Hehe, this gives me the opportunity to pass along an old favorite to a much younger generation. We were doing this around the time that today's college students were being born. The best part is that you can still get all the pieces for this (unlike many stories 20 years before my youth, which centered around things like large gunpowder fireworks and F-size model rocket engines).
If you were to take a square of aluminum foil, fold it diagonally in half to create a crease, fill the crease with lye (available as Red Devil drain cleaner, among others), and the roll the whole thing up like a... uh... hand-rolled cigarette, and then to fill a (preferably small, 500 mL or less) bottle with a fair amount of water, into which you then place the Drano Reefer before quickly (but firmly) closing the cap and throwing it far, far away, you'd get the Drano Reefer bomb.
The hydrogen comes from the water; the NaOH is merely a catalyst preventing the 2Al + 6H2O -> 2Al(OH)3 + 3H2 reaction from getting stopped by aluminum oxide films, etc. Done right, the gas pressure will rupture the bottle, while the hydrogen produced will add to any flame. For obvious reasons, not recommended for glass bottles.
For an encore, take a metal can (soup, tomato, soda, whatever) and add roughly 1:1 ratio by volume of brake fluid and pool chlorinator (the "shock treatment" is preferred for its high free chlorine content). Adding fluid to chlorinator produces a delayed reaction; adding chlorinator to fluid produces a much faster reaction. Work with the proportions to produce the desired effect - if done properly, you can reliably produce any effect from smoke-only to rapid bonfire. Once you're comfortable with that, you can start working with paper or styrofoam cups to produce a self-immolating container.
FWIW, OP probably should take it up the chain, since the guy who said "gimme a user account" probably has enough authority to blow his nose without permission, but not much else. You can't expect such people to cooperate, because they will for-sure get fired for deviating slightly from policy. The CTO/CIO, OTOH, has the authority to change the policy...
And ultimately, mgmt in an academic medical center is the dean of the medical school - and that will always be an MD who will be sympathetic to another MD trying to make things work. OP might not get what he wants, but he's very unlikely to get sanctioned for it.
While your vocabulary is highly amusing, it's worth noting that tenure doesn't really mean much in academic medicine - as a former chairman once pointed out, he could easily get rid of any tenured faculty he liked by eliminating their clinical job and pay. Most med school professors get the minimum salary for their professorial rank from the school itself; the bulk of their income is from practice.
You know, if you considered just explaining to people why something that a non-expert can do in his spare time in a night or two is actually a weeks-to-months long project when carried out by the IT department, you might make a lot more headway. Instead of saying no, say why not. "Opening the firewall is a potential HIPAA violation, and we actually have to do a fair amount of security testing before we can deploy anything more complicated than Minesweeper. Think about how much paperwork is needed just to cut off a wart, then imagine if your actions could harm every single patient the hospital has ever had" will take you seconds to say, and will go a long way toward making you look like a human instead of a bureaucrat.
A division head in academics is pretty high up; the only two levels above them are their chairman and the dean. (As an example, the chief of plastic surgery, or cardiology, or interventional radiology is normally a division head rather than a department head.) Depending on the department and the division, the division head may actually have more power than the chairman. Anyway, if the head of IT came over and explained the situation, I'm pretty sure that the problem would not be up here on/. I suspect that he's been told "no" by an MCSE monkey, not by the most senior security or network admin.
You know, if IT went to the doctors and said "Sure, we'll open that port, you'll just need to go down to legal and sign this form indicating that you personally assume 100% of all financial and criminal HIPAA liability for any intrusions that occur via your machine", instead of "We won't do that without an account", it would probably go a lot better. As you note, they're smart guys - they're usually smart enough to understand the reasons why, if you'll take a few minutes to educate them. Especially if said education includes the host of large, scary liabilities they will be responsible for assuming.
Personally, if I did this, I'd walk through the department asking everyone for $5 to pay for this year's hosting and do it on a machine located elsewhere.
But coops don't scale to the level of producing cars, or computers. They're great for situations in which a small number of people work together to share expenses (professional groups come about because it's advantageous to share office space, Internet service, secretaries, etc., among several people), but they'll never build the Golden Gate Bridge. The workers may be the ones who build it, the engineers may design it and make it safe, but it's the CEO who makes sure that it can be done at a profit. CEOs are often paid too much, but a good one is worth every penny.
Amazon can't sell you a Buick (yet). They'd rather advertise their own stuff and get you to buy it. And you only see Amazon Recommendations if you decide to Shop the Kindle Store - which I do from time to time, but only when I want to buy a book. This is putting those recommendations out there on the hibernate page where you'll see them. Frankly, I tired of the Kindle hibernate screens pretty quickly, and added my own instead, but I can definitely see why someone might choose to take $25 in return for seeing recommendations every time they turn the device off.
I can just see students opening their textbook and hearing/seeing "Remember, this Earth Sciences textbook is brought to you by Monsanto Growth for a Better World! or a five and ten second pre-rolls for every test question.
Why on earth would they make the device intentionally annoying? They would much rather sell you books by staying out of your way and throwing in an ad every time you turn it off - so that when you pick it up again, you see several books that Amazon thinks you might like.
You can read any Mobipocket book on a Kindle via USB sideload, download from a website, or the Kindle wireless file transfer (over the 3G connection, it's $0.15/MB, free over WiFi, and any conversions Amazon would do can be done for free via the @free.kindle.com address and USB). A non-DRM'ed book (or one whose DRM has been removed) can easily be converted into Mobipocket by using Calibre.
As long as what you're trying to do is read the book, there won't be any commercials. This is more like a DVD player that switches to a (silent) ad whenever it's been in pause mode for more than five minutes, but otherwise never shows one.
Humans have been setting one another on fire for a long, long time, under a wide variety of banners. The Church was *the* professional class of the Dark Ages and medieval Europe, and gave us the university system. As I said, a long way from perfect, but often better than the alternative.
You're talking about families that have stayed wealthy for many generations, even after the feudal gravy train ran out. They are obviously doing something right.
Well, no, but neither are the people at that Snopes link. The whole point of that story is to point out that (years Galileo Galilei was alive) and (years Harvard has been in operation) overlap. If it's false, I'll quit advertising it as true - but I'll just say that Harvard could have hired Galileo to be their chair of astronomy.
Meh, I'm not Catholic, so it didn't really bother me. The Church is a human institution, no doubt, but it spent a long time as the only civilizing influence in a lot of Europe. I know why people condemn it, but (like any other institution) its bad sides aren't the entirety of it.
And I have to wonder just how prestigious the Ivy League schools were in 1869.
It is worth noting, in this context, that Harvard once offered the chair of astronomy to Galileo. They've been around for longer than most think. At the time, of course, admission was much more predicated on pedigree than intelligence, but then again a good pedigree is actually a reasonable first estimate of intelligence.
That's a nice concept, but in fact it's surprisingly slippery -- people have a real difficulty understanding that it doesn't always lead to more complexity.
it seems strange that Harvard students are expected to know British currency
Not that strange; such students would have been expected to travel and conduct business in Britain, and Boston is almost as close to the UK as it is to California.
Slashdot Mirror
Hehe, this gives me the opportunity to pass along an old favorite to a much younger generation. We were doing this around the time that today's college students were being born. The best part is that you can still get all the pieces for this (unlike many stories 20 years before my youth, which centered around things like large gunpowder fireworks and F-size model rocket engines).
If you were to take a square of aluminum foil, fold it diagonally in half to create a crease, fill the crease with lye (available as Red Devil drain cleaner, among others), and the roll the whole thing up like a... uh... hand-rolled cigarette, and then to fill a (preferably small, 500 mL or less) bottle with a fair amount of water, into which you then place the Drano Reefer before quickly (but firmly) closing the cap and throwing it far, far away, you'd get the Drano Reefer bomb.
The hydrogen comes from the water; the NaOH is merely a catalyst preventing the 2Al + 6H2O -> 2Al(OH)3 + 3H2 reaction from getting stopped by aluminum oxide films, etc. Done right, the gas pressure will rupture the bottle, while the hydrogen produced will add to any flame. For obvious reasons, not recommended for glass bottles.
For an encore, take a metal can (soup, tomato, soda, whatever) and add roughly 1:1 ratio by volume of brake fluid and pool chlorinator (the "shock treatment" is preferred for its high free chlorine content). Adding fluid to chlorinator produces a delayed reaction; adding chlorinator to fluid produces a much faster reaction. Work with the proportions to produce the desired effect - if done properly, you can reliably produce any effect from smoke-only to rapid bonfire. Once you're comfortable with that, you can start working with paper or styrofoam cups to produce a self-immolating container.
FWIW, OP probably should take it up the chain, since the guy who said "gimme a user account" probably has enough authority to blow his nose without permission, but not much else. You can't expect such people to cooperate, because they will for-sure get fired for deviating slightly from policy. The CTO/CIO, OTOH, has the authority to change the policy...
And ultimately, mgmt in an academic medical center is the dean of the medical school - and that will always be an MD who will be sympathetic to another MD trying to make things work. OP might not get what he wants, but he's very unlikely to get sanctioned for it.
While your vocabulary is highly amusing, it's worth noting that tenure doesn't really mean much in academic medicine - as a former chairman once pointed out, he could easily get rid of any tenured faculty he liked by eliminating their clinical job and pay. Most med school professors get the minimum salary for their professorial rank from the school itself; the bulk of their income is from practice.
If they got a signed medical record release, they're probably in the clear.
play "Ride the Lightning" when performing an ECT procedure
Omigod, I know what tomorrow morning's soundtrack is going to be.
You know, if you considered just explaining to people why something that a non-expert can do in his spare time in a night or two is actually a weeks-to-months long project when carried out by the IT department, you might make a lot more headway. Instead of saying no, say why not. "Opening the firewall is a potential HIPAA violation, and we actually have to do a fair amount of security testing before we can deploy anything more complicated than Minesweeper. Think about how much paperwork is needed just to cut off a wart, then imagine if your actions could harm every single patient the hospital has ever had" will take you seconds to say, and will go a long way toward making you look like a human instead of a bureaucrat.
A division head in academics is pretty high up; the only two levels above them are their chairman and the dean. (As an example, the chief of plastic surgery, or cardiology, or interventional radiology is normally a division head rather than a department head.) Depending on the department and the division, the division head may actually have more power than the chairman. Anyway, if the head of IT came over and explained the situation, I'm pretty sure that the problem would not be up here on /. I suspect that he's been told "no" by an MCSE monkey, not by the most senior security or network admin.
You know, if IT went to the doctors and said "Sure, we'll open that port, you'll just need to go down to legal and sign this form indicating that you personally assume 100% of all financial and criminal HIPAA liability for any intrusions that occur via your machine", instead of "We won't do that without an account", it would probably go a lot better. As you note, they're smart guys - they're usually smart enough to understand the reasons why, if you'll take a few minutes to educate them. Especially if said education includes the host of large, scary liabilities they will be responsible for assuming.
Personally, if I did this, I'd walk through the department asking everyone for $5 to pay for this year's hosting and do it on a machine located elsewhere.
But coops don't scale to the level of producing cars, or computers. They're great for situations in which a small number of people work together to share expenses (professional groups come about because it's advantageous to share office space, Internet service, secretaries, etc., among several people), but they'll never build the Golden Gate Bridge. The workers may be the ones who build it, the engineers may design it and make it safe, but it's the CEO who makes sure that it can be done at a profit. CEOs are often paid too much, but a good one is worth every penny.
do NOT go on television about it
That's a good start. Even better: if you do something illegal but don't want to get caught, don't ever tell anyone about it.
Amazon can't sell you a Buick (yet). They'd rather advertise their own stuff and get you to buy it. And you only see Amazon Recommendations if you decide to Shop the Kindle Store - which I do from time to time, but only when I want to buy a book. This is putting those recommendations out there on the hibernate page where you'll see them. Frankly, I tired of the Kindle hibernate screens pretty quickly, and added my own instead, but I can definitely see why someone might choose to take $25 in return for seeing recommendations every time they turn the device off.
I can just see students opening their textbook and hearing/seeing "Remember, this Earth Sciences textbook is brought to you by Monsanto Growth for a Better World! or a five and ten second pre-rolls for every test question.
Why on earth would they make the device intentionally annoying? They would much rather sell you books by staying out of your way and throwing in an ad every time you turn it off - so that when you pick it up again, you see several books that Amazon thinks you might like.
You can read any Mobipocket book on a Kindle via USB sideload, download from a website, or the Kindle wireless file transfer (over the 3G connection, it's $0.15/MB, free over WiFi, and any conversions Amazon would do can be done for free via the @free.kindle.com address and USB). A non-DRM'ed book (or one whose DRM has been removed) can easily be converted into Mobipocket by using Calibre.
Blocking an ad server over your own wifi would be trivial.
Not if the ad server is the Kindle sync server.
As long as what you're trying to do is read the book, there won't be any commercials. This is more like a DVD player that switches to a (silent) ad whenever it's been in pause mode for more than five minutes, but otherwise never shows one.
Humans have been setting one another on fire for a long, long time, under a wide variety of banners. The Church was *the* professional class of the Dark Ages and medieval Europe, and gave us the university system. As I said, a long way from perfect, but often better than the alternative.
Yeah, you're right. It's been 19 years since I studied it, and I keep letting the small amount of Spanish I know interfere.
You're talking about families that have stayed wealthy for many generations, even after the feudal gravy train ran out. They are obviously doing something right.
Well, no, but neither are the people at that Snopes link. The whole point of that story is to point out that (years Galileo Galilei was alive) and (years Harvard has been in operation) overlap. If it's false, I'll quit advertising it as true - but I'll just say that Harvard could have hired Galileo to be their chair of astronomy.
Meh, I'm not Catholic, so it didn't really bother me. The Church is a human institution, no doubt, but it spent a long time as the only civilizing influence in a lot of Europe. I know why people condemn it, but (like any other institution) its bad sides aren't the entirety of it.
And I have to wonder just how prestigious the Ivy League schools were in 1869.
It is worth noting, in this context, that Harvard once offered the chair of astronomy to Galileo. They've been around for longer than most think. At the time, of course, admission was much more predicated on pedigree than intelligence, but then again a good pedigree is actually a reasonable first estimate of intelligence.
Evolution is a simple and obvious concept.
That's a nice concept, but in fact it's surprisingly slippery -- people have a real difficulty understanding that it doesn't always lead to more complexity.
Er, sorry.
Et tu barbaricus es. Et mater sua una simia est.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur. Et tu es barbaricus. Et mater sua est una simia.
it seems strange that Harvard students are expected to know British currency
Not that strange; such students would have been expected to travel and conduct business in Britain, and Boston is almost as close to the UK as it is to California.