IANAPhD, but I nearly was. Quote from a professor: "Getting a PhD is not mostly about learning although that is important, it's about getting things done. If you are a PhD student we in the department will essentially do whatever we can to prevent you from finishing your thesis. If you manage to finish _despite_ us, then you will get the PhD. You will have joined the club of 'people who get things done'. Thereafter schools and other institutions who are looking for people who get things done, and your PhD will tell them that you do."
I worked one summer ( a LONG time ago) as a keypunch operator (actually 'key-to-disk', not mechanical punching). I was the only male there. Working this specialized data is probably faster, but after three months I had gotten my speed up to 85 WPM, and I was by far still the slowest person in the room. A couple of really good ones were doing over 200 WPM. As I recall the best one was trying to get over 250, as she could then get a better-paying job in the big time at the regional grocery store chain - that was their minimum rate.
Again, keypunching can be much faster than typing, depending on the data.
And the women did this all while chatting up a storm about gossip, news, etc. I learned later that there were almost no men doing keypunch for a living. According to the data, men either pay too much attention => slow, or get distracted and think about other things => errors. Women have an ability to keep one part of the brain paying just enough attention to mundane tasks, while using the rest of their brain for social activities. Of course, this was according to the 'knowledge' of the time.
I Googled a bit about keypunch speed and didn't come up with any real numbers - one person bragged about doing 120 on their web page, however I know everyone in the room except me did better than that. Fast keypunchers and typists don't even sound like they are keying any more. You can't distinguish individual clicks, and it starts to sound like a low buzz (kinda like a playing card on a bike wheel.) But the data I can find online just doesn't jibe with my experience, so I don't know what to say. Maybe the scoring was different back then, and certainly the data was a restricted set - probably 90% numerics.
I just have to step in. If you do a bit of study of systems theory, particularly Rossby's constructability analysis and complexity theory, you will learn a particular fact about systems, which is that the complexity of the controller of a system must always be greater than the complexity of the system - else it can not control it. Without going into the details, one of the outcomes of this point is that no entity within a system can know (or deduce?) everything about the controller.
And from that one can see that no matter what argument you come up with either for or against a God ('controller') that controls the Universe ('system'), there is an equally valid argument against it. The question of whether there is a God is indeterminable, it's a matter of choice. Or, put in scientific terms, both existence and non-existence are not falsifiable.
Which is just my way of saying (to all sides), "Let's all just quit arguing about this, and let it be!!". Folks who disbelieve in God are not inherently crazy or stupid, and folks who believe in God are not inherently crazy or stupid. And some members of each group are crazy, stupid or both - but not for that reason.
And they came to the scene way too late to become a MS,Apple
Generally there are two ways to get out of that trap. One is to 'buy the market' like Intel bought the market (long ago) for scientific calculators by selling them at a lost for two or three years. Before that HP owned over 90% of the market. The other, that we have seen played out many times in the Web era, is to construct a new scene that makes the old one irrelevant. Thus the tech ferment continues.
Here's my bet: a wrist- or pocket-thingy, tied (via something faster than bluetooth) to a microdisplay hung on my glasses and an earpiece, always on, with eye tracking and subvocalization control. Later (gen II or III) maybe brainwave interface, if a way can be found to use and/or ignore the much larger signals from facial and head muscles. It's actually all been done already, but not cheap, integrated or easy-to-use.
Interestingly, in the Complex Adaptive Systems world (aka living systems), the transition between the two is called the Edge of Chaos. There's even a very interesting book by that name. It's a somewhat controversial idea but it works for me. Any good living system is always more-or-less teetering in the jumble-zone that separates the two extremes. Thus also democracies, economies, etc.
I didn't RTFA so I don't know if he mentioned Drudge. But your comment immediately made me think of Drudge as well. Drudge is famously 1999 in its style, makes no 'improvements', just provides the information that users want in a predictable way. And gets a zillion visits per day.
And somehow _that_ reminds me of a saying I learned a long time ago, from the early Mac days: User interfaces should follow the principle of 'least surprise'. A user interface need not be the wysiest or the fastest or easiest, but it must be predictable as time goes on.
Last I read (in the last month or so) something like 70% of goods purchased in the US are made here. We are also still one of, if not the, largest exporter in the world. I don't remember the details though.
Of course 'made here' may only mean 'assembled here from parts made all over the world' - like a Boeing 787 - Japanese manufacturers have been making major parts of Boeing planes for at least two decades, and with the 787 major parts are made in (surprise, surprise) every one of Boeing's major market zones. Major parts are also still made here, of course, and final assembly is done here. There is a big fight between Boeing and the unions about opening a new assembly plant in South Carolina.
US auto import tariff rules used to require some percentage (50%? 70%? IDK) a car to be made here. That percentage could include administrative costs, which seemed a bit of a stretch. I don't know the present situation.
A good question. Relevant reading below. From my own slight experience, quite a while back, these buildings are often much more secure than they appear on the outside. They are purposely nondescript. Sometimes there are fake fronts and such, and even sometimes a smallish building on the surface connects to a large underground complex. Putting them in relatively high traffic areas makes it easier to hide the traffic of workers going in and out.
Back in the day I saw a few in DC suburbs (Tyson's Corner VA) that had no windows and only one door, and walls that were blast-resistant and incorporated Faraday cages to prevent electronic leakage. That was the old-school way, I don't know to what extent that is still the case but I assume that is mostly still true, just as a starter. It depends on the type and quality of information.
Even back in the late 1970s and early 1980s technical equipment intended for some government agencies had to pass the TEMPEST EMI test, which has no published spec - they test it and tell you only whether it passed. If it didn't, you were not given any clues as to what needed fixing.
Another article, excerpted from the book: "Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State".
This article, adapted from a chapter of the newly released “Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State,” by Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, chronicles JSOC’s spectacular rise, much of which has not been publicly disclosed before. Two presidents and three secretaries of defense routinely have asked JSOC to mount intelligence-gathering missions and lethal raids, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in countries with which the United States was not at war, including Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, the Philippines, Nigeria and Syria.
“The CIA doesn’t have the size or the authority to do some of the things we can do,” said one JSOC operator.
The president has given JSOC the rare authority to select individuals for its kill list — and then to kill, rather than capture, them. Critics charge that this individual man-hunting mission amounts to assassination, a practice prohibited by U.S. law. JSOC’s list is not usually coordinated with the CIA, which maintains a similar but shorter roster of names.
well you want IT people to be IT not rifleman or other stuff that can let then be pulled from the IT to a non IT rifleman job even more so for a state side job.
IIRC 'every man a rifleman' is characteristic of the Marines, and not the same as other branches. The Marines consider it very important that every member of the team can operate that way. This is related to the particular job that Marines are intended to do, operating as small groups often out of touch with higher levels of command. So everyone on the team has to be able to pick up the slack when they lose someone. (IANA military guy - I've just read a lot.)
It's worth noting that in Desert Storm the Marines had their own network architecture (I think it was based on Banyan, an early proprietary windows-centric ethernet architecture). They brought in several thousand computers and had their entire network up and running in something over a week, from a bare patch of sand with no power. Pretty impressive for 1991. The other services, not so much.
Considering that defense, customs and border control are some of the few items actually set out in the Constitution as important activities of the federal government, that's probably a reasonably good thing. (Not to say that it's being done right now, I'm just sayin'). IIRC, for most of US history Defense was well over 1/2 of the total federal budget. Now it's somewhere close to 20%.
In the 1950s the entire Interstate Highway System was justified on defense grounds - the height of overpasses was set to allow military vehicles and missile carriers to go through.
The plain fact is that without borders and defense, we don't have a nation-state. EVERYTHING else is frosting on the cake. Is it being done right, effectively, etc.? Separate question. Should we be the policeman for the whole world? Nearly every other nation has wanted us in that role since WWII including many so-called counter parties like Russia and China. (Notable exceptions are of the ilk of North Korea, etc.) They often don't like the way we do it, but they distrust every other nation even more - and they certainly don't want the UN to have that kind of power any more than we do.
I was at a conference in 1999 where a Navy officer spoke. At that time the DoD was in the process of setting up three separate cyber warfare battalions, working on both defense and offense. He did mention that until recently-at-that-time it had been a hard slog getting the brass to wake up, but things were starting to move faster. IIRC a battalion is about 500 'soldiers' plus some number of support staff (Wikipedia sez 300-1200 total).
I would expect that in the 12 years since then the size of this effort has expanded by up to 2 orders of magnitude. There are literally thousands of nondescript buildings in shopping malls and industrial parks all over the country filled with folks doing all sorts of eyes-only burn-before-reading stuff, and I'm sure that a lot of that is cyber warfare research, training and activity. Part of the plan back in 1999 was to enlist major companies in information sharing regarding security threats to the economic infrastructure. Some of that effort got put into CERT early on, but I expect there are more classified levels of that going on.
Keeping the baddies out of Ford, SmithKline or even Proctor & Gamble is almost as important as keeping them out of several levels of DoD. Warfare has always been a fundamentally economic activity.
If I had the head for that sort of thing and were a lot younger I'd think seriously about getting into that - it would make for a very 'secure' future.:)
I am pretty sure that a particular clone set (clones of a particular dog) would be patentable, just as at present there are many patented varieties of roses and other plants, that result from selective breeding. (USPTO info on plant patents). In those cases they are effectively clones, having been created by making cuttings of the original plant. They are genetically identical. Patent would be stronger protection than copyright.
However, from my reading of the USPTO info, those patents apply to plants, not animals. I'm too lazy to research further. It may be that animal clones would have be to added to this patent structure by legislation in order to be patentable. Whether that is a good idea is an exercise for the reader. But I expect it will happen.
What were the Americans doing in 1836? Playing cowboys and indians I believe.
- and living on the fruits of cotton processing machinery technology stolen from the British, that kickstarted the American Industrial Revolution!:) (see "Samuel Slater")
And back in the 60s a Volkswagen bug making 25 MPG and lasting 100K miles was 'miraculous'. Now a Ford F150 can do 25 MPG and an equivalent to the VW bug can make 40-50 MPG, and last 200K to 300K miles.
Indeed. A good example was Samuel Slater. In 1789 the technology for spinning cotton was a British state secret. Stealing the technology, Samuel Slater kickstarted the cotton mill industry in New England and arguably the entire US part of the Industrial Revolution.
Worried about the possibility of losing her technological lead to other nations, and aware of the growing threat posed by American patriots as their battle for independence developed, Britain had passed a statute in 1774 making it illegal for cotton workers to leave the country, or for cotton-machine technology to be exported.
Disguised as a farmer, Samuel took ship from London on September 1st, 1789, telling no-one of his intentions and only informing his immediate family in a letter he posted just before going aboard.
Stitched into the lining of his clothing were his indenture papers, which would prove to any prospective employer that he knew his job. More importantly, in his head he carried all the secrets of the water frame and the continuous spinning process that Arkwright and Strutt had perfected.
APL FTW!:D Occasionally described as the first 'Write-only language'. But it was remarkably good at describing the pure problem efficiently, without all the syntactic fiddling most languages require. Cross-product was just 'cross-product' - no nested for loops. But the programmer had to think completely in terms of the abstract problem being solved, not piecewise refinement of all the fiddly details.
(wait, no, even better: at editing time, because you're IDE/Emacs/whatever *should* be able to compile even an impartial AST and tell you immediately that you got your types wrong).
I would like to agree with this (long ago I even work with an 'Interactive Incremental Compiler' for FORTRAN that did the syntax checking on a line by line basis as you typed). But there is a major problem - the editor basically has to include a complete, correct copy of the language compiler/interpreter in its own logic. Since most languages these days are built based on various token-tools, perhaps it would be possible to base the checking on the input definitions to those tools (sorry I can't remember what they are called.) That would be an interesting exercise, and might make it possible to build a multilanguage editor that had that capability.
Many editors (Vim, e.g.) have pretty good syntax coloring which is a good half-step in this direction. And the APL environment worked that way, and there have been others. I think languages that have adopted C-like syntax will be the last because C syntax is so... baroque.
I think it depends on the application. A project I worked on the proposal for was an upgrade to a large rail system. They had a big room with about a dozen huge projection displays that together showed the entire route system with live status from sensor data all over the area. I think every operator had their own console to work on their particular bit of it, but having the entire thing visible to everyone at once provided important contextual information. Similar displays, even full immersion rooms (for somewhat different purposes), are used in the chemical and oil industries. To some extent that would be true for any network-like operation, especially if you have a large number of nodes and edges.
One of the biggest issues I have with any computer monitor is that it is nearly impossible to provide all the contextual information that any wooden desktop provides. Seeing something 'out of the corner of my eye' is a valuable tool that is essentially not available in a computing environment. Our eyes and brains have an amazing capability to see both close-up detail and simultaneously be unconsciously monitoring a wide area around that detail. Working on computers, even the dual-screen setup I have now, is like always having to see through a porthole.
Back in the day the flow through the sewer systems was an accurate measure of the popularity of certain TV shows, as everyone flushed during the commercials. Nowadays that probably isn't so true.
In all fairness, there ain't no other kind. Anyone who thinks otherwise is whistling past the graveyard. True, some are better than others, but that's comparing nearly-completely-immune-compromised with not-quite-completely-immune-compromised. In both cases it doesn't take much exposure to make you very sick - but some are not exposed as often. Running an obscure OS that nobody else runs, which is merely a form of security by obscurity, is still probably helping more than the particulars of the OS itself.
The human genome is a pretty good example. As much as 10% and maybe a lot more of it is comprised of various bits of old viruses, transposons (there are about 300,000 copies of just one particular transposon) and other parasitic or predatory genetic bits. That's the result of eons of genetic system wars. Similarly, OS security wars are going to be with us forever - or at least as long as there are still entities that find benefit in exploitation of others.
Slashdot Mirror
IANAPhD, but I nearly was. Quote from a professor: "Getting a PhD is not mostly about learning although that is important, it's about getting things done. If you are a PhD student we in the department will essentially do whatever we can to prevent you from finishing your thesis. If you manage to finish _despite_ us, then you will get the PhD. You will have joined the club of 'people who get things done'. Thereafter schools and other institutions who are looking for people who get things done, and your PhD will tell them that you do."
I worked one summer ( a LONG time ago) as a keypunch operator (actually 'key-to-disk', not mechanical punching). I was the only male there. Working this specialized data is probably faster, but after three months I had gotten my speed up to 85 WPM, and I was by far still the slowest person in the room. A couple of really good ones were doing over 200 WPM. As I recall the best one was trying to get over 250, as she could then get a better-paying job in the big time at the regional grocery store chain - that was their minimum rate.
Again, keypunching can be much faster than typing, depending on the data.
And the women did this all while chatting up a storm about gossip, news, etc. I learned later that there were almost no men doing keypunch for a living. According to the data, men either pay too much attention => slow, or get distracted and think about other things => errors. Women have an ability to keep one part of the brain paying just enough attention to mundane tasks, while using the rest of their brain for social activities. Of course, this was according to the 'knowledge' of the time.
I Googled a bit about keypunch speed and didn't come up with any real numbers - one person bragged about doing 120 on their web page, however I know everyone in the room except me did better than that. Fast keypunchers and typists don't even sound like they are keying any more. You can't distinguish individual clicks, and it starts to sound like a low buzz (kinda like a playing card on a bike wheel.) But the data I can find online just doesn't jibe with my experience, so I don't know what to say. Maybe the scoring was different back then, and certainly the data was a restricted set - probably 90% numerics.
I just have to step in. If you do a bit of study of systems theory, particularly Rossby's constructability analysis and complexity theory, you will learn a particular fact about systems, which is that the complexity of the controller of a system must always be greater than the complexity of the system - else it can not control it. Without going into the details, one of the outcomes of this point is that no entity within a system can know (or deduce?) everything about the controller.
And from that one can see that no matter what argument you come up with either for or against a God ('controller') that controls the Universe ('system'), there is an equally valid argument against it. The question of whether there is a God is indeterminable, it's a matter of choice. Or, put in scientific terms, both existence and non-existence are not falsifiable.
Which is just my way of saying (to all sides), "Let's all just quit arguing about this, and let it be!!". Folks who disbelieve in God are not inherently crazy or stupid, and folks who believe in God are not inherently crazy or stupid. And some members of each group are crazy, stupid or both - but not for that reason.
This does make Pascal's Wager more interesting.
Haha!
And they came to the scene way too late to become a MS,Apple
Generally there are two ways to get out of that trap. One is to 'buy the market' like Intel bought the market (long ago) for scientific calculators by selling them at a lost for two or three years. Before that HP owned over 90% of the market. The other, that we have seen played out many times in the Web era, is to construct a new scene that makes the old one irrelevant. Thus the tech ferment continues.
Here's my bet: a wrist- or pocket-thingy, tied (via something faster than bluetooth) to a microdisplay hung on my glasses and an earpiece, always on, with eye tracking and subvocalization control. Later (gen II or III) maybe brainwave interface, if a way can be found to use and/or ignore the much larger signals from facial and head muscles. It's actually all been done already, but not cheap, integrated or easy-to-use.
Interestingly, in the Complex Adaptive Systems world (aka living systems), the transition between the two is called the Edge of Chaos. There's even a very interesting book by that name. It's a somewhat controversial idea but it works for me. Any good living system is always more-or-less teetering in the jumble-zone that separates the two extremes. Thus also democracies, economies, etc.
I didn't RTFA so I don't know if he mentioned Drudge. But your comment immediately made me think of Drudge as well. Drudge is famously 1999 in its style, makes no 'improvements', just provides the information that users want in a predictable way. And gets a zillion visits per day.
And somehow _that_ reminds me of a saying I learned a long time ago, from the early Mac days: User interfaces should follow the principle of 'least surprise'. A user interface need not be the wysiest or the fastest or easiest, but it must be predictable as time goes on.
Last I read (in the last month or so) something like 70% of goods purchased in the US are made here. We are also still one of, if not the, largest exporter in the world. I don't remember the details though.
Of course 'made here' may only mean 'assembled here from parts made all over the world' - like a Boeing 787 - Japanese manufacturers have been making major parts of Boeing planes for at least two decades, and with the 787 major parts are made in (surprise, surprise) every one of Boeing's major market zones. Major parts are also still made here, of course, and final assembly is done here. There is a big fight between Boeing and the unions about opening a new assembly plant in South Carolina.
US auto import tariff rules used to require some percentage (50%? 70%? IDK) a car to be made here. That percentage could include administrative costs, which seemed a bit of a stretch. I don't know the present situation.
V8 Lawnmower
Turns out there are quite a few of these - Google is your friend. Not to mention Tim Allen's Turbo Mower in Home Improvement - The Great Lawn Mower Race against Bob Vila.
That doesn't sound very physically secure.
A good question. Relevant reading below. From my own slight experience, quite a while back, these buildings are often much more secure than they appear on the outside. They are purposely nondescript. Sometimes there are fake fronts and such, and even sometimes a smallish building on the surface connects to a large underground complex. Putting them in relatively high traffic areas makes it easier to hide the traffic of workers going in and out.
Back in the day I saw a few in DC suburbs (Tyson's Corner VA) that had no windows and only one door, and walls that were blast-resistant and incorporated Faraday cages to prevent electronic leakage. That was the old-school way, I don't know to what extent that is still the case but I assume that is mostly still true, just as a starter. It depends on the type and quality of information.
Even back in the late 1970s and early 1980s technical equipment intended for some government agencies had to pass the TEMPEST EMI test, which has no published spec - they test it and tell you only whether it passed. If it didn't, you were not given any clues as to what needed fixing.
Top Secret America portal article.
Another article, excerpted from the book: "Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State".
This article, adapted from a chapter of the newly released “Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State,” by Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, chronicles JSOC’s spectacular rise, much of which has not been publicly disclosed before. Two presidents and three secretaries of defense routinely have asked JSOC to mount intelligence-gathering missions and lethal raids, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in countries with which the United States was not at war, including Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, the Philippines, Nigeria and Syria.
“The CIA doesn’t have the size or the authority to do some of the things we can do,” said one JSOC operator.
The president has given JSOC the rare authority to select individuals for its kill list — and then to kill, rather than capture, them. Critics charge that this individual man-hunting mission amounts to assassination, a practice prohibited by U.S. law. JSOC’s list is not usually coordinated with the CIA, which maintains a similar but shorter roster of names.
well you want IT people to be IT not rifleman or other stuff that can let then be pulled from the IT to a non IT rifleman job even more so for a state side job.
IIRC 'every man a rifleman' is characteristic of the Marines, and not the same as other branches. The Marines consider it very important that every member of the team can operate that way. This is related to the particular job that Marines are intended to do, operating as small groups often out of touch with higher levels of command. So everyone on the team has to be able to pick up the slack when they lose someone. (IANA military guy - I've just read a lot.)
It's worth noting that in Desert Storm the Marines had their own network architecture (I think it was based on Banyan, an early proprietary windows-centric ethernet architecture). They brought in several thousand computers and had their entire network up and running in something over a week, from a bare patch of sand with no power. Pretty impressive for 1991. The other services, not so much.
Ahh, yes. POSIX - sure, Windows is POSIX-certified ...
Considering that defense, customs and border control are some of the few items actually set out in the Constitution as important activities of the federal government, that's probably a reasonably good thing. (Not to say that it's being done right now, I'm just sayin'). IIRC, for most of US history Defense was well over 1/2 of the total federal budget. Now it's somewhere close to 20%.
In the 1950s the entire Interstate Highway System was justified on defense grounds - the height of overpasses was set to allow military vehicles and missile carriers to go through.
The plain fact is that without borders and defense, we don't have a nation-state. EVERYTHING else is frosting on the cake. Is it being done right, effectively, etc.? Separate question. Should we be the policeman for the whole world? Nearly every other nation has wanted us in that role since WWII including many so-called counter parties like Russia and China. (Notable exceptions are of the ilk of North Korea, etc.) They often don't like the way we do it, but they distrust every other nation even more - and they certainly don't want the UN to have that kind of power any more than we do.
I was at a conference in 1999 where a Navy officer spoke. At that time the DoD was in the process of setting up three separate cyber warfare battalions, working on both defense and offense. He did mention that until recently-at-that-time it had been a hard slog getting the brass to wake up, but things were starting to move faster. IIRC a battalion is about 500 'soldiers' plus some number of support staff (Wikipedia sez 300-1200 total).
I would expect that in the 12 years since then the size of this effort has expanded by up to 2 orders of magnitude. There are literally thousands of nondescript buildings in shopping malls and industrial parks all over the country filled with folks doing all sorts of eyes-only burn-before-reading stuff, and I'm sure that a lot of that is cyber warfare research, training and activity. Part of the plan back in 1999 was to enlist major companies in information sharing regarding security threats to the economic infrastructure. Some of that effort got put into CERT early on, but I expect there are more classified levels of that going on.
Keeping the baddies out of Ford, SmithKline or even Proctor & Gamble is almost as important as keeping them out of several levels of DoD. Warfare has always been a fundamentally economic activity.
If I had the head for that sort of thing and were a lot younger I'd think seriously about getting into that - it would make for a very 'secure' future. :)
I am pretty sure that a particular clone set (clones of a particular dog) would be patentable, just as at present there are many patented varieties of roses and other plants, that result from selective breeding. (USPTO info on plant patents). In those cases they are effectively clones, having been created by making cuttings of the original plant. They are genetically identical. Patent would be stronger protection than copyright.
However, from my reading of the USPTO info, those patents apply to plants, not animals. I'm too lazy to research further. It may be that animal clones would have be to added to this patent structure by legislation in order to be patentable. Whether that is a good idea is an exercise for the reader. But I expect it will happen.
The next thing I'd do is try to automate as much as possible. Because once it starts slowing down, it would be pretty frustrating to interact with.
:D
Oblig.: Sand Universe
What were the Americans doing in 1836? Playing cowboys and indians I believe.
- and living on the fruits of cotton processing machinery technology stolen from the British, that kickstarted the American Industrial Revolution! :) (see "Samuel Slater")
And back in the 60s a Volkswagen bug making 25 MPG and lasting 100K miles was 'miraculous'. Now a Ford F150 can do 25 MPG and an equivalent to the VW bug can make 40-50 MPG, and last 200K to 300K miles.
Indeed. A good example was Samuel Slater. In 1789 the technology for spinning cotton was a British state secret. Stealing the technology, Samuel Slater kickstarted the cotton mill industry in New England and arguably the entire US part of the Industrial Revolution.
Worried about the possibility of losing her technological lead to other nations, and aware of the growing threat posed by American patriots as their battle for independence developed, Britain had passed a statute in 1774 making it illegal for cotton workers to leave the country, or for cotton-machine technology to be exported.
Disguised as a farmer, Samuel took ship from London on September 1st, 1789, telling no-one of his intentions and only informing his immediate family in a letter he posted just before going aboard.
Stitched into the lining of his clothing were his indenture papers, which would prove to any prospective employer that he knew his job. More importantly, in his head he carried all the secrets of the water frame and the continuous spinning process that Arkwright and Strutt had perfected.
That'd be a browser in an OS in a browser in an OS. :D
... and that could be extended to an arbitrary depth!
APL FTW! :D Occasionally described as the first 'Write-only language'. But it was remarkably good at describing the pure problem efficiently, without all the syntactic fiddling most languages require. Cross-product was just 'cross-product' - no nested for loops. But the programmer had to think completely in terms of the abstract problem being solved, not piecewise refinement of all the fiddly details.
(wait, no, even better: at editing time, because you're IDE/Emacs/whatever *should* be able to compile even an impartial AST and tell you immediately that you got your types wrong).
I would like to agree with this (long ago I even work with an 'Interactive Incremental Compiler' for FORTRAN that did the syntax checking on a line by line basis as you typed). But there is a major problem - the editor basically has to include a complete, correct copy of the language compiler/interpreter in its own logic. Since most languages these days are built based on various token-tools, perhaps it would be possible to base the checking on the input definitions to those tools (sorry I can't remember what they are called.) That would be an interesting exercise, and might make it possible to build a multilanguage editor that had that capability.
Many editors (Vim, e.g.) have pretty good syntax coloring which is a good half-step in this direction. And the APL environment worked that way, and there have been others. I think languages that have adopted C-like syntax will be the last because C syntax is so ... baroque.
I think it depends on the application. A project I worked on the proposal for was an upgrade to a large rail system. They had a big room with about a dozen huge projection displays that together showed the entire route system with live status from sensor data all over the area. I think every operator had their own console to work on their particular bit of it, but having the entire thing visible to everyone at once provided important contextual information. Similar displays, even full immersion rooms (for somewhat different purposes), are used in the chemical and oil industries. To some extent that would be true for any network-like operation, especially if you have a large number of nodes and edges.
One of the biggest issues I have with any computer monitor is that it is nearly impossible to provide all the contextual information that any wooden desktop provides. Seeing something 'out of the corner of my eye' is a valuable tool that is essentially not available in a computing environment. Our eyes and brains have an amazing capability to see both close-up detail and simultaneously be unconsciously monitoring a wide area around that detail. Working on computers, even the dual-screen setup I have now, is like always having to see through a porthole.
Back in the day the flow through the sewer systems was an accurate measure of the popularity of certain TV shows, as everyone flushed during the commercials. Nowadays that probably isn't so true.
...what exactly?
Other than writing a vulnerable OS, I mean.
In all fairness, there ain't no other kind. Anyone who thinks otherwise is whistling past the graveyard. True, some are better than others, but that's comparing nearly-completely-immune-compromised with not-quite-completely-immune-compromised. In both cases it doesn't take much exposure to make you very sick - but some are not exposed as often. Running an obscure OS that nobody else runs, which is merely a form of security by obscurity, is still probably helping more than the particulars of the OS itself.
The human genome is a pretty good example. As much as 10% and maybe a lot more of it is comprised of various bits of old viruses, transposons (there are about 300,000 copies of just one particular transposon) and other parasitic or predatory genetic bits. That's the result of eons of genetic system wars. Similarly, OS security wars are going to be with us forever - or at least as long as there are still entities that find benefit in exploitation of others.