I lived in Sedona and spent time in Cottonwood. Both of these places as well as the Prescott Valley area has varying degree of arsenic in the ground water.
Of course, the wells are very deep typically 200 feet or more. Back in the Midwest one can dig a hole in the ground with a shovel and have it fill up with water.
Typical well water in Cottonwood Arizona area contains approximately 50 ppb
The University of Arizona Cooperative Extension Recommends:
Test your well water regularly....including Arsenic
Determine the level of Arsenic contamination and what is your exposure level to Arsenic.
If you are experiencing any health problems which could be caused by excessive exposure to Arsenic.... consult your family physician or Arizona Department of Health Services.
If your well water Arsenic tests exceed 10ppb, stop drinking it...move to a safer source of water for drinking and cooking while you come up with a plan.
When I was a kid we would take a blue blade (old type of razor blade) and a piece of graphite from a lead pencil and by judiciously touching it just right would act as a diode and thus a receiver.
We made a one piece headset from a cardboard tack box and would wrap wire around a form with a small magnet glued inside on one side of the tackbox and the coil glued to the other side.
The first portable radio I ever saw other than the home made variety had small tubes in them and ran on batteries.
Sulfur is bad both to smell in water (think rotten eggs) but is really hard on all the equipment tied to the water lines.
In Arizona though the problem is arsenic in the wells so drinking bottled or carried water was the only alternative. The concentration of arsenic would vary from well to well in the same neighborhood so one had to be careful of the source.
I wonder how effective something like this device would be in the low humidity deserts of Arizona?
Even though a six month cycle seems brutal (Max's own words)it does permit a developer to finish and even polish his/her code because the next release in 6 months is just not that long of time span to wait.
I shudder at the code I have seen in other distros that was not quite ready but had to be included because the next release would not be for a another year or longer so we have to go with what we got now... regardless!
Fedora and its community members should be congratulated for their work in the Linux arena.
Montana is so far back in the sticks that they don't get the Grand Ole Opry till Monday morning so maybe the meteor did go through in the morning everywhere else.
To augment your position... not only do the police have jurisdiction over the video feeds from the police cars, but they may have total jurisdiction over the entire town thus could snoop for that which they might disagree... whether child porn or something of a lesser notion.
I would be very wary of having my browsing habits monitored by the police. I like the idea of separation between my ISP and the police even though I am a law abiding citizen. It is just too easy to copy a log file from one place to another to set someone up for a fall.
Giving this power to the city of Ponca City seems way out of balance to me.
That would be an interesting poll.. How many add-ons are you running on your browser? I am running 30 right now on FF3 however one of them is disabled temporarily as a test condition for an anomaly that is sometimes experienced.
I lived in Des Peres and worked as an engineer at McDonnell Douglas before it went out of business.
The McDonnell people would order pencils with McDonnell-Douglas printed on it so when you sharpen the point then Douglas would disappear.
The Douglas people (mainly in CA) would buy pencils with the company name written the other direction so that McDonnell would disappear when it was sharpened.
Read "The Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder about the design of the Eclipse and Data General.
Amazon usually has this book used for a couple of bucks.
It is in my top ten best books EVER read.
from amazon: Amazon.com Review The computer revolution brought with it new methods of getting work done--just look at today's news for reports of hard-driven, highly-motivated young software and online commerce developers who sacrifice evenings and weekends to meet impossible deadlines. Tracy Kidder got a preview of this world in the late 1970s when he observed the engineers of Data General design and build a new 32-bit minicomputer in just one year. His thoughtful, prescient book, The Soul of a New Machine, tells stories of 35-year-old "veteran" engineers hiring recent college graduates and encouraging them to work harder and faster on complex and difficult projects, exploiting the youngsters' ignorance of normal scheduling processes while engendering a new kind of work ethic.
These days, we are used to the "total commitment" philosophy of managing technical creation, but Kidder was surprised and even a little alarmed at the obsessions and compulsions he found. From in-house political struggles to workers being permitted to tease management to marathon 24-hour work sessions, The Soul of a New Machine explores concepts that already seem familiar, even old-hat, less than 20 years later. Kidder plainly admires his subjects; while he admits to hopeless confusion about their work, he finds their dedication heroic. The reader wonders, though, what will become of it all, now and in the future. --Rob Lightner
It is my impression that often creativity comes from the soul... far eclipsing the brain and the mind. How can something like this be inspired without coming from the Gods or from the God within us all?
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and ideal Grace. I love thee to the level of everyday's Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. I love thee freely, as men strive for Right; I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise. I love thee with a passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints, --- I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life! --- and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I have written code that defies logical explanation especially in the encryption/decryption arena. something inside told me to write a subroutine in a certain way and if by magic insight was gained thus allowing for the next step.
I follow my heart in all decisions I make even when my logical self is decrying another avenue.
I was in the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was a systems analyst for the minuteman missiles systems which carry nukes.
I was a member of the Combat Targeting team made up of three team members and our job was to program the missile's computer with target data and other information and to aim/align its guidance system optically to true north.
The half finished missile sites in Montana were taken away (literally commandeered) from Boeing and new missiles postured for use adding a larger quantity of nukes than the USSR had counted on facing.
The Strategic Air Command (SAC) was at its finest with the B47's ready and the B52's ready as well.
This was a time to remember.
we assumed we were going to die but did not know much about what was going on (all portable radios were confiscated) so just did our jobs to the best of our abilities.
Probably the NSA is going to look me up for sharing this.
Keeping the mind trained on the issues as it is surmised will produce this kind of code, yet in a week or so the ability to read it (unless it is commented) approaches nil.
I have written stuff like this and to my amazement (and horror) it works. Without comments though it makes the updating process very difficult... even with comments it makes the updating very difficult come to think of it.
n 1884, coal miners working the Black Diamond mine in New Straitsville, southeastern Ohio, went on strike when the Columbus and Hocking Coal and Iron Company cut their pay from 60 cents a ton to 40 cents. Legend has it that other miners, unhappy with the work stoppage, loaded several coal cars with oil-soaked firewood and rolled them into the mine.
It's hard to imagine what benefit they anticipated, but I bet they never dreamt of what resulted.
For the next 122 years and counting, the underground fire, called the Devil's Oven, has burned in the coals seams around the Monday Creek area. At times the fires have been prominent and close to the surface. In fact, in the 1930's tourists came to the area to watch their guides cook meals over smoking holes in the ground.
During the depression, a WPA crew was dispatched to the area to fight the fire, with indifferent success.
The Ohio Department of Natural Resources estimates that to date the Devil's Oven has consumed 276 million tons of coal, or 20 square miles of the black gold. Today the fire is burning about 40 feet underground... from blog of Tom Barlow
I have a book published in 1994 that has the following copyright notice... here it is verbatim.
"This book sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser."
So if I sell or give the book away then how do I guarantee that I fulfilled my part and why should I care anyway what someone else does with the book.
"Imposed on the subsequent purchaser" sounds like I have certain responsibilities but no true authority to make it happen.
Normally authority and responsibility go hand in hand.
The whole copyright thing has only gotten more convoluted as time goes on.
Wang (now a defunct company) built a PC in the early 70's that was actually called a "PC" but it stood for Professional Computer. It used the 8088 technology. Earlier prototypes utilized the 4004 and the 8008 as well and was in other technology designed by the company R&D department. Later the computer used the 8086 but for years was not "IBM" compatible at the microcode level thus could not run IBM type programs. The company was inflexible on fixing the problem as they expected IBM to conform to Wang Standards rather than vice versa. Some of the instruction set worked differently in order to save a clock cycle or two.
Eventually the Wang PC became IBM compatible but it was too little... too late and the use of the PC was pretty much restricted to being a terminal rather than a full fledged processing device.
Dr. An Wang was the person who designed core memory and started Wang Laboratories in the 50's. What an inspiration he was (and still is although he died in 1990) to young and old who are inspiring individuals with creative talents.
I know about backups. This was a mainframe size system.
In 1962 my title was "Systems Analyst" so I know a lot about maintaining systems. Much of my original knowledge though is old stuff that individuals today only hear about... disk drives larger than a washing machine, CPU's with thousands of logic boards so one must troubleshoot and not swap boards, tape machines tall as a person with vacuum columns to match, etc.
I'm older than most here on Slashdot but still very capable.
Your comment could be considered a troll however I believe it was asked in good faith and so I attempted to reply in kind.
We had open communications and would redesign on the fly although I had final control if it was needed (seldom invoked). Usually we talked each day and could agree on nearly everything... however most of the coding was done by him and a fine job he did.
This was a heady project for us especially that MIS would not take on because it was "Doomed to Fail"... yet together we made it work and implemented it as well.
We actually designed in the $Y even though others saw no use for it... until the system went live and then they wanted it. So changing some chars in the control file enabled $Y as if by magic.
That project was probably one of the most fun and exciting projects I had ever worked upon in my career.
We had total control because no one else wanted to be tainted with the failure it would surely bring so there was no pointy haired boss making illogical decisions... there was just him and I.
I will try not to be defensive... this episode took place over 25 years ago so all feelings and facts are not crystal clear any longer.
He received a big promotion into the mainstream MIS division of our company (multi-national) after the successful worldwide implementation of the software. This was a low budget, high visibility project we did and together he and I pulled it off.
Six months later he was escorted to the door with a police escort because of the MIS manager feared his retribution when he was let go.
He was super skilled, very smart and self taught but was a loose cannon at the same time.
I knew he was unstable to a degree... I was simply unsure to what degree and gave him the benefit of the doubt. I'm sure the pressure of the project added to it as well.
When does being a little different from mainstream turn into a disgruntled Engineer hijacking a system?
Sometimes that line is very fine. If the SF employee was handle a little differently by management/HR perhaps the system would not be hijacked nor would jail time be involved.
Making the backups was my way of cooling the situation. If he did tip then nothing was lost except his future valuable service and if he did not tip then nothing was lost either. It was purely insurance against what seemed to be a shaky situation.
What amount was a figment of my imagination?
Probably more than I would like to admit but I was supervising (via team leaders) about 30 individuals at the time and he was the only one I felt this way about.
Thanks for asking that question and giving me the chance to re-examine my feelings, thoughts and reflections.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole Yavapai County area.
I lived in Sedona and spent time in Cottonwood. Both of these places as well as the Prescott Valley area has varying degree of arsenic in the ground water.
Of course, the wells are very deep typically 200 feet or more. Back in the Midwest one can dig a hole in the ground with a shovel and have it fill up with water.
Typical well water in Cottonwood Arizona area contains approximately 50 ppb
The University of Arizona
Cooperative Extension
Recommends:
Test your well water regularly....including Arsenic
Determine the level of Arsenic contamination and what is your exposure level to Arsenic.
If you are experiencing any health problems which could be caused by excessive exposure to Arsenic.... consult your family physician or Arizona Department of Health Services.
If your well water Arsenic tests exceed 10ppb, stop drinking it...move to a safer source of water for drinking and cooking while you come up with a plan.
When I was a kid we would take a blue blade (old type of razor blade) and a piece of graphite from a lead pencil and by judiciously touching it just right would act as a diode and thus a receiver.
We made a one piece headset from a cardboard tack box and would wrap wire around a form with a small magnet glued inside on one side of the tackbox and the coil glued to the other side.
The first portable radio I ever saw other than the home made variety had small tubes in them and ran on batteries.
Sulfur is bad both to smell in water (think rotten eggs) but is really hard on all the equipment tied to the water lines.
In Arizona though the problem is arsenic in the wells so drinking bottled or carried water was the only alternative. The concentration of arsenic would vary from well to well in the same neighborhood so one had to be careful of the source.
I wonder how effective something like this device would be in the low humidity deserts of Arizona?
Even though a six month cycle seems brutal (Max's own words)it does permit a developer to finish and even polish his/her code because the next release in 6 months is just not that long of time span to wait.
I shudder at the code I have seen in other distros that was not quite ready but had to be included because the next release would not be for a another year or longer so we have to go with what we got now... regardless!
Fedora and its community members should be congratulated for their work in the Linux arena.
thats OK
Montana is so far back in the sticks that they don't get the Grand Ole Opry till Monday morning so maybe the meteor did go through in the morning everywhere else.
To augment your position... not only do the police have jurisdiction over the video feeds from the police cars, but they may have total jurisdiction over the entire town thus could snoop for that which they might disagree... whether child porn or something of a lesser notion.
I would be very wary of having my browsing habits monitored by the police. I like the idea of separation between my ISP and the police even though I am a law abiding citizen. It is just too easy to copy a log file from one place to another to set someone up for a fall.
Giving this power to the city of Ponca City seems way out of balance to me.
That would be an interesting poll.. How many add-ons are you running on your browser? I am running 30 right now on FF3 however one of them is disabled temporarily as a test condition for an anomaly that is sometimes experienced.
I don't think that the troll was accidental... he seemed to mean every bit of it.
I lived in Des Peres and worked as an engineer at McDonnell Douglas before it went out of business.
The McDonnell people would order pencils with McDonnell-Douglas printed on it so when you sharpen the point then Douglas would disappear.
The Douglas people (mainly in CA) would buy pencils with the company name written the other direction so that McDonnell would disappear when it was sharpened.
Not surprising the company is out of business.
You definitely do live in the St. Louis vicinity... What you said is all true.
Darl belongs in jail... in addition to being stripped of his power.
Read "The Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder about the design of the Eclipse and Data General.
Amazon usually has this book used for a couple of bucks.
It is in my top ten best books EVER read.
from amazon:
Amazon.com Review
The computer revolution brought with it new methods of getting work done--just look at today's news for reports of hard-driven, highly-motivated young software and online commerce developers who sacrifice evenings and weekends to meet impossible deadlines. Tracy Kidder got a preview of this world in the late 1970s when he observed the engineers of Data General design and build a new 32-bit minicomputer in just one year. His thoughtful, prescient book, The Soul of a New Machine, tells stories of 35-year-old "veteran" engineers hiring recent college graduates and encouraging them to work harder and faster on complex and difficult projects, exploiting the youngsters' ignorance of normal scheduling processes while engendering a new kind of work ethic.
These days, we are used to the "total commitment" philosophy of managing technical creation, but Kidder was surprised and even a little alarmed at the obsessions and compulsions he found. From in-house political struggles to workers being permitted to tease management to marathon 24-hour work sessions, The Soul of a New Machine explores concepts that already seem familiar, even old-hat, less than 20 years later. Kidder plainly admires his subjects; while he admits to hopeless confusion about their work, he finds their dedication heroic. The reader wonders, though, what will become of it all, now and in the future. --Rob Lightner
It is my impression that often creativity comes from the soul... far eclipsing the brain and the mind. How can something like this be inspired without coming from the Gods or from the God within us all?
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, --- I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! --- and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I have written code that defies logical explanation especially in the encryption/decryption arena. something inside told me to write a subroutine in a certain way and if by magic insight was gained thus allowing for the next step.
I follow my heart in all decisions I make even when my logical self is decrying another avenue.
He also would hide his own easter eggs.
I was in the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was a systems analyst for the minuteman missiles systems which carry nukes.
I was a member of the Combat Targeting team made up of three team members and our job was to program the missile's computer with target data and other information and to aim/align its guidance system optically to true north.
The half finished missile sites in Montana were taken away (literally commandeered) from Boeing and new missiles postured for use adding a larger quantity of nukes than the USSR had counted on facing.
The Strategic Air Command (SAC) was at its finest with the B47's ready and the B52's ready as well.
This was a time to remember.
we assumed we were going to die but did not know much about what was going on (all portable radios were confiscated) so just did our jobs to the best of our abilities.
Probably the NSA is going to look me up for sharing this.
That is why it is called "Write Only" code.
Keeping the mind trained on the issues as it is surmised will produce this kind of code, yet in a week or so the ability to read it (unless it is commented) approaches nil.
I have written stuff like this and to my amazement (and horror) it works. Without comments though it makes the updating process very difficult... even with comments it makes the updating very difficult come to think of it.
YMMV
"Take the American government"
Fixed it for you
Take the American government please.
Thank you for using a car analogy
http://dilbert.com/fast/2005-08-01/
This one is a few miles from my house.
n 1884, coal miners working the Black Diamond mine in New Straitsville, southeastern Ohio, went on strike when the Columbus and Hocking Coal and Iron Company cut their pay from 60 cents a ton to 40 cents. Legend has it that other miners, unhappy with the work stoppage, loaded several coal cars with oil-soaked firewood and rolled them into the mine.
It's hard to imagine what benefit they anticipated, but I bet they never dreamt of what resulted.
For the next 122 years and counting, the underground fire, called the Devil's Oven, has burned in the coals seams around the Monday Creek area. At times the fires have been prominent and close to the surface. In fact, in the 1930's tourists came to the area to watch their guides cook meals over smoking holes in the ground.
During the depression, a WPA crew was dispatched to the area to fight the fire, with indifferent success.
The Ohio Department of Natural Resources estimates that to date the Devil's Oven has consumed 276 million tons of coal, or 20 square miles of the black gold. Today the fire is burning about 40 feet underground... from blog of Tom Barlow
I have a book published in 1994 that has the following copyright notice... here it is verbatim.
"This book sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser."
So if I sell or give the book away then how do I guarantee that I fulfilled my part and why should I care anyway what someone else does with the book.
"Imposed on the subsequent purchaser" sounds like I have certain responsibilities but no true authority to make it happen.
Normally authority and responsibility go hand in hand.
The whole copyright thing has only gotten more convoluted as time goes on.
Wang (now a defunct company) built a PC in the early 70's that was actually called a "PC" but it stood for Professional Computer. It used the 8088 technology. Earlier prototypes utilized the 4004 and the 8008 as well and was in other technology designed by the company R&D department. Later the computer used the 8086 but for years was not "IBM" compatible at the microcode level thus could not run IBM type programs. The company was inflexible on fixing the problem as they expected IBM to conform to Wang Standards rather than vice versa. Some of the instruction set worked differently in order to save a clock cycle or two.
Eventually the Wang PC became IBM compatible but it was too little... too late and the use of the PC was pretty much restricted to being a terminal rather than a full fledged processing device.
Dr. An Wang was the person who designed core memory and started Wang Laboratories in the 50's. What an inspiration he was (and still is although he died in 1990) to young and old who are inspiring individuals with creative talents.
I know about backups. This was a mainframe size system.
In 1962 my title was "Systems Analyst" so I know a lot about maintaining systems. Much of my original knowledge though is old stuff that individuals today only hear about... disk drives larger than a washing machine, CPU's with thousands of logic boards so one must troubleshoot and not swap boards, tape machines tall as a person with vacuum columns to match, etc.
I'm older than most here on Slashdot but still very capable.
Your comment could be considered a troll however I believe it was asked in good faith and so I attempted to reply in kind.
I have definitely been there too.
We had open communications and would redesign on the fly although I had final control if it was needed (seldom invoked). Usually we talked each day and could agree on nearly everything... however most of the coding was done by him and a fine job he did.
This was a heady project for us especially that MIS would not take on because it was "Doomed to Fail"... yet together we made it work and implemented it as well.
We actually designed in the $Y even though others saw no use for it... until the system went live and then they wanted it. So changing some chars in the control file enabled $Y as if by magic.
That project was probably one of the most fun and exciting projects I had ever worked upon in my career.
We had total control because no one else wanted to be tainted with the failure it would surely bring so there was no pointy haired boss making illogical decisions... there was just him and I.
I will try not to be defensive... this episode took place over 25 years ago so all feelings and facts are not crystal clear any longer.
He received a big promotion into the mainstream MIS division of our company (multi-national) after the successful worldwide implementation of the software. This was a low budget, high visibility project we did and together he and I pulled it off.
Six months later he was escorted to the door with a police escort because of the MIS manager feared his retribution when he was let go.
He was super skilled, very smart and self taught but was a loose cannon at the same time.
I knew he was unstable to a degree... I was simply unsure to what degree and gave him the benefit of the doubt. I'm sure the pressure of the project added to it as well.
When does being a little different from mainstream turn into a disgruntled Engineer hijacking a system?
Sometimes that line is very fine. If the SF employee was handle a little differently by management/HR perhaps the system would not be hijacked nor would jail time be involved.
Making the backups was my way of cooling the situation. If he did tip then nothing was lost except his future valuable service and if he did not tip then nothing was lost either. It was purely insurance against what seemed to be a shaky situation.
What amount was a figment of my imagination?
Probably more than I would like to admit but I was supervising (via team leaders) about 30 individuals at the time and he was the only one I felt this way about.
Thanks for asking that question and giving me the chance to re-examine my feelings, thoughts and reflections.