fair game to try to throw down a dictatorship of thugs.
But the absolute worst nightmare is a bureaucracy of well-meaning weenies, always concerned about your own well-being, sometimes genuinely. Those won't stop harassing you, ever. They know what's good for you. They know you're too dumb to survive without them. And they know that they need to constantly babysit you from cradle to grave. There is no way to get them to stop. You cannot throw money at them to have them leave you alone, because they want you to be happy. Of course, they'll make you miserable. They are the nannycrats.
We are clearly in that case here. And you know the cinch? When nannycrats get ousted, they are surprised, nay, shocked that people don't want their overbearing, crushing attention.
Beware of people who want to make you happy in spite of yourself. Gimme a thug anytime over a nannycrat.
SOX is lke a full employment act for auditors. This law makes it extremely difficult for a start-up to go public and launch an IPO (Initial Public Offering). As a result, the number of IPOs has dropped dramatically, in favor of merger and acquisitions. But M&A are only a musical chair game among pre-existing stockholders, and do nothing to spread the economic growth of companies among new shareholders.
The big winners here are institutional investors and executives with fat stock-options. The loser is Joe Public who is deprived of a chance to bid a few hundred bucks on the next Google.
In short, SOX doesn't just make auditors richer. It also concentrate the wealth in fewer hands.
Well done, Mr. Sarbanes. Now tell me again, with a straight face, that you care about the small people. I need a good laugh today.
I found no study on the effect of cosmic radiations on film, but there are many about their effect on electronic components. I am going to assume that a radiation hit that is detrimental to components is detrimental to film.
n .pdf.
IBM did a study, long ago, on the effect of background radiation and cosmic rays on electronic component reliability. They found that high-altitude places such as Denver, Co. were getting an order of magnitude more Single Event Upsets (that is, one solar/cosmic ionizing particle trickling into a CMOS circuit) than sea-level locations. They also found that the atmosphere was en efficient shield and that most of what remained at sea level was Nth-generation particles from a cascade of events triggered by the initial high-energy protons. See http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/401/ogorma
Best practice is to shield machines in 50 cm (20 in) of concrete. They noted that 3 floors of concrete buildings offered sufficient protection.
Caveat about some materials (especially ceramics) that contain radionucleides.
Bottom line, put your films in a radon-free basement, and since they chemically decay, put them in as low a temp as they can withstand.
The only thing that could affect it is when precious metal thieves replace it with a wood block. At the rate metal is stolen in Europe, it could already have been swiped. We are at the point where highway signs are stolen and sold by the pound, sorry, the kilogram.
I'd wait a bit before booting emacs. It is said that emacs is a very nice operating system, but it lacks a good editor.
My programming instructor said he had an evil boss at a government job who made him use Emacs.
You're lucky. *My* evil boss makes me edit Java and XML with Excel.
I am using the latest Firefox 1.5. I went to the demo page : http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/ifsnatch/ . The first test shows that it is possible to rewrite the content of an iframe. That is rather dangerous in situations involving trusted messages.
The 2nd demo was supposed to snoop on the keyboad, but it invoked a pop-up, which was immediately blocked by the pop-up blocker. So unconfimed as far as I know. However, the demo page did open a CNN.com page.
Anyone has better "luck" to demo the keyboard snooping?
You're right on a general basis.
But concerning the show, do you think that the character of Dr. Balthazar was plausibly portrayed in the series? (I guess it's a yes). If so, it's just me then...
I know a few. They have quirks, but they are not STUPID. That's the point of, er, being a genius.
I think this show jumped the shark in season 3.
Also, when one of your main characters is supposedly a genius, aren't you supposed to write him as such, instead of having him emote, think and act like a slightly retarded teenager? The writers obviously didn't think so, and that has really riled me up.
There is even a spamgourmet user who created a unique address for ameritrade and received spam, thus confirming the trend. See http://www.spamgourmet.com/bbs/viewtopic.php?t=81& postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=60. The user complained and got the same kind of letter as everyone else.
True. I read in WWII history books that US authorities very liberally doused DDT on civilians in Europe, notably in Italy, to make sure that they would stay vermin-free. See, when your house lies in rubles, showers can become a problems, especially during Winter. And since fleas are a vector for many epidemic diseases...
As far as I know, Italy didn't see an increase in cancer mortality in cities that were sprayed. Now, the stuff might have side effects on animals, but let me tell you: after visiting Africa and seeing the effects of insect-borne diseases with your own eyes, you start wishing that DDT was still around.
That's more like it!
One remark, though: do not underestimate people you disagree with, especially politico. Remember that the image they project has nothing to do with their actual personality. Underestimating them, calling them "morons", lulls you into a false sense of superiority.
You're much better off suspecting them of ulterior motive sthan ascribing their actions to stupidity.
Hey, I'm sympathetic to the protesters. Once, I was manning a stand at a computer show, and I walked out when the mayor of the city showed up among cameras and flashes. I waiting for him to be gone. But notice that I ignored him, I didn't gve him control of the whole show. So I understand the motives, but I do believe that the stategy is misguided. For the boycott to be successful, it will have to be complete. We'll see. If the boycott is not complete, LinuxTag will be Schaeuble's event, And if it fails, nobody among politicos know what Linux is anyway. It's OSS in Germany that will be hurt, not the Minister who couldn't care less. That's what I am afraid of. When LinuxTag opens on May 30th, we'll see if the protester's strategy was successful.
That's just a politician who wants to generate PR by attending an event that contains lots of buzzwords ("this Linux thingy and these computers and technology, that's trendy, let's attend"). But he doesn't own the LinuxTag. By staging a boycott, the German OSS crowd gives him a de facto ownership of the event.