If you're giving the situation of trying to deal with older code, I'd also recommend Perl Medic: Transforming Legacy Code by Peter J. Scott. It has advice for dealing with existing code of questionable quality, rather than the case of writing good code from the beginning. (in the case of dealing with existing code, I'd actually recommend it before Higher Order Perl and possibly Perl Best Practices -- I've never read the other two you mentioned, so can't gauge their relative usefulness).
Another book that might be useful is Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook by Ian Langworth and chromatic, so that you can write better test suites to determine what you're breaking as you update the code.
I'm thinking that these things could be rebuilt into information kiosks, or something else useful, rather than just crushing & recycling.
I mean, touch screens aren't cheap, and I'd personally love to get my hands on a few. (eg, one for the kitchen to flip through recipies w/out needing a keyboard w/ all of its germ-hiding crevices... a small PC or embedded system to drive a digital picture frame that's also a home automation control center... I'm guessing others could come up with plenty of uses that'd actually benefit the states / counties / municipalities..)
But before you all go out into the street to dance, let me remind everyone that those paper ballots aren't exactly hand counted... those too are counted by... say it with me: ELECTRONIC machines. They have software. They are connected to a network. They have to store their results on media at some point.
It doesn't make one "bit" of difference whether a vote is tallied as a bit, or a missing (or hanging) chad... the integrity of an election, ANY ELECTION, is dependent SOLELY UPON the integrity of the people who carry it out.
Although there can be issues with the people running the election*, the problem comes with how much work it would be for someone to manipulate the election, and for the manipulation to be detected during for after the attack. So, the question becomes -- can a single person, or a small group without the cooperation of the majority of the election judges, rig the election with a reasonable chance of not being detected? The risk of this dramatically increases when the situation is entirely electronic.
With paper ballots, the boxes are inspected before the election starts by all election judges and poll watchers. The boxes are sealed and kept in public view through the entire election -- no one has enough time to unlock the box, break the seal, remove (x) number of ballots, insert the same number of manipulated ballots, relock the box, and reseal the box (with the identically numbered tag)... without anyone noticing. I'm not going to say it's impossible, but it's going to look rather suspicious if someone spent more than 10 sec dropping their ballot in the box -- and there is no reason for a poll watcher to ever go near the box (unless they're voting at the time), or for an election judge to touch the box during the voting process.
Now, in many cases, paper ballots were hand counted before these systems went electronic. And, in normal practice, these voting machines are not connected to a network, but use physical media to transfer data between the machines and the counting system. (I'll leave it up to the security folks to decide which transfer method is more dependable)
*disclaimer -- I've been chief election judge for two municipal elections, using paper ballots.
I'm not sure how much knowledge you have in this area, to speak authoritatively on it?
I don't. All I know is what the trickle-down affects were to the projects I worked on. Although I did go to a meeting (more auditorium style than personal) when Griffin explained to our center what his views were on the NASA advisory council, I had very little to do with any management other than my immediate ATRs.
But my big question would be; Why does NASA expect they *deserve* more federal funding, when it appears they've been making too many mistakes and mis-steps in recent years?
I don't think you read my comment, or at least, didn't understand what I'm saying. My issue is that NASA was told to do more things, and wasn't given the funding to cover it. I'm not going to say that all NASA projects deserve funding, but they're tied in certain regards due to congressional earmarks and the executive branch's "Vision for Space Exploration" that force funding into specific projects that may not be well justified in the context of NASA's published strategic goals. (I don't know that there are ones that should specifically be cut, but it seems that if the projects were worthwhile on their own, they wouldn't need congressional earmarks)
As for the problems you cite -- not all of them were engineering. Some were administrative, and some were on NASA projects, but not by NASA personnel. In the case of the satellite bolts issue, one of the teams took the bolts from another group's satellite. I've heard rumors that the "failed to follow procedures" came from someone checking off tasks as they were started, and not completed, right as a shift change occurred, so the bolts weren't verified before the satellite was moved. But this didn't happen at NASA -- this happened at Lockheed Martin. Were the contractors held accountable for their actions? I have no idea -- it's well outside of my scope of work. But I do know that it got mentioned quite a bit, so hopefully, others have learned from it.
And would the problems have occurred if there were adequate funding for oversight? I have no idea, but doing things on the cheap and/or rushed can lead to mistakes. If a job's worth doing, it's worth spending money on. (Okay, some things are worth doing at price $X, but not at $X+Y... it's that whole benefit-cost analysis thing). Now, some projects are intentionally risky -- they spend less money on something that's not yet proven, because the potential payoff is quite high, but they can't dedicate the full funding. And there's a whole 'TRL' (tech readiness level) system and different classes of missions as a result. But if a delay from a contractor results in the delay of a satellite launch (because it costs money to store the satellite in a clean room before launch, etc.), then money is taken from the project's later years... ie, the satellite's up, but there's less money to actually 'do science' with the data from it.
So in effect, I'm agreeing to a certain degree with your final analysis, but I'd argue that many of the problems aren't all NASA's fault, but the situations that they're put into by the other areas of government and the contractors they go through. I'd personally like to see more focus on the 'advance knowledge of (X)' aspects of the strategic goals, but Griffin is right -- the scientists and contractors all want more money spent on their area, so they might not be the best advisors, even if they do work for other scientific agencies.
"Considering Obama's shifting positions, he cannot be trusted to fully support NASA's mission to Mars," said the RNC's Conant. "The only thing Barack Obama knows about sending a man to the moon is that it's a good applause line."
Yes, because it's much better to tell people we're going to go to Mars, and then not give them sufficient money to do so, resulting in other programs getting cut. Even John Glenn referred to Bush's "Vision for Space Exploration" as an unfunded mandate.
And it's not like this is the only unfunded mandate shoved down NASA's throat -- how much is HSPD-12 costing all of the agencies?
Disclaimer : I've been a contractor at NASA, and one of my projects lost their funding for more than year because of the Mars program... by the time we got funding again, we couldn't get the team back together, because they had been assigned to other projects.
A good way to complement spam source filtering thru greylisting is to block home/dynamic IPs, ranges where mail servers arent supposed to be, but where are the majority of personal pcs (that gets owned by botnets). Spamhaus PBL i.e. have this particular target (or zen that combines this one with other known sources of spam)
IP ranges change, and there's nothing worse than getting assigned an IP that was previously in a dial-up pool.
Some people are obsessed with getting rid of all spam -- I'm personally willing to accept a little bit of spam through, so long as that I don't trash any legitimate mail. Everyone has a different acceptable range for false positives or false negatives. Blocking those addresses will result in lost mail. Maybe not much for the average person... but enough that I wouldn't outright block it...
FARNSWORTH: He's good, alright. But he's no Clem Johnson. And Johnson played back in the days before steroid injections were mandatory.
BENDER: Clem Johnson? That skin bag wouldn't have lasted one pitch in the old Robot Leagues! Now Wireless Joe Jackson, there was a blern hitting machine!
LEELA: Exactly! He was a machine designed to hit blerns! I mean, come on, Wireless Joe was nothing but a programmable bat on wheels.
BENDER: Oh, and I suppose Pitchomat 5000 was just a modified howitzer?
Unfortunately, due to a lot of servers NOT sending 404 error messages, (eg, ColdFusion servers, which respond w/ 200 for _everything_ (or at least, used to... haven't had to administer more recent versions)), quite a few serch engines will ask for a few randomly generated pages to attempt to determine what a '404' type page should look like.
The first time I noticed it, it was Yahoo -- I think they appeared in bunches of 20 or so, every few weeks. It's also a good idea to set the cache control down on your robots.txt, as many search engines will assume that the time since last modification is an indication of how long something can be cached if there's no cache control headers... so that robots.txt that was last modified 2+ years ago isn't going to be checked every 5 min or even 5 hrs if it's been changed.
TCP wouldn't, as it's Transport (Layer 4). What you talk about would be either Data Link or Physical. (I'm going to assume Physical, as it's dealing with aspects of modulation).
As for needing to compensate for it... yes. And it's still a problem. (And testing sucks, too.)
You're responsible for maintaining a nuclear reactor. Your manager, who has no idea how to actually runs the reactor comes in and demands to be given all of the necessary keys and passwords to the reactor. The reactor is currently working flawlessly, and there is no obvious reason for your manager to need access to the system.
Do you:
A. realize that this could be very bad for the company, and protect the company by refusing to turn over access to an unqualified person? B. turn over access to the access to an unqualified person, and just hope that they don't do anything which results in anyone's death, or your working 16hr shifts for the next 3 months straight.
I would argue that choosing "B" could be criminally negligent, and that A is the better choice, however, he should also immediately go to HR and explain why he's violating the order. In this particular case, he might've saved the city of San Francisco millions of dollars in lost productivity from someone getting access who had no clue what they were doing.
Of course, some systems consider the leading 0 to be a notation that the number's in base 8, so both of those would be invalid dates. 02007 is actually 1031 CE... and then it jumps to 02010 for 1031 CE.
2008 CE would then be 03730, and 1999 CE would be 03717.
I came within inches of being plastered across the front of an SUV when crossing Pennsylvania Ave one night in DC -- it would've taken quite some time to figure out what it was that I did to my systems, as management never gave me a chance to document everything. (I kept a quote up on my wall from my boss's boss : "Documentation is phase two")
Last year, my roommate's dad, the senior network engineer for the Prince George's County (Maryland) public school system died of a heart attack a week before classes started back up... I know he was obsessive enough to have documentation, but I have no idea how useful the documentation's going to be to anyone else who didn't understand the ins and outs of the system.
...
So yes, these sort of things happen. Although my final end at that job was probably closer to Terry Childs, but it's a long story. I'll wait to make a judgement on this case, as if it were anything like my situation, he may have been set up to fail. (I've since been told that my project manager was told to harass me 'til I quit... it's possible there was more going on under the surface than people want to admit).
I don't know what they're using as criteria for 'entered', but the one race I was in, they had a wheel failure in qualifying, and didn't even make the starting line.
Of course, whoever's dumb idea it was to finish in Golden, CO should've been shot -- uphill climb, after 2 days of cloudy weather... with parts of the race route on the Denver beltway... we were told to collect the cars w/ trailers, as there was too much rubber necking as rush-hour started.
(of course, they also thought it was a good idea to give us an 'alternate route' for the trailers and support vehicles that on one day, included a ferry. And on another day, was more than 2x the race route, passing through 2 states the race didn't.)
Just because two problems have the same mitigation doesn't mean that they're the same problem.
You can take aspirin for a headache, or for a heart attack, but that doesn't mean that a headache is a heart attack or visa-versa. In some cases (I don't know the history, I never followed djbdns), you can have someone state a solution without a known attack -- 'This doesn't feel right, I don't think we should do it, but I can't say exactly why', and so we can get into a situation where there was no flaw for it to be the same as.
What kind of additional data could you get out of 2 vectors that you couldn't out of one, especially since they are physically attached?
Rotation
They'd be able to measure acceleration in 3 axis and derive angular acceleration in 3 axis. (And the further apart the two accelerometers are, the more sensitive it'd be to angular changes).
It could probably be easier to find NASA software, and I doubt this particular software would ever be released, but there's lots of NASA software that's been released:
... and whatever stuff's out in the wild that's not being tracked.
There's issues because much of NASA stuff is done as part of grants, and so it's officially owned by the academic / research institution that won the grant... as such, there might be other NASA funded code that's out there, that you don't know is NASA code... at least one program (AISRP) has started a place to collect software by grantees.
I've been to NASA workshops where there's plenty of code that's being written where people would LOVE to have their software find a broader audience. At the last one, we had an hour debate on if we were allowed to release code as GPL, as that'd place restrictions on the use of the code (that derivative copies have to be open), which should not be done as the software was developed w/ federal money and as such citizens should be free to do whatever they want with it. I think someone was assigned to talk to NASA's legal department and find out what we had to do to release our code.
In high school (early 1990s), I had a calculus teacher who was _required_ by the school system to count homework as part of the grade. So, he had a simple formula:
You only turned in your homework on the day of a test.
If you got above an 80% on the test, you obviously did enough of the homework to understand the concepts, and so got 100% for homework.
If you had below a B average on the test, then he'd count to see if you had tried doing the homework -- not that you got the right answer, but would just count how many you attempted to do.
And, if you had at least an 80% on homework, he'd drop your lowest test score when computing your test average... which I vaguely remember also affecting your eligibility for the homework score
Now, part of this was because of a teacher's union rule that teachers wouldn't take homework home to grade -- so he made sure he got to drop large amounts of homework to grade. And yet, even with that, some people still failed his class, because they were too lazy to even try.
He tried getting out of teaching the 'lab 99' classes (pre-pre-algebra, for those students who weren't expected to make it to geometry before they graduated), but our new principal said he wasn't qualified to teach calculus, and took away all of his higher level math classes, so he walked the year after I graduated.
Unicomp still makes the old-fashioned keyboards... unfortunately, looking at their lists, most of the 101 and 102 key ones are PS2 or AT, not USB. They have a 'linux' model, but from the description I'm not sure if any of them are available as USB:
I was _1 week_ late to register sucks.org -- I would've loved to have been able to give people subdomains off of it... although, technically, it'd be a network service, so sucks.net would've been more appropriate (but that was taken the year before).
I've never actually contacted any of the sucks.{com|net|org} owners to see if they'd be willing to give people A records. (.net and.org keep going year-to-year and renewing each time....com's longer term)
And here's something else, another problem you might have: Suppose your prayers aren't answered. What do you say? "Well, it's God's will." "Thy Will Be Done." Fine, but if it's God's will, and He's going to do what He wants to anyway, why the fuck bother praying in the first place? Seems like a big waste of time to me! Couldn't you just skip the praying part and go right to His Will? It's all very confusing.
So to get around a lot of this, I decided to worship the sun. But, as I said, I don't pray to the sun. You know who I pray to? Joe Pesci. Two reasons: First of all, I think he's a good actor, okay? To me, that counts. Second, he looks like a guy who can get things done. Joe Pesci doesn't fuck around. In fact, Joe Pesci came through on a couple of things that God was having trouble with.
For years I asked God to do something about my noisy neighbor with the barking dog, Joe Pesci straightened that cocksucker out with one visit. It's amazing what you can accomplish with a simple baseball bat.
So I've been praying to Joe for about a year now. And I noticed something. I noticed that all the prayers I used to offer to God, and all the prayers I now offer to Joe Pesci, are being answered at about the same 50% rate. Half the time I get what I want, half the time I don't. Same as God, 50-50. Same as the four-leaf clover and the horseshoe, the wishing well and the rabbit's foot, same as the Mojo Man, same as the Voodoo Lady who tells you your fortune by squeezing the goat's testicles, it's all the same: 50-50. So just pick your superstition, sit back, make a wish, and enjoy yourself.
When they first came out, they seemed to bring up their last state, and then update... so you'd have a weather widget, and it'd show you 2 day old weather when you brought it up until it got its update. Now, it shows a blank widget, and doesn't seem to give you control until it's updated. Needless to say, this makes the calculator widget useless when I'm flying and it refuses to give me control until its update times out.
I'd love to find a way to disable it completely, so it doesn't suck down extra memory if I'm not going to use it.
I'll preface this with saying that I'm currently at the AGU Joint Assembly -- but I'm not a scientist. (I'm in information science, not physical sciences) I'd actually say that we're getting to the point where I could actually see that it's quite possible that future scientists might not need to learn how to program.
Now, there are going to need to be scientists who can program, but there were plenty of scientists in the past who couldn't program -- coming up with the theories and thinking about their given discipline in new and interesting ways are more important. Knowing how to program might make the scientists think about the problem in such a way that it fits within the given language -- and it might bind their hands, keeping them from thinking as freely about their disciple. (and that being said, you'd have to go to a completely non-number crunching educations system, where even spreadsheets aren't used).
But, there's another aspect -- all of the scientists I work with can program -- but to significantly varying degrees. Most of them don't keep up on the languages, so they're still writing Perl 4 code or IDL, Matlab, Fortran, whatever it was that they learned during grad school, and don't use the majority of the features of the language. If they learn a second language, they'll probably still write it as if it were their first language. (ever seen IDL code written in Perl? It's not pretty -- imagine pre-initializing the size of your array, rather than using 'push'.) In many cases, it may be better for scientists to have a pool of programmers to assign jobs to, sort of like the old secretary pools.
Also, if everyone knows how to program, they end up making their own solutions to every problem they run into, rather than looking for existing solutions. I just spent most of the day in session on data informatics, with people talking about how they're trying to get scientists to work to common standards, so that we can share data, and ultimately make better use of it. We won't need every new experiment to write all new visualization tools -- you make your data set, you register it with a federated data system, and you can plot / generate movies / whatever to your heart's content. With some of the new semantic systems being built (eg, SESDI), we're getting closer to that point.
That's not to say that there won't be a need for scientists who are programmers, or programmers who are scientists, I'm not saying that I don't think every scientist needs to be a programmer.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're giving the situation of trying to deal with older code, I'd also recommend Perl Medic: Transforming Legacy Code by Peter J. Scott. It has advice for dealing with existing code of questionable quality, rather than the case of writing good code from the beginning. (in the case of dealing with existing code, I'd actually recommend it before Higher Order Perl and possibly Perl Best Practices -- I've never read the other two you mentioned, so can't gauge their relative usefulness).
Another book that might be useful is Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook by Ian Langworth and chromatic, so that you can write better test suites to determine what you're breaking as you update the code.
I'm thinking that these things could be rebuilt into information kiosks, or something else useful, rather than just crushing & recycling.
I mean, touch screens aren't cheap, and I'd personally love to get my hands on a few. (eg, one for the kitchen to flip through recipies w/out needing a keyboard w/ all of its germ-hiding crevices ... a small PC or embedded system to drive a digital picture frame that's also a home automation control center ... I'm guessing others could come up with plenty of uses that'd actually benefit the states / counties / municipalities..)
Although there can be issues with the people running the election*, the problem comes with how much work it would be for someone to manipulate the election, and for the manipulation to be detected during for after the attack. So, the question becomes -- can a single person, or a small group without the cooperation of the majority of the election judges, rig the election with a reasonable chance of not being detected? The risk of this dramatically increases when the situation is entirely electronic.
With paper ballots, the boxes are inspected before the election starts by all election judges and poll watchers. The boxes are sealed and kept in public view through the entire election -- no one has enough time to unlock the box, break the seal, remove (x) number of ballots, insert the same number of manipulated ballots, relock the box, and reseal the box (with the identically numbered tag) ... without anyone noticing. I'm not going to say it's impossible, but it's going to look rather suspicious if someone spent more than 10 sec dropping their ballot in the box -- and there is no reason for a poll watcher to ever go near the box (unless they're voting at the time), or for an election judge to touch the box during the voting process.
Now, in many cases, paper ballots were hand counted before these systems went electronic. And, in normal practice, these voting machines are not connected to a network, but use physical media to transfer data between the machines and the counting system. (I'll leave it up to the security folks to decide which transfer method is more dependable)
*disclaimer -- I've been chief election judge for two municipal elections, using paper ballots.
I don't. All I know is what the trickle-down affects were to the projects I worked on. Although I did go to a meeting (more auditorium style than personal) when Griffin explained to our center what his views were on the NASA advisory council, I had very little to do with any management other than my immediate ATRs.
I don't think you read my comment, or at least, didn't understand what I'm saying. My issue is that NASA was told to do more things, and wasn't given the funding to cover it. I'm not going to say that all NASA projects deserve funding, but they're tied in certain regards due to congressional earmarks and the executive branch's "Vision for Space Exploration" that force funding into specific projects that may not be well justified in the context of NASA's published strategic goals. (I don't know that there are ones that should specifically be cut, but it seems that if the projects were worthwhile on their own, they wouldn't need congressional earmarks)
As for the problems you cite -- not all of them were engineering. Some were administrative, and some were on NASA projects, but not by NASA personnel. In the case of the satellite bolts issue, one of the teams took the bolts from another group's satellite. I've heard rumors that the "failed to follow procedures" came from someone checking off tasks as they were started, and not completed, right as a shift change occurred, so the bolts weren't verified before the satellite was moved. But this didn't happen at NASA -- this happened at Lockheed Martin. Were the contractors held accountable for their actions? I have no idea -- it's well outside of my scope of work. But I do know that it got mentioned quite a bit, so hopefully, others have learned from it.
And would the problems have occurred if there were adequate funding for oversight? I have no idea, but doing things on the cheap and/or rushed can lead to mistakes. If a job's worth doing, it's worth spending money on. (Okay, some things are worth doing at price $X, but not at $X+Y ... it's that whole benefit-cost analysis thing). Now, some projects are intentionally risky -- they spend less money on something that's not yet proven, because the potential payoff is quite high, but they can't dedicate the full funding. And there's a whole 'TRL' (tech readiness level) system and different classes of missions as a result. But if a delay from a contractor results in the delay of a satellite launch (because it costs money to store the satellite in a clean room before launch, etc.), then money is taken from the project's later years ... ie, the satellite's up, but there's less money to actually 'do science' with the data from it.
So in effect, I'm agreeing to a certain degree with your final analysis, but I'd argue that many of the problems aren't all NASA's fault, but the situations that they're put into by the other areas of government and the contractors they go through. I'd personally like to see more focus on the 'advance knowledge of (X)' aspects of the strategic goals, but Griffin is right -- the scientists and contractors all want more money spent on their area, so they might not be the best advisors, even if they do work for other scientific agencies.
Yes, because it's much better to tell people we're going to go to Mars, and then not give them sufficient money to do so, resulting in other programs getting cut. Even John Glenn referred to Bush's "Vision for Space Exploration" as an unfunded mandate.
And it's not like this is the only unfunded mandate shoved down NASA's throat -- how much is HSPD-12 costing all of the agencies?
Disclaimer : I've been a contractor at NASA, and one of my projects lost their funding for more than year because of the Mars program ... by the time we got funding again, we couldn't get the team back together, because they had been assigned to other projects.
IP ranges change, and there's nothing worse than getting assigned an IP that was previously in a dial-up pool.
Some people are obsessed with getting rid of all spam -- I'm personally willing to accept a little bit of spam through, so long as that I don't trash any legitimate mail. Everyone has a different acceptable range for false positives or false negatives. Blocking those addresses will result in lost mail. Maybe not much for the average person ... but enough that I wouldn't outright block it ...
FARNSWORTH: He's good, alright. But he's no Clem Johnson. And Johnson played back in the days before steroid injections were mandatory.
BENDER: Clem Johnson? That skin bag wouldn't have lasted one pitch in the old Robot Leagues! Now Wireless Joe Jackson, there was a blern hitting machine!
LEELA: Exactly! He was a machine designed to hit blerns! I mean, come on, Wireless Joe was nothing but a programmable bat on wheels.
BENDER: Oh, and I suppose Pitchomat 5000 was just a modified howitzer?
LEELA: Yep.
AltaVista has a 'NEAR' modifier:
Note that it _must_ be upper cased, or it'll search for the word 'near'.
Unfortunately, due to a lot of servers NOT sending 404 error messages, (eg, ColdFusion servers, which respond w/ 200 for _everything_ (or at least, used to ... haven't had to administer more recent versions)), quite a few serch engines will ask for a few randomly generated pages to attempt to determine what a '404' type page should look like.
The first time I noticed it, it was Yahoo -- I think they appeared in bunches of 20 or so, every few weeks. It's also a good idea to set the cache control down on your robots.txt, as many search engines will assume that the time since last modification is an indication of how long something can be cached if there's no cache control headers ... so that robots.txt that was last modified 2+ years ago isn't going to be checked every 5 min or even 5 hrs if it's been changed.
TCP wouldn't, as it's Transport (Layer 4). What you talk about would be either Data Link or Physical. (I'm going to assume Physical, as it's dealing with aspects of modulation).
As for needing to compensate for it ... yes. And it's still a problem. (And testing sucks, too.)
I just thought the numbers looked a little low ... (only seconds to Voyager2?)
it'd actually be a bit of a pain, as you'd need the distances between each hop, and I don't have SPICE installed on this machine.
Let's try this one instead:
You're responsible for maintaining a nuclear reactor. Your manager, who has no idea how to actually runs the reactor comes in and demands to be given all of the necessary keys and passwords to the reactor. The reactor is currently working flawlessly, and there is no obvious reason for your manager to need access to the system.
Do you:
A. realize that this could be very bad for the company, and protect the company by refusing to turn over access to an unqualified person?
B. turn over access to the access to an unqualified person, and just hope that they don't do anything which results in anyone's death, or your working 16hr shifts for the next 3 months straight.
I would argue that choosing "B" could be criminally negligent, and that A is the better choice, however, he should also immediately go to HR and explain why he's violating the order.
In this particular case, he might've saved the city of San Francisco millions of dollars in lost productivity from someone getting access who had no clue what they were doing.
Of course, some systems consider the leading 0 to be a notation that the number's in base 8, so both of those would be invalid dates. 02007 is actually 1031 CE ... and then it jumps to 02010 for 1031 CE.
2008 CE would then be 03730, and 1999 CE would be 03717.
I came within inches of being plastered across the front of an SUV when crossing Pennsylvania Ave one night in DC -- it would've taken quite some time to figure out what it was that I did to my systems, as management never gave me a chance to document everything. (I kept a quote up on my wall from my boss's boss : "Documentation is phase two")
Last year, my roommate's dad, the senior network engineer for the Prince George's County (Maryland) public school system died of a heart attack a week before classes started back up ... I know he was obsessive enough to have documentation, but I have no idea how useful the documentation's going to be to anyone else who didn't understand the ins and outs of the system.
...
So yes, these sort of things happen. Although my final end at that job was probably closer to Terry Childs, but it's a long story. I'll wait to make a judgement on this case, as if it were anything like my situation, he may have been set up to fail. (I've since been told that my project manager was told to harass me 'til I quit ... it's possible there was more going on under the surface than people want to admit).
For those of us already in our 30s, we'd be over the hill in 10-12 years.
It's much more likely that we'd be end up more like Captain Jackson, Zetaman, Captain Prospect or some other "real life superhero"
I don't know what they're using as criteria for 'entered', but the one race I was in, they had a wheel failure in qualifying, and didn't even make the starting line.
Of course, whoever's dumb idea it was to finish in Golden, CO should've been shot -- uphill climb, after 2 days of cloudy weather ... with parts of the race route on the Denver beltway ... we were told to collect the cars w/ trailers, as there was too much rubber necking as rush-hour started.
(of course, they also thought it was a good idea to give us an 'alternate route' for the trailers and support vehicles that on one day, included a ferry. And on another day, was more than 2x the race route, passing through 2 states the race didn't.)
Just because two problems have the same mitigation doesn't mean that they're the same problem.
You can take aspirin for a headache, or for a heart attack, but that doesn't mean that a headache is a heart attack or visa-versa. In some cases (I don't know the history, I never followed djbdns), you can have someone state a solution without a known attack -- 'This doesn't feel right, I don't think we should do it, but I can't say exactly why', and so we can get into a situation where there was no flaw for it to be the same as.
Rotation
They'd be able to measure acceleration in 3 axis and derive angular acceleration in 3 axis. (And the further apart the two accelerometers are, the more sensitive it'd be to angular changes).
What's that have anything to do with it?
NASA has an OSI approved license:
It could probably be easier to find NASA software, and I doubt this particular software would ever be released, but there's lots of NASA software that's been released:
There's issues because much of NASA stuff is done as part of grants, and so it's officially owned by the academic / research institution that won the grant ... as such, there might be other NASA funded code that's out there, that you don't know is NASA code... at least one program (AISRP) has started a place to collect software by grantees.
I've been to NASA workshops where there's plenty of code that's being written where people would LOVE to have their software find a broader audience. At the last one, we had an hour debate on if we were allowed to release code as GPL, as that'd place restrictions on the use of the code (that derivative copies have to be open), which should not be done as the software was developed w/ federal money and as such citizens should be free to do whatever they want with it. I think someone was assigned to talk to NASA's legal department and find out what we had to do to release our code.
In high school (early 1990s), I had a calculus teacher who was _required_ by the school system to count homework as part of the grade. So, he had a simple formula:
And, if you had at least an 80% on homework, he'd drop your lowest test score when computing your test average ... which I vaguely remember also affecting your eligibility for the homework score
Now, part of this was because of a teacher's union rule that teachers wouldn't take homework home to grade -- so he made sure he got to drop large amounts of homework to grade. And yet, even with that, some people still failed his class, because they were too lazy to even try.
He tried getting out of teaching the 'lab 99' classes (pre-pre-algebra, for those students who weren't expected to make it to geometry before they graduated), but our new principal said he wasn't qualified to teach calculus, and took away all of his higher level math classes, so he walked the year after I graduated.
Unicomp still makes the old-fashioned keyboards ... unfortunately, looking at their lists, most of the 101 and 102 key ones are PS2 or AT, not USB. They have a 'linux' model, but from the description I'm not sure if any of them are available as USB:
http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/keyboards.html
(and if you're scared of the springs -- they have quiet keyboards, too)
I was _1 week_ late to register sucks.org -- I would've loved to have been able to give people subdomains off of it ... although, technically, it'd be a network service, so sucks.net would've been more appropriate (but that was taken the year before).
I've never actually contacted any of the sucks.{com|net|org} owners to see if they'd be willing to give people A records. (.net and .org keep going year-to-year and renewing each time ... .com's longer term)
I've learned to hate them.
... so you'd have a weather widget, and it'd show you 2 day old weather when you brought it up until it got its update. Now, it shows a blank widget, and doesn't seem to give you control until it's updated. Needless to say, this makes the calculator widget useless when I'm flying and it refuses to give me control until its update times out.
When they first came out, they seemed to bring up their last state, and then update
I'd love to find a way to disable it completely, so it doesn't suck down extra memory if I'm not going to use it.
I'll preface this with saying that I'm currently at the AGU Joint Assembly -- but I'm not a scientist. (I'm in information science, not physical sciences) I'd actually say that we're getting to the point where I could actually see that it's quite possible that future scientists might not need to learn how to program.
Now, there are going to need to be scientists who can program, but there were plenty of scientists in the past who couldn't program -- coming up with the theories and thinking about their given discipline in new and interesting ways are more important. Knowing how to program might make the scientists think about the problem in such a way that it fits within the given language -- and it might bind their hands, keeping them from thinking as freely about their disciple. (and that being said, you'd have to go to a completely non-number crunching educations system, where even spreadsheets aren't used).
But, there's another aspect -- all of the scientists I work with can program -- but to significantly varying degrees. Most of them don't keep up on the languages, so they're still writing Perl 4 code or IDL, Matlab, Fortran, whatever it was that they learned during grad school, and don't use the majority of the features of the language. If they learn a second language, they'll probably still write it as if it were their first language. (ever seen IDL code written in Perl? It's not pretty -- imagine pre-initializing the size of your array, rather than using 'push'.) In many cases, it may be better for scientists to have a pool of programmers to assign jobs to, sort of like the old secretary pools.
Also, if everyone knows how to program, they end up making their own solutions to every problem they run into, rather than looking for existing solutions. I just spent most of the day in session on data informatics, with people talking about how they're trying to get scientists to work to common standards, so that we can share data, and ultimately make better use of it. We won't need every new experiment to write all new visualization tools -- you make your data set, you register it with a federated data system, and you can plot / generate movies / whatever to your heart's content. With some of the new semantic systems being built (eg, SESDI), we're getting closer to that point.
That's not to say that there won't be a need for scientists who are programmers, or programmers who are scientists, I'm not saying that I don't think every scientist needs to be a programmer.