If your RFID tag number is a unique identifier, whenever you walk into a store you can be tracked. Whenever you walk down the sidewalk, you can be tracked. When you go anywhere that has a sensor, you're tracked. All companies would want to know who was shopping, when they shop, etc. When you exit a business (like Home Depot or McDonalds), they'll can cross-reference RFID tags from your purchases to your checkout and thus associate your Government RFID number to a first/last name, etc. From then on, they can track where in the store you're walking, what you're interested in, etc. (all for good "marketing" reasons).
RE: the number... If this number is a 20 digit or 30 digit alphanumeric, then we'll eventually want to / need to memorize them like our SSN's, right? There's now one more piece of critical info to safeguard against identity theft.
I'm suggesting safeguarding this info by NOT making it RFID readable due to privacy concerns. Bar-code scannable, YES, fine, but NOT READABLE WITHOUT MY EXPRESS CONSENT.
The implications of having a card like this are HUGE.
We must address a variety of privacy concerns, including if the card will have its own ID number, how long that number is, whether it has 'check digits' in it to verify that is is valid (a checksum or 'hash' in computer lingo), whether anyone can request or retain the information in it, whether it has the person's address, if the address's city is the Post Office's or not (various villages are not recognized by the USPS), If there will be an RFID embedded in it, and if so, what information will be accessible via that RFID, and many other questions.
Please address these issues in committee or in the Senate before voting quickly on something with so many privacy concerns attached. Various people in and out of the US Senate have said it is a very deliberative body. This bill cries out for committee hearings to determine what the advantages and disadvantages are for various items of information being put on the card as well as the open questions above.
Thanks for your time, Cordially yours, -- Kevin (etc).
Write your state senators and legislators and urge adoption of california style laws that require companies to notify their customers if any private data is compromised.
Illinois does not have a law, and it should.
From what I understand, the main reason we're hearing more about these data intrusions is the California law now mandates such disclosures.
Sorry to pop the idea balloon, but: Rutan's feather reentry design will NOT work for the shuttle.
The difference is the delta-V, the speed of the craft when it hits atmosphere. Rutan is functionally at a dead stop (topping out in the zero-g trajectory and falling backwards). The shuttle is at mach 25, about 17,000 mpg (iirc). This means putting up a high-drag chute and hitting the atmosphere would (a) rip the chute off, or (b) decelerate it so fast the puny humans would be liquified, slightly before the craft flew apart.
The idea has merit - exploring different methods of reentry (no pr0n references please) - but the crucial bit that the shuttle's energy of motion (orbital velocity) is converted to heat, and that heat has to go somewhere. If there was a way to dissipate that heat into the air it is flying through quicker, great. If there was a way to avoid the friction altogether, they wouldn't slow down. So, we have to avoid absorbing the heat from the hot air that's been friction heated. The tiles do exactly that - they're great heat insulators.
I would suppose that there are other aerobraking orbits that involve interacting with the atmosphere several times, but I'm not sure if these have been considered or if they involve more risks than are worth it.
You are also forced to use very narrow structural safety margins
There is a good point here - safety margins = reliability. How can you increase the safety margin without increasing the inherent strength of a component?
PROBLEM SUMMARY: If you have a component that is welded alumninum (for example), and to succeed the weld must survive pressure X, you design the material+weld for pressure X+10% so you're not too close to the margin. You could add 20%, but that'd add more weight which would increase other component's weight, etc., and pretty soon you're doomed.
SOLUTIONS: (1) use better materials to increase the X/weight ratio; (2) TEST THE SUCKER. If you build 20,000 of these things under tightly controlled conditions, constantly improving the monitoring of the processing, then TEST EACH OF THEM TO FAILURE, you can very well characterize (a) the failure modes, (b) exactly what X is plus or minus some percentage.
The difficult part is often not building the part, but building 10,000 of them and testing them to destruction, which leads to every engineer's dream, a 'well-characterized component' (I'm leaving off the more entertaining engineering dreams - you get the idea).
In combination with Perl, which has a neato module for using this, you can create very nice, functional graphs with minimal fuss.
I automated the creation of a set of graphs for a project I was working on. The hardest part was rebuilding Perl to include the GDI interface. But, that's much better documented than it was, and there's several subclass / extension modules to simplify life even further (check at CPAN.org for more info on GD, but a first link is: http://cpan.uwinnipeg.ca/dist/GD)
You can do almost anything you want. GD-graph, GD-chart3d, etc. Very easy to use once I got it installed.
The reality of modern banking risk management (in my experience at Bank One, which became JPMC) was that there were many different measures of risk attached to each exposure. The popular ones are the standard short term 'delta', or DV01, which measures a specific 1-day interest rate risk, gamma, vega, etc.
There's also something called stress testing, and it usually involves lots of cycle time to run (we ran it over weekends). This would take several scenarios, including the 1987 crash, the LTCM scenario, and even some aspects of the Barclay bank scenario (one trader sacked the bank, and other banks were exposed to because of Barclay was on the other end of some financial deals).
The QED people at Bank One were (and are) serious brainiacs that worked very hard coming up with scenarios and models that would severely test, in as real-world ways as possible, a deal or set of deals. I highly respected this group; they were fun to work near. Some conversations included how their models coped with "out-there" scenarios like large scale (9/11 and significantly larger) attacks and their effects on the markets.
Suffice to say, the larger US banks have put significant effort into making sure the risks they're taking on are accurately measured. But, that task is very large, and challenging computationally, organizationally, mathematically, and personally. JPMC (Bank One) wasn't perfect at the risk measurement game, but they were trying hard.
I used to work in the Risk Management department of the capital markets division of a large international bank as a programmer.
When I started, 4 years ago, the reports generated were basically compilations by a cut-and-paste-monkey staff (despite being highly trained, very conciencious individuals) of reports generated by other departments. I was part of a team that reformed the IT basis for creating risk reporting, and found that while there was a lot of expertise and complex methods available, what was actually implemented was much much smaller for the simple reason that it was tough to get the right reports generated given the inputs the department was given.
The project I worked on parsed the input data from the Excel spreadsheet inputs and loaded it to a database, where it could then be queried intelligently and nice reports generated. These reports were growing very fast in complexity, building towards the best toolsets available for determining the actual risk the bank was taking.
Several points about this job were fascinating: 1. How much many departments are so caught up in the minutae of "getting the report out" that they don't have time to examine the contents of it; 2. How much money can be made by knowing what the actual risk is. If you don't know the risk, you estimate high, and put lots of dollars in a reserve account. If you do know the risk accurately, you usually can greatly lower reserves to accurately meet even very bad case estimated losses, and use the rest of the money to fund interest-generating ventures. 3. How much the banking consolidation trend is increasing, due to the repeal of glass-steagal (sp?) allowing multi-state banks to gobble and grow. This makes a consumer's life better because of more resources being available (auto-bill-pay, check images, etc.
It was a fun job. Then I found another one where I get to play with Python!
I have a close friend that is in the food shipping business.
She's said that her first job was trying to optimize the amount of stock in the warehouse at any given point, given that stock (in this case, frozen potatoes, hash browns, etc.) goes bad if stored too long. Yet, if they don't have supply, they miss out on tremoundous money making opportunities.
The problems would seem to be (at least with her work, and you can comment about how applicable this is to your situation): 1. Warehouse supply chain - prediction of needs; 2. Given several warehouses, where to move stock given disparate and sporadic ordering; 3. As you mentioned, routing trucks and how much they carry; 4. tracking unethical short-shipments (where the invoice says they shipped 12 cartons but they only really shipped 11); 5. tracking ethical short-shipments (where you order 12 and only get 11 and are properly invoiced for 11); 6. tracking suppliers on-time percentages, trucker's reliabilities, speeds, and costs; 7. doing predictive modeling of demand cycles given inputs of time of year, price of raw product, going rate (sales price) (and thus profit margin), availability of trucking and rail, etc.
This kind of stuff is why Walmart is huge (no flames on them being evil here, this is just a comment on their technial prowess in supply chain management). If you want to be successful, keep track of everything and run some queries to see what you could do to improve.
There are 2 reasons why Planes are better than trains:
1. Security. Granted if you have one bomb in a plane, it will probably kill all aboard, while one bomb on a high-speed train might only kill a carload. The important aspect of trains is that the bomb can also be on the tracks. It's impossible to monitor 10 bazillion miles of track for sabotage. But, it is possible to do site defense at an airport, albeit with some human-factors difficulties and/or technological conniptions.
2. Economics. Given a constantly shifting travel demand, it's easier to shift where an airplane flies than to build more track. I would wager that the cost of Denver international would be quite comparable to upgrading the Boston-NY-DC track to high-speed-rail quality and upgrading passenger terminals/signals/etc. at those terminii. Granted locomotives and rolling stock is probably significantly cheaper than aircraft, but counting the airports and other infrastructure, I'm thinking the equation tilts in favor of planes being cheaper per passenger mile. I do invite rebuttal on this, though, not being a transportation engineer...
Okay, this is silly - having them post a piece of paper near their screen with these commands is a great idea, but you can make their lives so much simpler with several aliases:
alias dir="ls -al" alias rename="mv" alias move="mv" alias copy="cp" alias help="man" # this or alias help="info" # this
These 5 or so commands will help them immensely. DOS / cmd.exe only has a very few commands anyway, and you can successfully alias all of them.
Midnight commander is an excellent idea as well.
ALSO: Create a couple of directories in everyone's home dir named, "MyDocuments", "MyPictures", etc., so people don't even have to learn how to create a directory.
ALSO: don't forget to tell them that there's control-C to break, but there's also control-\ to interrupt (on most terminals) which works much nicer.
Some would say that most news outside of the main NYT and others is generated by PR firms providiing "information" to reporters in the hopes of getting an article published. I would argue that the interesting thing about this "article" is not that the non-news it contains:
* website attacks are most commonly peformed by schoolboys * attacks are on the rise * attacks are commonly politically motivated
This "news" isn't new. Thus, who asked for the article or provided the info in it? Symantec, pushing antivirus software? Cisco, trying to induce worry about security in general and sell their more 'secure' routers? IBM, EDS, Siemens, or someone else, selling E-Commerce security software?
Being a critical reader is not just asking, "is this story true". Nowadays, it's asking, "Why was this story published?"
If you...solder yourself... and it subsequently burns your house down, you will get $0 from your insurance company when they figure it out.
The insurance industry doesn't quite work that way.
You can burn down your house by misusing matches (or a propane torch, or a hand grenade) and you'll still get your insurance adjustment. As long as you don't do it ON PURPOSE you're covered. That means if you accidentally knock the lit candle into the paper-shredder-basket, it's covered. If you trip over the cat and do the same thing, you're still covered. But if you decide, "Hey, I don't like my stuff anymore!" and do it on purpose, you're not covered.
This leaves aside the stupidity of purposefully burning down your own house. Most policies cover 80% of actual (demonstrated) losses, with some very-much-higher priced policies covering 80% of replacement costs. In both cases you have to prove what you owned. This is usually quite difficult to reconstruct from ashes. One good trip 30-minute around the house with a video recorder and sending the tape to your favorite sibling/parent/safe-deposit-box supposedly means the difference between getting bubkus and actually being able to state (and prove!) you owned relatively new 25 button-down shirts at 50% of their expected lifespan at $30 each = $15 * 25 *.8 = $300. Extend that to underwear, ties, shoes, etc. and you end up with huge dollars involved in just replacing what you have.
Remember the reimbursement price for lots of things is basically garage-sale prices, which isn't much considering you'll have to go out and actually find it all again.
Fires suck. Insurance sucks, too, except when you need it, and then it's the best thing there ever was. I dated a gal a long time ago that lost everything in a tornado. She got new stuff, but not very much of it, and she lost all the pics she'd ever taken, etc.
So: It's okay to solder your own Power Supply. It's okay with your insurance company (probably, IIRC) to use it. But, it's wise to test the sucker and probably leave it plugged in for a couple of days on a concrete floor with no combustibles around and a good circuit breaker protecting things.
My advice: Simplify things. Buy a set of 5 outlet strips, use the provided screws to affix them to a piece of plywood, plug them into each other (cascade them; they have built in circuit breakers themselves), plug all your bricks into this arrangement, and put a very nice smoke detector right over the whole thing.
* 5 output ports; * for each port (or via a central control panel) configuration for output voltage on that port, continuously variable from 2 VDC to 24 VDC; * each port capable of 50 watts without significant voltage drop; * a handful of accessory connectors / converters including 1 plug male -> 4 plugs female, big diameter plug to small plug, extension cables, etc. * silent power supply if possible / air cooled, or very, very quiet fan
I'd think that a sealed design with a large external heat sink is best. I have a cat and the cat hair ends up all over things on the floor, which is the power bricks and one of my PC's, making cleaning a regular (once / 2 months) thing to lengthen lifespan / prevent overheating).
I don't care about weight too much. It should be well grounded.
Another wonderful idea is the ability of it to use as input a 12VDC car/marine-deep-cycle battery, so if the power goes, I can still use my accessories.
The quality of a TV show is often irrelevent to its cancellation. As best I can tell (based on experience with many beloved shows) it depends on:
* Buffy, MASH, etc.: Great shows, cancelled because producers and/or actors felt the show had 'run its course'. * Wonderfalls, Firefly, Space:Above and Beyond (and HUGE numbers of others): F$*&^$'ing FOX had a political axe to grind and decided that progressive shows (with a Democratic leaning) should be killed and the rights to restart them never released; * (Almost Buffy): production costs due to special effects were so high that it almost didn't balance the quite significant Advertising revenue; * Ellen: Advertiser pullout due to a controversial actor; * 1970's Space:1999: Bad writing, including implausible, inconsistent plotlines, characters that just 'show up', stilted language, etc., will kill a show through bad ratings - people recognize quality, to some degree. * Sonny and Cher: Some shows deserve to be killed (grin); Seriously, this was a good show for its time but the TV 'Variety Show' went away with cable because the variety was available on different channels instead of all in the same show.
I can foresee signal strength problems due to: * snow * swarming hordes of rampaging mosquitoes
Ever hear the joke: "Perhaps there's a reason the wind is always blowing north in Iowa... Minnesota sucks!"
BTW: I'm a former Edina MN and St. Anthony MN resident; It's a GREAT place to live! But, you've got to wear a durable environment suit in the summer early evening due to the large mosquitoe population (Land of 10,000 lakes makes for lots of stagnant breeding grounds).
Living there, I quickly learned that most people just don't go outside near sunset in the summer. It's not smart. Breathe too deeply and you'll choke on the swarms. The state needs to start an aggressive Bat breeding program to give the skeeter population a natural check besides insecticide. But, there's all sorts of misconceptions about bats, so that'll probably never happen. Alas...
Or, they could put Bat Houses on the same poles as the Wireless antennae and try to solve 2 problems at once!
The change specifies a read distance of approximately 4 inches.
I wonder if the technical experts have bothered to mention that this signal is being broadcast in all directions, and that simple dish antennae can enable exchanging signals over tens of yards/meters if not longer?
Has anyone thought about Embassy security personnel being given a task to eliminate all radio-frequency broadcasting devices in the building to prevent espionage, yet everyone will now be carrying a small broadcasting station that can be converted to send data out of the building? Detecting small bugs is a big deal to these guys. I wonder if they have an opinion about their jobs getting harder...
Supposedly, putting an RFID tag in a microwave will kill it (make it no longer workable). This is an easy fix for those who don't want people nearby to read their passport info.
Questions: * What do I gain, as a passport user, by having mine working? * What prevents someone from putting a fake RFID tag in/on my passport, thus making it seem like I'm engaging in high-tech forgery? * What benefits come from an RFID-based reading of the thing, vs. some kind of contact-based smart card that clearly shows when it's being read (you have to make physical contact with the device)? * What's to stop the authorities from putting RFID readers throughout the airport and tracking where specific people walk? * Why not put rfid tags on boarding passes instead, so that to go from the counter to the plane you have to walk past numerous RFID readers and it keeps track that you didn't miss a checkpoint, etc. * Won't my address and phone number be on this? What if I'm a single female concerned with personal security? Some schmo could stalk an airport, find me, strike up a conversation, and then get home before me since they know I'm not home? * What about ex-husbands / abusers / stalkers / restraining-order-prevented people from scanning the new address of someone to find / kill / abuse them again?
Seems to me there's something very Orwellian / Soviet / THX-1138-ish about this whole thing.
Curly braces { } have always been a stylistic thorn in the side of C, C++, and now Java programmers. I'm sure other languages use them, too.
The old K&R style of doing:
if (test) {
expression;
}
versus:
if (test) {
expression; }
this is NASTY in the debates it causes and wars people fight over which is 'right' or 'easier'. For those who don't know, Python doesn't use braces, it uses any consistent indent, as in:
if (test)
expression
Very simple. Reduces line count by 1 or 2 and completely removes the religious debate about brace location. I really like this. There's enough problems debating what the code header/copyright/IDENTIFICATION DIVISION (grin) section's going to look like. "I like #####!" "No, I like #-------!!!", "You Suck!" "No, You Suck!" etc.
Don't knock the lack of braces until you try it. it really does make the code look cleaner.
I work at an Application Service Provider startup with 16 employees (5 developers) using Python (30K lines+).
I have 6 years of Perl development plus another 8 in C. So, a newcomer to Python (about 2 months now), I have several reactions shaded by that experience: * Nice syntax: Not perfect, but very passable overall. * Love the no-brackets: Indentation as a means of delineating code blocks is great; there's no debate over where to put squiggly braces (the 'if test { statement; } stuff; * Immature toolsets: there are very few mature toolsets yet. We're using SQLObject, which is in version 0.6, as an object-relational-mapper. It's got some limitations and is admittedly not 'enterprise ready'. it's hard to compare to the Perl DBI because the dbi just is an interface and doesn't do mapping. * Lack of CPAN: the single most fantastic "tool" I've found in my programming career (15 years) has been CPAN. Got a problem? Someone has probably already seen it and started a solution. I know this is in the works for Python but the tools are not all there yet. * Syntax (bad): Lack of a requirement to declare vars before use. I really would like the ability to require that all vars are explicitly declared before being assigned to. it would help coding reliability.
...you're kind of screwed. but try to screw them a bit back
Parent post has a point. Create a mother project and describe it in very broad terms. This is not an attempt at cheating; the project is your 'Education and Upbringing Project' and it includes all your prior work in school both as official classwork and as personal investigations for your own betterment.
Also, induce a hassle factor for them so they're less induced to try this legal tactic again for the next 100 applicants - attach a memorandum of "including but not limited to..." items that is several pages long, listing all the names of the documents in your 'my documents' directory, even personal letters (if you're not embarrased about their contents). Mention that neat idea you had in 4th grade for a dinosaur toy that had actual knives for claws and would explode if played with for too long by the wrong person (your brother).
The point is to induce their legal department to have to review the list and thus take up their lawyer's time. Which will then induce them to change the wording so they don't have such problems with (pardon the insult, I'm looking at it from their point of view) "dweeby students and their silly IP fetishes" (grin).
It would seem that all information-based, intellectual property (IP) business models depend on either: A. Being able to control the distribution medium; B. Introducing risks or rewards that make payment preferable to nonpayment.
Option A seems to be doomed once the intellectual property is digitally transferrable in its entirity in a manageable size across the internet.
If intellectual property owners can divide the IP into a transferrable part and a non-transferrable part (like any Application Service Provider does), they can still succeed.
Option B includes the use of enforcement, which has a huge public relations downside. But, it can also dictate another pricing model. If there is a quality/reliability difference between acquiring a dataset (IP product) from a random location vs. getting it from a known good source, the consumer will prefer the better cost/benefit.
Isn't it safer to just acknowledge option B is the more sustainable option and pursue lower prices in a higher quality format?
Slashdot Mirror
If your RFID tag number is a unique identifier, whenever you walk into a store you can be tracked. Whenever you walk down the sidewalk, you can be tracked. When you go anywhere that has a sensor, you're tracked. All companies would want to know who was shopping, when they shop, etc. When you exit a business (like Home Depot or McDonalds), they'll can cross-reference RFID tags from your purchases to your checkout and thus associate your Government RFID number to a first/last name, etc. From then on, they can track where in the store you're walking, what you're interested in, etc. (all for good "marketing" reasons).
RE: the number... If this number is a 20 digit or 30 digit alphanumeric, then we'll eventually want to / need to memorize them like our SSN's, right? There's now one more piece of critical info to safeguard against identity theft.
I'm suggesting safeguarding this info by NOT making it RFID readable due to privacy concerns. Bar-code scannable, YES, fine, but NOT READABLE WITHOUT MY EXPRESS CONSENT.
I wrote:
The implications of having a card like this are HUGE.
We must address a variety of privacy concerns, including if the card will have its own ID number, how long that number is, whether it has 'check digits' in it to verify that is is valid (a checksum or 'hash' in computer lingo), whether anyone can request or retain the information in it, whether it has the person's address, if the address's city is the Post Office's or not (various villages are not recognized by the USPS), If there will be an RFID embedded in it, and if so, what information will be accessible via that RFID, and many other questions.
Please address these issues in committee or in the Senate before voting quickly on something with so many privacy concerns attached. Various people in and out of the US Senate have said it is a very deliberative body. This bill cries out for committee hearings to determine what the advantages and disadvantages are for various items of information being put on the card as well as the open questions above.
Thanks for your time,
Cordially yours,
-- Kevin (etc).
Write your state senators and legislators and urge adoption of california style laws that require companies to notify their customers if any private data is compromised.
Illinois does not have a law, and it should.
From what I understand, the main reason we're hearing more about these data intrusions is the California law now mandates such disclosures.
Sorry to pop the idea balloon, but: Rutan's feather reentry design will NOT work for the shuttle.
The difference is the delta-V, the speed of the craft when it hits atmosphere. Rutan is functionally at a dead stop (topping out in the zero-g trajectory and falling backwards). The shuttle is at mach 25, about 17,000 mpg (iirc). This means putting up a high-drag chute and hitting the atmosphere would (a) rip the chute off, or (b) decelerate it so fast the puny humans would be liquified, slightly before the craft flew apart.
The idea has merit - exploring different methods of reentry (no pr0n references please) - but the crucial bit that the shuttle's energy of motion (orbital velocity) is converted to heat, and that heat has to go somewhere. If there was a way to dissipate that heat into the air it is flying through quicker, great. If there was a way to avoid the friction altogether, they wouldn't slow down. So, we have to avoid absorbing the heat from the hot air that's been friction heated. The tiles do exactly that - they're great heat insulators.
I would suppose that there are other aerobraking orbits that involve interacting with the atmosphere several times, but I'm not sure if these have been considered or if they involve more risks than are worth it.
-- Kevin
You are also forced to use very narrow structural safety margins
There is a good point here - safety margins = reliability. How can you increase the safety margin without increasing the inherent strength of a component?
PROBLEM SUMMARY: If you have a component that is welded alumninum (for example), and to succeed the weld must survive pressure X, you design the material+weld for pressure X+10% so you're not too close to the margin. You could add 20%, but that'd add more weight which would increase other component's weight, etc., and pretty soon you're doomed.
SOLUTIONS: (1) use better materials to increase the X/weight ratio; (2) TEST THE SUCKER. If you build 20,000 of these things under tightly controlled conditions, constantly improving the monitoring of the processing, then TEST EACH OF THEM TO FAILURE, you can very well characterize (a) the failure modes, (b) exactly what X is plus or minus some percentage.
The difficult part is often not building the part, but building 10,000 of them and testing them to destruction, which leads to every engineer's dream, a 'well-characterized component' (I'm leaving off the more entertaining engineering dreams - you get the idea).
-- Kevin
ABSOLUTELY SECOND THE MOTION FOR GD.
In combination with Perl, which has a neato module for using this, you can create very nice, functional graphs with minimal fuss.
I automated the creation of a set of graphs for a project I was working on. The hardest part was rebuilding Perl to include the GDI interface. But, that's much better documented than it was, and there's several subclass / extension modules to simplify life even further (check at CPAN.org for more info on GD, but a first link is: http://cpan.uwinnipeg.ca/dist/GD)
You can do almost anything you want. GD-graph, GD-chart3d, etc. Very easy to use once I got it installed.
usually defines risk independently
The reality of modern banking risk management (in my experience at Bank One, which became JPMC) was that there were many different measures of risk attached to each exposure. The popular ones are the standard short term 'delta', or DV01, which measures a specific 1-day interest rate risk, gamma, vega, etc.
There's also something called stress testing, and it usually involves lots of cycle time to run (we ran it over weekends). This would take several scenarios, including the 1987 crash, the LTCM scenario, and even some aspects of the Barclay bank scenario (one trader sacked the bank, and other banks were exposed to because of Barclay was on the other end of some financial deals).
The QED people at Bank One were (and are) serious brainiacs that worked very hard coming up with scenarios and models that would severely test, in as real-world ways as possible, a deal or set of deals. I highly respected this group; they were fun to work near. Some conversations included how their models coped with "out-there" scenarios like large scale (9/11 and significantly larger) attacks and their effects on the markets.
Suffice to say, the larger US banks have put significant effort into making sure the risks they're taking on are accurately measured. But, that task is very large, and challenging computationally, organizationally, mathematically, and personally. JPMC (Bank One) wasn't perfect at the risk measurement game, but they were trying hard.
I used to work in the Risk Management department of the capital markets division of a large international bank as a programmer.
When I started, 4 years ago, the reports generated were basically compilations by a cut-and-paste-monkey staff (despite being highly trained, very conciencious individuals) of reports generated by other departments. I was part of a team that reformed the IT basis for creating risk reporting, and found that while there was a lot of expertise and complex methods available, what was actually implemented was much much smaller for the simple reason that it was tough to get the right reports generated given the inputs the department was given.
The project I worked on parsed the input data from the Excel spreadsheet inputs and loaded it to a database, where it could then be queried intelligently and nice reports generated. These reports were growing very fast in complexity, building towards the best toolsets available for determining the actual risk the bank was taking.
Several points about this job were fascinating:
1. How much many departments are so caught up in the minutae of "getting the report out" that they don't have time to examine the contents of it;
2. How much money can be made by knowing what the actual risk is. If you don't know the risk, you estimate high, and put lots of dollars in a reserve account. If you do know the risk accurately, you usually can greatly lower reserves to accurately meet even very bad case estimated losses, and use the rest of the money to fund interest-generating ventures.
3. How much the banking consolidation trend is increasing, due to the repeal of glass-steagal (sp?) allowing multi-state banks to gobble and grow. This makes a consumer's life better because of more resources being available (auto-bill-pay, check images, etc.
It was a fun job. Then I found another one where I get to play with Python!
-- Kevin
I have a close friend that is in the food shipping business.
She's said that her first job was trying to optimize the amount of stock in the warehouse at any given point, given that stock (in this case, frozen potatoes, hash browns, etc.) goes bad if stored too long. Yet, if they don't have supply, they miss out on tremoundous money making opportunities.
The problems would seem to be (at least with her work, and you can comment about how applicable this is to your situation):
1. Warehouse supply chain - prediction of needs;
2. Given several warehouses, where to move stock given disparate and sporadic ordering;
3. As you mentioned, routing trucks and how much they carry;
4. tracking unethical short-shipments (where the invoice says they shipped 12 cartons but they only really shipped 11);
5. tracking ethical short-shipments (where you order 12 and only get 11 and are properly invoiced for 11);
6. tracking suppliers on-time percentages, trucker's reliabilities, speeds, and costs;
7. doing predictive modeling of demand cycles given inputs of time of year, price of raw product, going rate (sales price) (and thus profit margin), availability of trucking and rail, etc.
This kind of stuff is why Walmart is huge (no flames on them being evil here, this is just a comment on their technial prowess in supply chain management). If you want to be successful, keep track of everything and run some queries to see what you could do to improve.
There are 2 reasons why Planes are better than trains:
1. Security. Granted if you have one bomb in a plane, it will probably kill all aboard, while one bomb on a high-speed train might only kill a carload. The important aspect of trains is that the bomb can also be on the tracks. It's impossible to monitor 10 bazillion miles of track for sabotage. But, it is possible to do site defense at an airport, albeit with some human-factors difficulties and/or technological conniptions.
2. Economics. Given a constantly shifting travel demand, it's easier to shift where an airplane flies than to build more track. I would wager that the cost of Denver international would be quite comparable to upgrading the Boston-NY-DC track to high-speed-rail quality and upgrading passenger terminals/signals/etc. at those terminii. Granted locomotives and rolling stock is probably significantly cheaper than aircraft, but counting the airports and other infrastructure, I'm thinking the equation tilts in favor of planes being cheaper per passenger mile. I do invite rebuttal on this, though, not being a transportation engineer...
-- Kevin
Okay, this is silly - having them post a piece of paper near their screen with these commands is a great idea, but you can make their lives so much simpler with several aliases:
alias dir="ls -al"
alias rename="mv"
alias move="mv"
alias copy="cp"
alias help="man" # this or
alias help="info" # this
These 5 or so commands will help them immensely. DOS / cmd.exe only has a very few commands anyway, and you can successfully alias all of them.
Midnight commander is an excellent idea as well.
ALSO: Create a couple of directories in everyone's home dir named, "MyDocuments", "MyPictures", etc., so people don't even have to learn how to create a directory.
ALSO: don't forget to tell them that there's control-C to break, but there's also control-\ to interrupt (on most terminals) which works much nicer.
That's my 5 cents.
Re: Clones, Myths and Prizes
Shouldn't that read, "Clothes, Misses, and Pizzas?" as his wealth increases?
Some would say that most news outside of the main NYT and others is generated by PR firms providiing "information" to reporters in the hopes of getting an article published. I would argue that the interesting thing about this "article" is not that the non-news it contains:
* website attacks are most commonly peformed by schoolboys
* attacks are on the rise
* attacks are commonly politically motivated
This "news" isn't new. Thus, who asked for the article or provided the info in it? Symantec, pushing antivirus software? Cisco, trying to induce worry about security in general and sell their more 'secure' routers? IBM, EDS, Siemens, or someone else, selling E-Commerce security software?
Being a critical reader is not just asking, "is this story true". Nowadays, it's asking, "Why was this story published?"
-- Kevin
If you...solder yourself ... and it subsequently burns your house down, you will get $0 from your insurance company when they figure it out.
.8 = $300. Extend that to underwear, ties, shoes, etc. and you end up with huge dollars involved in just replacing what you have.
The insurance industry doesn't quite work that way.
You can burn down your house by misusing matches (or a propane torch, or a hand grenade) and you'll still get your insurance adjustment. As long as you don't do it ON PURPOSE you're covered. That means if you accidentally knock the lit candle into the paper-shredder-basket, it's covered. If you trip over the cat and do the same thing, you're still covered. But if you decide, "Hey, I don't like my stuff anymore!" and do it on purpose, you're not covered.
This leaves aside the stupidity of purposefully burning down your own house. Most policies cover 80% of actual (demonstrated) losses, with some very-much-higher priced policies covering 80% of replacement costs. In both cases you have to prove what you owned. This is usually quite difficult to reconstruct from ashes. One good trip 30-minute around the house with a video recorder and sending the tape to your favorite sibling/parent/safe-deposit-box supposedly means the difference between getting bubkus and actually being able to state (and prove!) you owned relatively new 25 button-down shirts at 50% of their expected lifespan at $30 each = $15 * 25 *
Remember the reimbursement price for lots of things is basically garage-sale prices, which isn't much considering you'll have to go out and actually find it all again.
Fires suck. Insurance sucks, too, except when you need it, and then it's the best thing there ever was. I dated a gal a long time ago that lost everything in a tornado. She got new stuff, but not very much of it, and she lost all the pics she'd ever taken, etc.
So: It's okay to solder your own Power Supply. It's okay with your insurance company (probably, IIRC) to use it. But, it's wise to test the sucker and probably leave it plugged in for a couple of days on a concrete floor with no combustibles around and a good circuit breaker protecting things.
My advice: Simplify things. Buy a set of 5 outlet strips, use the provided screws to affix them to a piece of plywood, plug them into each other (cascade them; they have built in circuit breakers themselves), plug all your bricks into this arrangement, and put a very nice smoke detector right over the whole thing.
The requirements seem to be:
* 5 output ports;
* for each port (or via a central control panel) configuration for output voltage on that port, continuously variable from 2 VDC to 24 VDC;
* each port capable of 50 watts without significant voltage drop;
* a handful of accessory connectors / converters including 1 plug male -> 4 plugs female, big diameter plug to small plug, extension cables, etc.
* silent power supply if possible / air cooled, or very, very quiet fan
I'd think that a sealed design with a large external heat sink is best. I have a cat and the cat hair ends up all over things on the floor, which is the power bricks and one of my PC's, making cleaning a regular (once / 2 months) thing to lengthen lifespan / prevent overheating).
I don't care about weight too much. It should be well grounded.
Another wonderful idea is the ability of it to use as input a 12VDC car/marine-deep-cycle battery, so if the power goes, I can still use my accessories.
The quality of a TV show is often irrelevent to its cancellation. As best I can tell (based on experience with many beloved shows) it depends on:
* Buffy, MASH, etc.: Great shows, cancelled because producers and/or actors felt the show had 'run its course'.
* Wonderfalls, Firefly, Space:Above and Beyond (and HUGE numbers of others): F$*&^$'ing FOX had a political axe to grind and decided that progressive shows (with a Democratic leaning) should be killed and the rights to restart them never released;
* (Almost Buffy): production costs due to special effects were so high that it almost didn't balance the quite significant Advertising revenue;
* Ellen: Advertiser pullout due to a controversial actor;
* 1970's Space:1999: Bad writing, including implausible, inconsistent plotlines, characters that just 'show up', stilted language, etc., will kill a show through bad ratings - people recognize quality, to some degree.
* Sonny and Cher: Some shows deserve to be killed (grin); Seriously, this was a good show for its time but the TV 'Variety Show' went away with cable because the variety was available on different channels instead of all in the same show.
Just my 5 cents.
- Kevin
I can foresee signal strength problems due to:
* snow
* swarming hordes of rampaging mosquitoes
Ever hear the joke: "Perhaps there's a reason the wind is always blowing north in Iowa... Minnesota sucks!"
BTW: I'm a former Edina MN and St. Anthony MN resident; It's a GREAT place to live! But, you've got to wear a durable environment suit in the summer early evening due to the large mosquitoe population (Land of 10,000 lakes makes for lots of stagnant breeding grounds).
Living there, I quickly learned that most people just don't go outside near sunset in the summer. It's not smart. Breathe too deeply and you'll choke on the swarms. The state needs to start an aggressive Bat breeding program to give the skeeter population a natural check besides insecticide. But, there's all sorts of misconceptions about bats, so that'll probably never happen. Alas...
Or, they could put Bat Houses on the same poles as the Wireless antennae and try to solve 2 problems at once!
The change specifies a read distance of approximately 4 inches.
I wonder if the technical experts have bothered to mention that this signal is being broadcast in all directions, and that simple dish antennae can enable exchanging signals over tens of yards/meters if not longer?
Has anyone thought about Embassy security personnel being given a task to eliminate all radio-frequency broadcasting devices in the building to prevent espionage, yet everyone will now be carrying a small broadcasting station that can be converted to send data out of the building? Detecting small bugs is a big deal to these guys. I wonder if they have an opinion about their jobs getting harder...
Supposedly, putting an RFID tag in a microwave will kill it (make it no longer workable). This is an easy fix for those who don't want people nearby to read their passport info.
Questions:
* What do I gain, as a passport user, by having mine working?
* What prevents someone from putting a fake RFID tag in/on my passport, thus making it seem like I'm engaging in high-tech forgery?
* What benefits come from an RFID-based reading of the thing, vs. some kind of contact-based smart card that clearly shows when it's being read (you have to make physical contact with the device)?
* What's to stop the authorities from putting RFID readers throughout the airport and tracking where specific people walk?
* Why not put rfid tags on boarding passes instead, so that to go from the counter to the plane you have to walk past numerous RFID readers and it keeps track that you didn't miss a checkpoint, etc.
* Won't my address and phone number be on this? What if I'm a single female concerned with personal security? Some schmo could stalk an airport, find me, strike up a conversation, and then get home before me since they know I'm not home?
* What about ex-husbands / abusers / stalkers / restraining-order-prevented people from scanning the new address of someone to find / kill / abuse them again?
Seems to me there's something very Orwellian / Soviet / THX-1138-ish about this whole thing.
-- Kevin
The old K&R style of doing:versus:this is NASTY in the debates it causes and wars people fight over which is 'right' or 'easier'. For those who don't know, Python doesn't use braces, it uses any consistent indent, as in:Very simple. Reduces line count by 1 or 2 and completely removes the religious debate about brace location. I really like this. There's enough problems debating what the code header/copyright/IDENTIFICATION DIVISION (grin) section's going to look like. "I like #####!" "No, I like #-------!!!", "You Suck!" "No, You Suck!" etc.
Don't knock the lack of braces until you try it. it really does make the code look cleaner.
--Kevin
I work at an Application Service Provider startup with 16 employees (5 developers) using Python (30K lines+).
I have 6 years of Perl development plus another 8 in C. So, a newcomer to Python (about 2 months now), I have several reactions shaded by that experience:
* Nice syntax: Not perfect, but very passable overall.
* Love the no-brackets: Indentation as a means of delineating code blocks is great; there's no debate over where to put squiggly braces (the 'if test { statement; } stuff;
* Immature toolsets: there are very few mature toolsets yet. We're using SQLObject, which is in version 0.6, as an object-relational-mapper. It's got some limitations and is admittedly not 'enterprise ready'. it's hard to compare to the Perl DBI because the dbi just is an interface and doesn't do mapping.
* Lack of CPAN: the single most fantastic "tool" I've found in my programming career (15 years) has been CPAN. Got a problem? Someone has probably already seen it and started a solution. I know this is in the works for Python but the tools are not all there yet.
* Syntax (bad): Lack of a requirement to declare vars before use. I really would like the ability to require that all vars are explicitly declared before being assigned to. it would help coding reliability.
Just my 5 cents.
-- Kevin
Remember:
* MS == Microsoft
* MS == Multiple Sclerosis
* MS == Mississippi
All 3 of these require more education spending to combat evil.
Parent post has a point. Create a mother project and describe it in very broad terms. This is not an attempt at cheating; the project is your 'Education and Upbringing Project' and it includes all your prior work in school both as official classwork and as personal investigations for your own betterment.
Also, induce a hassle factor for them so they're less induced to try this legal tactic again for the next 100 applicants - attach a memorandum of "including but not limited to..." items that is several pages long, listing all the names of the documents in your 'my documents' directory, even personal letters (if you're not embarrased about their contents). Mention that neat idea you had in 4th grade for a dinosaur toy that had actual knives for claws and would explode if played with for too long by the wrong person (your brother).
The point is to induce their legal department to have to review the list and thus take up their lawyer's time. Which will then induce them to change the wording so they don't have such problems with (pardon the insult, I'm looking at it from their point of view) "dweeby students and their silly IP fetishes" (grin).
-- Kevin
For the RIAA:
It would seem that all information-based, intellectual property (IP) business models depend on either:
A. Being able to control the distribution medium;
B. Introducing risks or rewards that make payment preferable to nonpayment.
Option A seems to be doomed once the intellectual property is digitally transferrable in its entirity in a manageable size across the internet.
If intellectual property owners can divide the IP into a transferrable part and a non-transferrable part (like any Application Service Provider does), they can still succeed.
Option B includes the use of enforcement, which has a huge public relations downside. But, it can also dictate another pricing model. If there is a quality/reliability difference between acquiring a dataset (IP product) from a random location vs. getting it from a known good source, the consumer will prefer the better cost/benefit.
Isn't it safer to just acknowledge option B is the more sustainable option and pursue lower prices in a higher quality format?
Yuck! Slashdot's machinery cut up those links. Here they are again:
The official 4217 list of currency codes is at here
The official ISO 3166 Country codes list is at:
here.