I had the same damn problem with one of my ex-employers. You could list that you worked for them and such, but any employee of theirs was expressly barred by company policy for giving any kind of personal reference, job reference and even barred from discussing what your responsibilities were.
You could list them and they would confirm you worked for them and confirm the dates etc but they would not provide any more data.
When I pushed to find out why, it turns out that they had successfully been sued several years ago by a third party who had recieved references for two employees. Those two got caught stealing from the company and some judge found my company liable for giving references to thieves. Lesson - don't count on the courts to be rational.
We are f**ked. If a political system is so broken that it can't keep this from getting through then... well...
We are f**ked.
I really am an IT Auditor for a living and this is exactly the kind of work I do (although I mostly work for Utility Companies like water or electricity) and I know how these reports are created. There is HUGE pressure to "build assurance".
What that means is that you find an risk that is not addressed by a suitible control - and try to find a control - something, anything, that you can call a control to cover that risk. That's all fine and good, but what it means is that the risks that actually make it into the report are the really big, bad, completely unaccounted for ones. Put another way, for every risk that gets in, three didn't that a normal person would have thought should have.
Long and short, I write reports like this for a living and this is way, way, way worse than it looks.
Shiver me timbers! I'm aware of the common use of the fine word ye bilge rat. I'm just saying that, as a pirate, you diminish my trade by likening me to the scurvy land-lubbers who steal software.
I don't mind people calling common software theives "a pirate", but the next son of a port whore who asks me for a copy of LoTR:TTT will walk the plank. If you need some cargo stolen, I'm yer man but I don't burn DVDs.
And if you're going to steal software, at least do me and the sea dogs a favor and get yer self an eye patch, buy a monkey or a parrot and maybe lop of a limb or two. We pirates gots an image, matey.
I know it's not my point - other people have said it before me, and probably more succinctly. But piracy is boarding a ship on the high seas, robbing the ship and possibly kidnapping or killing the people on board.
Theft of information is still theft. Stealing is still stealing and violating a copyright is still violating a copyright. But none of those things involves boarding a ship on the high seas.
Equating those things with killing people for what they have on their boats is an attempt to increase the perception of the magnitude of the crime. There IS a tangible difference between physically robbing someone, and stealing information. Both are wrong, but both are not "piracy".
Wowzaz. I hope that gets modded up as Insightful. I didn't think of that at all when I posted the original comment although ironically, you've caused me to polarize my views even moreso.
You're right, in an increasingly secular society, the government (or committees or really anyone who has money and authority over others) is trying harder and harder to be god. Humanity has suffered long enough under the yoke of false gods - the answer is not real ones.
Wow. You're right. I was raised devoutly Roman Catholic and became an agnostic at age 18. By age 22 I was an atheist and still am to this day. Getting rid of god was the best thing I ever did for myself. Thinking back now, if I'd had to deal with a real god along with the fairy-tale one... well, my childhood would have been even more profoundly f**ked up.
I have to admit my initial gut reaction was to be in favour of something like this. If you know teachers, especially in smaller grade inner city and underprivileged schools you'll have heard stories about how a couple of unrully students completely and consistently disrupt the class to the point that the education process almost grinds to a halt. The same parents that produce these little monsters refuse to do anything about it but freak out if someone else does.
So the teacher ends up in a no win situation where they can't really do anything substancial to prevent one or two kids for ruining it for everyone.
Add a camera and instantly - the teacher has an overwhelming argument supporting proper punishment or banishment for the out of control kids. So the psycho kids will get the punishment / attention they need and the other kids get an environment where they can actually learn.
But... you have to wonder what kind of effect it would have on a child to be effectively raised in a constantly monitored environment. If "Friend Computer" or "Big Brother" watches you your whole youth - how agressively are you going to champion your freedoms as an adult? Does America really need a whole generation of people raised to simply - passively - accept being monitored? Can you imagine how different you'd have turned out if you never got away with anything as a student?
There are some merits to the idea of monitoring classrooms. However, there are, if you really think about it very few circumstances that would apply to all classrooms at all times.
What about a program that allows cameras to be brought in on a temporary basis if there is reason to suspect that they are needed? Something like that, implemented correctly would probably cost less, be more effective and wouldn't create an atmosphere where children are raised in a state of constant intrusive monitoring.
Just my opinion, I'll admit I haven't let the idea sink in yet.
The first time around the penalties must not have been to severe - hell - the second time with the Enron thing the legal penalties weren't actually that bad either.
But the thing that the big 4 (formerly big 5) accounting firms sell is their opinion. And the worthiness of that opinion is the value of the company.
Blow your credibility like Anderson did with Enron, and your company has no product to sell. Anderson was a POWERFUL reminder to the other four big accounting firms of the consequences of that sort of thing. Anderson did not disolve like candy-floss in the rain because of lawsuits, fines or other monetary issues. It folded because they lost all their customers. They lost their customers because they blew their credibility.
The companies in that industry self regulate because if they don't, they'll shrivel up and die.
Whoever wants assurance that the systems are working. An interest group of voters could hire the auditors if they wanted to. I've worked for government, banks, insurers, shareholders, the companies themselves... anyone with a stake in the process.
That doesn't mean that the company making the software would let them come in and audit - but these are a fairly big deal and it would be VERY strange if someone with an interest was willing to pay for an audit and the company in question was unwilling to let the audit go forward.
But auditors qualified to do 70/5900s are not something there are tonnes of. The big 4 Accounting firms maintain them, and some smaller shops. But this is all tied into accounting and business management standards.
And as much as people point to Enron/Anderson and say you can't trust the big four - its just not true. One falsified SAS 70 or Section 5900 report and a whole multi-billion dollar company with 10s of thousands of employees can unravel. There is checking, double checking and very rigid standards of audit evidence that are required for these things.
Every piece of work I do gets checked by at least three other people.
"We are finding that most of the stuff in our universe is abnormal in that it is gravitationally repulsive rather than gravitationally attractive..."
How can most of the universe be abnormal. Wouldn't the majority of the universe be "normal"? If most of the universe is repulsive instead of attractive (why did I think of the last three blind dates I've been on when I wrote that) then wouldn't repulsive be "normal". Right?
Damn, now I'm thinking of Karen... talk about repulsive being normal.
Normally I don't reply to ACs but you do raise a valid point. No amount of auditing, assurance and control can prevent insider criminal conspiracies, and if all you go on is a 70/5900 for something as critical as a voting machine (or medical gear etc) you're not being smart about the whole thing
That is why code reviews, 70/5900s, independent reviews of the hardware etc are essential. In the end through, if an individual, party or secret Cabal operating from a Secure Undisclosed Location were to try and rig an election, an electronic voting machine would probably make things easier.
Not that recent history shows that its that hard regardless.
Seriously. One of the things I do for Comp Sec is change management and version management. There are VERY strict auditing standards that companies like this need to meet. In the US there is a SAS 70 auditing standard that companies need to meet in order to do things like this. Up here in Canada, we call it a Section 5900 but its the same basic idea.
The way it works is, a company says that there are controls in place to assure people that something is or is not happening. If someone wants to test those controls, they'll call in a team of qualified IT auditors and we'll do a Section 5900.
For the 5900, the people hiring us to do the job (could be the company in question, a regulatory board, a judge, a client etc) will draft a list of risks or controls. These controls are things they want to see in place.
So, for a voting machine, the people requesting the 5900 would list controls similar to the following: -All changes to code are authorized and approved. -All changes are adequately tested, approved and testing is not carried out by the original developer. -No changes are introduced to the code after testing. -Changes are promoted and versioned by someone other than the original programmer. -Code that is installed into the production system is the same code that was tested and approved.
... and so on.
Then the auditors will go in and verify that these controls exist, that the risks these controls are designed to cover off are adequately covered and that the controls are effective. If a company fails a SAS 70 or a 5900, they usually HAVE to fix the problems.
Also, it usually isn't that hard to get your hands on a Section 5900 or SAS 70 report. Most companies will happy give them out unless they failed them or there are other NDA issues. As a voter, you probably have rights to these reports, and even if you don't, your elected representatives definitely do.
I used to work in a Future Shop with an in house repair shop. During some renovations, some contractor left some fairly heavy tools around that he took forever to come and pick up. (We had the damn things for almost 6 months.) These were serious construction tools like big ass drills with 2 foot bits, woodworking stuff, nail guns etc. For some reason, these tools were on the shelves in the repair area.
You could see into the shop through some bay windows, and every now and then the repair guys would haul out this old broken down HP desktop they had and "work on it" with the heavy tools. We'd get a kick out of watching customers watch our repair guys go at a desktop with a rotating saw and a nailgun.
Check out Robert Forward's "Time Master" for an interesting read on Negative Matter. (Not the same as Anti-matter.) It has repulsive instead of attractive gravity, it annihilates itself with matter producing zero energy and a bunch of other cool properties. And aparently, there is strong theoretical evidence that it might exist too.
Funny story there. A guy I know (and don't like much, thus the slightly gleeful tone of this anecdote) decided to ship a laptop. Brand new, worth many thousands of dollars and basically his baby. Some friend or family member of his gave him the worthy and sage advice of not bothering with the optional insurance. "It's a rip off."
So he packaged it up, shipped it to himself at his point of destination and went to pick it up. Destroyed, completely destroyed. So he went to complain, and complain he did. But alas, no insurance. The shipping company had a policy of paying out by the pound. Top of the line laptop, 6.8 pounds, $13.50. He was fairly salty and even moreso when he tried to garner sympathy and told us in the bar. We laughed good and hard and started paying the waitress beer insurance (tips) so if she spilled our drinks on the way to the table we would get new ones free of charge.
So ya, if you ship it, insure it and make sure that you insure it for the complete replacement value.
But also because for the first time there is a realistic alternative to Windows that runs on Intel-based PCs.
I love that. He writes that as though in his grandfather and great grandfather's day we all had no choice for OSes. It never ceases to amaze me the power branding has over people. M$ drops a couple of billion into ads and people really buy into it. People really believe that Nike's shoes are better somehow, people actually go to McDonalds.
One of my favourite analogies when it comes to M$ and Linux comes from something I saw a couple of summers ago. Some soccer club was doing a fund raiser and selling food at a soccer tournament. They had bar-b-ques fired up, real beef burgers going, a salad bar where you could get the fixings you wanted for it and although it was mostly people improvising stuff they were serving up a damn good burger.
Half a block away there was a McDonalds, and me and some of the other watched people leave the stands, walk to the McDonalds and come back with a McDonalds hamburger (or whatever, Big Mac or what have you). The burgers the soccer club was selling were cheaper, clearly better by any definition of a burger and right there for the taking. The only explanation me and my friends could come up with for why people would walk to the McDonalds is brand.
I was in South America and because I knew I had to fix a relative's computer, I brought my tool kit, a bunch of CDs with drivers on them (including a couple of OSes incase I needed to do a complete install). Later on I was in a Cyber Cafe in a tiny cafe two hours from no where. They had a broken computer and I offered to fix it. After success (some moron had installed some prgram that f@#ked it up), I had free internet access, free food and much gratitude.
IF you know what the hell you're doing, IF you're not worried about travel weight (I was in a jeep) and IF you don't mind blowing off afternoons of your travel time fixing computers you can really help out the locals, make friends and mooch a little.
Portable MD players run $130-350. Portable CD/MP3 players from Sony run $90-150. None of these are what seems to be outside the reach of the middle class in the US.
You have a deeply skewed idea of what people can afford. $130-350 represents the entire monthly disposable income of more than half the families in the US. The "middle class" is a shrinking minority. I assure you, the number of mini-disk players in the backpacks of students in a given highschool varies in direct proportion to where that highschool is.
Can any of you who work in a corporate environment actually envision people accepting doc format where people had to specify who could read, print or forward what? People would hotkey the "allow all" option or set it as a default and life will go on. Anyone who is going to go to the trouble of placing restrictions on their content can already do it now. M$ is MUCH more worried about DRM than their clients.
I work for an auditing firm and this nonsense would been seen for exactly what it is, one more layer of administrivia preventing me from doing what I'm paid to do. I actaully audit other companies complaince to their privacy policies (among other things) and I can tell you that this "important new feature" is going to be viewed as an obstacle 99% of the time. And just wait for the first time some idiot CFO accidentally locks himself out of his own files...
But you have no concrete values to plug into 'p'. Why the hell go through the trouble of using an exacting formula when you're talking about inexact data? And if you have specific samples, you don't need to talk about diversity since you can talk about the specific genetic differences.
Sheesh! I work with enough bean counters all damn day, I don't need them here too.
"I dare you to drink that." "No, I dare you." "Ok, we all dared, so we all drink."
Then they all got sick except one who not only brained them with a club and sired children with thier wives... After that, he taught his sons how he got all the foxy wives and they went to neighboring villiages...
First off, tits and beer rock. Sports... I can take of leave.
As for the parent comment, I studied anthropology in school and did a rather large term paper on genetic diversity. Not the topics in the articles exactly, but enough that I do know what I mean, and I think I know what they mean.
As for the genetic diversity, usually, they mean exactly what the term would imply. The different genotypes that occur in a given sample. In humans, it doesn't mean the difference between the two most genetically different people. The problem with discussing the difference between the two most genetically different people is that it implies a range. That's not the case, there isn't some genetic continuum or between disparate people. There are other people who might not be as genetically different as the two extremes but possess novel genes that the two extremes lack, thus they contribute to the over all diversity.
Your problem (other than being a contrariam who would rather criticize the discussion than contribute to it) is that you're used to thinking in terms of the quantifiable and the continua. There is a continual, quantifiable spectra of light for example, so you try to apply this thinking to other non-continuous phenomena.
If geneticists needed to discuss gene diversity in some sort of quantifiable measure, it would eliminate their ability to discuss relevant topics. Unless you are referring to a specific sample of genes, you can't quantify the diversity. So you just call it diversity instead of lamenting the lack of a standardized "Gene-ino" quanta. Just because they haven't sampled every gene of every human doesn't mean they can't make statements about human genetic diversity.
And another thing, it doesn't really matter which group of chimps they were talking about. The point stands even if it is only true for a single chimp troop out of all the chimp troops in the world. If somewhere out there there are 60 - 70 chimps with more diversity than all of humanity, then chimps possess more diversity, and a scientist will ask why.
You're right of course, the article is too vague. It was really just musing onto the keyboard. I'm not advancing a theory or anything. There could be many explanations for the low genetic diversity including subsequent death of lineages, genetic advantages of a sub-group (the whole scikle cell anemia - malaria connection) etc. Also, there was some genetic bottlenecking, where an even smaller group populates most of the world and the remainder stays behind in Africa.
I remember reading that if you took any world wide sample non-Africans - ANY sample no matter how diverse - and an equal number of randomly sampled Africans from the same villiage, you'd find more genetic diversity in the African villiage. The argument being that there was some genetic bottneck on the way out of Africa and only a tiny minority of the gene pool actually left.
Oh, and if us Neaderthals were still cheesed about that whole cannibalism thing, we'd let you know. We're over it. We ate you guys too. It's all good.
Thinking about that, I didn't make myself clear on something. What I was trying to say was that if a single troop of 60 to 70 chimps can have X diversity, shouldn't a group of 60 to 70 humans - a close relative of the chimp - also have X diversity. What struck me about the article is that their implication is that those 2000 people they say sired us had less diversity than 60 to 70 chimps.
Makes you wonder if it has something to do with human females being fertile year round. If I recall, chimp females are not. Because chimps can only mate at certain times, there is less oppurtunity for one male to sire all the children in a troop. In a human harem type social group, this could be easily accomplished which would cut down the genetic diversity considerably. Do this for a couple of generations and you might end up with a population with a depressed gene pool. Anyway, just arm chair theorizing off the top of my head. (Gotta use that anth degree for something.)
Unlike our close genetic relatives - chimps - all humans have virtually identical DNA. In fact, one group of chimps can have more genetic diversity than all of the six billion humans alive today.
Something about that struck me. If the natural state of affairs is for a wide genetic diversity even in a small group - such as the chimps, then why wasn't there a similar diversity in the 2000 people who went on to sire the rest of us.
Think about it. A chimp troop can consist of up to 60-70 chimps for a big troop. Assume all but around 30 troops are killed off leaving around 2000 chimps. If a single troop of those chimps could have more genetic diversity than all of humanity - ie. more than the 2000 people who sired us then 2000 chimps would have around 30 times more diversity. (Or more than that depending on how much more diversity in a chimp troop than there is in humanity.)
So, either humanity dwindled down by chance to 2000 people who happened to have little genetic diversity, or there was some common genetic trait that selected for those specific people. Or something. But then who knows... maybe chimps are just naturally genetically diverse and we're not... or maybe I just missed something that the writer thought was too technical for the article.
The Adolescence of P1, Thomas Ryan
The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, Clifford Stoll
The Ambidextrous Universe: Left, Right and the Fall of Parity, Martin Gardner
Dragon's Egg, Robert Forward
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut.
Slashdot Mirror
I had the same damn problem with one of my ex-employers. You could list that you worked for them and such, but any employee of theirs was expressly barred by company policy for giving any kind of personal reference, job reference and even barred from discussing what your responsibilities were.
You could list them and they would confirm you worked for them and confirm the dates etc but they would not provide any more data.
When I pushed to find out why, it turns out that they had successfully been sued several years ago by a third party who had recieved references for two employees. Those two got caught stealing from the company and some judge found my company liable for giving references to thieves. Lesson - don't count on the courts to be rational.
We are f**ked. If a political system is so broken that it can't keep this from getting through then... well...
We are f**ked.
I really am an IT Auditor for a living and this is exactly the kind of work I do (although I mostly work for Utility Companies like water or electricity) and I know how these reports are created. There is HUGE pressure to "build assurance".
What that means is that you find an risk that is not addressed by a suitible control - and try to find a control - something, anything, that you can call a control to cover that risk. That's all fine and good, but what it means is that the risks that actually make it into the report are the really big, bad, completely unaccounted for ones. Put another way, for every risk that gets in, three didn't that a normal person would have thought should have.
Long and short, I write reports like this for a living and this is way, way, way worse than it looks.
Shiver me timbers! I'm aware of the common use of the fine word ye bilge rat. I'm just saying that, as a pirate, you diminish my trade by likening me to the scurvy land-lubbers who steal software.
I don't mind people calling common software theives "a pirate", but the next son of a port whore who asks me for a copy of LoTR:TTT will walk the plank. If you need some cargo stolen, I'm yer man but I don't burn DVDs.
And if you're going to steal software, at least do me and the sea dogs a favor and get yer self an eye patch, buy a monkey or a parrot and maybe lop of a limb or two. We pirates gots an image, matey.
AARRRRR!.
I know it's not my point - other people have said it before me, and probably more succinctly. But piracy is boarding a ship on the high seas, robbing the ship and possibly kidnapping or killing the people on board.
Theft of information is still theft. Stealing is still stealing and violating a copyright is still violating a copyright. But none of those things involves boarding a ship on the high seas.
Equating those things with killing people for what they have on their boats is an attempt to increase the perception of the magnitude of the crime. There IS a tangible difference between physically robbing someone, and stealing information. Both are wrong, but both are not "piracy".
On another note, September 19th (this Friday) is talk like a Pirate day.
Arrrr.
Wowzaz. I hope that gets modded up as Insightful. I didn't think of that at all when I posted the original comment although ironically, you've caused me to polarize my views even moreso.
You're right, in an increasingly secular society, the government (or committees or really anyone who has money and authority over others) is trying harder and harder to be god. Humanity has suffered long enough under the yoke of false gods - the answer is not real ones.
Wow. You're right. I was raised devoutly Roman Catholic and became an agnostic at age 18. By age 22 I was an atheist and still am to this day. Getting rid of god was the best thing I ever did for myself. Thinking back now, if I'd had to deal with a real god along with the fairy-tale one... well, my childhood would have been even more profoundly f**ked up.
I have to admit my initial gut reaction was to be in favour of something like this. If you know teachers, especially in smaller grade inner city and underprivileged schools you'll have heard stories about how a couple of unrully students completely and consistently disrupt the class to the point that the education process almost grinds to a halt. The same parents that produce these little monsters refuse to do anything about it but freak out if someone else does.
So the teacher ends up in a no win situation where they can't really do anything substancial to prevent one or two kids for ruining it for everyone.
Add a camera and instantly - the teacher has an overwhelming argument supporting proper punishment or banishment for the out of control kids. So the psycho kids will get the punishment / attention they need and the other kids get an environment where they can actually learn.
But... you have to wonder what kind of effect it would have on a child to be effectively raised in a constantly monitored environment. If "Friend Computer" or "Big Brother" watches you your whole youth - how agressively are you going to champion your freedoms as an adult? Does America really need a whole generation of people raised to simply - passively - accept being monitored? Can you imagine how different you'd have turned out if you never got away with anything as a student?
There are some merits to the idea of monitoring classrooms. However, there are, if you really think about it very few circumstances that would apply to all classrooms at all times.
What about a program that allows cameras to be brought in on a temporary basis if there is reason to suspect that they are needed? Something like that, implemented correctly would probably cost less, be more effective and wouldn't create an atmosphere where children are raised in a state of constant intrusive monitoring.
Just my opinion, I'll admit I haven't let the idea sink in yet.
Lol.
The first time around the penalties must not have been to severe - hell - the second time with the Enron thing the legal penalties weren't actually that bad either.
But the thing that the big 4 (formerly big 5) accounting firms sell is their opinion. And the worthiness of that opinion is the value of the company.
Blow your credibility like Anderson did with Enron, and your company has no product to sell. Anderson was a POWERFUL reminder to the other four big accounting firms of the consequences of that sort of thing. Anderson did not disolve like candy-floss in the rain because of lawsuits, fines or other monetary issues. It folded because they lost all their customers. They lost their customers because they blew their credibility.
The companies in that industry self regulate because if they don't, they'll shrivel up and die.
Whoever wants assurance that the systems are working. An interest group of voters could hire the auditors if they wanted to. I've worked for government, banks, insurers, shareholders, the companies themselves... anyone with a stake in the process.
That doesn't mean that the company making the software would let them come in and audit - but these are a fairly big deal and it would be VERY strange if someone with an interest was willing to pay for an audit and the company in question was unwilling to let the audit go forward.
But auditors qualified to do 70/5900s are not something there are tonnes of. The big 4 Accounting firms maintain them, and some smaller shops. But this is all tied into accounting and business management standards.
And as much as people point to Enron/Anderson and say you can't trust the big four - its just not true. One falsified SAS 70 or Section 5900 report and a whole multi-billion dollar company with 10s of thousands of employees can unravel. There is checking, double checking and very rigid standards of audit evidence that are required for these things.
Every piece of work I do gets checked by at least three other people.
Damn, now I'm thinking of Karen... talk about repulsive being normal.
Normally I don't reply to ACs but you do raise a valid point. No amount of auditing, assurance and control can prevent insider criminal conspiracies, and if all you go on is a 70/5900 for something as critical as a voting machine (or medical gear etc) you're not being smart about the whole thing
That is why code reviews, 70/5900s, independent reviews of the hardware etc are essential. In the end through, if an individual, party or secret Cabal operating from a Secure Undisclosed Location were to try and rig an election, an electronic voting machine would probably make things easier.
Not that recent history shows that its that hard regardless.
Seriously. One of the things I do for Comp Sec is change management and version management. There are VERY strict auditing standards that companies like this need to meet. In the US there is a SAS 70 auditing standard that companies need to meet in order to do things like this. Up here in Canada, we call it a Section 5900 but its the same basic idea.
The way it works is, a company says that there are controls in place to assure people that something is or is not happening. If someone wants to test those controls, they'll call in a team of qualified IT auditors and we'll do a Section 5900.
For the 5900, the people hiring us to do the job (could be the company in question, a regulatory board, a judge, a client etc) will draft a list of risks or controls. These controls are things they want to see in place.
So, for a voting machine, the people requesting the 5900 would list controls similar to the following:
-All changes to code are authorized and approved.
-All changes are adequately tested, approved and testing is not carried out by the original developer.
-No changes are introduced to the code after testing.
-Changes are promoted and versioned by someone other than the original programmer.
-Code that is installed into the production system is the same code that was tested and approved.
... and so on.
Then the auditors will go in and verify that these controls exist, that the risks these controls are designed to cover off are adequately covered and that the controls are effective. If a company fails a SAS 70 or a 5900, they usually HAVE to fix the problems.
Also, it usually isn't that hard to get your hands on a Section 5900 or SAS 70 report. Most companies will happy give them out unless they failed them or there are other NDA issues. As a voter, you probably have rights to these reports, and even if you don't, your elected representatives definitely do.
I used to work in a Future Shop with an in house repair shop. During some renovations, some contractor left some fairly heavy tools around that he took forever to come and pick up. (We had the damn things for almost 6 months.) These were serious construction tools like big ass drills with 2 foot bits, woodworking stuff, nail guns etc. For some reason, these tools were on the shelves in the repair area.
You could see into the shop through some bay windows, and every now and then the repair guys would haul out this old broken down HP desktop they had and "work on it" with the heavy tools. We'd get a kick out of watching customers watch our repair guys go at a desktop with a rotating saw and a nailgun.
Check out Robert Forward's "Time Master" for an interesting read on Negative Matter. (Not the same as Anti-matter.) It has repulsive instead of attractive gravity, it annihilates itself with matter producing zero energy and a bunch of other cool properties. And aparently, there is strong theoretical evidence that it might exist too.
Funny story there. A guy I know (and don't like much, thus the slightly gleeful tone of this anecdote) decided to ship a laptop. Brand new, worth many thousands of dollars and basically his baby. Some friend or family member of his gave him the worthy and sage advice of not bothering with the optional insurance. "It's a rip off."
So he packaged it up, shipped it to himself at his point of destination and went to pick it up. Destroyed, completely destroyed. So he went to complain, and complain he did. But alas, no insurance. The shipping company had a policy of paying out by the pound. Top of the line laptop, 6.8 pounds, $13.50. He was fairly salty and even moreso when he tried to garner sympathy and told us in the bar. We laughed good and hard and started paying the waitress beer insurance (tips) so if she spilled our drinks on the way to the table we would get new ones free of charge.
So ya, if you ship it, insure it and make sure that you insure it for the complete replacement value.
One of my favourite analogies when it comes to M$ and Linux comes from something I saw a couple of summers ago. Some soccer club was doing a fund raiser and selling food at a soccer tournament. They had bar-b-ques fired up, real beef burgers going, a salad bar where you could get the fixings you wanted for it and although it was mostly people improvising stuff they were serving up a damn good burger.
Half a block away there was a McDonalds, and me and some of the other watched people leave the stands, walk to the McDonalds and come back with a McDonalds hamburger (or whatever, Big Mac or what have you). The burgers the soccer club was selling were cheaper, clearly better by any definition of a burger and right there for the taking. The only explanation me and my friends could come up with for why people would walk to the McDonalds is brand.
Weird weird stuff.
I was in South America and because I knew I had to fix a relative's computer, I brought my tool kit, a bunch of CDs with drivers on them (including a couple of OSes incase I needed to do a complete install). Later on I was in a Cyber Cafe in a tiny cafe two hours from no where. They had a broken computer and I offered to fix it. After success (some moron had installed some prgram that f@#ked it up), I had free internet access, free food and much gratitude.
IF you know what the hell you're doing, IF you're not worried about travel weight (I was in a jeep) and IF you don't mind blowing off afternoons of your travel time fixing computers you can really help out the locals, make friends and mooch a little.
Can any of you who work in a corporate environment actually envision people accepting doc format where people had to specify who could read, print or forward what? People would hotkey the "allow all" option or set it as a default and life will go on. Anyone who is going to go to the trouble of placing restrictions on their content can already do it now. M$ is MUCH more worried about DRM than their clients.
I work for an auditing firm and this nonsense would been seen for exactly what it is, one more layer of administrivia preventing me from doing what I'm paid to do. I actaully audit other companies complaince to their privacy policies (among other things) and I can tell you that this "important new feature" is going to be viewed as an obstacle 99% of the time. And just wait for the first time some idiot CFO accidentally locks himself out of his own files...
But you have no concrete values to plug into 'p'. Why the hell go through the trouble of using an exacting formula when you're talking about inexact data? And if you have specific samples, you don't need to talk about diversity since you can talk about the specific genetic differences.
Sheesh! I work with enough bean counters all damn day, I don't need them here too.
"I dare you to drink that."
"No, I dare you."
"Ok, we all dared, so we all drink."
Then they all got sick except one who not only brained them with a club and sired children with thier wives... After that, he taught his sons how he got all the foxy wives and they went to neighboring villiages...
First off, tits and beer rock. Sports... I can take of leave.
As for the parent comment, I studied anthropology in school and did a rather large term paper on genetic diversity. Not the topics in the articles exactly, but enough that I do know what I mean, and I think I know what they mean.
As for the genetic diversity, usually, they mean exactly what the term would imply. The different genotypes that occur in a given sample. In humans, it doesn't mean the difference between the two most genetically different people. The problem with discussing the difference between the two most genetically different people is that it implies a range. That's not the case, there isn't some genetic continuum or between disparate people. There are other people who might not be as genetically different as the two extremes but possess novel genes that the two extremes lack, thus they contribute to the over all diversity.
Your problem (other than being a contrariam who would rather criticize the discussion than contribute to it) is that you're used to thinking in terms of the quantifiable and the continua. There is a continual, quantifiable spectra of light for example, so you try to apply this thinking to other non-continuous phenomena.
If geneticists needed to discuss gene diversity in some sort of quantifiable measure, it would eliminate their ability to discuss relevant topics. Unless you are referring to a specific sample of genes, you can't quantify the diversity. So you just call it diversity instead of lamenting the lack of a standardized "Gene-ino" quanta. Just because they haven't sampled every gene of every human doesn't mean they can't make statements about human genetic diversity.
And another thing, it doesn't really matter which group of chimps they were talking about. The point stands even if it is only true for a single chimp troop out of all the chimp troops in the world. If somewhere out there there are 60 - 70 chimps with more diversity than all of humanity, then chimps possess more diversity, and a scientist will ask why.
You're right of course, the article is too vague. It was really just musing onto the keyboard. I'm not advancing a theory or anything. There could be many explanations for the low genetic diversity including subsequent death of lineages, genetic advantages of a sub-group (the whole scikle cell anemia - malaria connection) etc. Also, there was some genetic bottlenecking, where an even smaller group populates most of the world and the remainder stays behind in Africa.
I remember reading that if you took any world wide sample non-Africans - ANY sample no matter how diverse - and an equal number of randomly sampled Africans from the same villiage, you'd find more genetic diversity in the African villiage. The argument being that there was some genetic bottneck on the way out of Africa and only a tiny minority of the gene pool actually left.
Oh, and if us Neaderthals were still cheesed about that whole cannibalism thing, we'd let you know. We're over it. We ate you guys too. It's all good.
Thinking about that, I didn't make myself clear on something. What I was trying to say was that if a single troop of 60 to 70 chimps can have X diversity, shouldn't a group of 60 to 70 humans - a close relative of the chimp - also have X diversity. What struck me about the article is that their implication is that those 2000 people they say sired us had less diversity than 60 to 70 chimps.
Makes you wonder if it has something to do with human females being fertile year round. If I recall, chimp females are not. Because chimps can only mate at certain times, there is less oppurtunity for one male to sire all the children in a troop. In a human harem type social group, this could be easily accomplished which would cut down the genetic diversity considerably. Do this for a couple of generations and you might end up with a population with a depressed gene pool. Anyway, just arm chair theorizing off the top of my head. (Gotta use that anth degree for something.)
Think about it. A chimp troop can consist of up to 60-70 chimps for a big troop. Assume all but around 30 troops are killed off leaving around 2000 chimps. If a single troop of those chimps could have more genetic diversity than all of humanity - ie. more than the 2000 people who sired us then 2000 chimps would have around 30 times more diversity. (Or more than that depending on how much more diversity in a chimp troop than there is in humanity.)
So, either humanity dwindled down by chance to 2000 people who happened to have little genetic diversity, or there was some common genetic trait that selected for those specific people. Or something. But then who knows... maybe chimps are just naturally genetically diverse and we're not... or maybe I just missed something that the writer thought was too technical for the article.
Still, the numbers bothered me.
The Adolescence of P1, Thomas Ryan
The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, Clifford Stoll
The Ambidextrous Universe: Left, Right and the Fall of Parity, Martin Gardner
Dragon's Egg, Robert Forward
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut.
If you haven't read these books, you should.