I've never understood why Firefox makes it so difficult for web site users to use unsigned keys. Now it makes sense, the "authorities" probably have a back-door into the companies that sell "authenticated" keys and can access those keys "when necessary" (and with what counts as "due process" nowadays).
Did the spy agencies infiltrate the crypto system in Firefox and put these scary warnings in place to prevent a proliferation of self-signed keys that they can't access? The Wired article mentioned the FBI was "entitled" to the Lavabit SSL key - how many other SSL keys are they "entitled" to?
Striking just shows at they can't. Otherwise they already would have.
I've worked in high-altitude mines in northern Chile and suggest that the working conditions are similar, but the pay is better in mining. There is a large pool of skilled and semi-skilled people who work in the high altitude mines (Collahuasi, Quebrada Blanca, Pascua Lama, Los Bronces, Andina, El Teniente just to name a few) that are the same labour pool that the telescopes are competing for.
The demand for skilled people in mining is driving up wages in Chile. Since these telescopes are competing for the same skilled people, they better pay competitive wages or else watch their people head elsewhere.
> Honest question, do the Canadians give us "special pricing", or do they sell at market rates?
Short answer is "special pricing", for two reasons.
First reason is the "Brent-WTI spread" that makes land-locked oil delivered to Oklahoma (WTI, today= $85.12) cheaper than sea-borne oil (Brent $107.78). Second reason is that a lot of Canada's current exports to the USA are "heavy crude" that trade at a discount to WTI (varies up to $30) because they require extra equipment to process (delayed cokers or hydrotreaters). This equipment is common in refineries near tide-water (Texas gulf coast, for example), but few exist in the US mid-west. The glut of heavy crude in that market has driven down the land-locked price that Canadians get by about $50/bbl.
Most oil in Canada comes from land-locked Alberta and Saskatchewan. Since Canada doesn't have a major pipeline connecting these provinces to the Pacific coast (yet), our American neighbours are getting our oil at a discount to what, for example, Korea would pay.
Avoid using overly abstract concepts, and try to put things in terms they can understand. Since you are teaching statistics, try to use a lot of gambling references (lotto, roulette, etc.) since nearly all the students will have some familiarity with those.
I've found I can teach engineering concepts to elementary school teachers as long as I avoid formulae (and avoid using Latin references, so use the term "formulas":-) ).
I do process engineering calculations in some pretty big applications. Many of them are web-based since I'm too lazy to program user interfaces. Side bonus is two of us can work on the application at the same time if it is web-based.
The single most useful thing I can recommend for engineering & science students is SQL. I can't tell you how many people I've seen using spreadsheets for a completely inappropriate application because they don't know how a proper database works.
But SQL doesn't do much by itself - I use PHP to interface with it. PHP has its problems, but it is simple, forgiving, and widespread.
I frequently click the ads of companies and organizations I disagree with (eg. PETA, soft) to bleed money from the advertiser to the website. Except I open the ad in a background tab on Firefox, then close the tab without viewing it.
This is the same thing as send back those pre-paid envelopes for 'business reply' to groups I dislike and leaving the envelope empty.
Computers are good at solving problems, so learn how to solve problems and encode that methodology into computer languages. The language doesn't matter -- in fact you may find some problems are better suited to certain languages/concepts. I tell people that I program in JAFPL (Just Another [] Programming Language).
I'm actually a mining engineer who can do some programming. I regularly use mashups of MySQL, PHP, Java and web coding. I dismissed C and C++ as 'too tough' for the problems I wanted to solve, so found these easier languages that accomplished what I need.
I've been playing a Linux/Windows/Mac friendly MMORG called Wurm Online for some time now. The basic idea is you appear in an iron-age society and there is largely NO storyline. You settle and build your little farm, or you join a village and become a craftsman, or you turn to the "black light" and become a fanatical raider.
But the land is what's magic about Wurm. You can terraform almost everything in the game - chop down forests and make plains, plant trees and make plains into forests, dig canals, flatten mountaintops and build fortification, dig tunnel labyrinths, and more. About the only thing players haven't done yet is fill in the ocean with dirt, but that should be possible the way the game engine is written:-) . So it is more than a war game, in fact the war is almost incidental to building the villages that fight the wars.
True capitalism, quoting Wikipedia Adam Smith's 'invisible hand', is:
The "invisible hand" of the market, through which the pursuit of individual interest produces a collective good for society. This belief in the market as the most fair and efficient arbitrator of resources is strongly associated with the classical liberal doctrine of minimal government intervention in the economy.
Capitalism has nothing to do with whatever you were whinging about.
Typically the type of gold mine that uses bug-leaching is a sulphide hosted deposit. The gold is encapsulated in sulphide mineral and is not available to be extracted. Fortunately, there are bacteria called Thiobacillus ferrooxidans who can dissolve and disintegrate sulphide matrices, thereby liberate the micron-sized gold grains.
The bugs don't actually leach the gold. After bug-leaching destroys the sulphides, you cyanide leach the heap to get the gold.
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I use a Palm Tungsten T PDA and wanted a basic bluetooth GSM phone that I could use to connect the Palm to the Internet. The best I found -- actually, the only basic phone I found -- was the Nokia 6310i. Basic black and white screen, basic keyboard, somewhat large compared to other phones, but IT WORKS. My 6310i is now over 3 years old and I've seen nothing on the Canadian market that looks like it. I have a great Palm PDA - why would I want a $500 colour phone discounted to $99 with a 3 year contract?
Revolt is also known as "strike" in labour circles. I know businesses and government departments that have been shut down for less that what the post described.
If your customers are not happy with your service, then I suggest it is more than them being arrogant. Unhappy customers tend to find other ways to get things they want, in spite of your dictatorship. Deal with it.
I quote jobs on the basis of "bring my own computer" and the basic software for it. I expect the IT dept at the jobsite to provide:
Email access to the local system through something like IMAP or POP, but I'll settle for Lotus Notes in a pinch.
Network filesystem access for my workstation, either direct or VPN. No remote terminals! My software is needed to do my calculations, and if I can't store the files on "your network", then I'll store them on my hard drive and too bad for you.
Filesystem access from remote locations (home, other offices). I travel a lot and can't get much done if I'm limited to working in "their" office.
In return, I promise the customer:
To provide a PC with all relevant security patches installed, and virus protection enabled.
To use Client sanctioned applications where, in my professional opinion, they are capable of performing the tasks. This usually means Microsoft Office and usually means I get in a scrap with the IT guys when Excel is mandated for doing material balance or matrix calculations - both duties it is not suitable for. (Anybody able to explain to an IT dude what a Singular Matrix is and why it is not Invertible, in spite of what Excel does?)
I was at a presentation a couple of months ago where one of Environment Canada's senior climatologists made the observation that CO2 is the second most powerful greenhouse gas, and methane is the third. The most important (in terms of affecting the atmosphere's ability to retain heat) is water vapour.
This sits well with anyone who has ever spent a winter in the Canadian prairies. Cloudy nights are "warm", say -5 degrees C, whereas clear nights are cold, like -25 degrees C.
One reason for the piles is that the bedrock (devonian limestone) is over 100m below surface. Most of those plants are, in fact, built on 'lean oilsand', ergo, they are built on oily sand. Only the friction of long piles holds the tall structures upright.
The "vortex" is a analogy. The relativity formulae predict a behaviour of the universe that this probe is trying to observe. If "vortex" makes you dizzy then think corriolis effect or centrifugal forces, both of which are bogus simplifications humans use to describe messy bits of Newtonian mechanics. So, think of the vortex as a simplified mathematical/physics construction to describe some horrifically complicated equations.
Oh, and don't try this experiment in Kansas. Relativity is only a theory, after all.
I've never had a big problem with cumulative error. Typically the floating point errors are in the range of 10^-12. Not significant for the number of iterations I run.
Regarding Professional Engineers using _any_ software... this is a pet peeve of mine from way back. I don't trust black boxes. I also don't trust spreadsheets until they have undergone a lot of truthing. In order to use a spreadsheet in a formal calc where there are circulating loads (or other circular calculations), I want to see "double entry accounting" and some "sensibility checks" that the results are approximately what was expected. I've seen stats that between 70% and 90% of spreadsheets contain errors, and my experience says that is about right.
Using black-boxes in engineering calcs is a bigger problem that almost nobody in the chemical engineering business takes too seriously. In short, the calculations done in programs like Aspen, Matlab and other simulators will eventually run into any of the following problems: boundary conditions they can't handle, errors in databases, and extrapolations beyond what is reasonable all can give horrific error results. How does the average (junior) engineer using black-box software know that when a model is unsuitable? How often does it tell you that "the model for bitumen doesn't work in the presence of water"? At least if I build the model for bitumen from scratch, then I should know the limitations of it. Then the danger is incorrectly programming the model rather than a hidden model limitation.
Simply, because I like the format - written news on my Palm. I like it so much that I pay for it. Anything of value to me is worth supporting.
Television can't do news properly and Radio is only useful for transmitting headlines and local news. If I want good coverage of international news, then I get an online newspaper and stuff it into Plucker and read it at my leasure.
Excel is a serious problem for people like me doing circulating load calculations in process engineering. See my papers here and here. It is OK for chequebooks, but don't expect to design a copper smelter using it (use an ancient ver of 1-2-3 instead).
To be blunt, the guys who wrote the Excel GUI got an "A" in computer science, but the guys who built the calculation engine only got a "C+". To be a truely great spreadsheet, Excel must:
Use backward chaining to iterate circular calculations
Not invert singular matrices
Put in a more robust statistics package, although this may be a sub-set of the matrix math problems.
Any engineer who gives me a calculation done in Excel using circular reference calculations had better be prepared to get his butt roasted. I've had 10Mb files modelling a copper smelter that converged to a wrong answer - that's unacceptable given that the same calculation saved as a 1-2-3 file converged to a correct answer in 10 seconds using Lotus 1-2-3.
I do contract engineering work for mining and oilsand clients. In the last 5 years I have worked, in order: in Calgary, Vancouver, Edmonton, Vancouver, Edmonton and am currently in Vancouver. Two of the lean times have been very lean and forced the move from city to city, the other moves were chasing better opportunities.
Two other comments: -I could never have made this work if I was encumbered with a wife/offspring. -I will never go back to being an employee. Well, if I get hungry enough I might, but if I'm not hungry, then I'm not interested in being an employee.
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I've never understood why Firefox makes it so difficult for web site users to use unsigned keys. Now it makes sense, the "authorities" probably have a back-door into the companies that sell "authenticated" keys and can access those keys "when necessary" (and with what counts as "due process" nowadays).
Did the spy agencies infiltrate the crypto system in Firefox and put these scary warnings in place to prevent a proliferation of self-signed keys that they can't access? The Wired article mentioned the FBI was "entitled" to the Lavabit SSL key - how many other SSL keys are they "entitled" to?
Frankly, I dont think the US should use gMail etc for governmental communications either.
Correct. Google might outsource the Gmail service to India.
Go find work elsewhere then.
Striking just shows at they can't. Otherwise they already would have.
I've worked in high-altitude mines in northern Chile and suggest that the working conditions are similar, but the pay is better in mining. There is a large pool of skilled and semi-skilled people who work in the high altitude mines (Collahuasi, Quebrada Blanca, Pascua Lama, Los Bronces, Andina, El Teniente just to name a few) that are the same labour pool that the telescopes are competing for.
The demand for skilled people in mining is driving up wages in Chile. Since these telescopes are competing for the same skilled people, they better pay competitive wages or else watch their people head elsewhere.
> Honest question, do the Canadians give us "special pricing", or do they sell at market rates?
Short answer is "special pricing", for two reasons.
First reason is the "Brent-WTI spread" that makes land-locked oil delivered to Oklahoma (WTI, today= $85.12) cheaper than sea-borne oil (Brent $107.78). Second reason is that a lot of Canada's current exports to the USA are "heavy crude" that trade at a discount to WTI (varies up to $30) because they require extra equipment to process (delayed cokers or hydrotreaters). This equipment is common in refineries near tide-water (Texas gulf coast, for example), but few exist in the US mid-west. The glut of heavy crude in that market has driven down the land-locked price that Canadians get by about $50/bbl.
Most oil in Canada comes from land-locked Alberta and Saskatchewan. Since Canada doesn't have a major pipeline connecting these provinces to the Pacific coast (yet), our American neighbours are getting our oil at a discount to what, for example, Korea would pay.
Avoid using overly abstract concepts, and try to put things in terms they can understand. Since you are teaching statistics, try to use a lot of gambling references (lotto, roulette, etc.) since nearly all the students will have some familiarity with those.
I've found I can teach engineering concepts to elementary school teachers as long as I avoid formulae (and avoid using Latin references, so use the term "formulas" :-) ).
I do process engineering calculations in some pretty big applications. Many of them are web-based since I'm too lazy to program user interfaces. Side bonus is two of us can work on the application at the same time if it is web-based.
The single most useful thing I can recommend for engineering & science students is SQL. I can't tell you how many people I've seen using spreadsheets for a completely inappropriate application because they don't know how a proper database works.
But SQL doesn't do much by itself - I use PHP to interface with it. PHP has its problems, but it is simple, forgiving, and widespread.
I frequently click the ads of companies and organizations I disagree with (eg. PETA, soft) to bleed money from the advertiser to the website. Except I open the ad in a background tab on Firefox, then close the tab without viewing it.
This is the same thing as send back those pre-paid envelopes for 'business reply' to groups I dislike and leaving the envelope empty.
Computers are good at solving problems, so learn how to solve problems and encode that methodology into computer languages. The language doesn't matter -- in fact you may find some problems are better suited to certain languages/concepts. I tell people that I program in JAFPL (Just Another [] Programming Language).
I'm actually a mining engineer who can do some programming. I regularly use mashups of MySQL, PHP, Java and web coding. I dismissed C and C++ as 'too tough' for the problems I wanted to solve, so found these easier languages that accomplished what I need.
As many people in India speak English than there are Americans who speak English. (source http://bizpr.news.prweb.com/releases/2004/4/prweb116904.htm) Guess which way Indians spell maths?
This is why so many ships are registered in Panama and Liberia. Also why so many people migrate from basket-case country X to first-world country Y.
Commerce and free people seek countries with the best conditions, and then migrate. Thus the requirement for the Berlin Wall to limit both.
But the land is what's magic about Wurm. You can terraform almost everything in the game - chop down forests and make plains, plant trees and make plains into forests, dig canals, flatten mountaintops and build fortification, dig tunnel labyrinths, and more. About the only thing players haven't done yet is fill in the ocean with dirt, but that should be possible the way the game engine is written :-) . So it is more than a war game, in fact the war is almost incidental to building the villages that fight the wars.
Oooo, screenshots
The "invisible hand" of the market, through which the pursuit of individual interest produces a collective good for society. This belief in the market as the most fair and efficient arbitrator of resources is strongly associated with the classical liberal doctrine of minimal government intervention in the economy.
Capitalism has nothing to do with whatever you were whinging about.
-AD
Typically the type of gold mine that uses bug-leaching is a sulphide hosted deposit. The gold is encapsulated in sulphide mineral and is not available to be extracted. Fortunately, there are bacteria called Thiobacillus ferrooxidans who can dissolve and disintegrate sulphide matrices, thereby liberate the micron-sized gold grains. The bugs don't actually leach the gold. After bug-leaching destroys the sulphides, you cyanide leach the heap to get the gold. -AD
I use a Palm Tungsten T PDA and wanted a basic bluetooth GSM phone that I could use to connect the Palm to the Internet. The best I found -- actually, the only basic phone I found -- was the Nokia 6310i. Basic black and white screen, basic keyboard, somewhat large compared to other phones, but IT WORKS. My 6310i is now over 3 years old and I've seen nothing on the Canadian market that looks like it. I have a great Palm PDA - why would I want a $500 colour phone discounted to $99 with a 3 year contract?
If your customers are not happy with your service, then I suggest it is more than them being arrogant. Unhappy customers tend to find other ways to get things they want, in spite of your dictatorship. Deal with it.
- Email access to the local system through something like IMAP or POP, but I'll settle for Lotus Notes in a pinch.
- Network filesystem access for my workstation, either direct or VPN. No remote terminals! My software is needed to do my calculations, and if I can't store the files on "your network", then I'll store them on my hard drive and too bad for you.
- Filesystem access from remote locations (home, other offices). I travel a lot and can't get much done if I'm limited to working in "their" office.
In return, I promise the customer:- To provide a PC with all relevant security patches installed, and virus protection enabled.
- To use Client sanctioned applications where, in my professional opinion, they are capable of performing the tasks. This usually means Microsoft Office and usually means I get in a scrap with the IT guys when Excel is mandated for doing material balance or matrix calculations - both duties it is not suitable for. (Anybody able to explain to an IT dude what a Singular Matrix is and why it is not Invertible, in spite of what Excel does?)
-ADAnd another oddball use of spreadsheets that will curl most people's short hairs.
-AD
-AD
This sits well with anyone who has ever spent a winter in the Canadian prairies. Cloudy nights are "warm", say -5 degrees C, whereas clear nights are cold, like -25 degrees C.
So we have to ban that dihydrogen monoxide stuff.
One reason for the piles is that the bedrock (devonian limestone) is over 100m below surface. Most of those plants are, in fact, built on 'lean oilsand', ergo, they are built on oily sand. Only the friction of long piles holds the tall structures upright.
-AD
The "vortex" is a analogy. The relativity formulae predict a behaviour of the universe that this probe is trying to observe. If "vortex" makes you dizzy then think corriolis effect or centrifugal forces, both of which are bogus simplifications humans use to describe messy bits of Newtonian mechanics. So, think of the vortex as a simplified mathematical/physics construction to describe some horrifically complicated equations.
Oh, and don't try this experiment in Kansas. Relativity is only a theory, after all.
-AD
I've never had a big problem with cumulative error. Typically the floating point errors are in the range of 10^-12. Not significant for the number of iterations I run.
... this is a pet peeve of mine from way back. I don't trust black boxes. I also don't trust spreadsheets until they have undergone a lot of truthing. In order to use a spreadsheet in a formal calc where there are circulating loads (or other circular calculations), I want to see "double entry accounting" and some "sensibility checks" that the results are approximately what was expected. I've seen stats that between 70% and 90% of spreadsheets contain errors, and my experience says that is about right.
Regarding Professional Engineers using _any_ software
Using black-boxes in engineering calcs is a bigger problem that almost nobody in the chemical engineering business takes too seriously. In short, the calculations done in programs like Aspen, Matlab and other simulators will eventually run into any of the following problems: boundary conditions they can't handle, errors in databases, and extrapolations beyond what is reasonable all can give horrific error results. How does the average (junior) engineer using black-box software know that when a model is unsuitable? How often does it tell you that "the model for bitumen doesn't work in the presence of water"? At least if I build the model for bitumen from scratch, then I should know the limitations of it. Then the danger is incorrectly programming the model rather than a hidden model limitation.
-AD
Television can't do news properly and Radio is only useful for transmitting headlines and local news. If I want good coverage of international news, then I get an online newspaper and stuff it into Plucker and read it at my leasure.
-AD
To be blunt, the guys who wrote the Excel GUI got an "A" in computer science, but the guys who built the calculation engine only got a "C+". To be a truely great spreadsheet, Excel must:
Any engineer who gives me a calculation done in Excel using circular reference calculations had better be prepared to get his butt roasted. I've had 10Mb files modelling a copper smelter that converged to a wrong answer - that's unacceptable given that the same calculation saved as a 1-2-3 file converged to a correct answer in 10 seconds using Lotus 1-2-3.
-AD
I do contract engineering work for mining and oilsand clients. In the last 5 years I have worked, in order: in Calgary, Vancouver, Edmonton, Vancouver, Edmonton and am currently in Vancouver. Two of the lean times have been very lean and forced the move from city to city, the other moves were chasing better opportunities.
Two other comments:
-I could never have made this work if I was encumbered with a wife/offspring.
-I will never go back to being an employee. Well, if I get hungry enough I might, but if I'm not hungry, then I'm not interested in being an employee.
-AD