Thanks. I should have thought of that - I have a sailboat that I plan to cruise on eventually, and I know the whole issue of availability of charts for different areas is a big one - US charts can be downloaded from NOAA for free, but (as I understand it) most chartplotter vendors have their own proprietary formats and charge large sums for both original charts for an area and for the updates - just like the GPS vendors only worse. There is a small open source charting community (OpenCPN is one example) but AFAIK such tools can only be used on computers, not dedicated chartplotters.
I used to work in Sugar Land TX, and we had armadillos and other critters wandering around the office park on a regular basis. In real life, armadillos are cute. They're almost completely blind, so if you are quiet and work closer to them from downwind you can get quite close. They are surprisingly fast (for short distances), grubbing around in the grass looking for bugs and such. Their ears wiggle and they have a cartoony appearance.
If they didn't smell so much they'd probably make an interesting pet - except for the obvious problem cited here, the fact that they're wild, nocturnal, not housebroken, and are illegal in some states.
Looks pretty bad to me. Anybody that reads and understands the above will never provide their real name or birthdate to a corporation online again. Ever.
Good luck with that. Moving out to Amish country, are we?:)
Seriously, just for example, as time goes on you probably won't be able to make an appointment with your doctor or see the results of the blood test without accessing the clinic's online chart system. One hopes that the clinic's security is better than Sony's, of course.
I'm afraid that in this, Zuckerberg is right - 'privacy is an illusion'. With security barriers falling down left and right, encryption schemes becoming compromised faster than new ones can be contrived, and all the tools of society becoming digitalized, effectively everything about each of us will be public, at least for those who desire to know. Even homeless folks are largely in the system already. 1984 was a mere shadow of the depth of knowledge that Big Brother will know.
It's also more complicated. Since this is essentially medical data, there are legal, regulatory and ethical restrictions on allowing non-medical personnel (including IT) access to the data.
IMHO this is truly an appropriate issue to take to the hospital's policy level. It's not just a 'rogue server' question. It may be that this person will have to become a 'delegated IT' person, with both permissions and responsibilities of a subset of the overall IT relevant to that department. IT would also have to have a backup access, normally not visible to IT personnel without permission from the department in charge of medical privacy issues.
One of the fundamental security issues of 'normal' Unix, Linux etc. is that root has access to everything. I wonder if this could be handled by use of SE-Linux. IIRC, one of the purposes of SE-Linux was the ability to compartmentalize access to information, so the 'root' user could not see information that they did not have security clearances for. Is that right?
Don't forget all the other important languages! * brainfuck * whitespace * piet * INTERCAL * false * befunge * malbolge and, of course (last but not least!) * LOLCODE
Actually COBOL predates SQL by about 10 years. AFAIK nobody has written a language that implements the relational query model to replace SQL. And (though I have never written anything in COBOL he says thankfully) COBOL has its place even today. I would not be surprised if there are as many lines of COBOL still running in enterprises everywhere as there are of PHP or Perl in those same enterprises.
And COBOL even now is without question a better solution for business and application programming than C ever was or ever will be. (Of course it's arguable that there are other languages better for those tasks than COBOL as well.) C is good for device drivers, kernels and as a target for interpreted and scripting languages with compiled code generators. C is, as Kernighan, Ritchie or Thompson (I forget which) said, "a structured PDP-11 Macro-assembler". Today (putting my Nomex suit on...) IMHO application programmers should not be wasting their time coping with segfaults and compile-link cycles. Their time is worth more than the machine time that any cycle-saving difference.:)
I was thinking about this a couple of days ago - the LFTR (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor) might actually be a feasible candidate for providing the heat energy to run one or two really big fans. One of the many advantages of the LFTR is that it can be sized for particular applications, and it's just possible that it might be made small enough to fit on a large airplane. The LFTR is a high temperature, low pressure reactor and also (IIRC) requires much less shielding than U-238 reactors.
So it's possible that an LFTR-powered plane using superheated water to drive the turbines might just work. If so, then the 'jet' output would have zero emissions (except for heat). The planes would only have to be refueled once in a while.
I'm too lazy to figure out just how big a plane it would have to be.
Full disclosure: my dad was a builder, who built some of the buildings for the very ill-fated Atomic Airplane project back in the 1950s - GE actually built a successful test engine, but the entire rest of the program was a complete mess. He got screwed for $400,000 in 1950s dollars and never got it back.
And that is why these guys recommend shipping insurance (there are many others in their business, I'm sure). They also maintain the Gallery of Transport Loss, with photos of the disasters that have occurred to various ships and freight airplanes, which for some reason I find terrifically amusing.
It's also an example of terrible web design (on every page you have to scroll down a long way to get to the actual content). Nevertheless it's worth navigating in any case for a couple of hours of pictures of ships on the beach, ships sinking, ships struck by hurricanes, ships losing containers, etc.
You know something else? I suspect they are more 'American' in one sense than many of the Americans they're competing with. That is, that they had the initiative, the willingness to take risks, the willingness or desire to go someplace far away, to achieve something, and did what was necessary to get themselves here - just like the folks who came here 300 years ago, and built this country.
A friend of mine many years ago, working on an EE degree, came from a tiny fishing village in Iran. The entire village got together to raise the money to send him to America and pay for tuition at a state school. That's all they could do. He had to find a job here to pay for housing, food, books and everything else. He got about three hours of sleep a night, after studying, working his job and working on his English. Once he graduated and got a good job, his duty was to send money back to fund the next one. Of course, if he reneged there was no way the village could have done anything about it. I lost track of him, but I'm sure that he did what was expected, and he is probably a successful engineer somewhere now, or maybe a professor.
Oh, I agree. I also think that we should establish the same policy regarding immigrants from each country based on their policy toward immigration by us. For example, from what I've read Mexico is quite difficult to immigrate into and get citizenship and are quite harsh on illegal immigrants. So why should we allow them to come here?
I will say that the progress on environment has been substantial in all those countries, due largely in part to the demands first of their customers here, and now their own people. It will take a while - last I read China uses five times as much energy per unit of productivity as we do, and emissions of mercury and other toxics by Chinese plants are showing up in the air here, today - but things are improving. Twenty years ago the Chinese establishment basically turned a deaf ear to issues of worker safety, environment, product safety, etc. Since then things seem to have changed a lot. It will take several generations, though, before the purely-pragmatic value system that supported rampant cheating on every axis will be completely purged.
It's worth noting that several countries (including the US) have successfully used overly strict environmental and product quality laws as unfair barriers to free trade.
I read a study recently (sorry, don't recall where) that showed the best programmers don't stay at the same company. They tend to get bored after three or four years and move on to a new challenge. The ones that tend to stay at one company also tend to become the dead wood. Also, changing situations is a good way to kick start your creative processes. I don't see any significant value in staying at one company. In fact right now I'm torn because I'm at about that point, but I've become attached to the folks at the company, and I know they need me. OTOH I'm being pretty successful now at teaching others there what I do, so if I do leave in the future, they won't be left hanging.
Hee hee. A female family friend of mine has a PhD in physics from Carnegie Mellon, and now works on various high tech stuff for Phillips. She also reads Harlequin romance novels - about one a week.:D
Just a word to the wise - keep up the marketing side of the biz. I did consulting for quite a while, but was never good at drumming up new work. I had a couple of very big, very good clients but after a while their parent company took them in another direction (different tech) and they couldn't use me any more. As a result, my income suffered badly after a couple of good years. Also, make sure you have at least a one-year cushion for those lean times.
Haha - funny thing. As of five years ago (last time I read anything about it) the average systems administrator made more ($65K) than the average lawyer ($59K).
Funny thing, that sounds just like the complaints of the unions in Detroit when the car companies were opening 'greenfield' plants in North Carolina, Georgia, etc. This is just the global version of the same thing. Pertinent question. Walmart has created more 'middle class' jobs (by world standards) than any other institution in history, bringing entire nations into the global economy. Something over 10 million families have gone from living on dirt and sticks to have real income. Do you advocate forcing all those people back into subsistence farming?
That's the real issue. What we are experiencing now is simply a more efficient global economy, which is going through a transition to where wage scales will be more or less equivalent for people all over the world. As a case in point, the Chinese government is already worried about 'low wage' jobs getting moved to SE Asia and Africa. As wage differentials gradually stabilize, the demand for jobs here will increase. I have been receiving occasional 'in-sourcing' recruiting emails for a couple of years - Indian companies that are looking for Americans to work here, for them there.
The sad fact is that in a level world, American workers at all levels will have to compete without any artificial barriers. What is wrong with that?
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks. I should have thought of that - I have a sailboat that I plan to cruise on eventually, and I know the whole issue of availability of charts for different areas is a big one - US charts can be downloaded from NOAA for free, but (as I understand it) most chartplotter vendors have their own proprietary formats and charge large sums for both original charts for an area and for the updates - just like the GPS vendors only worse. There is a small open source charting community (OpenCPN is one example) but AFAIK such tools can only be used on computers, not dedicated chartplotters.
We bought a Tom-Tom for my sister at Costco a few months ago, and it came with lifetime free updates.
I used to work in Sugar Land TX, and we had armadillos and other critters wandering around the office park on a regular basis. In real life, armadillos are cute. They're almost completely blind, so if you are quiet and work closer to them from downwind you can get quite close. They are surprisingly fast (for short distances), grubbing around in the grass looking for bugs and such. Their ears wiggle and they have a cartoony appearance.
If they didn't smell so much they'd probably make an interesting pet - except for the obvious problem cited here, the fact that they're wild, nocturnal, not housebroken, and are illegal in some states.
Looks pretty bad to me. Anybody that reads and understands the above will never provide their real name or birthdate to a corporation online again. Ever.
Good luck with that. Moving out to Amish country, are we? :)
Seriously, just for example, as time goes on you probably won't be able to make an appointment with your doctor or see the results of the blood test without accessing the clinic's online chart system. One hopes that the clinic's security is better than Sony's, of course.
I'm afraid that in this, Zuckerberg is right - 'privacy is an illusion'. With security barriers falling down left and right, encryption schemes becoming compromised faster than new ones can be contrived, and all the tools of society becoming digitalized, effectively everything about each of us will be public, at least for those who desire to know. Even homeless folks are largely in the system already. 1984 was a mere shadow of the depth of knowledge that Big Brother will know.
It's also more complicated. Since this is essentially medical data, there are legal, regulatory and ethical restrictions on allowing non-medical personnel (including IT) access to the data.
IMHO this is truly an appropriate issue to take to the hospital's policy level. It's not just a 'rogue server' question. It may be that this person will have to become a 'delegated IT' person, with both permissions and responsibilities of a subset of the overall IT relevant to that department. IT would also have to have a backup access, normally not visible to IT personnel without permission from the department in charge of medical privacy issues.
One of the fundamental security issues of 'normal' Unix, Linux etc. is that root has access to everything. I wonder if this could be handled by use of SE-Linux. IIRC, one of the purposes of SE-Linux was the ability to compartmentalize access to information, so the 'root' user could not see information that they did not have security clearances for. Is that right?
Don't forget all the other important languages!
* brainfuck
* whitespace
* piet
* INTERCAL
* false
* befunge
* malbolge
and, of course (last but not least!)
* LOLCODE
Actually COBOL predates SQL by about 10 years. AFAIK nobody has written a language that implements the relational query model to replace SQL. And (though I have never written anything in COBOL he says thankfully) COBOL has its place even today. I would not be surprised if there are as many lines of COBOL still running in enterprises everywhere as there are of PHP or Perl in those same enterprises.
And COBOL even now is without question a better solution for business and application programming than C ever was or ever will be. (Of course it's arguable that there are other languages better for those tasks than COBOL as well.) C is good for device drivers, kernels and as a target for interpreted and scripting languages with compiled code generators. C is, as Kernighan, Ritchie or Thompson (I forget which) said, "a structured PDP-11 Macro-assembler". Today (putting my Nomex suit on...) IMHO application programmers should not be wasting their time coping with segfaults and compile-link cycles. Their time is worth more than the machine time that any cycle-saving difference. :)
I was thinking about this a couple of days ago - the LFTR (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor) might actually be a feasible candidate for providing the heat energy to run one or two really big fans. One of the many advantages of the LFTR is that it can be sized for particular applications, and it's just possible that it might be made small enough to fit on a large airplane. The LFTR is a high temperature, low pressure reactor and also (IIRC) requires much less shielding than U-238 reactors.
So it's possible that an LFTR-powered plane using superheated water to drive the turbines might just work. If so, then the 'jet' output would have zero emissions (except for heat). The planes would only have to be refueled once in a while.
I'm too lazy to figure out just how big a plane it would have to be.
Full disclosure: my dad was a builder, who built some of the buildings for the very ill-fated Atomic Airplane project back in the 1950s - GE actually built a successful test engine, but the entire rest of the program was a complete mess. He got screwed for $400,000 in 1950s dollars and never got it back.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new ...' Isaac Asimov
discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny
This event seems to fit that bill well.
And that is why these guys recommend shipping insurance (there are many others in their business, I'm sure). They also maintain the Gallery of Transport Loss, with photos of the disasters that have occurred to various ships and freight airplanes, which for some reason I find terrifically amusing.
It's also an example of terrible web design (on every page you have to scroll down a long way to get to the actual content). Nevertheless it's worth navigating in any case for a couple of hours of pictures of ships on the beach, ships sinking, ships struck by hurricanes, ships losing containers, etc.
A couple of examples:
towboat pulled under a bridge, rolled upside down, and comes up on the other side
M/V APL China struck by hurricane, limps into port with containers hanging over the side.
Last but not least, a day at the beach turns into four months. Truly amazing pictures of people walking up the beach next to a huge container carrier
I like it! :D
or, Hustler's revenge! (What was that guy's name - founded Hustler, got shot and wheelchair bound.)
Use a design inspired by R.Crumb. :)
Gee, that makes me wonder if the Large Hadron Collider might be somehow behind it.
Hmm. That's a game idea... An old geezer who (kinda like Popeye) becomes super when he takes his Viagra. Comedy gold! :D
Extra points when you whack the villain with your pole!
... plus 40 miles of gaseous envelope to trap what gets through, and secondary particles ...
You know something else? I suspect they are more 'American' in one sense than many of the Americans they're competing with. That is, that they had the initiative, the willingness to take risks, the willingness or desire to go someplace far away, to achieve something, and did what was necessary to get themselves here - just like the folks who came here 300 years ago, and built this country.
A friend of mine many years ago, working on an EE degree, came from a tiny fishing village in Iran. The entire village got together to raise the money to send him to America and pay for tuition at a state school. That's all they could do. He had to find a job here to pay for housing, food, books and everything else. He got about three hours of sleep a night, after studying, working his job and working on his English. Once he graduated and got a good job, his duty was to send money back to fund the next one. Of course, if he reneged there was no way the village could have done anything about it. I lost track of him, but I'm sure that he did what was expected, and he is probably a successful engineer somewhere now, or maybe a professor.
Oh, I agree. I also think that we should establish the same policy regarding immigrants from each country based on their policy toward immigration by us. For example, from what I've read Mexico is quite difficult to immigrate into and get citizenship and are quite harsh on illegal immigrants. So why should we allow them to come here?
I will say that the progress on environment has been substantial in all those countries, due largely in part to the demands first of their customers here, and now their own people. It will take a while - last I read China uses five times as much energy per unit of productivity as we do, and emissions of mercury and other toxics by Chinese plants are showing up in the air here, today - but things are improving. Twenty years ago the Chinese establishment basically turned a deaf ear to issues of worker safety, environment, product safety, etc. Since then things seem to have changed a lot. It will take several generations, though, before the purely-pragmatic value system that supported rampant cheating on every axis will be completely purged.
It's worth noting that several countries (including the US) have successfully used overly strict environmental and product quality laws as unfair barriers to free trade.
i have a counter proposal for you: can we export ignorant americans?
... and thus we have the original reasoning behind the ship that populated Earth in "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"! :D
I read a study recently (sorry, don't recall where) that showed the best programmers don't stay at the same company. They tend to get bored after three or four years and move on to a new challenge. The ones that tend to stay at one company also tend to become the dead wood. Also, changing situations is a good way to kick start your creative processes. I don't see any significant value in staying at one company. In fact right now I'm torn because I'm at about that point, but I've become attached to the folks at the company, and I know they need me. OTOH I'm being pretty successful now at teaching others there what I do, so if I do leave in the future, they won't be left hanging.
The best programmers are the ones that do it all the time at their house as a hobby, so you probably had it made anyway.
Gee, too bad I can't get paid for reading Slashdot! :D
Hee hee. A female family friend of mine has a PhD in physics from Carnegie Mellon, and now works on various high tech stuff for Phillips. She also reads Harlequin romance novels - about one a week. :D
Indeed - I spent a week in India last September. I loved it, but it was also illuminating.
For perspective, the average person reading this blog probably spent more on coffee today than the average Indian's entire income.
Just a word to the wise - keep up the marketing side of the biz. I did consulting for quite a while, but was never good at drumming up new work. I had a couple of very big, very good clients but after a while their parent company took them in another direction (different tech) and they couldn't use me any more. As a result, my income suffered badly after a couple of good years. Also, make sure you have at least a one-year cushion for those lean times.
Haha - funny thing. As of five years ago (last time I read anything about it) the average systems administrator made more ($65K) than the average lawyer ($59K).
Funny thing, that sounds just like the complaints of the unions in Detroit when the car companies were opening 'greenfield' plants in North Carolina, Georgia, etc. This is just the global version of the same thing. Pertinent question. Walmart has created more 'middle class' jobs (by world standards) than any other institution in history, bringing entire nations into the global economy. Something over 10 million families have gone from living on dirt and sticks to have real income. Do you advocate forcing all those people back into subsistence farming?
That's the real issue. What we are experiencing now is simply a more efficient global economy, which is going through a transition to where wage scales will be more or less equivalent for people all over the world. As a case in point, the Chinese government is already worried about 'low wage' jobs getting moved to SE Asia and Africa. As wage differentials gradually stabilize, the demand for jobs here will increase. I have been receiving occasional 'in-sourcing' recruiting emails for a couple of years - Indian companies that are looking for Americans to work here, for them there.
The sad fact is that in a level world, American workers at all levels will have to compete without any artificial barriers. What is wrong with that?
Wish I had mod points!! :D