The point is that a good domain name system implementation needs to be secure against protocol attacks. DNSSEC secures it against hackers, but makes it more vulnerable to political attacks.
You do know that DNS root servers are located (and co-located) around the world (20+ countries I believe off the top of my head), and they are all equal. The only US-centric part is that the designated maintainers (ICANN and IANA) are US based organizations, in large part due to historically originating in the US, and this does have the benefit being one of the best legal protection for free-speech in the world.
Certainly possible. Compact arc-welding units (available for 120Vac AC mains) are pretty small, and if the pieces of metal you are welding are as well, then with proper ventilation, and isolation from flammable materials, then sure it is possible in small degrees.
Inadvertently triggering a fire alarm and/or suppression system in an office environment could be an issue too.
Many amateurs or hobbyists have faced this dilemma in their own personal (and professional) work spaces for centuries nows. Two groups I know a little about are woodworkers and machinists, who have written dozens of books and articles about this subject, in both the general and specific case.
0. Safety equipment: dust masks, goggles, safety glasses (with side protection), gloves (nitrile, latax, neoprene), hearing protection (ear muffs, ear plugs), and as needed! 1. Tools 2. Storage / management of those tools 3. Hard copy (dead-tree) documentation, it is being rapidly moved online thanks to cheap and compact computers and laptops, but much older reference material is still in old-school paper form (which can be handy) (example references to collect: ARRL Handbook, Art of Electronics, Machinery's Handbook, Woodworking Basics, Understanding Wood, Wiring Simplified) 4. Commonly used materials (lumber, hoses, holes clamps, fabric, sheet metal, dowels, nuts & bolts, wood and metal screws, etc.) 5. Parts (in anti-static containers for any static sensitive parts like CMOS ICs) 6. Labelling tools 7. Log / Lab notebooks . These should be paper-based, though can be complimented with online documents, a honest to goodness hard copy lab book is essential. 8. Chemicals 9. Large, easy to read clock 10. Test equipment: rulers, tape measures, calipers, digital multi-meter 11. Plenty of AC mains circuits and outlets. Preferably with a separate circuit for lighting versus wall outlets. - Avoid extended use of extension cables, and excessive use of power bars.
Perhaps bluntly said, but I agree at least in part: Access to structure and assistance can be a huge benefit.
In fact, part of this story does involve access to assistance for the "students", via the Internet for asking questions. I think this part of learning is necessary. The potential issue is that taken as a whole, the Internet is a mixed bag, and not all forums are of high quality value sources for answers.
One of the most common quotes from new university or college students, is that they don't know what they want to do. So rather than make 17-18 years old pick (guess) their first / primary vocation for the rest of the life, they can self-select "streams" of learning, which are pre-packaged by people with similar inclinations into a coherent, if basic, form, outlining a background that should create opportunities that the individuals can seize for themselves as they become more experienced and more familiar with those "streams" and their associated professions.
I've worked as a demonstrator and tutor a lot and I'd barelly class what I tell my friend teaching.
I would say you are teaching your friend, but you are not lecturing (or "hand-holding" / "spoon-feeding") him, since he is an adult (I assume).
It's that you are acting more as a mentor, than a lecturer which is different than the majority of formal education, but that doesn't make you any less of a teacher.
Drawing up a plain language version of a CS degree program (complete with possible electives) for your friend might be a helpful way to also help your friend, Map out what topics he has 'yet' to learn, so he at least knowns what he knowns versus the entire domain of knowledge (which he can learn as needed, as time permits).
No need for an alternate universe, tool libraries, while not common, do exist. In part associated with the maker "movement" which has increased the number of formal open-membership hacker spaces around the world.
I suspect any medium to large city could make a tool library work, and a number of public libraries are acting as catalysts for the tool libraries, in the cases where they are not yet large enough to be free-standing organizations.
Of course, if you want to argue that we should go after countries that give material support to murderous organizations, then we should have gone to war with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan.
The majority of errors and mistakes should be random, but cheaters copy both correct answers and mistakes, in a pattern that is non-typical. The errors or mistakes that relate to faulty understanding of the course material are the exception mentioned. E.g. applying the wrong approximation/ rule/ theory/ calculation in order to answer the question.
Of course, using more complex evaluation is another method to deter cheating. It's harder to copy hand written essays than multiple choice questions, during a test or exam, though they also take far longer to mark and are more subjective for the marker to evaluate.
However if exigent circumstances exist and an officer has reasonable and probable grounds to believe a person is in immediate harm, they must be able to disclose this information. Even then the officer must still within 24hrs, submit a request and a full explanation of why they used exigent circumstances for the information.
So what checks-and-balance exist to verify that a police officer is not abusing such rapid access authority to spy on their current or former spouse or partner? It seems that is the officer makes false claims of a violent stalking complaint to the telecom or ISP, and then "fails" to do the follow-up paperwork with the Crown, he/she gets aware with it. Something similar happened before, I think it was, in L.A. where officers spied on current and former girlfriends and spouses.
While I am sympathetic to lawful officers burden to complete 60-100+ pages of paperwork to obtain a straight forward warrant, given the option, law enforcement will attempt to maximize the usage of warranty-less wiretaps regardless of actual need. It's human nature. I'm sympathetic to 90% of law enforcement officers, but still distressed at the growing number of lapses in judgment or criminal behaviour officers of major units including the RCMP have been found guilty of.
I haven't had a chance to read the proposed bill and current legislation myself, I would suggest that things like this have the habit of morphing into a large broken mess, if allowed to, akin to the long-gun registry. Regardless whether you think such a database has merit, it evolved into a billion dollar piece of garbage (in its first year alone) because too many "vested parties" tweaked the implementation to include their own pet desires. My favourite is the self-declaration regarding mental health. It's sad to see that law enforcement take such an un-enlightened look at issues such as PTSD and depression, two mental health conditions rampant within their own ranks. Of which if their own ranks were held to the same standard, most LEO veterans would be desk bound and weapon-less.
But the Israelis don't tolerate groping children like the USA does.
It is actually so HLS can recruit more TSA 'agents' from the talent pool of candidates that aren't suitable for jobs like priests, halfway house workers, hockey coaches, and fugly homosexuals*.
*) Not suggesting homosexuals are any more likely to abuse than the general population. Problem is, there are too many people from the general population that are already willing to abuse minors, of both sexes, and I doubt the TSA is going to successfully screen them out before they are let loose upon the public with near perfect federal and state immunity.
Maybe the US army? Well, I'm not sure, but I believe both the US and British navies (navy plural) have dropped star (sextant) navigation training. Although given the growing reliance of most NATO and US-friendly countries on GPS (et all Sat nav), it wouldn't surprise me if land based navigation is no longer taught. Map and compass is hard to learn with an iPhone for a map. Most working maps are digital, and increasingly only viewed in digital form.
That depends, not everyone is good at, or prefers dealing with the analyst role. For many medium and small firms they don't even have designated analysts because many strong programmers don't function well in purely that role.
Anyhow, I know programmers-turn-whatever adaptable types that were laid off from IBM and others regardless.
Thankfully, my employer can't outsource due to business nature, and our customer depends upon us to manage so much of their own business (process, assets, strategy) that we don't expect to go away anytime soon.
following up on the book "Programmers at Work" which was about Microsoft programmers.
No, many of them never worked for Microsoft. The book was published by Microsoft Press as I remember.
Though most if not all were microcomputer (i.e. Personal Computer aka PC) programmers. That's were the revolution was happening. Mini and mainframes had been around for a while by that time in computing's history.
Gary Kildall
Andy Hertzfeld
Jef Raskin
Toru Iwatani
C. Wayne Ratliff
Dan Bricklin
Scott Kim
...
All of these programmers never worked at Microsoft, and neither did I.
Are you suggesting the OP, a self-described interested lay person, learns or even mere follow mathematic research by reading arXiv? If so, WTF!?
arXiv is a pre-print archive of original research articles, not exactly a welcoming place for a non-mathematician (or non-subject specialist, e.g. physics, and computer science also use it). Even with an undergrad degree in mathematics, I find it a difficult (and/or useless) place to try to follow progress in the field, without the editorial assistants to filter the wheat from the chaff. And I've been reading original (first source) research papers since the mid-1990s in multiple research disciplines.
You might as well ask him to read Euclid's Elements in its original Greek. Heck, after the translation, it would be more accessible, as it is intended to be a textbook for learning.
I would rather suggest, try reading some of the mathematics journals that are intended to be more accessible, such as from MAA and AMS societies. Some are aimed at students of two-year and four-year "colleges" (aka polytechs / technical colleges and universities), while others are just interesting yet often accessible, such as Journal of Recreational Mathematics and Mathematics Magazine and online columns such as Kevin Devlin's Devlin's Angle.
Unfortunately I can't think of any pop-math books or articles on linear algebra, in the vein of "e: The Story of a Number" (Maor), "An Imaginary Tale" (Nahin), "Flatland" (Abbott), "Flatterland" (Stwart), "A Mathematician's Apology" (Hardy), "Fermat's Last Theorm" / "Fermat's Engima" (US) (Singh), "Does God Play Dice?" (Stewart), "Chaos" (Gleick), and many others.
To wit, mathematics is I believe the only discipline where fourth year undergrad students take third or fourth year courses with "introduction" or "elementary" in their course titles. But I digress. My point is that one "problem" is that given mathematics long history, and that is has fascinated people across cultures throughout history, the subject has accumulated such a vast body of knowledge, so it is difficult to get a firm understanding on every field within mathematics. So feeling overwhelmed with all the facts and fields to learn is normal.
Maybe I dreamt it, but I thought that the US and Canadian government bailed out multiple US automotive manufacturers, and where told to stop be dumb-***** pissing away money on dumb products, and concentrate on improving fuel economy, emissions, and affordability in a time of economy downturn (recession or depression).
I forget what was it in the end, something like $19 billion+ US dollars? Guess that doesn't buy much these days.
I still think they should of required every CEO and VP of the affected companies to spend four weeks doing various jobs at their companies, including two weeks of factory workers in order to keep their jobs. (I'm think in the style of Undercover Boss television show).
It's rare for anyone, never mind a big-time CEO, to make such frank assessment of their career in public."
That's not true, but it does reflect the media's obsession and perception of CEOs are rock stars, even using the reference to conjure the image of larger than life these people who head companies.
Frankly the truth is that business media, which is rarely actually news oriented (as in novel events and objective reporting; versus press release regurgitation), doesn't actually investigate the non-celebrity business leaders. In the present day United States they are mostly limited to privately held corporations, often of family owned businesses. In other countries the same trend is happening, though at a slower pace.
The media loves a "star" that they can gossip about, and call it news, it's cheaper and less effort than actually reading through SEC filings and quarterly statements and creating a spreadsheet. Not that many "business news" people can actually do and understand such a process.
Disclosure: I'm basing much of this on private conversations with Masters graduates of an internationally recognized university in England, and a book written by a financial / business news reporter. Sorry, I don't have the title handy.
Get training on procurement process through whatever level of government you are with (e.g. US Federal, Ontario provincial, etc.). Then you will know what purchasing options are available. The problem is that many departments and agencies have cut their procurement & supply staff, and those remaining tend to be at best amateurs in their knowledge about IT purchases, and most IT departments staff avoid dull training like procurement, and thus their purchases are done in a very ad-hoc manner, and often reflect personal bias (like only buying from Dell).
In the USA, at the federal level the government U.S. General Services Administration runs a program GSA Advantage.
In Canada the federal government Public Works and Government Services Canada (PWGSC) runs a Standing Offer Index including a specific one for microcomputers. For generic office PCs, these are starting points that are "pre-approved" purchases so you don't need to create and advertise and evaluate and have contested a RFQ (Request For Quotes), and as well the purchasers can also do LPO (local purchase offers) or RVD (Request Volume Discount) and likely other techniques I don't know of in particular if the Index is out of date, or a large volume purchase may warrant a discount.
Also learn and understand TCO - Total Cost of Ownership, that is the overall cost of the purchase (i.e. a PC in this case) including repairs / replacement components, down time due to failure - including the cost of have the employee unable to fully function at their job, plus cost in time & labour of IT staff for deployment (roll-out) including disk imaging (by vendor or IT), as well as overall satisfaction of the agency with the IT department's perceived value. This is standard IT management (CIO and below) knowledge, so talk to an intelligent IT manager for any help you need in this regard.
Unless you have scores of idle IT staff, assembling 1000 PCs is a lot of labour and time. And that's assuming you pick a hardware configuration that works, is stable, and is reliable. Most IT departments are staffed with strictly software oriented system administrators as their rank and file, with reasonably few if any computer hardware technicians and tools. And "at-home builders" experience don't cut it in a professional setting; it's a starting point for new hires, not a substitute for fully trained technicians. I'm sure that will cause flames, but I don't care, and to wit, I'm not a computer hardware technician, but I have respect for the few I have worked with, they were excellent at their job, and knew which end of the soldering iron to hold when making custom serial cables.
Anytime a record follows a person there needs to be some form of error checking involved and the ability to fix it.
And on the electronic patient medical record system I worked on a decade ago (which was roughly 20 years old then) had not only the ability to change/correct, but also keep an audit trail of any revisions, so malicious or competing edits (think Wikipedia editing wars) could at least be logged.
Why I don't doubt that some good critical thinking, and legitimate questioning come from these meta-research studies, I fear that the process is ripe for abuse, as basically being so awash in data (information overload) that given enough data you can pick and choose to fit your a priori or posteriori hypothesis.
I applaud the increased scrutiny of statistical analysis, which is truly difficult to administer on even the best designed and controlled biological and medical studies, where you have very little "total control" of the experimental subjects - damn ethics committees on testing human subjects, and using double blind testing is the best you can do to eliminate bias, yet may mask discovery of experimental flaws during the testing phase. Things go "wonky" in strange ways, for example testing a heart medication, and a freak snowstorm skews all the results because of the rise of heart attacks from the increase in shovelling. We can't legally put 1000s of humans in vats for 10-20 years to test everything, and computational models are primitive and only address what the model is designed to look for, while most medical testing focuses on the unexpected results and effects that may only appear in a small fraction of society, yet if the consequences are dire, it can kill an entire potentially life-saving product.
I fear that the "undergrad social science" approach of meta-study research will make the approach stained with a reputation of people who want to "do science", but without the messy get-your-hands-dirty that costs money (an increasingly mythical subatomic particle in most fields of science and labs around the world) and just do a PR-style re-spin (think: re-branding) of the results of multiple similar but different experiments to reach a conclusion that was not considered by the original experimenters, so whom may not include appropriate experimental controls to minimize draw incorrect conclusions from this re-interpretation of the experimental data. Of if they are really lazy (like social science elective takers), draw conclusions from a compilation of results, and not even bother looking at the original (raw or filtered) data at all. I guess I'm trying to say that there is limited latitude for re-interpreting data for anything beyond what the experiment was designed to test. It can be very useful for detecting and thwarting bad or biased experiments, but as far as I know, it cannot produce trustworthy results from bad experiments.
To be serious for a moment (I know this can be frown upon in non-CS topics), engineering a virus is more work than modifying a bacteria. Because if you remember anything junior high biology, bacterias are man times larger than viruses, making them much easier to work with.
To wit, there is so far no known virus (size) DIYbio projects known within the communities, and the government (namely FBI) have been monitoring groups to watch for idiots asking for advice on malicious uses of host/target species (i.e. known pathogens).
You're more likely to get a STD, even if you're a uber-geek, than be harmed by a DIYbio project - of either the successfully-malicious, or the accidentally-harmful kind.
Remember that their definition of "data center" is more than a little self-serving, it can include any re-purposed office closet or "server room" in any of the tens of thousands of government offices in the thousands of government buildings.
Slashdot Mirror
I was thinking more or less the same thing.
The point is that a good domain name system implementation needs to be secure against protocol attacks. DNSSEC secures it against hackers, but makes it more vulnerable to political attacks.
You do know that DNS root servers are located (and co-located) around the world (20+ countries I believe off the top of my head), and they are all equal. The only US-centric part is that the designated maintainers (ICANN and IANA) are US based organizations, in large part due to historically originating in the US, and this does have the benefit being one of the best legal protection for free-speech in the world.
If you want an alternate system, edit your DNS root hints file.
Join the Internet Society, ICANN, and your national domain registrar if you want to make difference.
Certainly possible. Compact arc-welding units (available for 120Vac AC mains) are pretty small, and if the pieces of metal you are welding are as well, then with proper ventilation, and isolation from flammable materials, then sure it is possible in small degrees.
Inadvertently triggering a fire alarm and/or suppression system in an office environment could be an issue too.
Many amateurs or hobbyists have faced this dilemma in their own personal (and professional) work spaces for centuries nows. Two groups I know a little about are wood workers and machinists, who have written dozens of books and articles about this subject, in both the general and specific case.
0. Safety equipment: dust masks, goggles, safety glasses (with side protection), gloves (nitrile, latax, neoprene), hearing protection (ear muffs, ear plugs), and as needed!
1. Tools
2. Storage / management of those tools
3. Hard copy (dead-tree) documentation, it is being rapidly moved online thanks to cheap and compact computers and laptops, but much older reference material is still in old-school paper form (which can be handy) (example references to collect: ARRL Handbook, Art of Electronics, Machinery's Handbook, Woodworking Basics, Understanding Wood, Wiring Simplified)
4. Commonly used materials (lumber, hoses, holes clamps, fabric, sheet metal, dowels, nuts & bolts, wood and metal screws, etc.)
5. Parts (in anti-static containers for any static sensitive parts like CMOS ICs)
6. Labelling tools
7. Log / Lab notebooks . These should be paper-based, though can be complimented with online documents, a honest to goodness hard copy lab book is essential.
8. Chemicals
9. Large, easy to read clock
10. Test equipment: rulers, tape measures, calipers, digital multi-meter
11. Plenty of AC mains circuits and outlets. Preferably with a separate circuit for lighting versus wall outlets. - Avoid extended use of extension cables, and excessive use of power bars.
And time.
Perhaps bluntly said, but I agree at least in part: Access to structure and assistance can be a huge benefit.
In fact, part of this story does involve access to assistance for the "students", via the Internet for asking questions. I think this part of learning is necessary. The potential issue is that taken as a whole, the Internet is a mixed bag, and not all forums are of high quality value sources for answers.
One of the most common quotes from new university or college students, is that they don't know what they want to do. So rather than make 17-18 years old pick (guess) their first / primary vocation for the rest of the life, they can self-select "streams" of learning, which are pre-packaged by people with similar inclinations into a coherent, if basic, form, outlining a background that should create opportunities that the individuals can seize for themselves as they become more experienced and more familiar with those "streams" and their associated professions.
I've worked as a demonstrator and tutor a lot and I'd barelly class what I tell my friend teaching.
I would say you are teaching your friend, but you are not lecturing (or "hand-holding" / "spoon-feeding") him, since he is an adult (I assume).
It's that you are acting more as a mentor, than a lecturer which is different than the majority of formal education, but that doesn't make you any less of a teacher.
Drawing up a plain language version of a CS degree program (complete with possible electives) for your friend might be a helpful way to also help your friend, Map out what topics he has 'yet' to learn, so he at least knowns what he knowns versus the entire domain of knowledge (which he can learn as needed, as time permits).
And best of luck to your friend.
No need for an alternate universe, tool libraries, while not common, do exist. In part associated with the maker "movement" which has increased the number of formal open-membership hacker spaces around the world.
I suspect any medium to large city could make a tool library work, and a number of public libraries are acting as catalysts for the tool libraries, in the cases where they are not yet large enough to be free-standing organizations.
Of course, if you want to argue that we should go after countries that give material support to murderous organizations, then we should have gone to war with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan.
You forgot the United States of America.
Welcome to statistical analysis.
The majority of errors and mistakes should be random, but cheaters copy both correct answers and mistakes, in a pattern that is non-typical. The errors or mistakes that relate to faulty understanding of the course material are the exception mentioned. E.g. applying the wrong approximation/ rule/ theory/ calculation in order to answer the question.
Of course, using more complex evaluation is another method to deter cheating. It's harder to copy hand written essays than multiple choice questions, during a test or exam, though they also take far longer to mark and are more subjective for the marker to evaluate.
You obviously don't hang out with many real scientists!
We just try not to be recorded saying that.
Actaully we'd say, AC wants massive exothermic reaction
However if exigent circumstances exist and an officer has reasonable and probable grounds to believe a person is in immediate harm, they must be able to disclose this information. Even then the officer must still within 24hrs, submit a request and a full explanation of why they used exigent circumstances for the information.
So what checks-and-balance exist to verify that a police officer is not abusing such rapid access authority to spy on their current or former spouse or partner? It seems that is the officer makes false claims of a violent stalking complaint to the telecom or ISP, and then "fails" to do the follow-up paperwork with the Crown, he/she gets aware with it. Something similar happened before, I think it was, in L.A. where officers spied on current and former girlfriends and spouses.
While I am sympathetic to lawful officers burden to complete 60-100+ pages of paperwork to obtain a straight forward warrant, given the option, law enforcement will attempt to maximize the usage of warranty-less wiretaps regardless of actual need. It's human nature. I'm sympathetic to 90% of law enforcement officers, but still distressed at the growing number of lapses in judgment or criminal behaviour officers of major units including the RCMP have been found guilty of.
I haven't had a chance to read the proposed bill and current legislation myself, I would suggest that things like this have the habit of morphing into a large broken mess, if allowed to, akin to the long-gun registry. Regardless whether you think such a database has merit, it evolved into a billion dollar piece of garbage (in its first year alone) because too many "vested parties" tweaked the implementation to include their own pet desires. My favourite is the self-declaration regarding mental health. It's sad to see that law enforcement take such an un-enlightened look at issues such as PTSD and depression, two mental health conditions rampant within their own ranks. Of which if their own ranks were held to the same standard, most LEO veterans would be desk bound and weapon-less.
BT;DT;
Hindawi affair back in April 1986.
But the Israelis don't tolerate groping children like the USA does.
It is actually so HLS can recruit more TSA 'agents' from the talent pool of candidates that aren't suitable for jobs like priests, halfway house workers, hockey coaches, and fugly homosexuals*.
*) Not suggesting homosexuals are any more likely to abuse than the general population. Problem is, there are too many people from the general population that are already willing to abuse minors, of both sexes, and I doubt the TSA is going to successfully screen them out before they are let loose upon the public with near perfect federal and state immunity.
Maybe the US army? Well, I'm not sure, but I believe both the US and British navies (navy plural) have dropped star (sextant) navigation training. Although given the growing reliance of most NATO and US-friendly countries on GPS (et all Sat nav), it wouldn't surprise me if land based navigation is no longer taught. Map and compass is hard to learn with an iPhone for a map. Most working maps are digital, and increasingly only viewed in digital form.
That depends, not everyone is good at, or prefers dealing with the analyst role. For many medium and small firms they don't even have designated analysts because many strong programmers don't function well in purely that role.
Anyhow, I know programmers-turn-whatever adaptable types that were laid off from IBM and others regardless.
Thankfully, my employer can't outsource due to business nature, and our customer depends upon us to manage so much of their own business (process, assets, strategy) that we don't expect to go away anytime soon.
following up on the book "Programmers at Work" which was about Microsoft programmers.
No, many of them never worked for Microsoft. The book was published by Microsoft Press as I remember.
Though most if not all were microcomputer (i.e. Personal Computer aka PC) programmers. That's were the revolution was happening. Mini and mainframes had been around for a while by that time in computing's history.
All of these programmers never worked at Microsoft, and neither did I.
I can tell it's truly News for Nerds because I can barely understand what it's saying and it drops causal references to advanced mathematics
I recommend you start visiting arXiv then.
Are you suggesting the OP, a self-described interested lay person, learns or even mere follow mathematic research by reading arXiv? If so, WTF!?
arXiv is a pre-print archive of original research articles, not exactly a welcoming place for a non-mathematician (or non-subject specialist, e.g. physics, and computer science also use it). Even with an undergrad degree in mathematics, I find it a difficult (and/or useless) place to try to follow progress in the field, without the editorial assistants to filter the wheat from the chaff. And I've been reading original (first source) research papers since the mid-1990s in multiple research disciplines.
You might as well ask him to read Euclid's Elements in its original Greek. Heck, after the translation, it would be more accessible, as it is intended to be a textbook for learning.
I would rather suggest, try reading some of the mathematics journals that are intended to be more accessible, such as from MAA and AMS societies. Some are aimed at students of two-year and four-year "colleges" (aka polytechs / technical colleges and universities), while others are just interesting yet often accessible, such as Journal of Recreational Mathematics and Mathematics Magazine and online columns such as Kevin Devlin's Devlin's Angle.
In the more general sense, I would recommend popular math writers such as Ian Stewart, Simon Singh, Paul J. Nahin, the recently deceased Martin Gardner (slashdot), and many more authors that I cannot recall.
Unfortunately I can't think of any pop-math books or articles on linear algebra, in the vein of "e: The Story of a Number" (Maor), "An Imaginary Tale" (Nahin), "Flatland" (Abbott), "Flatterland" (Stwart), "A Mathematician's Apology" (Hardy), "Fermat's Last Theorm" / "Fermat's Engima" (US) (Singh), "Does God Play Dice?" (Stewart), "Chaos" (Gleick), and many others.
To wit, mathematics is I believe the only discipline where fourth year undergrad students take third or fourth year courses with "introduction" or "elementary" in their course titles. But I digress. My point is that one "problem" is that given mathematics long history, and that is has fascinated people across cultures throughout history, the subject has accumulated such a vast body of knowledge, so it is difficult to get a firm understanding on every field within mathematics. So feeling overwhelmed with all the facts and fields to learn is normal.
Maybe I dreamt it, but I thought that the US and Canadian government bailed out multiple US automotive manufacturers, and where told to stop be dumb-***** pissing away money on dumb products, and concentrate on improving fuel economy, emissions, and affordability in a time of economy downturn (recession or depression).
I forget what was it in the end, something like $19 billion+ US dollars? Guess that doesn't buy much these days.
I still think they should of required every CEO and VP of the affected companies to spend four weeks doing various jobs at their companies, including two weeks of factory workers in order to keep their jobs. (I'm think in the style of Undercover Boss television show).
I think it goes without saying that an animal is unable to give consent, therefore any sex with animals is going to be unethical.
So, if you let your farm or domestic animals reproduce, without the written consent of both age of majority* participants, that's animal abuse?
You did say, any.
*) I don't know if dog years is appropriate to mention here.
It's rare for anyone, never mind a big-time CEO, to make such frank assessment of their career in public."
That's not true, but it does reflect the media's obsession and perception of CEOs are rock stars, even using the reference to conjure the image of larger than life these people who head companies.
Frankly the truth is that business media, which is rarely actually news oriented (as in novel events and objective reporting; versus press release regurgitation), doesn't actually investigate the non-celebrity business leaders. In the present day United States they are mostly limited to privately held corporations, often of family owned businesses. In other countries the same trend is happening, though at a slower pace.
The media loves a "star" that they can gossip about, and call it news, it's cheaper and less effort than actually reading through SEC filings and quarterly statements and creating a spreadsheet. Not that many "business news" people can actually do and understand such a process.
Disclosure: I'm basing much of this on private conversations with Masters graduates of an internationally recognized university in England, and a book written by a financial / business news reporter. Sorry, I don't have the title handy.
Get training on procurement process through whatever level of government you are with (e.g. US Federal, Ontario provincial, etc.). Then you will know what purchasing options are available. The problem is that many departments and agencies have cut their procurement & supply staff, and those remaining tend to be at best amateurs in their knowledge about IT purchases, and most IT departments staff avoid dull training like procurement, and thus their purchases are done in a very ad-hoc manner, and often reflect personal bias (like only buying from Dell).
In the USA, at the federal level the government U.S. General Services Administration runs a program GSA Advantage.
In Canada the federal government Public Works and Government Services Canada (PWGSC) runs a Standing Offer Index including a specific one for microcomputers. For generic office PCs, these are starting points that are "pre-approved" purchases so you don't need to create and advertise and evaluate and have contested a RFQ (Request For Quotes), and as well the purchasers can also do LPO (local purchase offers) or RVD (Request Volume Discount) and likely other techniques I don't know of in particular if the Index is out of date, or a large volume purchase may warrant a discount.
Also learn and understand TCO - Total Cost of Ownership, that is the overall cost of the purchase (i.e. a PC in this case) including repairs / replacement components, down time due to failure - including the cost of have the employee unable to fully function at their job, plus cost in time & labour of IT staff for deployment (roll-out) including disk imaging (by vendor or IT), as well as overall satisfaction of the agency with the IT department's perceived value. This is standard IT management (CIO and below) knowledge, so talk to an intelligent IT manager for any help you need in this regard.
Unless you have scores of idle IT staff, assembling 1000 PCs is a lot of labour and time. And that's assuming you pick a hardware configuration that works, is stable, and is reliable. Most IT departments are staffed with strictly software oriented system administrators as their rank and file, with reasonably few if any computer hardware technicians and tools. And "at-home builders" experience don't cut it in a professional setting; it's a starting point for new hires, not a substitute for fully trained technicians. I'm sure that will cause flames, but I don't care, and to wit, I'm not a computer hardware technician, but I have respect for the few I have worked with, they were excellent at their job, and knew which end of the soldering iron to hold when making custom serial cables.
Anytime a record follows a person there needs to be some form of error checking involved and the ability to fix it.
And on the electronic patient medical record system I worked on a decade ago (which was roughly 20 years old then) had not only the ability to change/correct, but also keep an audit trail of any revisions, so malicious or competing edits (think Wikipedia editing wars) could at least be logged.
Why I don't doubt that some good critical thinking, and legitimate questioning come from these meta-research studies, I fear that the process is ripe for abuse, as basically being so awash in data (information overload) that given enough data you can pick and choose to fit your a priori or posteriori hypothesis.
I applaud the increased scrutiny of statistical analysis, which is truly difficult to administer on even the best designed and controlled biological and medical studies, where you have very little "total control" of the experimental subjects - damn ethics committees on testing human subjects, and using double blind testing is the best you can do to eliminate bias, yet may mask discovery of experimental flaws during the testing phase. Things go "wonky" in strange ways, for example testing a heart medication, and a freak snowstorm skews all the results because of the rise of heart attacks from the increase in shovelling. We can't legally put 1000s of humans in vats for 10-20 years to test everything, and computational models are primitive and only address what the model is designed to look for, while most medical testing focuses on the unexpected results and effects that may only appear in a small fraction of society, yet if the consequences are dire, it can kill an entire potentially life-saving product.
I fear that the "undergrad social science" approach of meta-study research will make the approach stained with a reputation of people who want to "do science", but without the messy get-your-hands-dirty that costs money (an increasingly mythical subatomic particle in most fields of science and labs around the world) and just do a PR-style re-spin (think: re-branding) of the results of multiple similar but different experiments to reach a conclusion that was not considered by the original experimenters, so whom may not include appropriate experimental controls to minimize draw incorrect conclusions from this re-interpretation of the experimental data. Of if they are really lazy (like social science elective takers), draw conclusions from a compilation of results, and not even bother looking at the original (raw or filtered) data at all. I guess I'm trying to say that there is limited latitude for re-interpreting data for anything beyond what the experiment was designed to test. It can be very useful for detecting and thwarting bad or biased experiments, but as far as I know, it cannot produce trustworthy results from bad experiments.
idiot roommate engineering a virus
To be serious for a moment (I know this can be frown upon in non-CS topics), engineering a virus is more work than modifying a bacteria. Because if you remember anything junior high biology, bacterias are man times larger than viruses, making them much easier to work with.
To wit, there is so far no known virus (size) DIYbio projects known within the communities, and the government (namely FBI) have been monitoring groups to watch for idiots asking for advice on malicious uses of host/target species (i.e. known pathogens).
You're more likely to get a STD, even if you're a uber-geek, than be harmed by a DIYbio project - of either the successfully-malicious, or the accidentally-harmful kind.
Remember that their definition of "data center" is more than a little self-serving, it can include any re-purposed office closet or "server room" in any of the tens of thousands of government offices in the thousands of government buildings.
This is more about printers, mostly colour printers I believe, but it is a related technology as far as I know.
About EURion constellation and bank notes: