I was best man at my best friend's wedding the day after Mt. Saint Helens erupted. After driving two hours at 90 mph in a gaudy orange Kharman Ghia I borrowed from my brother, I actually arrived early, to my everlasting surprise, and spent an interesting morning with my friend's sister's husband looking over a computer he'd built from a HeathKit box. As I recall, it ran a strange operating system called MS-DOS, so I heard the word "boot" for the first time in a context other than Wild West or Wellingtons. On the computer was a game: Adventure. "You can go in there and get lost," my host said.
True then. True now. True forever. I brought a hibachi as a wedding gift. In return, I got carpal tunnel syndrome, cataracts and lens implants in both eyes, and a viral itch I may never be able to scratch. Thanks, Larry.
10K out of 10K+1 bad hiring experiences are caused by psychology majors who find a permanent niche in HR and think they're contributing.
My first rule, following the TOTKO principle, is don't hire anyone over 39. They've shot their wad, and all they're really good for is code maintenance, provided they wrote the stuff in the first place.
My second rule, don't hire a recent college grad. They don't know squat, so you get gigantic holes in your existing codebase, patched over by tripe that only works 80% of the time. The old stuff only worked 95% before your environment reprioritized everything, for sure, but if you hire a recent grad, either be prepared to whip them through a steep forgetting and relearning curve, or put them on a team far away from design responsibility.
My third rule, hire idiosyncratic genius. Communication will be hell for a few months as everyone reaches new consensus on what terms like "embedded" really mean, but the results will be outstanding -- for two years. That's the ENTIRE attention span for anyone who can both plan and execute a project. After the project is over, sign her onto another, different project fast. If you just kick your producing players upstairs or out the door, you will be unable to maintain code (because of the RCG syndrome mentioned above), and your company, or division, or section, will implode, or worse, decay slowly. I.G. can be 40 year old women who took a course after losing a job at a meat packing plant, by the way. Be supple.
The exception to my third rule, never ever hire I.G.'s who play dungeons and dragons, or who are exceptionally good at FPS. Automatic asocial disqualifiers.
The Kaypro 10 was a luggable CP/M 2.2 machine cased in a steel box and painted dark green. I loved it. But the keyboard, which doubled as a snapon lid, had a harsh forward edge that was too easy to put your wrists on. Ok, I had no real reason to own a Kaypro, but you could play Adventure on it — which I did for hours at a time. It was my own damn fault, then: The ring and pinky fingers on both hands went completely numb, except for the blaze of fiery pain in my wrists. To this day, I cannot touch my left pinky with my left thumb — my left hand spasms and trembles like Michael J. Fox.
To be fair, my brother wrote a Ph.D. dissertion (using WordStar) on that monster, and he didn't destroy his carpal tunnels. Lucky stiff.
Linux desktop is a joke. It didn't have to be a joke, but it is. Apple may be morphing into the next square-jawed gimlet-eyed goon ("You'll eats yer spinach, and you'll likes it!"), but they understand how to write a decently secure multi-user working environment. Linux doesn't seem to understand WHY it needs to learn, while Microsoft is forgetting how to do a simple Seven Ball Juggle and other skills they nailed down forever in the Nineties.
I was really sucked in by that "manganese nodules exploration" story put out by Howard Hughes' Glomar Explorer. I even babbled excitedly about it at a U.N. meeting to a law of the sea guy who happened to know it was a CIA op to recover a Soviet sub from the abyssal plain. He avoided me like plague until we all went away. Us naive nerds are such lusers.
So now we're supposed to believe in SETI? Gimme a break. No one gets that seriously funded to chase fairies at the bottom of the garden without an ulterior motive. Would aliens really be heavily invested in the electromagnetic spectrum? Nope, I think they handed FDR a tin can about 64 years ago, and every once in a while, they twang our string to see if we're still listening. String? Just a theory.
I was struck by Terrence Sejnowski's observation that cortical neurons (in humans) are "more capable" than we ever thought, an observation drawn from fly neurons orders of magnitude less numerous than ours, yet just as able for their assigned tasks.
If we've learned anything from computers, it's that B. F. Skinner's reflexology is not only bunk, but trivial, uninteresting bunk. Look what a dragonfly, e.g., does: Its "brain" is in its eyes, and scarcely anywhere else, and yet it can patrol an area larger than Kansas City (relative to itself), seek, acquire and target an object which is taking evasive action, pursue and kill (or pursue and mate with) it, eat, seek a reed tip to refuel, clean and maintain itself, then relaunch and do the same thing again, exceeding Department of Defense mean times to failure by a factor of ten or a hundred thousands. Also, a dragonfly can compensate for external conditions -- a barn swallow attack, e.g. -- without ever being programmed for it. Dragonflies were shaped by 300 million years of evolution to fill a particular niche, and anyone who comments blithely about "instinct" is simply not aware of what the beastie is doing.
When it comes to Skinner and his pigeon boxes, the best that can be said is that the man achieved tenure in his milieau with a laughably inappropriate and minimalist appreciation of reality. Bad old stuff sucks, for sure. The best of the oldschool behaviorists, such as Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz, were at least looking in the right direction.
So, let's see... If we're all inside a black hole accelerating (by nano-creaks, as the onion adds another shell at the periphery) toward the center... and now we're slowing down... that just means the cookie in the middle must be getting done... As if;-) Doesn't a relative wobble just mean that our private hell accretes new material at a variable rate?
No, thanks. Peter Jackson anywhere near the scene of Bilberry rescuing Owing, Glowing, Boing, Sproing, Doris and Donk from the spiders gives me the heebie-jeebies. He throws in a lot of greasy frisson that Tolkien never intended, and arguing that he would if he'd thought of it is churlish. Peter Jackson doing "What's up, Doc?" in the cameo outside the inn at Bree, is droll, maybe, but not half as funny as Ann jumping after the monkey would have been. Strider wearing camo? Glazzic. Boneless dinosaurs? CGI or not, I kept looking for the wires.
Reminds me of the "systems analyst" we had back in the daze when Apple/// and Great Plains Accounting software were trying to get IT off the ground. Yes, that system is to MySQL and a Dell notebook what Wright Brothers' gimcrack is to a Piper Cub, but it seemed like The Future back then. She, the K.I.A., did not want to do backups. "A waste of my time!" She insisted that our best guy set up a button she could push to (heh) Back. Up. The. Accounting. Data. Onto. The. SAME. FUCKING. HARD. DRIVE. And she got the boss to back her up, because she was a hardnose beancounter who could really make a company hum.
I won't bore you with the inevitable, except to say it took weeks to recover the data. Yes, our "best guy" was that good.
That reminds me of another User From Hell, though. Apple///'s and ]['s were notoriously hard to network, especially using Corvus, which tended to flicker out if somebody two buildings over turned on a power saw. Anyway, and I call her The Princess, our customer tended to cry whenever that happened, and our hardware tech was about as tough as a bag of hot marshmallows. She got a LOT of his time. The guy eventually figured out she was conning him, but not what to do about it.
She got me on the phone after that. She needed to see (names HAVE been altered) Rudolf, NOW, because the network was down again.
"Sorry, Rudolf can't work you into the schedule before Thursday."
The hot tears started, the voice on the line went into full whine mode. "But I need him NOW!"
"Sorry, can't be done."
"But why NO-OT??" My daughter is a better con artist. SHE has the wounded deer act down pat.
"Because he works for a living!" (Click)
Got fired inside of fifteen minutes. Probably deserved it, too. Who in their right mind would sell Apple ]['s as a serious business machine. You had to hot-wire the keyboard to get lower case, for crying out loud.
...single neuron out of Spock's brain. Some of my private code is downright pleasing, although revoltingly non-commercial. When I was (*ahem*) "coding" — HR geekphreeze for munger wrangling that translates more or less 103% correctly as "less money than programmers get," just as HR learned very early on that "programmer analyst" is $35,000 more per annum than "programmer" — back in my shrinkwrap daze, I always felt my stuff was three weeks too premature for genius. Deadlines. It's worth noting that NOT ONE LINE OF CODE that was commercially successfully for that company (long since gutted by a buyout during the Dot Com shakedown) was ever written in-house.
Robots should be graphic actors which mediate between people and machines, such as allowing an autopilot screen personality to parallel park a Toyota. Can you imagine phoning Angelina Jolie (the Grendel's mom version) and telling her you'll be late getting home? Then, in 5 us or less, she tells your kitchen that dinner will be late by 2 hours, so don't defrost the TV dinners yet? There's a crude version of this in Red Dwarf (Holly), a parody of it in M.I.B. (the POS Ford autopilot), and a fully-formed sketch of it in GITS (cybernautic tachikomas). Prior mention goes to Arthur C. Clarke, for the
"monitor" (IIRC) in Against the Fall of Night.
Law is settled by warfare, not logic - i.e., not who's right, but who's left standing when the dust settles. Which is why Krishna tells Arjuna that he MUST fight. Rather than fill bandwidth with pious libertarian dreck, why not contribute a few bucks to the EFF before our Fearless Leader has beaten the dollar down to peso parity?
...Natalie Portman. The only good dialog in the entire series was "I know," and that was sheer accident, but for my money the worst thing he did was to bury Keisha Castle-Hughes under a walk-on role carrying more weight, in terms of misogynist costumery, than a gunnery sergeant. Could it get any worse?
Life is levelling up, right? You were abandoned by your working parents, so you levelled up from pre-school to kindergarten. You levelled up every year, except (in your case) fifth grade, all the way through high school. You probably got diplomas and certificates along the way. Assuming you graduate from college, you might even get to hear Dick Cheney spewing wisdom down your ear canal like Hamlet's uncle. If you achieve the lofty heights of grad school, you'll get to wear a fancier costume and command a fancier salary in your chosen profession (possibly the arcane field of pre-Raphaelite influences on iPod design).
Eventually you'll even achieve a Ph.D., or Fudd, as we call it here in Realworld, and if your grip on actual quantum mechanics has been (heh) level enough, you might get a call from Dull-sounding Dynamics, which is constructing the world's first wavebent camouflage for Japanese Gundam suits. You'll have meetings. You'll climb the corporate ladder. You'll level up.
The simple answer is... uh... simpler. It's show biz, and ya gotta shift the scenery. Don't notice the ninjas, ok? They work backstage.
Isn't there kind of an obvious caveat here that the bad guys won't be using officially-sanctioned NSA stuff? Especially if three or four minutes of thought and some very old code that was on the pre-911 internet is as unbreakable now as it was then.
They're roughly 180 degrees apart, according to my highly placed sources (I dimly remember seeing something about this on Discovery Channel), and approximately coeval. Plus, IIRC, 300K is only about 0.46% of 65M, presumably within MOE.
Re:Improbable (Less One)
on
Cracking Go
·
· Score: 1
Less one, of course, because the empty Go board is not a member of the set of Go positions -- no stone has been placed, no contest has begun. Board plus stones, minimum one stone, and that black, defines a Go position. The notion of null set is not applicable to the spirit of the game.
Unlike checkers or chess, Go end positions get MORE complex, not LESS complex, in terms of sheer brute force. Of course, many advanced amateur and pro games get resolved quite early -- leaving what appears to be an "unfinished" game on the board. The problem is that human players tell themselves quite interesting stories about the meanings of these boards, while a computer, presumably lacking a sense of spatial narrative, is clueless. One of the best examples of these outcomes occurs early in the Hikaru no Go manga series; the position left on the board is a famous 19th century board by Shusaku Honinbo, and the defeated thug's demeanor (he looks like he's seen a ghost) is apposite and appropriate.
The number of possible Go positions is 3**(19*19) - 1, by the way.
You're kidding, right? Microsoft is notorious for shipping buggy crap that gets fixed (sometimes) on the next iteration, provided you pay for the update. It's been that way since 1986, at least, and MS C V4.
If somebody in charge is promising to submit MS stuff to QC with teeth, bravo. The short sharp exhalations are me not holding my breath.
How about a neo-fascist pro-Bush microhegemony sitting like a boil on the southern edge of the Pacific Rim? Gee, who could think like that, you may well wonder. Uhh... Indonesia? Singapore? New Zealand? Sri Lanka? How about the heavy hitters, like say... India? Fast forward ten years, beyond the scenarios where pacifist Japan has kicked the U.S. off Okinawa, and resurgent Edo, finally fed up with 120 Hz alternating U.S. neglect and micromanagement, suddenly re-aligns with China. Da mime boggles. Point being, if OZ can crack U.S. flight codes, anybody can, especially the Japanese.
Slashdot Mirror
I was best man at my best friend's wedding the day after Mt. Saint Helens erupted. After driving two hours at 90 mph in a gaudy orange Kharman Ghia I borrowed from my brother, I actually arrived early, to my everlasting surprise, and spent an interesting morning with my friend's sister's husband looking over a computer he'd built from a HeathKit box. As I recall, it ran a strange operating system called MS-DOS, so I heard the word "boot" for the first time in a context other than Wild West or Wellingtons. On the computer was a game: Adventure. "You can go in there and get lost," my host said. True then. True now. True forever. I brought a hibachi as a wedding gift. In return, I got carpal tunnel syndrome, cataracts and lens implants in both eyes, and a viral itch I may never be able to scratch. Thanks, Larry.
10K out of 10K+1 bad hiring experiences are caused by psychology majors who find a permanent niche in HR and think they're contributing. My first rule, following the TOTKO principle, is don't hire anyone over 39. They've shot their wad, and all they're really good for is code maintenance, provided they wrote the stuff in the first place. My second rule, don't hire a recent college grad. They don't know squat, so you get gigantic holes in your existing codebase, patched over by tripe that only works 80% of the time. The old stuff only worked 95% before your environment reprioritized everything, for sure, but if you hire a recent grad, either be prepared to whip them through a steep forgetting and relearning curve, or put them on a team far away from design responsibility. My third rule, hire idiosyncratic genius. Communication will be hell for a few months as everyone reaches new consensus on what terms like "embedded" really mean, but the results will be outstanding -- for two years. That's the ENTIRE attention span for anyone who can both plan and execute a project. After the project is over, sign her onto another, different project fast. If you just kick your producing players upstairs or out the door, you will be unable to maintain code (because of the RCG syndrome mentioned above), and your company, or division, or section, will implode, or worse, decay slowly. I.G. can be 40 year old women who took a course after losing a job at a meat packing plant, by the way. Be supple. The exception to my third rule, never ever hire I.G.'s who play dungeons and dragons, or who are exceptionally good at FPS. Automatic asocial disqualifiers.
The Kaypro 10 was a luggable CP/M 2.2 machine cased in a steel box and painted dark green. I loved it. But the keyboard, which doubled as a snapon lid, had a harsh forward edge that was too easy to put your wrists on. Ok, I had no real reason to own a Kaypro, but you could play Adventure on it — which I did for hours at a time. It was my own damn fault, then: The ring and pinky fingers on both hands went completely numb, except for the blaze of fiery pain in my wrists. To this day, I cannot touch my left pinky with my left thumb — my left hand spasms and trembles like Michael J. Fox.
To be fair, my brother wrote a Ph.D. dissertion (using WordStar) on that monster, and he didn't destroy his carpal tunnels. Lucky stiff.
Maybe we just haven't been seeing what we're looking at?
Linux desktop is a joke. It didn't have to be a joke, but it is. Apple may be morphing into the next square-jawed gimlet-eyed goon ("You'll eats yer spinach, and you'll likes it!"), but they understand how to write a decently secure multi-user working environment. Linux doesn't seem to understand WHY it needs to learn, while Microsoft is forgetting how to do a simple Seven Ball Juggle and other skills they nailed down forever in the Nineties.
I was really sucked in by that "manganese nodules exploration" story put out by Howard Hughes' Glomar Explorer. I even babbled excitedly about it at a U.N. meeting to a law of the sea guy who happened to know it was a CIA op to recover a Soviet sub from the abyssal plain. He avoided me like plague until we all went away. Us naive nerds are such lusers.
So now we're supposed to believe in SETI? Gimme a break. No one gets that seriously funded to chase fairies at the bottom of the garden without an ulterior motive. Would aliens really be heavily invested in the electromagnetic spectrum? Nope, I think they handed FDR a tin can about 64 years ago, and every once in a while, they twang our string to see if we're still listening. String? Just a theory.
I was struck by Terrence Sejnowski's observation that cortical neurons (in humans) are "more capable" than we ever thought, an observation drawn from fly neurons orders of magnitude less numerous than ours, yet just as able for their assigned tasks.
If we've learned anything from computers, it's that B. F. Skinner's reflexology is not only bunk, but trivial, uninteresting bunk. Look what a dragonfly, e.g., does: Its "brain" is in its eyes, and scarcely anywhere else, and yet it can patrol an area larger than Kansas City (relative to itself), seek, acquire and target an object which is taking evasive action, pursue and kill (or pursue and mate with) it, eat, seek a reed tip to refuel, clean and maintain itself, then relaunch and do the same thing again, exceeding Department of Defense mean times to failure by a factor of ten or a hundred thousands. Also, a dragonfly can compensate for external conditions -- a barn swallow attack, e.g. -- without ever being programmed for it. Dragonflies were shaped by 300 million years of evolution to fill a particular niche, and anyone who comments blithely about "instinct" is simply not aware of what the beastie is doing.
When it comes to Skinner and his pigeon boxes, the best that can be said is that the man achieved tenure in his milieau with a laughably inappropriate and minimalist appreciation of reality. Bad old stuff sucks, for sure. The best of the oldschool behaviorists, such as Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz, were at least looking in the right direction.
So, let's see... If we're all inside a black hole accelerating (by nano-creaks, as the onion adds another shell at the periphery) toward the center... and now we're slowing down... that just means the cookie in the middle must be getting done... As if ;-) Doesn't a relative wobble just mean that our private hell accretes new material at a variable rate?
No, thanks. Peter Jackson anywhere near the scene of Bilberry rescuing Owing, Glowing, Boing, Sproing, Doris and Donk from the spiders gives me the heebie-jeebies. He throws in a lot of greasy frisson that Tolkien never intended, and arguing that he would if he'd thought of it is churlish. Peter Jackson doing "What's up, Doc?" in the cameo outside the inn at Bree, is droll, maybe, but not half as funny as Ann jumping after the monkey would have been. Strider wearing camo? Glazzic. Boneless dinosaurs? CGI or not, I kept looking for the wires.
Reminds me of the "systems analyst" we had back in the daze when Apple /// and Great Plains Accounting software were trying to get IT off the ground. Yes, that system is to MySQL and a Dell notebook what Wright Brothers' gimcrack is to a Piper Cub, but it seemed like The Future back then. She, the K.I.A., did not want to do backups. "A waste of my time!" She insisted that our best guy set up a button she could push to (heh) Back. Up. The. Accounting. Data. Onto. The. SAME. FUCKING. HARD. DRIVE. And she got the boss to back her up, because she was a hardnose beancounter who could really make a company hum.
///'s and ]['s were notoriously hard to network, especially using Corvus, which tended to flicker out if somebody two buildings over turned on a power saw. Anyway, and I call her The Princess, our customer tended to cry whenever that happened, and our hardware tech was about as tough as a bag of hot marshmallows. She got a LOT of his time. The guy eventually figured out she was conning him, but not what to do about it.
I won't bore you with the inevitable, except to say it took weeks to recover the data. Yes, our "best guy" was that good.
That reminds me of another User From Hell, though. Apple
She got me on the phone after that. She needed to see (names HAVE been altered) Rudolf, NOW, because the network was down again.
"Sorry, Rudolf can't work you into the schedule before Thursday."
The hot tears started, the voice on the line went into full whine mode. "But I need him NOW!"
"Sorry, can't be done."
"But why NO-OT??" My daughter is a better con artist. SHE has the wounded deer act down pat.
"Because he works for a living!" (Click)
Got fired inside of fifteen minutes. Probably deserved it, too. Who in their right mind would sell Apple ]['s as a serious business machine. You had to hot-wire the keyboard to get lower case, for crying out loud.
...single neuron out of Spock's brain. Some of my private code is downright pleasing, although revoltingly non-commercial. When I was (*ahem*) "coding" — HR geekphreeze for munger wrangling that translates more or less 103% correctly as "less money than programmers get," just as HR learned very early on that "programmer analyst" is $35,000 more per annum than "programmer" — back in my shrinkwrap daze, I always felt my stuff was three weeks too premature for genius. Deadlines. It's worth noting that NOT ONE LINE OF CODE that was commercially successfully for that company (long since gutted by a buyout during the Dot Com shakedown) was ever written in-house.
Robots should be graphic actors which mediate between people and machines, such as allowing an autopilot screen personality to parallel park a Toyota. Can you imagine phoning Angelina Jolie (the Grendel's mom version) and telling her you'll be late getting home? Then, in 5 us or less, she tells your kitchen that dinner will be late by 2 hours, so don't defrost the TV dinners yet? There's a crude version of this in Red Dwarf (Holly), a parody of it in M.I.B. (the POS Ford autopilot), and a fully-formed sketch of it in GITS (cybernautic tachikomas). Prior mention goes to Arthur C. Clarke, for the "monitor" (IIRC) in Against the Fall of Night.
...or you will not the worlds in conquest enmesh.
Law is settled by warfare, not logic - i.e., not who's right, but who's left standing when the dust settles. Which is why Krishna tells Arjuna that he MUST fight. Rather than fill bandwidth with pious libertarian dreck, why not contribute a few bucks to the EFF before our Fearless Leader has beaten the dollar down to peso parity?
...Natalie Portman. The only good dialog in the entire series was "I know," and that was sheer accident, but for my money the worst thing he did was to bury Keisha Castle-Hughes under a walk-on role carrying more weight, in terms of misogynist costumery, than a gunnery sergeant. Could it get any worse?
Oh, wait. I'd almost forgotten: Ewoks.
Life is levelling up, right? You were abandoned by your working parents, so you levelled up from pre-school to kindergarten. You levelled up every year, except (in your case) fifth grade, all the way through high school. You probably got diplomas and certificates along the way. Assuming you graduate from college, you might even get to hear Dick Cheney spewing wisdom down your ear canal like Hamlet's uncle. If you achieve the lofty heights of grad school, you'll get to wear a fancier costume and command a fancier salary in your chosen profession (possibly the arcane field of pre-Raphaelite influences on iPod design).
... uh ... simpler. It's show biz, and ya gotta shift the scenery. Don't notice the ninjas, ok? They work backstage.
Eventually you'll even achieve a Ph.D., or Fudd, as we call it here in Realworld, and if your grip on actual quantum mechanics has been (heh) level enough, you might get a call from Dull-sounding Dynamics, which is constructing the world's first wavebent camouflage for Japanese Gundam suits. You'll have meetings. You'll climb the corporate ladder. You'll level up.
The simple answer is
Isn't there kind of an obvious caveat here that the bad guys won't be using officially-sanctioned NSA stuff? Especially if three or four minutes of thought and some very old code that was on the pre-911 internet is as unbreakable now as it was then.
Shoot, all pipes leak at both ends, anyway.
Looks like tectonics. Squeezed stuff makes rounded shapes too.
They're roughly 180 degrees apart, according to my highly placed sources (I dimly remember seeing something about this on Discovery Channel), and approximately coeval. Plus, IIRC, 300K is only about 0.46% of 65M, presumably within MOE.
Less one, of course, because the empty Go board is not a member of the set of Go positions -- no stone has been placed, no contest has begun. Board plus stones, minimum one stone, and that black, defines a Go position. The notion of null set is not applicable to the spirit of the game.
You win. Upper bound is fine. The computer will have to decide if the position "makes sense."
Unlike checkers or chess, Go end positions get MORE complex, not LESS complex, in terms of sheer brute force. Of course, many advanced amateur and pro games get resolved quite early -- leaving what appears to be an "unfinished" game on the board. The problem is that human players tell themselves quite interesting stories about the meanings of these boards, while a computer, presumably lacking a sense of spatial narrative, is clueless. One of the best examples of these outcomes occurs early in the Hikaru no Go manga series; the position left on the board is a famous 19th century board by Shusaku Honinbo, and the defeated thug's demeanor (he looks like he's seen a ghost) is apposite and appropriate. The number of possible Go positions is 3**(19*19) - 1, by the way.
...and Door into Summer (jes f'rinstance) comes in three parts. I think Amazon.com probably has it for 9 bucks.
You're kidding, right? Microsoft is notorious for shipping buggy crap that gets fixed (sometimes) on the next iteration, provided you pay for the update. It's been that way since 1986, at least, and MS C V4. If somebody in charge is promising to submit MS stuff to QC with teeth, bravo. The short sharp exhalations are me not holding my breath.
How about a neo-fascist pro-Bush microhegemony sitting like a boil on the southern edge of the Pacific Rim? Gee, who could think like that, you may well wonder. Uhh... Indonesia? Singapore? New Zealand? Sri Lanka? How about the heavy hitters, like say... India? Fast forward ten years, beyond the scenarios where pacifist Japan has kicked the U.S. off Okinawa, and resurgent Edo, finally fed up with 120 Hz alternating U.S. neglect and micromanagement, suddenly re-aligns with China. Da mime boggles. Point being, if OZ can crack U.S. flight codes, anybody can, especially the Japanese.