This was written by James McHenry; he recorded it in the notes he took when he was the Maryland delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention. It's unclear the specific date, but Dr. McHenry clearly attributed the quote directly to Franklin. Source: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/... weylin
This story is misleading. Is the concentration of nutrients going down? Yes. Is that a problem?
Well...
As it turns out, what's really happening is the carbon dioxide is promoting bulk growth, which is making more food (particularly, more carbohydrates) in the same amount of time. However, the nutrients are getting stocked into the food at the same rate.
So, the total carbohydrate loading is increasing, making food bulkier. But the total nutrient loading in the food is the same. Since the bulk is larger with the same nutrient loading, the concentration (nutrients per unit bulk) goes down.
Clearly by my verbiage, I'm not a botanist. And I'll say I'm not a climate change denier. But it's not clear to me why this specifically is a "problem" per se.
Why does it need to be a Great Circle route? A Great Circle route is a route that follows an arc of a circle whose origin is the center of the Earth. But if I plot a course to follow a line of Longitude such that I drive around Antarctica, I've followed a straight path but just not a Great Circle route. There's other non-Great Circle routes that go at an angle, the only key is where the origin is of the circle. On top of that, limiting to just Great Circle routes make the additional fallacious assumption that the Earth is a sphere, when it's actually an oblate spheroid: it bulges at the Equator, so the Great Circle that is the Equator is actually larger than a Great Circle that passes through the poles. (For clarity: it's really really close to a sphere, but they're looking for extremes so it matters.)
Not saying the solution won't be a Great Circle route - It likely will be, since that's the theoretical biggest possible straight line. But there's no reason is *has* to be.
Concur. The question is "why is Einstein famous." The adult answer is that he was an inflection point in scientific progression, more than most other really famous scientists; the adolescent answer is that he single-handedly changed science.
Basically: 1. Aristotle invented science. 2. Newton called shenanigans on Aristotle's work, and invented both correct science and the math to support it. 3. Einstein changed the gears of the scientific community in ways we're still trying to figure out the details of. Einstein demonstrated that Newton was only correct in special cases (that happen to be our everyday experience), and that the Universe is really really weird once you get outside the special cases.
You remember reading that? So, you were old enough to read. I remember watching Wiley E Coyote get an anvil dropped on his head when I was... younger than Kindergarten. I definitely didn't realize that wasn't real; I vividly remember trying to figure out how Mr. Coyote's body could bend like that from the anvil, and thinking the 12-inch lump is what really happened when you get a big hunk of metal dropped on your head. I definitely had some level of "grok" regarding death, but for comedy- and cartoon-vs-reality, especially 40s-era slapstick, that conceptualization happened somewhere around 1st grade.
Maybe I'm just dumb like you suggest? Perhaps. But the point isn't about intelligence, it's about the mental capability to process a YouTube video, and the resulting impacts against happiness. If you remember "the good old days" as actually being good old days, then you're memory of them is much rosier than how it actually was.
The Law of Differential Masses says the larger ship gets right-of-way. The Law of the Sea, or more correctly the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea as well as the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, says the more maneuverable vessel is the give-way vessel, but only when higher levels of responsibility aren't present.
An example of a higher level of responsibility? How about International Rule 8.f(iii), as defined by the US Coast Guard Rules of the Road: "A vessel, the passage of which is not to be impeded remains fully obliged to comply with the rules of this part when the two vessels are approaching one another so as to involve risk of collision."
Or the Inland version of the same rule: "A vessel the passage of which is not to be impeded remains fully obliged to comply with the Rules of Subpart B (Rules 4-19) when the two vessels are approaching one another so as to involve risk of collision."
Or the English vernacular version: "Fuck all if you have right-of-way, you still have responsibility to avoid going bump." Which means even if the destroyer's driver was an ass-hat and was 99% in the wrong, if the merchant was making way under her own power then she cannot avoid her own responsibility.
The problem is that what a quantum physicist refers to as a "wave function" does not directly relate to the EM waves themselves. What's being referred to is that the specific properties of a particle (location, momentum, time, etc) is not deterministic, but rather probabilistic. And when you plot this function, the result looks remarkably "wave-like" in that the probabilities are not continuous, but rather they have highs and lows, or peaks and troughs.
Enter Heisenburg and his "uncertainty principle." it holds true that you cannot know all properties of a particle until you measure them, but until you measure them ALL possible states are not only possible... but in fact the particle is *actually* in all possible states at the same time. It's only when you measure it, does the particle "choose" where it wants to be. This is called "collapsing" the wave function - of all the possibilities that it can be / is, it suddenly resolves to only one of those possibilities.
So to answer the question: it has nothing whatsoever to do with radio.
Where things get even more interesting, is that two particles can have a causal relationship in their states - that is, while they might both have wave functions, when once of the pair resolves where it is, the other of the pair resolves itself as well to match it... even though no communication occurs between them. the second particle might never have been measured, and yet it's wave function still collapses when you measure the first particle. This is known as "quantum entanglement," or what Einstein famously referred to as "spooky action at a distance" because it happens faster then "c".
I haven't read TFA, but I have to believe they're somehow making use of this phenomenon.
weylin
And... I am not a physicist, but my college roommate now holds a PhD in the field, my dad was an astronomer, and I'm a devoted viewer of PBS's "spacetime" youtube series. So I'm a "lay" physicist. https://www.youtube.com/channe...
Incandescent bulbs are hot from heat, not IR. There's a lot of IR, as well, which may make this kind of coating worthwhile; but, the heat will still radiate.
The only problem with this is that there is NOONE in the US that Apple can go to for manufacturing.
Apple was, for a long time, a die-hard "Made in the US" organization. Eventually, though, they got to the point where American Manufacturing was just completely unable to manufacture their products. And it's not just the individual plants - it's the entire manufacturing chain, from mining to final product assembly. Obama even asked Steve Jobs what Apple needed to manufacture the iPhone in the US. His reply? To paraphrase: "it can't be done."
Richard Stallman *****HATED***** copyright. Hated it with a passion. He found the very concept repugnant. So, he wrote the GPL to essentially say "do whatever you want with this, just don't say you invented it from scratch and don't prevent anyone else from doing the same." The GPL is essentially about removing copyright restrictions, and preventing someone else from re-implementing them back onto the same body of work.
So, while copyright law does in fact make the GPL enforceable, the whole pint of the GPL is to use copyright law to remove copyright. Hence why it's often called copyleft - compared to a normal copyright, it's kinda the logical opposite.
And if we're getting into poop-flinging on "logic 101" I recommend studying what logic actually is. Formal Logic; Informal Logic (aka Natural Language Logic); Symbolic Logic; Mathematical Logic... there's several different types of "logic." This discussion revolved primarily around the informal variety, which your parent post used correctly.
I remember playing around with my dad's 10MB MFM on the Wang PC-clone (80386 at 20MHz and a Turbo button that would take it to 25MHz) that he borrowed from work in '85 when I was 7 (he worked at Wang as a computer imaging scientist and engineer). It was a half-height drive (which for those who don't know means it only took up a single 5" slot) and could store oh-so-much more than I could throw at it at the time.
He also brought home an 85MB MFM full-height drive (two 5" bays) for me to play with to see if I could get it to work with that same computer. After struggling for a week he brought me a DIP and said "here, try swapping this with the one that's installed" (it was an experimental PROM BIOS chip, though I didn't realize it at the time). Worked fine after that.
Not quite old enough to remember the FM drives. The IDEs were a god-send; the MFM's ISA expansion cards were massive (>12" long?), and a pain to deal with (all those jumpers -shudder-).
By the way, anyone care to make a guess how big my Windows partition is?
Bigger than your penis?
My 20GB Windows partition is on an 80GB Western Digital drive, so it should be possible to somehow figure out the length it takes up. By length, I mean the longest straight line that can be placed against the physical area taken up on the platter(s).
Assuming *at most* that the 20GB tracks are on the outside of the 3.5" drive, I would say that makes - 3.5"? I'm not certain you would necessarily want to advertise that....
What you say is true for power-users, but an average user has neither the requisite understanding, nor desire, nor availability to do the manual labor necessary.
My wife doesn't know the first thing about auto-updates beyond asking me "hey I'm getting this pop-up in the bottom right-corner of my screen, do you know why I'm getting it?" And I just don't have the time to do it on her laptop regularly. I don't auto-update everything on her laptop and periodically I'll update her software (about every three or fours months, like I did for 4 hours yesterday), but for some things it's a necessity in order to get the bona fide security patches she actually needs in a timely manner.
The problem with having everyone use only a single version is that while known-problems would get patched, unknown-problems would bite the ENTIRE network and take it down again all at once. Diversity has its downsides, but a slight amount is a good way to prevent that. Weylin
Midshipmen majoring in Computer Science at the US Naval Academy (my major and alma mater, class of '00) are indeed cognizant of Admiral Hopper, though I don't think there's anything specifically that teaches about her contributions. Part of this (and here I start to hypothesize) is the relative age - ADM Hopper's contributions, though extremely important and noteworthy, are relatively recent, in comparison to the rest of what goes on at USNA - the goal is, after all, to provide highly technically-trained graduates to drive ships, not go on to academic careers. Much of the infrastructure and heritage stems from the people and events of the Revolutionary War (aka "War for American Independence") through World War II, heavily favoring the mid- to late-1800's. Operational topics before and after that (and during, to give meaning and context to the heritage) are taught in classroom settings. But though ADM Hopper's contributions to the field of computer science are important, at best it's the contributions that are taught (not the name), and definitely not in an operational context (she spent her entire career as a reservist and rarely was operational).
Several other comments talk about a pair of particles being created out of nothing, one gets absorbed and the other flies away. This is basically right, but can be confusing (the one that gets absorbed has negative energy in order to conserve energy). Here's an easier mental model....
Steve Hawking came up with an idea a while ago (70's perhaps?). He was thinking about black holes whose event horizon was around the size of an atom. Then he put it up against the Heizenberg Uncertainty Principle. He realized that particles in these black holes would have such a high degree of certainty about their position, that there would be such a low certainty about their velocity. Therefor, there would be some that would be REALLY fast. Not fast enough that they could escape the pull of the black hole, but fast enough that they could get just above the event horizon. There, they could give off a high-energy photon, and fall back in. This photon, since it was emitted outside the event horizon, would actually escape. This radiation can (and has been) detected, and causes what is known as evaporation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation#Black_hole_evaporation
Ironically, this means that smaller black holes (which have higher certainty about a particle's position) evaporate faster. Large-ish black holes absorb more energy cosmic microwave radiation than they emit in Hawking radiation, but if they have small enough mass (I believe smaller than the size of our moon), they emit more Hawking radiation than they receive from the cosmic background.
ROT-26 is DMCA approved... again, assuming the "ROT-13 is DMCA-approved" comment is correct. ROT-26 is application of the ROT-13 algorithm... It's just applied twice. Using the same logic, any ROT-x algorithm (where x is any positive integer multiplied by 13) is DMCA-approved.
FYI, any and all internally-available details of any cracking attempts (such as which organization is instigating, intensity, effectiveness of our measures, etc.) are FOUO at the very least, and usually CONFIDENTIAL or better. Having seen the SECRET messages, and dealing with the CTOs and INFOCON changes (I'm the CIO at my command), I've had to deal with a few situations where the classification has mattered.
I work at the Naval Submarine School in Groton, CT. Actually, I'm the CIO there (until the 26th when I transfer to Norfolk), how apropos.
Anyway, I took over the job when the fileserver crashed, and the CIO at the time didn't understand the difference between a workstation and a server, and couldn't figure out what "no backup" meant. Bless her soul, she's a great leader over a good many things. But she was assigned to the job because the commanding officer at the time was not IT-savvy, and said "it's just management of people, the techs know what they're doing."
After she was fired, they looked for someone IT-smart. I e-mailed my boss and said "I've been doing IT support for 3 or 4 years, one on a submarine, two in college, and several months in the Computer Science department after graduation while waiting for follow-on schooling. And I have a BS in CS." They took about 2 minutes to give me the job. That's how long it took for them to receive the e-mail.
Anyway, enough rambling, my point is that I can understand how it happens. You don't have to be IT-smart to become CIO. You just have to demonstrate to whomever is hiring that you can get the job done.
Slashdot Mirror
This was written by James McHenry; he recorded it in the notes he took when he was the Maryland delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention. It's unclear the specific date, but Dr. McHenry clearly attributed the quote directly to Franklin.
Source: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/...
weylin
This story is misleading. Is the concentration of nutrients going down? Yes. Is that a problem?
Well...
As it turns out, what's really happening is the carbon dioxide is promoting bulk growth, which is making more food (particularly, more carbohydrates) in the same amount of time. However, the nutrients are getting stocked into the food at the same rate.
So, the total carbohydrate loading is increasing, making food bulkier. But the total nutrient loading in the food is the same. Since the bulk is larger with the same nutrient loading, the concentration (nutrients per unit bulk) goes down.
Clearly by my verbiage, I'm not a botanist. And I'll say I'm not a climate change denier. But it's not clear to me why this specifically is a "problem" per se.
weylin
Why does it need to be a Great Circle route? A Great Circle route is a route that follows an arc of a circle whose origin is the center of the Earth. But if I plot a course to follow a line of Longitude such that I drive around Antarctica, I've followed a straight path but just not a Great Circle route. There's other non-Great Circle routes that go at an angle, the only key is where the origin is of the circle. On top of that, limiting to just Great Circle routes make the additional fallacious assumption that the Earth is a sphere, when it's actually an oblate spheroid: it bulges at the Equator, so the Great Circle that is the Equator is actually larger than a Great Circle that passes through the poles. (For clarity: it's really really close to a sphere, but they're looking for extremes so it matters.)
Not saying the solution won't be a Great Circle route - It likely will be, since that's the theoretical biggest possible straight line. But there's no reason is *has* to be.
weylin
Concur. The question is "why is Einstein famous." The adult answer is that he was an inflection point in scientific progression, more than most other really famous scientists; the adolescent answer is that he single-handedly changed science.
Basically:
1. Aristotle invented science.
2. Newton called shenanigans on Aristotle's work, and invented both correct science and the math to support it.
3. Einstein changed the gears of the scientific community in ways we're still trying to figure out the details of. Einstein demonstrated that Newton was only correct in special cases (that happen to be our everyday experience), and that the Universe is really really weird once you get outside the special cases.
weylin
The only thing that screams "I'm from New England!" louder than that?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
You remember reading that? So, you were old enough to read. I remember watching Wiley E Coyote get an anvil dropped on his head when I was... younger than Kindergarten. I definitely didn't realize that wasn't real; I vividly remember trying to figure out how Mr. Coyote's body could bend like that from the anvil, and thinking the 12-inch lump is what really happened when you get a big hunk of metal dropped on your head. I definitely had some level of "grok" regarding death, but for comedy- and cartoon-vs-reality, especially 40s-era slapstick, that conceptualization happened somewhere around 1st grade.
Maybe I'm just dumb like you suggest? Perhaps. But the point isn't about intelligence, it's about the mental capability to process a YouTube video, and the resulting impacts against happiness. If you remember "the good old days" as actually being good old days, then you're memory of them is much rosier than how it actually was.
The Law of Differential Masses says the larger ship gets right-of-way. The Law of the Sea, or more correctly the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea as well as the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, says the more maneuverable vessel is the give-way vessel, but only when higher levels of responsibility aren't present.
An example of a higher level of responsibility? How about International Rule 8.f(iii), as defined by the US Coast Guard Rules of the Road: "A vessel, the passage of which is not to be impeded remains fully obliged to comply with the rules of this part when the two vessels are approaching one another so as to involve risk of collision."
Or the Inland version of the same rule: "A vessel the passage of which is not to be impeded remains fully obliged to comply with the Rules of Subpart B (Rules 4-19) when the two vessels are approaching one another so as to involve risk of collision."
Or the English vernacular version: "Fuck all if you have right-of-way, you still have responsibility to avoid going bump." Which means even if the destroyer's driver was an ass-hat and was 99% in the wrong, if the merchant was making way under her own power then she cannot avoid her own responsibility.
Wondering who Google would turn to find information.
That's sort of like asking "where do Hawai'ians go for vacation? (BTW: it's Las Vegas, aka "the 9th island.")
weylin
The problem is that what a quantum physicist refers to as a "wave function" does not directly relate to the EM waves themselves. What's being referred to is that the specific properties of a particle (location, momentum, time, etc) is not deterministic, but rather probabilistic. And when you plot this function, the result looks remarkably "wave-like" in that the probabilities are not continuous, but rather they have highs and lows, or peaks and troughs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Enter Heisenburg and his "uncertainty principle." it holds true that you cannot know all properties of a particle until you measure them, but until you measure them ALL possible states are not only possible... but in fact the particle is *actually* in all possible states at the same time. It's only when you measure it, does the particle "choose" where it wants to be. This is called "collapsing" the wave function - of all the possibilities that it can be / is, it suddenly resolves to only one of those possibilities.
So to answer the question: it has nothing whatsoever to do with radio.
Where things get even more interesting, is that two particles can have a causal relationship in their states - that is, while they might both have wave functions, when once of the pair resolves where it is, the other of the pair resolves itself as well to match it... even though no communication occurs between them. the second particle might never have been measured, and yet it's wave function still collapses when you measure the first particle. This is known as "quantum entanglement," or what Einstein famously referred to as "spooky action at a distance" because it happens faster then "c".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I haven't read TFA, but I have to believe they're somehow making use of this phenomenon.
weylin
And... I am not a physicist, but my college roommate now holds a PhD in the field, my dad was an astronomer, and I'm a devoted viewer of PBS's "spacetime" youtube series. So I'm a "lay" physicist.
https://www.youtube.com/channe...
This sounds an awful lot like a Bayesian Trap, also called a Base Rate Bias. See here for a decent explanation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
weylin
it is mostly incremental, it is mostly determined by what NSF/NIH/DARPA want to see researched, and it is loaded with overstatements of results.
Funny, that sounds an aweful lot like corporate America. I wish "humor" tags would be apropos here, but no....
Weylin
Interestingly: Christianity was 1000-1500 years old at the time. And Islam is about that old now.
Incandescent bulbs are hot from heat, not IR. There's a lot of IR, as well, which may make this kind of coating worthwhile; but, the heat will still radiate.
The only problem with this is that there is NOONE in the US that Apple can go to for manufacturing.
Apple was, for a long time, a die-hard "Made in the US" organization. Eventually, though, they got to the point where American Manufacturing was just completely unable to manufacture their products. And it's not just the individual plants - it's the entire manufacturing chain, from mining to final product assembly. Obama even asked Steve Jobs what Apple needed to manufacture the iPhone in the US. His reply? To paraphrase: "it can't be done."
This seems to be a good writeup:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1
Weylin
You're missing the point.
Richard Stallman *****HATED***** copyright. Hated it with a passion. He found the very concept repugnant. So, he wrote the GPL to essentially say "do whatever you want with this, just don't say you invented it from scratch and don't prevent anyone else from doing the same." The GPL is essentially about removing copyright restrictions, and preventing someone else from re-implementing them back onto the same body of work.
So, while copyright law does in fact make the GPL enforceable, the whole pint of the GPL is to use copyright law to remove copyright. Hence why it's often called copyleft - compared to a normal copyright, it's kinda the logical opposite.
And if we're getting into poop-flinging on "logic 101" I recommend studying what logic actually is. Formal Logic; Informal Logic (aka Natural Language Logic); Symbolic Logic; Mathematical Logic... there's several different types of "logic." This discussion revolved primarily around the informal variety, which your parent post used correctly.
Weylin
Like this, where the materials used were the wrong ones and caused even survivors to go through difficult tragedies.
weylin
I remember playing around with my dad's 10MB MFM on the Wang PC-clone (80386 at 20MHz and a Turbo button that would take it to 25MHz) that he borrowed from work in '85 when I was 7 (he worked at Wang as a computer imaging scientist and engineer). It was a half-height drive (which for those who don't know means it only took up a single 5" slot) and could store oh-so-much more than I could throw at it at the time.
He also brought home an 85MB MFM full-height drive (two 5" bays) for me to play with to see if I could get it to work with that same computer. After struggling for a week he brought me a DIP and said "here, try swapping this with the one that's installed" (it was an experimental PROM BIOS chip, though I didn't realize it at the time). Worked fine after that.
Not quite old enough to remember the FM drives. The IDEs were a god-send; the MFM's ISA expansion cards were massive (>12" long?), and a pain to deal with (all those jumpers -shudder-).
Weylin
By the way, anyone care to make a guess how big my Windows partition is?
Bigger than your penis?
My 20GB Windows partition is on an 80GB Western Digital drive, so it should be possible to somehow figure out the length it takes up. By length, I mean the longest straight line that can be placed against the physical area taken up on the platter(s).
Assuming *at most* that the 20GB tracks are on the outside of the 3.5" drive, I would say that makes - 3.5"? I'm not certain you would necessarily want to advertise that....
What you say is true for power-users, but an average user has neither the requisite understanding, nor desire, nor availability to do the manual labor necessary.
My wife doesn't know the first thing about auto-updates beyond asking me "hey I'm getting this pop-up in the bottom right-corner of my screen, do you know why I'm getting it?" And I just don't have the time to do it on her laptop regularly. I don't auto-update everything on her laptop and periodically I'll update her software (about every three or fours months, like I did for 4 hours yesterday), but for some things it's a necessity in order to get the bona fide security patches she actually needs in a timely manner.
Weylin
The problem with having everyone use only a single version is that while known-problems would get patched, unknown-problems would bite the ENTIRE network and take it down again all at once. Diversity has its downsides, but a slight amount is a good way to prevent that.
Weylin
Midshipmen majoring in Computer Science at the US Naval Academy (my major and alma mater, class of '00) are indeed cognizant of Admiral Hopper, though I don't think there's anything specifically that teaches about her contributions. Part of this (and here I start to hypothesize) is the relative age - ADM Hopper's contributions, though extremely important and noteworthy, are relatively recent, in comparison to the rest of what goes on at USNA - the goal is, after all, to provide highly technically-trained graduates to drive ships, not go on to academic careers. Much of the infrastructure and heritage stems from the people and events of the Revolutionary War (aka "War for American Independence") through World War II, heavily favoring the mid- to late-1800's. Operational topics before and after that (and during, to give meaning and context to the heritage) are taught in classroom settings. But though ADM Hopper's contributions to the field of computer science are important, at best it's the contributions that are taught (not the name), and definitely not in an operational context (she spent her entire career as a reservist and rarely was operational).
Weylin
Several other comments talk about a pair of particles being created out of nothing, one gets absorbed and the other flies away. This is basically right, but can be confusing (the one that gets absorbed has negative energy in order to conserve energy). Here's an easier mental model....
Steve Hawking came up with an idea a while ago (70's perhaps?). He was thinking about black holes whose event horizon was around the size of an atom. Then he put it up against the Heizenberg Uncertainty Principle. He realized that particles in these black holes would have such a high degree of certainty about their position, that there would be such a low certainty about their velocity. Therefor, there would be some that would be REALLY fast. Not fast enough that they could escape the pull of the black hole, but fast enough that they could get just above the event horizon. There, they could give off a high-energy photon, and fall back in. This photon, since it was emitted outside the event horizon, would actually escape. This radiation can (and has been) detected, and causes what is known as evaporation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation#Black_hole_evaporation
Ironically, this means that smaller black holes (which have higher certainty about a particle's position) evaporate faster. Large-ish black holes absorb more energy cosmic microwave radiation than they emit in Hawking radiation, but if they have small enough mass (I believe smaller than the size of our moon), they emit more Hawking radiation than they receive from the cosmic background.
ROT-26 is DMCA approved... again, assuming the "ROT-13 is DMCA-approved" comment is correct. ROT-26 is application of the ROT-13 algorithm... It's just applied twice. Using the same logic, any ROT-x algorithm (where x is any positive integer multiplied by 13) is DMCA-approved.
weylin
FYI, any and all internally-available details of any cracking attempts (such as which organization is instigating, intensity, effectiveness of our measures, etc.) are FOUO at the very least, and usually CONFIDENTIAL or better. Having seen the SECRET messages, and dealing with the CTOs and INFOCON changes (I'm the CIO at my command), I've had to deal with a few situations where the classification has mattered.
weylin
I work at the Naval Submarine School in Groton, CT. Actually, I'm the CIO there (until the 26th when I transfer to Norfolk), how apropos.
Anyway, I took over the job when the fileserver crashed, and the CIO at the time didn't understand the difference between a workstation and a server, and couldn't figure out what "no backup" meant. Bless her soul, she's a great leader over a good many things. But she was assigned to the job because the commanding officer at the time was not IT-savvy, and said "it's just management of people, the techs know what they're doing."
After she was fired, they looked for someone IT-smart. I e-mailed my boss and said "I've been doing IT support for 3 or 4 years, one on a submarine, two in college, and several months in the Computer Science department after graduation while waiting for follow-on schooling. And I have a BS in CS." They took about 2 minutes to give me the job. That's how long it took for them to receive the e-mail.
Anyway, enough rambling, my point is that I can understand how it happens. You don't have to be IT-smart to become CIO. You just have to demonstrate to whomever is hiring that you can get the job done.
weylin