In order to authorize software which does DRM especially DRM based on "Trusted Computing based hardware that relies on keys loaded on the CPU or Trusted Computing chips on the motherboard. This includes but is not limited to the kernel.
Actually, the second law of thermodynamics would seem to apply. Some of aging is a simple increase in entropy of the existing organ systems. One can, in theory, provide enough "work" to maintain the local site of entropy of part of an open system,
Even if one provides enough outside energy to manage the physical state of entropy, one encounters information theory problems. Small errors in system replication accumulate, and the systems to correct errors themselves become vulnerable to errors over time.
And last, there is the "heat deth of the universe". Interestingly Freeman Dyson made some fascinating suggestions on how to avoid this, by perserving life in a very static way and only awakening the life for decreasingly small moments of time as the universe continues, effectively providing life to the very end of the universe, if not an actual experience of eternal life.
I must say, from long experience, that maintaining a pure firewall does _not_ do as well as NAT. The network overhead of NAT is unnoticeable with even the most modest household modems and routers of the last few decades. Maintaining even a modest firewall is often fragile, vulnerable to profound configuration errors, and likely to cut off expected services at the most inoportune moments. This is compounded by the genuinely awful interfaces and management tools for many firewalls. Simply activating NAT is so vastly simpler and reduces the attack surface so profoundly that it leaves time and money to do more effective internal firwalls, to configure as desired. that I find myself alarmed at _any_ environment that insists on putting all its devices on publicly routable IP addresses and relying, on correct and consistent configuration of firewalls to protect those systems.
Were you deliberately writing like a spammer to make fun?
If not, the basic Postfix configuration documentation you link to can be effectively in profoundly reducing spam, but the "remaining 20%" is still enough to flood most moderate mail servers.
I am amused that Symantec is claiming that spam has fallen below 50% of all current email. What they're counting as spam has apparently been pre-filtered on the _outbound_ side, by ISP's blocking port 25 outbound and forcing their clients to use authentication to mail proxy servers on port 587. It's been quite fascinating to watch as botnets are being forced to steal access to computers local credentials, and access the better run managed and better monitored mail proxies with individual stolen credentials.
> And nobody in his/her right mind would connect industrial control systems directly to the Internet.
The designer of an industrial system usually has _no_ control over how remote sites configure their local networks. None.
Many admins, and their supervisors, insist on dynamic monitoring of equipment to report its status. The investment in time, energy, and even network hardware to provide better protected network access to that equipment is a real expense which they often choose not to pay. If they think about in a conscious way, they think "my need to monitor or control this equipment at need is more important than maintaining a fragile and resource costly secured access to this and the other equipment we have to deal with".
I must also admit that this is a reason the Internet Of Things is dangerous, and I'm grateful that NAT based access has been used so effectively to extend the lifespan of IPv4. The forced switch to NAT for IPv4 users has enforced a basic defense for most environments against casual network scanning.
> Anonymous rating/review sites are ripe for abuse and slander
They're also priceless for due diligence by new employees, or for safely publishing thoughts about toxic workplaces. I used to regularly review the old "www.fuckedcompany.com" website for the real inner doings of clients, especially pending layoffs that might affect contracts with them.
> Being first-to-market is only relevant when you have material, previously unknown information.
They have first-yo-mstkry knowledge by a matter of milliseconds, even microseconds, by investing in high speed access to the fiber as it leaves the stock exchange. They then commit transactions while the stock is changing price, before anyone else can possibly respond. That isn't "adding liquidity" by any stretch of fiscal imagination, despite the frequent claims of companies involved in high speed trading. It's arbitrage, and nothing _but_ arbitrage. It's legal, but the extent of its current abuse is stunning.
to a modest extent, it's also a form of gambling because, if the price rose rather than fell or fell rather than rose, their gambles on investing would fail. Unfortunately, the high speed traders are not being held to account for their unwanted, "failed" bets. They simply cancel those, without noticeable penalty! That's not just gambling. That's gambling where you get to take your money back from the pot if you don't like seeing other players exposed ands, effectively takin gyour money back from the "pot".
Can an ordinary investor say "I'll sell short by $5", and say, when the stock prices rises, "never mind"? No. They have to actually make the short sale, and lose money for betting wrong. But these high speed traders simply cancel the orders before they exceed the very limited time in which they can do so. It's gambling where they don't have to pay their losses, and very much a form of cheating in the gambling that makes up a healthy stock market.
>> Must gambling businesses are subtle or outright frauds
> No, not really. Gambling businesses don't need to cheat or commit fraud to win.
Most, perhaps not all but certainly most, do commit subtle or outright frauds against their clientele. It's not new or even unusual. I've already pointed out the basic funding frauds of the state lotteries. Many of the "scratch ticket" businesses have a fascinating fraud in that they sell the tickets in two boxes. If the vendor sells the big winning ticket in the first box, you make sure to sell the first box to recover your expenses. If the big ticket winner does not show up in the first box, the vendor _throws away the second box, and never pays out the big ticket.
Even "legitimate" gambling is infamous for being used to launder criminal income. Winning lottery tickets and other gambling tickets are regularly sold off to local organized crime for a fraction of their worth, to provide a favor to organized crime, for the original ticket holder to get some income tax free instead of having it reported by the lottery, and for the organized crime members to claim the winnings and launder their earnings.
> At the very least they need to be cleaned up (regulated) so that they rise to the level of legitimate gambling sites.
That level is, unfortunately, very low.
>> Take a very good look at how "high speed trading" works.
> But again, nothing to do with gambling in general or steam in particular.
With steam in particulrar? Only in the sense that they are, in fact, gambling on the stock market and that they cheat, relying on private knowledge not available to the rest of the gamblers. It's self-deluding to claim that high speed trading, or gambling, benefit any economy except possibly the local adult entertainment industries.
> The problem is most of these sites are scam sites.
It's not just "these sites". Must gambling businesses are subtle or outright frauds. Even state lotteries take an enormous cut of the proceeds to fund the lottery bureaucracy itself, and not to help the schools as promised. The schools have their funding _replced_ by lottery winnings, not augmented. Even the "honest casinos" forbid card counters, whose behavior is technically legal but can actually allow players to win in the long run, not just the short run.
The same problems exist in the stock market. Additional information is forbidden to the ordinary player, but those with additional information can and inevitably do play illicitly. And at the scales available to the larger cheaters, it sucks the possibility of profit right out of the system for ordinary players. Take a very good look at how "high speed trading" works to get a sense of how much of stock market funds are sucked right out of the business by larger companies that can afford the "insider information' that a few microseconds of lead time on stock announcements provides.
> I'm going to go ahead and say that the man who filed the first suit indicated above wasn't winning.
Gamblers don't win in the long run. The house always takes a cut. If they're winning in the long run, they either have knowledge not available to the other gamblers (such as a skilled poker player counting the cards or reading "tells" from the other players), or they're cheating.
> Never include unnecessary code. If there are incorrect implementations that you are replacing, remove the incorrect ones!
When possible, I comment them out with "wrapper" comments to preserve the code in the source control change history. And explain _why_ you've replaced the code, so the evidence is there for at least one or two more releases. It can be very difficult indeed to compare new code to the deleted code it replaces if you've successfully removed the visible traces of the deleted code.
The original presentation on beating fingerprint sensors with ordinary laser printer printed copies of fingerprinters, laid on gelatin, published in 2002, is available at:
Mythbusters even demonstrated that simply printing a fingerprint on paper, and _licking the paper_, created a fake fingerprint good enough to defeat most sensors. There's little reason to think that the commercial fingerprint sensors have gotten any better, though I'd welcome a modern retest with modern cell phone and computer keyboard based sensors.
Basically, the "fuzziness" of fingerprint sensors which allows to identify real fingers with real sensors is enough "fuziiness" to allow them to be beaten with even casually made fake fingerprints. I've seen no good evidence that the necessarysensor and computational "fuzziness" has ever been worked around with even the most expensive modern sensors: I'd welcome any evidence with honestly done tests showing otherwise.
> It protects against a very specific form of malware
If the "malware" is considered to be "unsigned software accessing anything without permission by an upstream paid key holder", then yes. It becomes clear that the entire Trusted Computing stack is designed for DRM. Security against a few forms of attack is a consequence, not the purpose of the software.
It's more than enough for Tetris, Zork, tuxracer, Soitaire,, many modest chess programs, and many other graphically lightweight games. It's even enough CPU for the original Doom and Quake games, which are still good fun. And it's more than enough power and graphics for a "point-of-sale" system on lightweight, obsolete, and therefore inexpensive low end hardware. The machines even have decent enough screen size and battery life for a field console for use in a data center visit, or for handing one off to some kids to play with while traveling.
> If fair use is hindering their business, how would free use weigh in? Take open source, for example. Microsoft could easily argue Linux is making it difficult to sell their OS for server use. In fact, I'd imagine that if they somehow managed to eliminate fair use,
They did, using SCO as a disposable legal proxy. Please review the legal history of the SCO copyright cases, captured in the archives of https://www.groklaw.net/. Microsoft's fiscal support of SCO was established pretty early in the process: SCO could not have continued to confuse the intellectual property rights of Linux without the clear Microsoft support throughout most of the case.
> If the copyright holders are being harmed in some way by some particular usage, then fair use cannot be deemed to apply in the first place.
I'm sorry to say that this is nonsense. Criticism, satire, and political speech about a document are primary grounds for "fair use" quotations, and they can profoundly damage the value of a copyrighted work by exposing its quality or even exposing fraud by the author.
Sell the equipment and resources to the miners, skim the illicit trade hidden from governments, and rob your clients blind as an exit strategy seems to be the result of Bitcoin operations. Are there _any_ bitcoin markets that show legitimate handling of client transactions for more than a few months without turning to direct theft from clients?
The fan-made movies referred to as Star Trek: Phase 2 did a much better job of capturing the original series. And they did _fantastic_ task of exploring social issues that would have been unthinkable for Gene Roddenberry. The response of Captain Kirk to an openly gay crew member in their "Blood and Fire" episode was priceless. These fan made episodes are much better than the last few movies. And they pay loving homage to the original seies' work, with cameos by actors involving their older selves such as Walter Koenig, Nichelle Nicholls, and the unforgettable scene of George Takei as a screaming leather clad barbarian swordsman.
The fans who made these episodes captured the conflict between low budget, limited time, wonderful young actors learning their craft, and the high ideals that Gene Roddenberry and his entire cast and crew brought to the series. _These_ stories are why Star Trek was great.
I'm old enough to remember it, in the first re-runs at least. It was campy space opera with genuine moral dilemmas and thought provoking plots. Having a proud Russian speaking crew member hinted at a future without the Cold War era separatism. Spock's existence as a half-breed Vulcan, and Uhura's presence as a department leading critical helm officer, provided meaningful comments on the aggressive racism common in most of our societies. And I was too young at the time to understand how groundbreaking the black/white kiss in Plato's Stepchildren was.
Star Trek, and Gene Roddenberry's work in general, held up fascinating mirrors to our society and challenged us to do better, and said "we _can_ be better than this". I genuinely wish "The Great Bird of the Galaxy" could have stayed around and productive, to explore the similar scale of problems today of fanatical terrorism and global ecological destruction.
> I agree BUT, burning your bridges is never a smart idea if it is not necessary,
And if you must quit suddenly, _ensure_ that you've made a paper trail before the act. _Read_ your employment contract for what intellectual property you own, for how accumulated vacation pay is handled, and for what the dates actually are for your stock "vestments" to mature. Losing medical insurance, unemployment coverage, or an anticipated stock option from a company going public are reasons to postpone a delay. Losing the registration and tickets to that overseas conference, or being stuck with them on your own credit card after you've left the company sending you, can be very hard on your fiscal reserves.
If you're leaving because the workplace became intolerable, make sure you have witnesses who can and will testify. It can matter in court, and it certainly matters for getting your next role.
> In my area, schools provide zero medical attention to students. They literally aren't even allowed to apply bandages.
Really? That may be fiscal and legal. The schools I've dealt with were in fairly large school districts, with at least one school nurse on staff and any treatment administered in that nurse's clinic space.
Can you verify that they're not allowed to handle epinephrine pens? The anaphylactic shock from profound allergies can kill within 30 minutes, much too long to be confident of a timely ambulance response or parental arrival at the school.
That is a key question. Schools are often the available caregivers, with the legal responsibilities described as "in loco parentis". They are responsible for the child's safety on the school grounds, including the child's medical safety. How much information does a nanny, a babysitter, or an athletic coach nned to handle emergencies? Anaphylactic shock from a bee-sting or peanut allergy can kill within 30 minutes, much too long to obtain medical records from a highly secured third-party system. If a caregiver doesn't know about the condition and doesn't have the right tools available, this can be fatal. Asthma, epilepsy, and diabetes can all create dangerous and confusing reactions for children who may themselves panic and not be able to self-diagnose. And since the discovery of AIDS, schools have understandably become much more aware and cautious about long-term infections, even if the parents and their teachers try to provide as "normal" a life as possible for the child and keep quiet their illnesses.
I also recall a child from long ago, when I was much younger. He had cystic fibrosis, and his school needed very extensive medical records. He was a wonderful child, one of those chronically ill people who appreciates that every breath might be their last and lives life to its absolute fulleest. The school and community, collaborated to help him attend normal school. His family's friends, and soon his own friends who happened to be adults, provided the extra hands-on medical care the school could not possibly afford. I was asked to help because I was the only one available who could visit after school lunch and who would _beat_ him properly. He needed chest percussion several times a day to help him cough up mucus. There are some technological replacements for this chest percussion now. But to the best of my knowledge it's still most effective done by hand, and preferably by a friend who appreciates that they are saving the child's life.
It's an odd talent, but one I treasured being able to share with the child. I'm sure he died decades ago: cystic fibrosis patients don't have a long life expectancy. But the lessons about living life to the fullest resonate: I hope to have some small fraction of his courage and zest for life as I age further.
Slashdot Mirror
> After all, Coyote v. Acme was this country's longest running product liability suit.
I don't see where he'd have standing to sue under the ADA in any case, since Wile. E. Coyote _won_ his lawsuit for manufacturing defects in 1990.
http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...
In order to authorize software which does DRM especially DRM based on "Trusted Computing based hardware that relies on keys loaded on the CPU or Trusted Computing chips on the motherboard. This includes but is not limited to the kernel.
> Bitcoin exchanges seem to be hacked on a regular basis.
I'm not sure it's regular. It's definitely frequent, and often by the owners of hte Bitcoin exchange themselves.
> Aging is not a law of physics.
Actually, the second law of thermodynamics would seem to apply. Some of aging is a simple increase in entropy of the existing organ systems. One can, in theory, provide enough "work" to maintain the local site of entropy of part of an open system,
Even if one provides enough outside energy to manage the physical state of entropy, one encounters information theory problems. Small errors in system replication accumulate, and the systems to correct errors themselves become vulnerable to errors over time.
And last, there is the "heat deth of the universe". Interestingly Freeman Dyson made some fascinating suggestions on how to avoid this, by perserving life in a very static way and only awakening the life for decreasingly small moments of time as the universe continues, effectively providing life to the very end of the universe, if not an actual experience of eternal life.
I must say, from long experience, that maintaining a pure firewall does _not_ do as well as NAT. The network overhead of NAT is unnoticeable with even the most modest household modems and routers of the last few decades. Maintaining even a modest firewall is often fragile, vulnerable to profound configuration errors, and likely to cut off expected services at the most inoportune moments. This is compounded by the genuinely awful interfaces and management tools for many firewalls. Simply activating NAT is so vastly simpler and reduces the attack surface so profoundly that it leaves time and money to do more effective internal firwalls, to configure as desired. that I find myself alarmed at _any_ environment that insists on putting all its devices on publicly routable IP addresses and relying, on correct and consistent configuration of firewalls to protect those systems.
Were you deliberately writing like a spammer to make fun?
If not, the basic Postfix configuration documentation you link to can be effectively in profoundly reducing spam, but the "remaining 20%" is still enough to flood most moderate mail servers.
I am amused that Symantec is claiming that spam has fallen below 50% of all current email. What they're counting as spam has apparently been pre-filtered on the _outbound_ side, by ISP's blocking port 25 outbound and forcing their clients to use authentication to mail proxy servers on port 587. It's been quite fascinating to watch as botnets are being forced to steal access to computers local credentials, and access the better run managed and better monitored mail proxies with individual stolen credentials.
> And nobody in his/her right mind would connect industrial control systems directly to the Internet.
The designer of an industrial system usually has _no_ control over how remote sites configure their local networks. None.
Many admins, and their supervisors, insist on dynamic monitoring of equipment to report its status. The investment in time, energy, and even network hardware to provide better protected network access to that equipment is a real expense which they often choose not to pay. If they think about in a conscious way, they think "my need to monitor or control this equipment at need is more important than maintaining a fragile and resource costly secured access to this and the other equipment we have to deal with".
I must also admit that this is a reason the Internet Of Things is dangerous, and I'm grateful that NAT based access has been used so effectively to extend the lifespan of IPv4. The forced switch to NAT for IPv4 users has enforced a basic defense for most environments against casual network scanning.
Older sales directors do it too. I'd consider writing about it, but it wasn't _my_ company's sales director.
> Anonymous rating/review sites are ripe for abuse and slander
They're also priceless for due diligence by new employees, or for safely publishing thoughts about toxic workplaces. I used to regularly review the old "www.fuckedcompany.com" website for the real inner doings of clients, especially pending layoffs that might affect contracts with them.
> Being first-to-market is only relevant when you have material, previously unknown information.
They have first-yo-mstkry knowledge by a matter of milliseconds, even microseconds, by investing in high speed access to the fiber as it leaves the stock exchange. They then commit transactions while the stock is changing price, before anyone else can possibly respond. That isn't "adding liquidity" by any stretch of fiscal imagination, despite the frequent claims of companies involved in high speed trading. It's arbitrage, and nothing _but_ arbitrage. It's legal, but the extent of its current abuse is stunning.
to a modest extent, it's also a form of gambling because, if the price rose rather than fell or fell rather than rose, their gambles on investing would fail. Unfortunately, the high speed traders are not being held to account for their unwanted, "failed" bets. They simply cancel those, without noticeable penalty! That's not just gambling. That's gambling where you get to take your money back from the pot if you don't like seeing other players exposed ands, effectively takin gyour money back from the "pot".
Can an ordinary investor say "I'll sell short by $5", and say, when the stock prices rises, "never mind"? No. They have to actually make the short sale, and lose money for betting wrong. But these high speed traders simply cancel the orders before they exceed the very limited time in which they can do so. It's gambling where they don't have to pay their losses, and very much a form of cheating in the gambling that makes up a healthy stock market.
>> Must gambling businesses are subtle or outright frauds
> No, not really. Gambling businesses don't need to cheat or commit fraud to win.
Most, perhaps not all but certainly most, do commit subtle or outright frauds against their clientele. It's not new or even unusual. I've already pointed out the basic funding frauds of the state lotteries. Many of the "scratch ticket" businesses have a fascinating fraud in that they sell the tickets in two boxes. If the vendor sells the big winning ticket in the first box, you make sure to sell the first box to recover your expenses. If the big ticket winner does not show up in the first box, the vendor _throws away the second box, and never pays out the big ticket.
Even "legitimate" gambling is infamous for being used to launder criminal income. Winning lottery tickets and other gambling tickets are regularly sold off to local organized crime for a fraction of their worth, to provide a favor to organized crime, for the original ticket holder to get some income tax free instead of having it reported by the lottery, and for the organized crime members to claim the winnings and launder their earnings.
> At the very least they need to be cleaned up (regulated) so that they rise to the level of legitimate gambling sites.
That level is, unfortunately, very low.
>> Take a very good look at how "high speed trading" works.
> But again, nothing to do with gambling in general or steam in particular.
With steam in particulrar? Only in the sense that they are, in fact, gambling on the stock market and that they cheat, relying on private knowledge not available to the rest of the gamblers. It's self-deluding to claim that high speed trading, or gambling, benefit any economy except possibly the local adult entertainment industries.
> The problem is most of these sites are scam sites.
It's not just "these sites". Must gambling businesses are subtle or outright frauds. Even state lotteries take an enormous cut of the proceeds to fund the lottery bureaucracy itself, and not to help the schools as promised. The schools have their funding _replced_ by lottery winnings, not augmented. Even the "honest casinos" forbid card counters, whose behavior is technically legal but can actually allow players to win in the long run, not just the short run.
The same problems exist in the stock market. Additional information is forbidden to the ordinary player, but those with additional information can and inevitably do play illicitly. And at the scales available to the larger cheaters, it sucks the possibility of profit right out of the system for ordinary players. Take a very good look at how "high speed trading" works to get a sense of how much of stock market funds are sucked right out of the business by larger companies that can afford the "insider information' that a few microseconds of lead time on stock announcements provides.
> I'm going to go ahead and say that the man who filed the first suit indicated above wasn't winning.
Gamblers don't win in the long run. The house always takes a cut. If they're winning in the long run, they either have knowledge not available to the other gamblers (such as a skilled poker player counting the cards or reading "tells" from the other players), or they're cheating.
> Never include unnecessary code. If there are incorrect implementations that you are replacing, remove the incorrect ones!
When possible, I comment them out with "wrapper" comments to preserve the code in the source control change history. And explain _why_ you've replaced the code, so the evidence is there for at least one or two more releases. It can be very difficult indeed to compare new code to the deleted code it replaces if you've successfully removed the visible traces of the deleted code.
The original presentation on beating fingerprint sensors with ordinary laser printer printed copies of fingerprinters, laid on gelatin, published in 2002, is available at:
http://web.mit.edu/6.857/OldSt...
It's quite a good presentation, and was verified by MythBusters in 2011.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Mythbusters even demonstrated that simply printing a fingerprint on paper, and _licking the paper_, created a fake fingerprint good enough to defeat most sensors. There's little reason to think that the commercial fingerprint sensors have gotten any better, though I'd welcome a modern retest with modern cell phone and computer keyboard based sensors.
Basically, the "fuzziness" of fingerprint sensors which allows to identify real fingers with real sensors is enough "fuziiness" to allow them to be beaten with even casually made fake fingerprints. I've seen no good evidence that the necessarysensor and computational "fuzziness" has ever been worked around with even the most expensive modern sensors: I'd welcome any evidence with honestly done tests showing otherwise.
> It protects against a very specific form of malware
If the "malware" is considered to be "unsigned software accessing anything without permission by an upstream paid key holder", then yes. It becomes clear that the entire Trusted Computing stack is designed for DRM. Security against a few forms of attack is a consequence, not the purpose of the software.
It's more than enough for Tetris, Zork, tuxracer, Soitaire,, many modest chess programs, and many other graphically lightweight games. It's even enough CPU for the original Doom and Quake games, which are still good fun. And it's more than enough power and graphics for a "point-of-sale" system on lightweight, obsolete, and therefore inexpensive low end hardware. The machines even have decent enough screen size and battery life for a field console for use in a data center visit, or for handing one off to some kids to play with while traveling.
> If fair use is hindering their business, how would free use weigh in? Take open source, for example. Microsoft could easily argue Linux is making it difficult to sell their OS for server use. In fact, I'd imagine that if they somehow managed to eliminate fair use,
They did, using SCO as a disposable legal proxy. Please review the legal history of the SCO copyright cases, captured in the archives of https://www.groklaw.net/. Microsoft's fiscal support of SCO was established pretty early in the process: SCO could not have continued to confuse the intellectual property rights of Linux without the clear Microsoft support throughout most of the case.
> If the copyright holders are being harmed in some way by some particular usage, then fair use cannot be deemed to apply in the first place.
I'm sorry to say that this is nonsense. Criticism, satire, and political speech about a document are primary grounds for "fair use" quotations, and they can profoundly damage the value of a copyrighted work by exposing its quality or even exposing fraud by the author.
Sell the equipment and resources to the miners, skim the illicit trade hidden from governments, and rob your clients blind as an exit strategy seems to be the result of Bitcoin operations. Are there _any_ bitcoin markets that show legitimate handling of client transactions for more than a few months without turning to direct theft from clients?
The fan-made movies referred to as Star Trek: Phase 2 did a much better job of capturing the original series. And they did _fantastic_ task of exploring social issues that would have been unthinkable for Gene Roddenberry. The response of Captain Kirk to an openly gay crew member in their "Blood and Fire" episode was priceless. These fan made episodes are much better than the last few movies. And they pay loving homage to the original seies' work, with cameos by actors involving their older selves such as Walter Koenig, Nichelle Nicholls, and the unforgettable scene of George Takei as a screaming leather clad barbarian swordsman.
The fans who made these episodes captured the conflict between low budget, limited time, wonderful young actors learning their craft, and the high ideals that Gene Roddenberry and his entire cast and crew brought to the series. _These_ stories are why Star Trek was great.
I'm old enough to remember it, in the first re-runs at least. It was campy space opera with genuine moral dilemmas and thought provoking plots. Having a proud Russian speaking crew member hinted at a future without the Cold War era separatism. Spock's existence as a half-breed Vulcan, and Uhura's presence as a department leading critical helm officer, provided meaningful comments on the aggressive racism common in most of our societies. And I was too young at the time to understand how groundbreaking the black/white kiss in Plato's Stepchildren was.
Star Trek, and Gene Roddenberry's work in general, held up fascinating mirrors to our society and challenged us to do better, and said "we _can_ be better than this". I genuinely wish "The Great Bird of the Galaxy" could have stayed around and productive, to explore the similar scale of problems today of fanatical terrorism and global ecological destruction.
> I agree BUT, burning your bridges is never a smart idea if it is not necessary,
And if you must quit suddenly, _ensure_ that you've made a paper trail before the act. _Read_ your employment contract for what intellectual property you own, for how accumulated vacation pay is handled, and for what the dates actually are for your stock "vestments" to mature. Losing medical insurance, unemployment coverage, or an anticipated stock option from a company going public are reasons to postpone a delay. Losing the registration and tickets to that overseas conference, or being stuck with them on your own credit card after you've left the company sending you, can be very hard on your fiscal reserves.
If you're leaving because the workplace became intolerable, make sure you have witnesses who can and will testify. It can matter in court, and it certainly matters for getting your next role.
> In my area, schools provide zero medical attention to students. They literally aren't even allowed to apply bandages.
Really? That may be fiscal and legal. The schools I've dealt with were in fairly large school districts, with at least one school nurse on staff and any treatment administered in that nurse's clinic space.
Can you verify that they're not allowed to handle epinephrine pens? The anaphylactic shock from profound allergies can kill within 30 minutes, much too long to be confident of a timely ambulance response or parental arrival at the school.
> How much information do they need?
That is a key question. Schools are often the available caregivers, with the legal responsibilities described as "in loco parentis". They are responsible for the child's safety on the school grounds, including the child's medical safety. How much information does a nanny, a babysitter, or an athletic coach nned to handle emergencies? Anaphylactic shock from a bee-sting or peanut allergy can kill within 30 minutes, much too long to obtain medical records from a highly secured third-party system. If a caregiver doesn't know about the condition and doesn't have the right tools available, this can be fatal. Asthma, epilepsy, and diabetes can all create dangerous and confusing reactions for children who may themselves panic and not be able to self-diagnose. And since the discovery of AIDS, schools have understandably become much more aware and cautious about long-term infections, even if the parents and their teachers try to provide as "normal" a life as possible for the child and keep quiet their illnesses.
I also recall a child from long ago, when I was much younger. He had cystic fibrosis, and his school needed very extensive medical records. He was a wonderful child, one of those chronically ill people who appreciates that every breath might be their last and lives life to its absolute fulleest. The school and community, collaborated to help him attend normal school. His family's friends, and soon his own friends who happened to be adults, provided the extra hands-on medical care the school could not possibly afford. I was asked to help because I was the only one available who could visit after school lunch and who would _beat_ him properly. He needed chest percussion several times a day to help him cough up mucus. There are some technological replacements for this chest percussion now. But to the best of my knowledge it's still most effective done by hand, and preferably by a friend who appreciates that they are saving the child's life.
It's an odd talent, but one I treasured being able to share with the child. I'm sure he died decades ago: cystic fibrosis patients don't have a long life expectancy. But the lessons about living life to the fullest resonate: I hope to have some small fraction of his courage and zest for life as I age further.