+1 for Pibgorn, and anything that Brooke McEldowney does in general. His 9 Chickweed Lane has been running for 25 years, and ranges from one panel slapstick to long story arcs that will bring a tear to your eye over the power of love to triumph over adversity.
Saga by Image Comics, Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples, is pretty awesome.
Up to 8 trade graphic novels now and not stopping soon.
Forbidden love, intergalactic warfare, child rearing advice, Gender issues, In-Law issues, bounty hunters. A heart-tugging story! What more do you want?
And, and, maybe they can get the Uber drivers to get really large vans; and paint them in striking color schemes to make them easier to spot; and maybe run on a circular route on a schedule so people wouldn't have to book the Uber ride ahead of time, but just get on and pay.
Analog science fiction magazine had a story about these back in the sixties. The guy who invented them was named 'Short' so they were called 'Short Stacks'.
Man, I'm trying to find a citation but just can't come up with it.
The most important question so far! In an enterprise situation, you have to have multiple sets of keys so a single person can't turn their devices into bricks by forgetting their passwords. There are lots of scenario's around this: Lock a user out of their ability to decrypt due to termination, but still allow admin access to resources.
Leibnitz vs. Newton: philosophical views and yours
on
Ask Neal Stephenson
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Dear Neal,
In The System of the World you have the confrontation between Leibnitz and Newton (or rather their worldviews) with Princess Caroline as referee and Waterhouse as linejudge.
While Newton's is the best known, with a mechanistic world, set in motion by the great Clockmaker, (at least in my simplistic interpretation), Leibnitz's is not as well known, and much harder for me to grasp, not having been exposed to it in school. Leibnitz seems to imply a higher order guiding the interactions of things all the way down to atoms, or monads; with things knowing not only what to do, but perhaps the right, as in moral, things to do.
Princess Caroline properly fears the ruin of the world at the hands of Newton's disciples, in what seems to me to be a foreshadowing of the dangers of science run rampant, with nuclear destruction at the top of the heap.
Do you share Caroline's fears, and what do you see as the anodyne to the Newtonian worldview? Does Quantum uncertainty enter into the answer? Do you think that Leibnitz's worldview offers any insight today?
Finally, do you agree with Waterhouse that all the intellectual creativity of the people and times you present so well in the Baroque Cycle is merely the product of chemical processes, or do you feel that something more is going on, (which seems to be where Leibnitz, and Newton in his own way, were headed)?
I would rather see the judge order Tibbetts to chew a section of 2x4 into sawdust and present said sawdust in court, as Judge Whittaker J. Stang does in "Brainstorm" by Richard Dooling.
While I am a developer, my wife is a graphics artist who did a lot of ad & copy writing for various catalog and advertising firms.
She is still stupified at the idea of a programmer testing their own code. It was a firing offense at her firm to proofread your own copy and approve it. You always had to have another pair of eyes look over your work, since if you wrote it wrong, you would read it wrong when looking it over.
Programs working fine on test data the programmer wrote, then crashing horribly, are so common as to be legendary.
I have recently applied XP write tests first techniques to COBOL programs, of all things, and have been pleasantly surprised at how well it has worked.
Heck, I'm old enough to remember when the Alpha Operator in the computer room was the guy who could pick up a whole stack of punch cards out of the tray to load into the reader in one shot as opposed to taking several baby hand-fulls one at a time.
You had to press the stack together hard enough so that they would not slip and fall to the floor, but not so hard that the stack would buckle and explode in your face.
Mind you, this is also why you would take a marker and run a diagonal stripe down the top of the stack of cards so that if you dropped them you could get the 400 - 600 cards of the run deck back in order. Sequence numbers! We don' need no stinkeen sequence numbers!
Of couse the real benefit of working as a third-shift tape ape in an old fashioned mainframe shop was that you could keep a six-pack of beer cold under the raised floor and drink as the register lights flickered and the tape drives spun.
As to the fellow who spewed blood seeing JCL and Java on the same screen: happens to me every day at my current assignment.
Since the FISA courts and their MO were publicized years ago, I have been troubled by how we are separating the residents of our country into citizens, who annoyingly have certain rights guaranteed to them by the constitution, and all the aliens living here, whom the government treats the way they would really like to treat the rest of us. I thought that the Declaration of Independence said that "... all men are created equal..." not, "all citizens".
The newest revisions included in the USA act awaiting passage this very moment blur the lines considerably, reducing all citizens to potential victims of secret FISA warrants, black bag jobs, and surveillance of their communications and financial transactions as detailed in this write-up of the bill at ACLU.ORG
More troubling by far are the sentiments echoed in this story at the Washington Post, which contain speculations by government officials about the need to apply torture to material witnesses and the justification for this torture due to the urgent nature of the investigation. Mind you, these are material witnesses, not indicted criminal suspects. The fact that they have not been indicted removes all Miranda rights protections from them, including right to counsel. The fact that they are not citizens removes any protections against unlimited detention. There are persistent but unconfirmed reports of the detainees in Manhattan being subjected to sleep and sensory deprivation, and reports that doctors are being called in to determine exactly the levels of "pressure" they can be subjected to, as well as recommending drugs to be used to assist in interrogation. These reports seem to indicate that the torture has already started, and is not merely being discussed. The participation of doctors in this kind of torture, even in a monitoring capacity, is directly against the Nuremberg Code, the UN Principles of Medical Ethics, and the UN Convention against Torture.
As a nation, we are perilously close to returning to the days of the Cold War and before when unwitting human experimentation in mind-control and behavior modification was conducted in secret, when U.S. soldiers were drugged and in some cases driven to suicide in order to try out the very "truth serums" being discussed in the Post article, and when conscientious objectors were used as guinea pigs for starvation and cold weather exposure experiments not so very different from those that Nazi doctors were hung for at the end of WWII.
Looking at things from a legal point of view, we are either at war with someone, or we are not. If we are at war, then aren't the people being held in Manhattan Prisoners of War, and subject to the protections of the Geneva Convention? If we are not at war, then this all devolves into a pure criminal proceeding where coerced testimony, "assisted interrogation" and the like are clearly unconstitutional and will poison any cases ever brought against these people.
The corrupting influence at work here is the mixing of Intelligence activities and criminal proceedings, which are anathema to each other. Intelligence is the world of innuendo, hunches, and threads of circumstance where decisions to attack aspirin factories with cruise missiles can be made on the slimmest of evidence, or none at all. Criminal prosecution depends on rigorously documented chains of evidence, sworn testimony and eye-witnesses. Phrases like "beyond a reasonable doubt" seemed to appear frequently the two times I was a juror, once in a murder trial. Due to this difference, the FBI is not institutionally equipped to operate in the Intelligence community, and the CIA is psychologically unable to grasp the difference between rumor and evidence. Mixing the two as the USA act does will forever damage the integrity of our nation's government and reduce the United States to a totalitarian state the likes of which the world has never seen before:
Every totalitarian distopia ever envisioned in literature (or occurring in real life, over time) has one attribute in common: the crushing lack of personal luxury for the masses. This has been at least a partial stimulus to any resistance against these regimes. The levels of affluence in most of the US, combined with the public's ability to have their attention monopolized by the most recent media craze, whether the Gary Condit affair, or the current Anthrax scare, makes us most susceptible to a gradual erosion of our rights. The frogs are being not so gently boiled right now and no one is complaining too much.
Now we know why the Clinton Administration wants Carnivore up and running: its web page reconstruction capabilities fit in nicely with Mr. Gore's desires here. After all, the Gub-mint can do _anything_ to 'save the children'.
While I do not care for either candidate too much, the current administration's desire to have government oversight of packets flowing through ISP's scares the poop out of me.
FBI position on Carnivore states that harvesting of headers does not require a warrant, as it is functionally equivalent to a pen register, only content of messages requires a warrant. I would bet dollars to doughnuts that reconstruction of web pages visited won't require a warrant either, since I imagine this does not constitute a private person-to-person communication.
Put that together with the Administrative Supoena provisions of the Fugitive Apprehension act S.2516 and you have a recipe for incredibly intrusive surveillance of ordinary law-abiding citizens.
This bill will allow access to many different kinds of records of anyone _in contact_ with a Fugitive (merely charged or sought for questioning, not convicted, mind you!), prevent the entity furnishing the records from disclosing this fact to the subject of the investigation, and allow unlimited delay of government notification to the subject that they were the subject of an investigation.
This proposal of Gore's opens up complete surveillance of packets for all surfers, not just those who are under investigation.
Why not make it simpler for ISPs (take all the admin and compliance overhead out) and just mandate one NAP in DC (Ft. Meade, actually) that all packets traversing the US have to go through and no more difficulties with things like laws and the 4th amendment. Just a few DNS changes and Bob's your uncle.
When I was a mere programmer analyst, I was on call 24/7 for five years straight with no extra compensation. (really!)
Quit whining
(BTW I had to walk to the computer room 10 miles through the snow)
Seriously, I am pretty surprised to see any compensation being thrown at people for this. Most I have usually seen is comp-time. Most mainframe shops I have seen, even as a consultant, the oncall goes with the turf, BUT we had control of the apps that we were on call for. Pretty good incentive to clean up code.
I guess I will have to kick more if asked to be oncall.
Slashdot Mirror
+1 for Pibgorn, and anything that Brooke McEldowney does in general. His 9 Chickweed Lane has been running for 25 years, and ranges from one panel slapstick to long story arcs that will bring a tear to your eye over the power of love to triumph over adversity.
Saga by Image Comics, Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples, is pretty awesome.
Up to 8 trade graphic novels now and not stopping soon.
Forbidden love, intergalactic warfare, child rearing advice, Gender issues, In-Law issues, bounty hunters. A heart-tugging story! What more do you want?
And, and, maybe they can get the Uber drivers to get really large vans; and paint them in striking color schemes to make them easier to spot; and maybe run on a circular route on a schedule so people wouldn't have to book the Uber ride ahead of time, but just get on and pay.
Oh Wait.....
If we listen to economists and they come up with stuff this stupid, no wonder the economy is in the crapper!
You have to be dumber than a sack of hammers, or explicitly trolling to put forth an idea as ridiculous as this.
Heck I'm not even one of the offended class here, I'm over 60 and can smell BS when it's this thick.
No jobs, no education, middle class forced into all the entry level retail jobs, what does any one expect?
Analog science fiction magazine had a story about these back in the sixties. The guy who invented them was named 'Short' so they were called 'Short Stacks'.
Man, I'm trying to find a citation but just can't come up with it.
The most important question so far!
In an enterprise situation, you have to have multiple sets of keys so a single person can't turn their devices into bricks by forgetting their passwords. There are lots of scenario's around this: Lock a user out of their ability to decrypt due to termination, but still allow admin access to resources.
Dear Neal,
In The System of the World you have the confrontation between Leibnitz and Newton (or rather their worldviews) with Princess Caroline as referee and Waterhouse as linejudge.
While Newton's is the best known, with a mechanistic world, set in motion by the great Clockmaker, (at least in my simplistic interpretation), Leibnitz's is not as well known, and much harder for me to grasp, not having been exposed to it in school. Leibnitz seems to imply a higher order guiding the interactions of things all the way down to atoms, or monads; with things knowing not only what to do, but perhaps the right, as in moral, things to do.
Princess Caroline properly fears the ruin of the world at the hands of Newton's disciples, in what seems to me to be a foreshadowing of the dangers of science run rampant, with nuclear destruction at the top of the heap.
Do you share Caroline's fears, and what do you see as the anodyne to the Newtonian worldview? Does Quantum uncertainty enter into the answer? Do you think that Leibnitz's worldview offers any insight today?
Finally, do you agree with Waterhouse that all the intellectual creativity of the people and times you present so well in the Baroque Cycle is merely the product of chemical processes, or do you feel that something more is going on, (which seems to be where Leibnitz, and Newton in his own way, were headed)?
Tom Porter
I would rather see the judge order Tibbetts to chew a section of 2x4 into sawdust and present said sawdust in court, as Judge Whittaker J. Stang does in "Brainstorm" by Richard Dooling.
While I am a developer, my wife is a graphics artist who did a lot of ad & copy writing for various catalog and advertising firms.
She is still stupified at the idea of a programmer testing their own code. It was a firing offense at her firm to proofread your own copy and approve it. You always had to have another pair of eyes look over your work, since if you wrote it wrong, you would read it wrong when looking it over.
Programs working fine on test data the programmer wrote, then crashing horribly, are so common as to be legendary.
I have recently applied XP write tests first techniques to COBOL programs, of all things, and have been pleasantly surprised at how well it has worked.
"You never did, The Kenosha Kid"
You had to press the stack together hard enough so that they would not slip and fall to the floor, but not so hard that the stack would buckle and explode in your face.
Mind you, this is also why you would take a marker and run a diagonal stripe down the top of the stack of cards so that if you dropped them you could get the 400 - 600 cards of the run deck back in order. Sequence numbers! We don' need no stinkeen sequence numbers!
Of couse the real benefit of working as a third-shift tape ape in an old fashioned mainframe shop was that you could keep a six-pack of beer cold under the raised floor and drink as the register lights flickered and the tape drives spun.
As to the fellow who spewed blood seeing JCL and Java on the same screen: happens to me every day at my current assignment.
Old dog learning new tricks!
The newest revisions included in the USA act awaiting passage this very moment blur the lines considerably, reducing all citizens to potential victims of secret FISA warrants, black bag jobs, and surveillance of their communications and financial transactions as detailed in this write-up of the bill at ACLU.ORG
More troubling by far are the sentiments echoed in this story at the Washington Post, which contain speculations by government officials about the need to apply torture to material witnesses and the justification for this torture due to the urgent nature of the investigation. Mind you, these are material witnesses, not indicted criminal suspects. The fact that they have not been indicted removes all Miranda rights protections from them, including right to counsel. The fact that they are not citizens removes any protections against unlimited detention. There are persistent but unconfirmed reports of the detainees in Manhattan being subjected to sleep and sensory deprivation, and reports that doctors are being called in to determine exactly the levels of "pressure" they can be subjected to, as well as recommending drugs to be used to assist in interrogation. These reports seem to indicate that the torture has already started, and is not merely being discussed. The participation of doctors in this kind of torture, even in a monitoring capacity, is directly against the Nuremberg Code, the UN Principles of Medical Ethics, and the UN Convention against Torture.
As a nation, we are perilously close to returning to the days of the Cold War and before when unwitting human experimentation in mind-control and behavior modification was conducted in secret, when U.S. soldiers were drugged and in some cases driven to suicide in order to try out the very "truth serums" being discussed in the Post article, and when conscientious objectors were used as guinea pigs for starvation and cold weather exposure experiments not so very different from those that Nazi doctors were hung for at the end of WWII.
Looking at things from a legal point of view, we are either at war with someone, or we are not. If we are at war, then aren't the people being held in Manhattan Prisoners of War, and subject to the protections of the Geneva Convention? If we are not at war, then this all devolves into a pure criminal proceeding where coerced testimony, "assisted interrogation" and the like are clearly unconstitutional and will poison any cases ever brought against these people.
The corrupting influence at work here is the mixing of Intelligence activities and criminal proceedings, which are anathema to each other. Intelligence is the world of innuendo, hunches, and threads of circumstance where decisions to attack aspirin factories with cruise missiles can be made on the slimmest of evidence, or none at all. Criminal prosecution depends on rigorously documented chains of evidence, sworn testimony and eye-witnesses. Phrases like "beyond a reasonable doubt" seemed to appear frequently the two times I was a juror, once in a murder trial. Due to this difference, the FBI is not institutionally equipped to operate in the Intelligence community, and the CIA is psychologically unable to grasp the difference between rumor and evidence. Mixing the two as the USA act does will forever damage the integrity of our nation's government and reduce the United States to a totalitarian state the likes of which the world has never seen before:
Every totalitarian distopia ever envisioned in literature (or occurring in real life, over time) has one attribute in common: the crushing lack of personal luxury for the masses. This has been at least a partial stimulus to any resistance against these regimes. The levels of affluence in most of the US, combined with the public's ability to have their attention monopolized by the most recent media craze, whether the Gary Condit affair, or the current Anthrax scare, makes us most susceptible to a gradual erosion of our rights. The frogs are being not so gently boiled right now and no one is complaining too much.
Write to your Congress-Critters today!
"I fear for the Republic"
Tom Porter
Glad to see someone else who did this.
For most of my step-son's childhood we had the same setup: monitor hooked up to VCR, no TV in the house.
About age 16 the dreaded one-eyed monster made it into the house (no cable still) just to play its role as a treat to be denied in case of discipline.
Result: a fine son that reads voraciously, thinks for himself, and lacks the couch potatoe shape too many teens are finding themselve in these days.
After 10+ years of marriage (and our son now out on his own), no TV in the house. I'm not sure what I would do if we had one.
[Jeez, and to think I missed Survivor!]
Hell, folks!
Now we know why the Clinton Administration wants Carnivore up and running: its web page reconstruction capabilities fit in nicely with Mr. Gore's desires here. After all, the Gub-mint can do _anything_ to 'save the children'.
While I do not care for either candidate too much, the current administration's desire to have government oversight of packets flowing through ISP's scares the poop out of me.
FBI position on Carnivore states that harvesting of headers does not require a warrant, as it is functionally equivalent to a pen register, only content of messages requires a warrant. I would bet dollars to doughnuts that reconstruction of web pages visited won't require a warrant either, since I imagine this does not constitute a private person-to-person communication.
Put that together with the Administrative Supoena provisions of the Fugitive Apprehension act S.2516 and you have a recipe for incredibly intrusive surveillance of ordinary law-abiding citizens.
This bill will allow access to many different kinds of records of anyone _in contact_ with a Fugitive (merely charged or sought for questioning, not convicted, mind you!), prevent the entity furnishing the records from disclosing this fact to the subject of the investigation, and allow unlimited delay of government notification to the subject that they were the subject of an investigation.
This proposal of Gore's opens up complete surveillance of packets for all surfers, not just those who are under investigation.
Why not make it simpler for ISPs (take all the admin and compliance overhead out) and just mandate one NAP in DC (Ft. Meade, actually) that all packets traversing the US have to go through and no more difficulties with things like laws and the 4th amendment. Just a few DNS changes and Bob's your uncle.
This makes me want to puke.
When I was a mere programmer analyst, I was on call 24/7 for five years straight with no extra compensation. (really!)
Quit whining
(BTW I had to walk to the computer room 10 miles through the snow)
Seriously, I am pretty surprised to see any compensation being thrown at people for this. Most I have usually seen is comp-time. Most mainframe shops I have seen, even as a consultant, the oncall goes with the turf, BUT we had control of the apps that we were on call for. Pretty good incentive to clean up code.
I guess I will have to kick more if asked to be oncall.