This is precisely correct. You are deliberately prevented from complex layouts and sophisticated formatting. This compels document writers to use formats that are likely to be legible in 10 years, and that favor actual written content over sophisticated layout. I've found the change to be enormously helpful in revealing who can actually write documentation, instead of merely format it cleverly.
Notes runs on those platforms like Microsoft Office runs on MacOs. The release for non-Windows operating systems is always effectively 2 years behind the release on Windows. Being able to run on AIX or iSeries hardware is not relevant for laptop or desktop clients, where most email and docuemnt processing actually occurs today, so that's not a good salespoint.
I'm afraid there is no single powerful selling point for Lotus Notes, and hasn't been for years. LibreOffice and OpenOffice are cheaper for Linux, and have better MS Office compatibility, except for email. And we've seen many companies throwing out expensive internal mail server suites in favor of the consistent, world accessible, and robust Google services very effectively.
If the control is too fine grained, people give up and just turn off the controls altogether. I see this constantly with SELinux and complex firewalls and filesytem permissions, and two-part authentication.
by making Facebook "3-4 times more usable", it reduces the time people spend stuck with burdensome Facebook advertising and workflow to access desired material. In other words, it reduces Facebook's revenue for advertising from those links and burdensome clickthroughs. _Of course_ they object, and _of course_ they feel he's in violation of his terms of service or even more severe contract violations for interfering with what they try to sel to the advertisers and customer tracking companies, who actually pay Facebook's bills.
Why is there surprise that Facebook's legal staff and management would threaten the tool author over this?
I do this sort of thing as a matter of course, normally in much smaller environments. Healthcare organizations are problematic: they often have proprietary software wedged into their workflow in fascinating ways, such as laboratory data reporting tools and legacy accounting applications. Whether to maintain a minimal Windows architecture, or any other displaced architecture, for access to this old data is an important technical and buisiness decision. It has become easy to virtualize and isolate such hosts, so the underlying hardware is Linux based or VMware based, and the guest operating systems can be isolated and locked down for security and support reasons. Also, getting people off of Outlook and documenting everything with Word documents is often a nightmare. Documentation policies and a good mail system with good scheduling tools are invaluable for the migration.
A team of Windows admins in a large organization, such as 3 for Exchange, 3 for AD, 3 for the accounting system, 2 interns for swapping and transporting backup tapes, and 3 for desktop support, can often be retrained and shrunk. Or their roles expanded to cover tasks they couldn't manage before, such as security. If they're not already interested in the idea, the project will fail: That large of a bureaucratic group can poison a technology switch, even if they're reasonable as individuals, In some cases, they can often take over work previously passed off to external consultants and keep their head count. But if the migration is a planned from the vice president as an arbitrary "big picture" switch, without details considered, and it's a recipe for disaster.
Retraining is possible. Good engineers who handle such large migrations are worth their weight in gold, and even if the IT headcount shrinks, some can be convinced to take up a consulting role to support legacy apps and critical environments for long-term data access. (This is often critical for old medical or fiscal records.)
And there is one critical piece that I've repeatedly encountered. There is usually one absolutely critical software server, running on obsolete and unmaintainable hardware, that is neither allowed to be shut down for maintenance nor migrated to a newer version because "there is no budget for that", and yet is a critical 24x7 application. Whether it is a license server, print server, spam filter, or accounting software does not matter. This server has inevitably not gotten system updates in years, is unmonitored, has no password for its admin account, and is only discovered when attempting to clear an office of equipment and the entire environment shuts down when it is unplugged. The migrators are _always_ blamed for the problems with these unmaintained systems. It's vital to get such critical legacy systems into the migration plan, _in writing_, to avoid confusion about who gets to fix it when they inevitably fail.
The Swiss banking industry has been the haven of choice for private banking since the Middle Ages. With a proper warrant from the proper government, _and the account information_,, they will cooperate with recovering assets. But they don't allow governments free access to find that information. This has also been how Jews in WWII hid their assets from seizure by Nazis, and funds flowed from the US to guerrilla fighters throughout Europe. The banking privacy works both ways.
The concept that bankers are automatically sinful and should have their goods seized goes right back to the concept of charging interest as being a sin of "usury", and it's why some Jewish families became bankers for non-Jews: the laws did not apply to non-Jews. So, historically, a lot of the rage against bankers for stealing money they didn't earn has also been religious prejudice. And they do know that a lot of the money they manage, and hide the transactions for, has been purely personal or business discretion, and a lot of it has been with the full knowledge and support of the governments who've gotten critical loans or hidden payments to other countries through the Swiss banks.
Like free speech, discrete banking has many misuses, but its difficult to forbid without interfering with critical uses.
It matters. A stream of strangers sleeping in the same house, never knowing who's going to be next, is disruptive and unsafe. Those strangers often have direct physical access to the kids, and it should be considered from those grounds, much as running a bed&breakfast in the house should be considered for the child's safety. And if the male, or female lovers have mom over visiting them constantly, what are the arrangements for overnight child care?
The same standards can, and do, apply to single dads who try to date.
Glucagon shots rely on converting glycogen to glucose: how much is available in a normal human? And I assume they wouldn't work at all for someone who's been doing extended physical exercise, such as a marathon, and has depleted their glycogen?
This is all fascinating material: systems failure analysis, and detecting where assumptions about failure modes are not based on measurement or based on pure extrapolation, is one of the tasks I get paid for professionally, so I hope you don't mind that I'm questioning your claims. It's genuine curiosity.
> Even then, there's no way she could digest it fast enough without having her blood sugar drop precipitously low, leading to seizure etc, so emergency services would need to be called and told that she needs a dextrose IV drip.
This is the interesting claim that I don't see any experimental evidence for. This is a catastrophic event: is there anything else that would provide bottlenecks for the body's ability to consume glucose, such as limits of the other components of the ATP cycle in the cells themselves? Would those limits, themselves, be biologically catastrophic? If the short term danger of hypoglycemia is starving the brain of glucose, can guzzling or continuously sipping from a bottle of syrup keep such a diabetic alive until then, even if they are groggy or confused? (I business partner I met with regularly hated long meetings, because they could slip from a perfect blood sugar to 40 mg/dL, half human normal if lunch was late and they were focused strongly, and nabbing snacks or grabbing sweetened drinks caused social issues in the meetings. And they wouldn't realize until they tried to talk just how low their blood sugar was!)
It's not something I'd want to test on humans, but it would be fascinating animal experiments to get some idea of how to treat a diabetic who's had a pump overdose. In fact, I'd be quite surprised if such overdoses haven't happened by accident in hospitals with staff unfamiliar with diabetic doses: I've certainly received the wrong dose of medication from hospital staff.
I'm afraid that you're doing a flat linear extrapolation, which is understandable. If 5 grams of carbohydrate = 1 "unit", and the maximum reservoir size of the "Paradigm Series 7" is 3 millileters or 300 units, that's about 1500 grams of sucrose. That's about 3 pounds of carbohydrate: it's *possible* to eat that much in a few hours, but sounds awful.
I'm wondering, though, if there are other limiting biological factors that prevent the body's cells from being able to deplete the glucose that fast. For example, 1500 grams of carbohydrate is approximately If one gram of carbohydrate is approxaimatley 4 kCal (commonly referred to as "calories when discussing food), 1500 grams of carbohydrate is _6000_ caloiries worth of food. I'd like to suggest that you can't possibly metabolize a well supplied stream of glucose to your blood stream that fast. so Also, thinking about this, an insulin pump is normally connected to subcutaneous tissue, not to a large blood vessel. So I'd expect some delay as the large dose of insulin has to diffuse through existing tissue: I'd expect extraordinarily low blood sugar around the injection site, but can one take in enough glucose or sucrose orally to keep the blood glucose from bottoming out?
It's a fascinating question for just such possible risks of a mechanical insulin pump failure. I'm finding a few studies mentioning LD50 tests for human insulin, but they're all behind paywalls. I also found this article about insulin overdose suicide attempts (http://ccforum.com/content/11/5/r115) Many of them seem to have taken 300 units or more of insulin, and were universally treated in the ER with various I/V's of 30% dextrose, mostly successfully. It shows that prompt treatment is successful, but it's not clear if it would work to simply guzzle juice.
I know a number of children of divorce, and others whose parents are traveling overseas for work. I know one colleague who schedules a voice or video call with their child every day. The child's parents have agreed should have a phone in their school bag to "call mom or dad" in case they anything happens. It's a very limited, very cheap, used phone, so there are no complex games on it: the child is 8. The child also has a lot of allergies and a very strict diet, so the parents have had several heated arguments with the school about whether the child should have the phone at school, to call about school lunch changes or allergy concerns.
How much sugar? And for how long will she have to keep ingesting that much every, say, 15 minutes? Does opening up the body's ability to metabolize glucose this way have another limiting factor that will limit how much oral glucose is needed? I'm quite curious: there was a report a few months ago of an implanted insulin pump that could be remotely tricked into delivering its 30 day supply of insulin all at once, and I'm wondering if this could be reasonably survived with oral glucose or sucrose and frequent glucose testing to manage it.
What are the failure modes? If the insulin pump fails to deliver insulin, won't the diabetic notice with their next glucose test? Don't most travel with spare insulin and a few syringes, in case of pump failure, at least for long distance travel? How damaging is complete pump failure?
Conversely, what happens if the insulin is all delivered at once? An insulin pump holds what, typically, a few days of insulin? Can a diabetic keep ingesting enough sugar with juice or soda or candy to keep their blood sugar up for brain function, even if the insulin dose is overwhelmingly high? And the insulin, according to the last diabetic I met, only lasts a few hours: it's not a long-term effect, even with a huge amount injected, right?
I had a fascinating talk last month with a man who lives near a flood plain. Not in it, but the dikes have been overwhelmed enough times in his lifetime that he's seen failures of basic transport and utilities for the area half a dozen times. He uses "surviving a zombie apocalypse" as his guideline for preparedness. So he keeps a plentiful supply of ammo, and practices with his weapons, and loads his own ammo: he also hunts with those and with a bow, and keeps a freezer full of venison. He also keeps quite a large amount of long-term stable food stores, some water and _water testing and purification_ tools. His vehicles are well built, maintained, and he has several small generators, one in the basement (for weather reasons) and one in a vehicle (for portable use).
He's also doing backup fire and rescue duties for his county, and if there's a problem nearby, I want _him_ as one of my first responders.
That's absurd. Learning time-sensitive ordered tasks, such as in music or dance, or alternative ways to express similar ideas, such as language skills, are invaluable to skilled programmers. The ideas of checklists, logical operations, and revising a program on the basis of alternate events, learning about backup and what you can lose without it, are all useful.
I'd be more concerned about what happens with _bad_ programming lessons, being taught to manipulate only GUI based patterns in a teacher expected way or be marked down for not doing it the way an uninformed, underpaid coding monkey wrote to mark the checksheet off their daily tasks and pays no attention to encouraging the children to learn how things work. I'm concerned tht the children will be taught only how to fill out a checklist blindly. I've worked with programmers taught that way, and they can become an active obstacle to good computing, good science, or even good politics.
I'm afraid that a lot of the pre-teen children I've been meeting in public school would be better off, though, with real recess or a daily siesta rather than yet another mandatory lesson that requires sitting in a computer classroom. They're exhausted, and getting their bodies moving is being neglected in conflicting academic policies and goals.
It's been tried. The Fedora and Red Hat build serves were compromised back in 2008, and replaced or scrubbed practically in real time while new GPG signature keys were switched to and published, to avoid the possible installation of binaries whose provenance was compromised.
While correct, this is hardly a kernel specific problem. In many environments, local packages are published without GPG signatures, and installed quite arbitrarily from poorly secured internal repositories and poorly managed third party repositories. Even the most reputable repositories are vulnerable to having their build environments penetrated and signed, but backdoor-enabled packages, published.
Personally, I don't trust Canonical because of their poor attitudes about sending personal system data back to their ad service business. It makes me question their other security practices. Red Hat and the Debian developers have earned my trust through years of thoughtful, public security practice, especially when confronted with security impinging situations.
This sounds like excellent territory for the Linux based, programmer friendly, free software "One Laptop Per Child" project. The lack of expensive computing power and Windows integration reduces its usefulness for games and expensive or pirated software, they're surprisingly robust, their power consumption is minimal, and their brilliant use of LCD technology makes the batteries last far longer and be far easier to recharge in what is effectively a third world nation. Quoting from the website for OLPC: "The XO is also designed for constant connectivity. A few children working together under a tree can connect to each other without any other hardware, and a class full of students can share collaborative activities with one another and see what their classmates are doing."
This is exactly the kind of well-designed, robust technology that education and medicine and shopkeepers can use effectively in a third world nation.
According to the original paper at http://cryptome.org/gummy.htm, the gelatin fakes worked quite well as a thin layer over a live finger to defeat the thermal sensors or capacitive sensors designed to detect live fingers. So it's better than older phone apps which did not try to detect "live fingers", but it's vulnerable to precisely the same technology that beat the world's best fingerprint sensors better than 80% of the time, using photocopies of police fingerprint records laid on gelatin, in 2002.
Fingerprint forgery is now a well established technology, with numerous articles such as http://www.stdot.com/pub/ffs_article_asten_akaseva.pdf explaining the basic technology. That publication is 10 years old, and I've seen no evidence of any real improvement in the scanners themselves since then.
Commonplace scanning with the inevitable consumer applications storing it locally, and badly, will unfortunately contribute to the forgery problem by making the replicable fingerprints even more available to thieves and fraudsters. That sidesteps the "digital hash" storage problems, but takes more work to get complete fingerprint scans, such as those stored by the police or military databases for reference matching.
The article made little distinction between the free software and open source movements. That's more distinction than one might expect in such a short article, and a growing annual gathering of more than 7000 people for free software in Brazil rivals the largest Linux and UNIX conferences I've attended.
The investment costs for the first set of solar sails equipment to build the first fleet of asteroid recovery recovery ships is very high. But they need not be manned, and they can start a cycle of cheap solar sails guiding quite large asteroids back to earth orbit for mining. The fiscal ROI for any significant sized asteroids returned to LEO, then used for arbitrary manufacture, including spacecraft, is potentially enormous. It take a very long investment cycle: the asteroids will take years to recover from the asteroid belt, or for more predictable mining with high water content tap Saturn's rings. But the ROI, either way, is potentially _enormous_.
Bringing objects to, and from, larger gravity wells such as those of the Earth and Moon is enormously expensive in energy and "delta V". Without launch catapults or skyhooks all that energy and delta V has to come from rocket fuel. For small, limited payload objects, it's expensive but doable, as is demonstrated by the Apollo program.
For larger, ongoing systems like a lunar colony, the costs are literally astronomical. The potential benefits are often astronomical as well, but many of the benefits are achievable in earth orbit, without needing to deal with another gravity well on the Moon. Solar sail based power gathering, solar sail based asteroid or ice belt mining, zero G crystal growth for computer components, foamed metal manufacture, and enhancements in chemical analysis and production without the gravitational "settling" of heavier components could all pay for orbital stations. With those structures in place, it's then much easier to make the trip to the Moon: your spacecraft can be built as true spacecraft, without having to work in Earth's atmosphere or be over-engineered to survive the brutal launch accelerations necessary to efficiently launch from the Earth's surface to orbit.
But manufacturing spacecraft on the Moon seems ludicrous. Build them in orbit, and never even consider putting them in a deep gravity well.
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> Notes can run on Windows/Linux/AIX/iSeries
This is precisely correct. You are deliberately prevented from complex layouts and sophisticated formatting. This compels document writers to use formats that are likely to be legible in 10 years, and that favor actual written content over sophisticated layout. I've found the change to be enormously helpful in revealing who can actually write documentation, instead of merely format it cleverly.
> Notes can run on Windows/Linux/AIX/iSeries
Notes runs on those platforms like Microsoft Office runs on MacOs. The release for non-Windows operating systems is always effectively 2 years behind the release on Windows. Being able to run on AIX or iSeries hardware is not relevant for laptop or desktop clients, where most email and docuemnt processing actually occurs today, so that's not a good salespoint.
I'm afraid there is no single powerful selling point for Lotus Notes, and hasn't been for years. LibreOffice and OpenOffice are cheaper for Linux, and have better MS Office compatibility, except for email. And we've seen many companies throwing out expensive internal mail server suites in favor of the consistent, world accessible, and robust Google services very effectively.
If the control is too fine grained, people give up and just turn off the controls altogether. I see this constantly with SELinux and complex firewalls and filesytem permissions, and two-part authentication.
by making Facebook "3-4 times more usable", it reduces the time people spend stuck with burdensome Facebook advertising and workflow to access desired material. In other words, it reduces Facebook's revenue for advertising from those links and burdensome clickthroughs. _Of course_ they object, and _of course_ they feel he's in violation of his terms of service or even more severe contract violations for interfering with what they try to sel to the advertisers and customer tracking companies, who actually pay Facebook's bills.
Why is there surprise that Facebook's legal staff and management would threaten the tool author over this?
I do this sort of thing as a matter of course, normally in much smaller environments. Healthcare organizations are problematic: they often have proprietary software wedged into their workflow in fascinating ways, such as laboratory data reporting tools and legacy accounting applications. Whether to maintain a minimal Windows architecture, or any other displaced architecture, for access to this old data is an important technical and buisiness decision. It has become easy to virtualize and isolate such hosts, so the underlying hardware is Linux based or VMware based, and the guest operating systems can be isolated and locked down for security and support reasons. Also, getting people off of Outlook and documenting everything with Word documents is often a nightmare. Documentation policies and a good mail system with good scheduling tools are invaluable for the migration.
A team of Windows admins in a large organization, such as 3 for Exchange, 3 for AD, 3 for the accounting system, 2 interns for swapping and transporting backup tapes, and 3 for desktop support, can often be retrained and shrunk. Or their roles expanded to cover tasks they couldn't manage before, such as security. If they're not already interested in the idea, the project will fail: That large of a bureaucratic group can poison a technology switch, even if they're reasonable as individuals, In some cases, they can often take over work previously passed off to external consultants and keep their head count. But if the migration is a planned from the vice president as an arbitrary "big picture" switch, without details considered, and it's a recipe for disaster.
Retraining is possible. Good engineers who handle such large migrations are worth their weight in gold, and even if the IT headcount shrinks, some can be convinced to take up a consulting role to support legacy apps and critical environments for long-term data access. (This is often critical for old medical or fiscal records.)
And there is one critical piece that I've repeatedly encountered. There is usually one absolutely critical software server, running on obsolete and unmaintainable hardware, that is neither allowed to be shut down for maintenance nor migrated to a newer version because "there is no budget for that", and yet is a critical 24x7 application. Whether it is a license server, print server, spam filter, or accounting software does not matter. This server has inevitably not gotten system updates in years, is unmonitored, has no password for its admin account, and is only discovered when attempting to clear an office of equipment and the entire environment shuts down when it is unplugged. The migrators are _always_ blamed for the problems with these unmaintained systems. It's vital to get such critical legacy systems into the migration plan, _in writing_, to avoid confusion about who gets to fix it when they inevitably fail.
The Swiss banking industry has been the haven of choice for private banking since the Middle Ages. With a proper warrant from the proper government, _and the account information_,, they will cooperate with recovering assets. But they don't allow governments free access to find that information. This has also been how Jews in WWII hid their assets from seizure by Nazis, and funds flowed from the US to guerrilla fighters throughout Europe. The banking privacy works both ways.
The concept that bankers are automatically sinful and should have their goods seized goes right back to the concept of charging interest as being a sin of "usury", and it's why some Jewish families became bankers for non-Jews: the laws did not apply to non-Jews. So, historically, a lot of the rage against bankers for stealing money they didn't earn has also been religious prejudice. And they do know that a lot of the money they manage, and hide the transactions for, has been purely personal or business discretion, and a lot of it has been with the full knowledge and support of the governments who've gotten critical loans or hidden payments to other countries through the Swiss banks.
Like free speech, discrete banking has many misuses, but its difficult to forbid without interfering with critical uses.
It matters. A stream of strangers sleeping in the same house, never knowing who's going to be next, is disruptive and unsafe. Those strangers often have direct physical access to the kids, and it should be considered from those grounds, much as running a bed&breakfast in the house should be considered for the child's safety. And if the male, or female lovers have mom over visiting them constantly, what are the arrangements for overnight child care?
The same standards can, and do, apply to single dads who try to date.
Glucagon shots rely on converting glycogen to glucose: how much is available in a normal human? And I assume they wouldn't work at all for someone who's been doing extended physical exercise, such as a marathon, and has depleted their glycogen?
This is all fascinating material: systems failure analysis, and detecting where assumptions about failure modes are not based on measurement or based on pure extrapolation, is one of the tasks I get paid for professionally, so I hope you don't mind that I'm questioning your claims. It's genuine curiosity.
> Even then, there's no way she could digest it fast enough without having her blood sugar drop precipitously low, leading to seizure etc, so emergency services would need to be called and told that she needs a dextrose IV drip.
This is the interesting claim that I don't see any experimental evidence for. This is a catastrophic event: is there anything else that would provide bottlenecks for the body's ability to consume glucose, such as limits of the other components of the ATP cycle in the cells themselves? Would those limits, themselves, be biologically catastrophic? If the short term danger of hypoglycemia is starving the brain of glucose, can guzzling or continuously sipping from a bottle of syrup keep such a diabetic alive until then, even if they are groggy or confused? (I business partner I met with regularly hated long meetings, because they could slip from a perfect blood sugar to 40 mg/dL, half human normal if lunch was late and they were focused strongly, and nabbing snacks or grabbing sweetened drinks caused social issues in the meetings. And they wouldn't realize until they tried to talk just how low their blood sugar was!)
It's not something I'd want to test on humans, but it would be fascinating animal experiments to get some idea of how to treat a diabetic who's had a pump overdose. In fact, I'd be quite surprised if such overdoses haven't happened by accident in hospitals with staff unfamiliar with diabetic doses: I've certainly received the wrong dose of medication from hospital staff.
I'm afraid that you're doing a flat linear extrapolation, which is understandable. If 5 grams of carbohydrate = 1 "unit", and the maximum reservoir size of the "Paradigm Series 7" is 3 millileters or 300 units, that's about 1500 grams of sucrose. That's about 3 pounds of carbohydrate: it's *possible* to eat that much in a few hours, but sounds awful.
I'm wondering, though, if there are other limiting biological factors that prevent the body's cells from being able to deplete the glucose that fast. For example, 1500 grams of carbohydrate is approximately If one gram of carbohydrate is approxaimatley 4 kCal (commonly referred to as "calories when discussing food), 1500 grams of carbohydrate is _6000_ caloiries worth of food. I'd like to suggest that you can't possibly metabolize a well supplied stream of glucose to your blood stream that fast. so Also, thinking about this, an insulin pump is normally connected to subcutaneous tissue, not to a large blood vessel. So I'd expect some delay as the large dose of insulin has to diffuse through existing tissue: I'd expect extraordinarily low blood sugar around the injection site, but can one take in enough glucose or sucrose orally to keep the blood glucose from bottoming out?
It's a fascinating question for just such possible risks of a mechanical insulin pump failure. I'm finding a few studies mentioning LD50 tests for human insulin, but they're all behind paywalls. I also found this article about insulin overdose suicide attempts (http://ccforum.com/content/11/5/r115) Many of them seem to have taken 300 units or more of insulin, and were universally treated in the ER with various I/V's of 30% dextrose, mostly successfully. It shows that prompt treatment is successful, but it's not clear if it would work to simply guzzle juice.
I know a number of children of divorce, and others whose parents are traveling overseas for work. I know one colleague who schedules a voice or video call with their child every day. The child's parents have agreed should have a phone in their school bag to "call mom or dad" in case they anything happens. It's a very limited, very cheap, used phone, so there are no complex games on it: the child is 8. The child also has a lot of allergies and a very strict diet, so the parents have had several heated arguments with the school about whether the child should have the phone at school, to call about school lunch changes or allergy concerns.
How much sugar? And for how long will she have to keep ingesting that much every, say, 15 minutes? Does opening up the body's ability to metabolize glucose this way have another limiting factor that will limit how much oral glucose is needed? I'm quite curious: there was a report a few months ago of an implanted insulin pump that could be remotely tricked into delivering its 30 day supply of insulin all at once, and I'm wondering if this could be reasonably survived with oral glucose or sucrose and frequent glucose testing to manage it.
What are the failure modes? If the insulin pump fails to deliver insulin, won't the diabetic notice with their next glucose test? Don't most travel with spare insulin and a few syringes, in case of pump failure, at least for long distance travel? How damaging is complete pump failure?
Conversely, what happens if the insulin is all delivered at once? An insulin pump holds what, typically, a few days of insulin? Can a diabetic keep ingesting enough sugar with juice or soda or candy to keep their blood sugar up for brain function, even if the insulin dose is overwhelmingly high? And the insulin, according to the last diabetic I met, only lasts a few hours: it's not a long-term effect, even with a huge amount injected, right?
He'll smoke it later, if he has to. It keeps well frozen, and it's also safer from vermin in the freezer.
I had a fascinating talk last month with a man who lives near a flood plain. Not in it, but the dikes have been overwhelmed enough times in his lifetime that he's seen failures of basic transport and utilities for the area half a dozen times. He uses "surviving a zombie apocalypse" as his guideline for preparedness. So he keeps a plentiful supply of ammo, and practices with his weapons, and loads his own ammo: he also hunts with those and with a bow, and keeps a freezer full of venison. He also keeps quite a large amount of long-term stable food stores, some water and _water testing and purification_ tools. His vehicles are well built, maintained, and he has several small generators, one in the basement (for weather reasons) and one in a vehicle (for portable use).
He's also doing backup fire and rescue duties for his county, and if there's a problem nearby, I want _him_ as one of my first responders.
That's absurd. Learning time-sensitive ordered tasks, such as in music or dance, or alternative ways to express similar ideas, such as language skills, are invaluable to skilled programmers. The ideas of checklists, logical operations, and revising a program on the basis of alternate events, learning about backup and what you can lose without it, are all useful.
I'd be more concerned about what happens with _bad_ programming lessons, being taught to manipulate only GUI based patterns in a teacher expected way or be marked down for not doing it the way an uninformed, underpaid coding monkey wrote to mark the checksheet off their daily tasks and pays no attention to encouraging the children to learn how things work. I'm concerned tht the children will be taught only how to fill out a checklist blindly. I've worked with programmers taught that way, and they can become an active obstacle to good computing, good science, or even good politics.
I'm afraid that a lot of the pre-teen children I've been meeting in public school would be better off, though, with real recess or a daily siesta rather than yet another mandatory lesson that requires sitting in a computer classroom. They're exhausted, and getting their bodies moving is being neglected in conflicting academic policies and goals.
It's been tried. The Fedora and Red Hat build serves were compromised back in 2008, and replaced or scrubbed practically in real time while new GPG signature keys were switched to and published, to avoid the possible installation of binaries whose provenance was compromised.
While correct, this is hardly a kernel specific problem. In many environments, local packages are published without GPG signatures, and installed quite arbitrarily from poorly secured internal repositories and poorly managed third party repositories. Even the most reputable repositories are vulnerable to having their build environments penetrated and signed, but backdoor-enabled packages, published.
Personally, I don't trust Canonical because of their poor attitudes about sending personal system data back to their ad service business. It makes me question their other security practices. Red Hat and the Debian developers have earned my trust through years of thoughtful, public security practice, especially when confronted with security impinging situations.
They've apparently been interfering with open source and free software. (See John Gilmore's notes about the security agency hindered deveopment of IPsec, at http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg12325.html )
This sounds like excellent territory for the Linux based, programmer friendly, free software "One Laptop Per Child" project. The lack of expensive computing power and Windows integration reduces its usefulness for games and expensive or pirated software, they're surprisingly robust, their power consumption is minimal, and their brilliant use of LCD technology makes the batteries last far longer and be far easier to recharge in what is effectively a third world nation.
Quoting from the website for OLPC: "The XO is also designed for constant connectivity. A few children working together under a tree can connect to each other without any other hardware, and a class full of students can share collaborative activities with one another and see what their classmates are doing."
This is exactly the kind of well-designed, robust technology that education and medicine and shopkeepers can use effectively in a third world nation.
According to the original paper at http://cryptome.org/gummy.htm, the gelatin fakes worked quite well as a thin layer over a live finger to defeat the thermal sensors or capacitive sensors designed to detect live fingers. So it's better than older phone apps which did not try to detect "live fingers", but it's vulnerable to precisely the same technology that beat the world's best fingerprint sensors better than 80% of the time, using photocopies of police fingerprint records laid on gelatin, in 2002.
Fingerprint forgery is now a well established technology, with numerous articles such as http://www.stdot.com/pub/ffs_article_asten_akaseva.pdf explaining the basic technology. That publication is 10 years old, and I've seen no evidence of any real improvement in the scanners themselves since then.
Commonplace scanning with the inevitable consumer applications storing it locally, and badly, will unfortunately contribute to the forgery problem by making the replicable fingerprints even more available to thieves and fraudsters. That sidesteps the "digital hash" storage problems, but takes more work to get complete fingerprint scans, such as those stored by the police or military databases for reference matching.
The article made little distinction between the free software and open source movements. That's more distinction than one might expect in such a short article, and a growing annual gathering of more than 7000 people for free software in Brazil rivals the largest Linux and UNIX conferences I've attended.
The investment costs for the first set of solar sails equipment to build the first fleet of asteroid recovery recovery ships is very high. But they need not be manned, and they can start a cycle of cheap solar sails guiding quite large asteroids back to earth orbit for mining. The fiscal ROI for any significant sized asteroids returned to LEO, then used for arbitrary manufacture, including spacecraft, is potentially enormous. It take a very long investment cycle: the asteroids will take years to recover from the asteroid belt, or for more predictable mining with high water content tap Saturn's rings. But the ROI, either way, is potentially _enormous_.
Bringing objects to, and from, larger gravity wells such as those of the Earth and Moon is enormously expensive in energy and "delta V". Without launch catapults or skyhooks all that energy and delta V has to come from rocket fuel. For small, limited payload objects, it's expensive but doable, as is demonstrated by the Apollo program.
For larger, ongoing systems like a lunar colony, the costs are literally astronomical. The potential benefits are often astronomical as well, but many of the benefits are achievable in earth orbit, without needing to deal with another gravity well on the Moon. Solar sail based power gathering, solar sail based asteroid or ice belt mining, zero G crystal growth for computer components, foamed metal manufacture, and enhancements in chemical analysis and production without the gravitational "settling" of heavier components could all pay for orbital stations. With those structures in place, it's then much easier to make the trip to the Moon: your spacecraft can be built as true spacecraft, without having to work in Earth's atmosphere or be over-engineered to survive the brutal launch accelerations necessary to efficiently launch from the Earth's surface to orbit.
But manufacturing spacecraft on the Moon seems ludicrous. Build them in orbit, and never even consider putting them in a deep gravity well.