I remember the NexT computer. It was monochrome, when people attending computer expos were ignoring booths with monochrome displays. It was a closed hardware system, when at least one successful company was selling a "shell" PC, where even the cpu was on a plug-in card. People, especially business people, wanted to configure their own computers, not be forced to use whatever some manufacturer decided was right. Color was added, but it was already too late. The idea of paying a premium price for a computer that could not be updated easily when another great idea came along had little appeal.
NeXT software was indeed great, and revolutionary, and a masterpiece. But the best comment I heard on the hardware was,"NeXT: CPU of a micro, cost of a mini, distribution of a mainframe."
Keep looking in old articles and you will find that patents in telephone encryption often have to cite the work of the recently deceased movie star Hedy Lamar as prior art. She worked with engineers in her husband's company to develop telephone encryption. Her ideas were innovative and sound, but barely workable in WWII technology. The same could be said of the system described in this/. article.
I hate to disappoint all the doomsayers on Slashdot, but this "weapon" has been known for years. The EMP desired has infinite energy in an infinitely narrow pulse, and comes from the same store that sells frictionless bearings and perfect insulators. As with the bearings and insulators, the engineer settles for less than the perfect solution, but one that will do the desired job anyway. The pulse of interest is an impulse, where all of the energy available is packed into a pulse with the sharpest rise time possible, and the narrowest width, with the falling edge shaped for best utility. Such a pulse will have usable energy over a very wide frequency spectrum, and can be used to calibrate test receiver response, tune amplifiers, and so forth, as long as pulse power is kept low. This is available, and is a tool in daily use.
The military raises the power to the highest level possible, covers all the frequencies it can, and tries to burn out everything. This is impractical to the point of being impossible without imposing some limits. Infinite power at infinite bandwidth is not yet available. Enough power at the frequencies of interest is one object of electronic warfare, an ongoing game between nations that has no end in sight.
As a civilian, your defense against such a weapon does not exist. If it is perfected, your computer, TV, hifi, Internet and other communications, and possibly even electric power, will be destroyed instantly in some radius from the firing point. Inside the radius of destruction your equipment is toast. Actually implementing such a superweapon will be expensive. Defense against it will be expensive. The energy expended in talk and paperwork will dwarf the weapon itself. Welcome to the real world.
Peter Dyck has made an intelligent comment, which should be read carefully. Allow me to be the devil's advocate and state another point of view. One of my employers had an exceptionally good wireman, far better than his associates. They promoted him to foreman, feeling he would pass his skills on to the others in his area. It was a disaster. He was a wireman, not a manager or instructor. The company ended up with lower quality work, and less one very good wireman.
One point missed by many in this thread is the company itself. It exists, makes money, hires people, sells product. They are doing something, probably many things, right. If an individual really is smarter than company management, he should be able to buy the compay out of his own pocket, or rise through the chain of command to be the head man. I do not except women, it is just difficult to write in unisex. Also, I have seen both cases succeed. People with this much talent are rare, but they exist.
As for the original question, there is much advice in the thread, but only one person who can choose. Accept the company's choice, move on, or reach a compromise. My best advice is not to antagonize anyone, and if you sue the company, get enough to live out your life in comfort, because your career is finished.
Godsday? Would you be refering to Sunday, used by Christians that won't use the Sabbath, sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, which was chosen by God and is still observed by Hebrews and some Christians? Perhaps you mean Friday, observed by Muslims. There are numerous religions that have their own idea of the proper dates of worship, and have no allegiance to the God recognized by Abraham.
Attempting to create a universal calendar based on one person's limited knowledge and ideas is doomed to failure. Old and proud cultures will dismiss the project as the ravings of a spoiled brat who is uneducated in the ways of the world.
Defeating all other cultures, then forcing your ideas on everyone might seem like a good idea, but Alexander, Caeser, and Hitler are among those that tried and failed. Save time and effort by using the calendar we have. It works, and those that do not agree with it have adapted to it anyway.
Betamax is technically superior to VHS. This was never disputed. It had a shorter recording time per tape, a failing addressed by Sony a little too late. And, according to an engineer at an ATT booth at a state fair, Sony took a strong stand against porn on their tapes. The engineer said this was the final thing that guaranteed the faiure of Betamax. People wanted their racy movies, and were intolerant of prudes saying,"You can't have them on our system. We won't allow it!"
I could say,"I agree!", and be done with it, but that would cheat a prodigy and a tutor of a little helpful advice.
A prodigy must be able to communicate. The tools are language, with English having the widest use among engineers/scientists now, and mathematics, where quantum theory is still the end of the line.
Humanities, appreciation of beauty for its own sake, is important. George Santayana wrote an excellent essay on this subject. Beauty is important to many people, and success in any field will require that you get along with and understand people.
For the same reason, study some psychology, history, geography, literature, and related subjects. It helps the prodigy to understand people. There is no need to ovedo it, but a year or two of each will broaden the prodigy's viewpoint, and lead to the understanding of people and their motives, even if said prodigy disagrees with them.
The prodigy will probably find a specialty while a student. This should be something enjoyable, because the amount of time devoted to it will eventually overwhelm all else. Do not be in a hurry to reach this state. Beauty delights the eye, music pleases the ear, and a good book delights and relaxes the brain. Lose appreciation of this, and it may be time for the prodigy to review priorities.
Try to learn from the past. Remember, Oliver Heaviside antagonized just about everyone. He flatly refused to do rigorous proofs of his mathematics. He just stated that his methods worked, and those of his peers did not.
It was a few years before some mathemeticians realized that his methods were good, and conducted the rigorous proofs. Robert Turing, a brilliant man, whose work with computers advanced computer science and cryptology at a critical time, had his life ruined because he was a homosexual, and was unable to cope with the existing bigotry at the time. It does not matter who one is, or what knowledge or education is possessed,the person must be able to relate with people. A good negotiator can tell people to go to Hell, then get them to stand in line to buy tickets for the trip.
There is so much knowledge today that a prodigy must concentrate effort to master any subject or field. On the other hand, Robert Heinlein made a pretty good case for the renaissance man, stating that specialization was for insects. The prodigy must understand as many viewpoints as possible, then choose the correct path. Success should be measured as happiness, whether this means money, power, prestige, love, or personal satisfaction with a life well done.
There are plenty of tough environments, and computers designed to withstand them. Try working on the deck or in the superstructure of a ship at sea, or in a busy machine shop. My only objection to this pointing device is price, and if the company pays, the objection disappears.
This difficulty in getting accounts cancelled is a carryover from GTE dialup accounts. The only way to cancel a GTE dialup account was to dial a specific number. This number was always available, but only if the user knew how to locate it. Calling any other GTE business number would get you a promise of action, but no results. I finally found the right number after three months of being billed for a service I did not use.
Re:based on the NOVA episode
on
Longitude
·
· Score: 1
The Nova episode covers ocean navigation, not just the search for longitude. I had the privilege of visiting the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, and seeing John Harrison's clocks. Other comments cover this well.
I also worked at Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, and saw how the Marshallese use a knowledge of winds, current, and stars to find very small islands in a very large ocean. The islanders are aware that a stationary island in a steady wind and steady current has a wake, like a motorboat on a lake. The trade winds and ocean currents provide the environment. Marshallese, and other islanders, use a chart of sticks and cowrie shells as a guide, and feel the wave motion with their hands to search for island wakes.
A friend, Virgil Stennit, a telemetry technician, made a trading voyage on a ship navigated in this manner. He was suitably impressed when they unknowingly passed an island during the night. The crew spotted the discrepancy in currents, then the Captain turned the ship around to find the island's wake and the island. The Captain dipped his hand in the water to check the currents, and found landfall easily.
Increasing FBI monitoring powers is wrong because the court that hears wiretapping requests always agrees with the FBI that a suspected criminal is anyone the FBI says is suspect. Meanwhile, protecting yourself from the keyboard monitor is trivial. Never type anything critical on a computer electrically connected to anything else. Need to communicate? Use sneakernet to carry a disk with the encrypted message to a computer that is connected. Think you need more protection? Have a nice day.
I viewed and enjoyed some nude pictures of Australian Olympians posted in a newsgroup. It is highly unlikely the well-made pictures were approved by the IOC. The pronouncements of such high sounding groups are as irrelevant to Internet viewers as the pronouncements of the Soviet Communists when they tried to sack Gorbachev. Information is free, and attempts to control it are doomed. Banning information just assures it the widest possible dissemination. Denmark removed all forms of censorship, and the country still thrives. There was a brief flurry of porn sales until curiosity was satisfied, then life returned to normal, and the Danish police turned to matters far more important than small bookstores with limited numbers of customers. The control freaks have lost, although it may take them a few years, or centuries, to realize it.
People who fight changes in language are Luddites. Languages always change, and linguists have even figured out how they change well enough to determine how the proto-Indoeuropean language must have sounded. I will list a few examples:
Separate two groups speaking a common language, and in about six hundred years the two groups will speak mutually unintelligible languages. Several examples exist (Spain and Portugal, Scandinavia, Roman Empire, etc.) This fact was used to determine that the Amerindians were here a lot longer than the Clovis flint relics indicate.
Kill a language through corruption? Rabelais (1494-1553) deplored the way students were latinizing French. French survived. Latin alnost disappeared. The separate groups speaking Latin evolved their own languages.
If you feel English is static, try reading the King James Bible, Canterbury Tales, and Beowulf in the original text. Now, take a trip to England and read the road signs while you are there. Go to a pub, and listen to a Cockney and a Yorkshireman. Come back to the USA and listen to a mother from Yonkers talk to a Texas rancher.
Communications are now better than ever, and communications do promote a common language. It can also backfire. Stalin insisted on Russian throughout the USSR. It worked as a means of communication, but antagonized so many people that Russian as a common language is not very likely in the future.
Chinese ideographs are used as a means of communication by many peoples in the Orient. They are not a common language. The ideographs used by many nations are classical Chinese, comparable to Shakespearean English. The Chinese are several generations past that. They still understand the ideographs, but seldom use them in daily communication. Also, the meanings have changed over the years. The ideograph for engineer later meant technician, then later still meant skilled laborer.
My last trip to Europe included layovers in Sweden and Denmark. My Texas English worked until I tried to buy a dictionary. I went through the bookstore and found one. The lady was delighted to sell me a lexicon. Also we shorten "automobile" to "auto". The Swedes prefer "bil" (pronounced beel).
Language is a tool of communication. When it fails, it is changed or discarded. As in a popular science fiction series, resistance is futile. Go with the flow, and use whatever works.
Mr. Abagnale sounds like a man described by a fraud officer of the era as, "A man that could hand you a check on The Left Bank of the Missippi, signed by U. R. Hooked, get you to cash it, and be long gone before anything was suspected". If so, his health was broken by a long stay in a European prison, where the local authorities have a very limited sense of humor.
When I last read about him, Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Jr. was a Justice of the Peace in New Jersey, using his real name. In an interview, he pointed out that, as a medical doctor and surgeon, he never lost a patient, no matter what. He met many doctors that could not match this record.
I worked oveseas and at sea for US firms on Department of Defense contracts and foreign military contracts for over ten years. The biggest requirement here is a DoD security clearance at the proper level, even if you are working for a foreign military force. Generally, the worker is under military protection, and must behave per the desires of the base commander, and according to local custom. This means a great deal in countries like Saudi Arabia. In any case, avoid any political statement about any country or person. This is critical to your well being.
Foreign employers are a different matter. They work under their own rules, which usually bear little resemblance to US labor laws. Job requirements are clearly stated, including age, education, sex, marital status, and physical condition. Most employers will insist on a curriculum vitae (a detailed resume and life history), and several references. Do not submit these until asked. Get the IRS publications for expatriate workers and read them. Physical presence in a foreign country is easy to prove, but allows no deviations. Residence in a foreign country is difficult to establish, and will be disallowed for any of many listed, and some not so obvious, reasons.
Life can be very good in foreign countries, but it will be different. Be very adaptable, and enjoy all the good things. You will learn. Hopefully, you will also benefit.
I have known for a long time that I cannot distinguish yellow and blue very well. It is not a handicap in daily living, just a nuisance. Other people distinguish color differences better than I do, and those that work for commercial sewing thread distributors are awesome. It is not a reason to tell them to shut up, or to belittle them, which merely marks the speaker as a loser, and a handicapped one at that. As for four-color vision, tell your local sewing thread distributor about it. The distributor will actively search out these women, and do whatever is necessary to add them to the staff.
Paranoia means that you believe people are out to get you. When you know they are, it is called realism. The funny taste in your mouth is a side effect of both states.
My own time is more like 250 seconds, but my conclusions are the same. There will be no bomb found on the initial move with M$ and some other versions. Only a very few games can be solved with pure logic. It helps if the initial move uncovers a sizeable space with several bombs clearly indicated. Midgame may force one or more guesses, and end game may force a 50 percent, or less probable guess, on four or more spaces.
On the bright side, a cheat of the "easter egg" type does exist. I did not copy or remember it, and forgot the URL in a few minutes.
BadDoggie and Alioth both raise good points. The dream is an ordinary person strapping on a backpack and flying to a chosen destination without any worries. Reality is much uglier than that.
The means: a propellor-driven machine that will allow control in three dimensions. Helicopter and autogiro history tell us that this is not trivial, even under the best of conditions.
The medium: Air. Not nice, stable, dry, clean air found in laboratories and student problems, but that nasty stuff outside, full of water, dirt, bugs, and other pollutants. It varies constantly in density and velocity. Note that velocity includes direction and speed. In addition to the bearings to your destination, these other variables will affect your journey. They will probably be controlled by Murphy's Law. Have a nice day.
Other people: Some people drive as if they were sole owners of the road. Others attempt to follow the law, modified as necessary by changing conditions. Many people attempt to do other things while driving, with varying degrees of success. Add this to the items pointed out in The medium. This is real life. Hazards abound.
Past attempts: There have been limited successes in the past. The air car did fly, but only a few people had the money for a hand-built prototype and the time to master the skills necessary to pilot it. There were several reasons it did not succeed in the market, and blaming only politics, or science, or economy, or human nature, is short sighted. Back pack aircraft have flown. They had problems, too.
In spite of it all, I would buy a personal flying machine in a minute, if I could afford it. Take off and flight are fairly simple at low speed and altitude. It is the landing that worries me.
I was able to get Red Hat 5.2 working on an IBM 365CSD without problems. I had a PCMCIA 33.6K modem and 16MB of optional add-in memory installed already. Red Hat Linux works well. Battery life is not long, but I use it near wall sockets and telephone plugs. Bad is using a 640x480 window on an 1024x768 virtual screen, but only money for a new computer can fix that. This ancient device should be available on the used market for a reasonable price.
Re:Digital signatures are not really signatures.
on
GPG vs. PGP?
·
· Score: 1
R.J. Hansen is ignoring a vital point on on signatures that should be brought up. It does not matter what name, if any, is used when signing a contract. If the signer can be identified, the signature is valid. That is why an "X" can be used by an illiterate person, and is still a valid signature. Signing a document as "Mickey Mouse", then trying to disclaim it, will show the miscreant what "expensive mistake" means.
I am indebted to Willy Robertson, PE, for the following: In a three way conversation, All participants admitted to no schooling, but Alf said he knew how to sign with an "X". Bill said that his mother told him that his birth certificate showed a first, middle, and family name, so Bill signed with "XXX". Charlie then showed them his own signature, "XXX,XX". The others asked him, "Why five x's?" Charlie replied, "Charles D. Evans, Professional Engineer".
The short answer at the time was,"Processor of a micro, price of a mini, distribution of a main frame". Also, at the time, several computers died in the market because they lacked a color monitor. No color meant no sale. Color was added to the Next, but the originals did not have it and it came too late to save the machine. Also, Steve Jobs made the same mistake that brought down Ken Olsen of DEC, another brilliant man. Both men had the attitude,"Do it my way or not at all." The market does not like this attitude, and will look for an alternate solution as soon as possible. In the case of Ken Olsen, that was several years.
Spoken like a true member of the Flat Earth Society. Mathemeticians proved this logic faulty centuries ago. If you do not understand retrograde motion and elliptical orbits, study. Ignorance can be fixed, but stupidity is just a waste. You should be reluctant to display either.
You state that government is different now than it was in 1948. I respectfully disagree. It has not changed in any significant way since representative democracy was instituted by Caeser Augustus in Rome. Per Alistair Sims, Caeser Augustus looked to the Senate for advice and consent. He listened to a lot of advice and received a lot of consent. Extending suffrage to all citizens and to women are mere blips in history. The shift of power from one ruler to a group has been slower, and it is still happening. Lobbying and bribes have existed since the first day in Rome.
Note that this is about representative democracy, described by Winston Churchill as the worst form of government in existence, except for every other form. Direct democracy, as practiced in ancient Greece, is pretty much limited to Switzerland and to town meetings in some of the United States.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember the NexT computer. It was monochrome, when people attending computer expos were ignoring booths with monochrome displays. It was a closed hardware system, when at least one successful company was selling a "shell" PC, where even the cpu was on a plug-in card. People, especially business people, wanted to configure their own computers, not be forced to use whatever some manufacturer decided was right. Color was added, but it was already too late. The idea of paying a premium price for a computer that could not be updated easily when another great idea came along had little appeal. NeXT software was indeed great, and revolutionary, and a masterpiece. But the best comment I heard on the hardware was,"NeXT: CPU of a micro, cost of a mini, distribution of a mainframe."
Keep looking in old articles and you will find that patents in telephone encryption often have to cite the work of the recently deceased movie star Hedy Lamar as prior art. She worked with engineers in her husband's company to develop telephone encryption. Her ideas were innovative and sound, but barely workable in WWII technology. The same could be said of the system described in this /. article.
I hate to disappoint all the doomsayers on Slashdot, but this "weapon" has been known for years. The EMP desired has infinite energy in an infinitely narrow pulse, and comes from the same store that sells frictionless bearings and perfect insulators. As with the bearings and insulators, the engineer settles for less than the perfect solution, but one that will do the desired job anyway. The pulse of interest is an impulse, where all of the energy available is packed into a pulse with the sharpest rise time possible, and the narrowest width, with the falling edge shaped for best utility. Such a pulse will have usable energy over a very wide frequency spectrum, and can be used to calibrate test receiver response, tune amplifiers, and so forth, as long as pulse power is kept low. This is available, and is a tool in daily use.
The military raises the power to the highest level possible, covers all the frequencies it can, and tries to burn out everything. This is impractical to the point of being impossible without imposing some limits. Infinite power at infinite bandwidth is not yet available. Enough power at the frequencies of interest is one object of electronic warfare, an ongoing game between nations that has no end in sight.
As a civilian, your defense against such a weapon does not exist. If it is perfected, your computer, TV, hifi, Internet and other communications, and possibly even electric power, will be destroyed instantly in some radius from the firing point. Inside the radius of destruction your equipment is toast. Actually implementing such a superweapon will be expensive. Defense against it will be expensive. The energy expended in talk and paperwork will dwarf the weapon itself. Welcome to the real world.
Peter Dyck has made an intelligent comment, which should be read carefully. Allow me to be the devil's advocate and state another point of view. One of my employers had an exceptionally good wireman, far better than his associates. They promoted him to foreman, feeling he would pass his skills on to the others in his area. It was a disaster. He was a wireman, not a manager or instructor. The company ended up with lower quality work, and less one very good wireman.
One point missed by many in this thread is the company itself. It exists, makes money, hires people, sells product. They are doing something, probably many things, right. If an individual really is smarter than company management, he should be able to buy the compay out of his own pocket, or rise through the chain of command to be the head man. I do not except women, it is just difficult to write in unisex. Also, I have seen both cases succeed. People with this much talent are rare, but they exist.
As for the original question, there is much advice in the thread, but only one person who can choose. Accept the company's choice, move on, or reach a compromise. My best advice is not to antagonize anyone, and if you sue the company, get enough to live out your life in comfort, because your career is finished.
Godsday? Would you be refering to Sunday, used by Christians that won't use the Sabbath, sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, which was chosen by God and is still observed by Hebrews and some Christians? Perhaps you mean Friday, observed by Muslims. There are numerous religions that have their own idea of the proper dates of worship, and have no allegiance to the God recognized by Abraham.
Attempting to create a universal calendar based on one person's limited knowledge and ideas is doomed to failure. Old and proud cultures will dismiss the project as the ravings of a spoiled brat who is uneducated in the ways of the world.
Defeating all other cultures, then forcing your ideas on everyone might seem like a good idea, but Alexander, Caeser, and Hitler are among those that tried and failed. Save time and effort by using the calendar we have. It works, and those that do not agree with it have adapted to it anyway.
Betamax is technically superior to VHS. This was never disputed. It had a shorter recording time per tape, a failing addressed by Sony a little too late. And, according to an engineer at an ATT booth at a state fair, Sony took a strong stand against porn on their tapes. The engineer said this was the final thing that guaranteed the faiure of Betamax. People wanted their racy movies, and were intolerant of prudes saying,"You can't have them on our system. We won't allow it!"
I could say,"I agree!", and be done with it, but that would cheat a prodigy and a tutor of a little helpful advice.
A prodigy must be able to communicate. The tools are language, with English having the widest use among engineers/scientists now, and mathematics, where quantum theory is still the end of the line.
Humanities, appreciation of beauty for its own sake, is important. George Santayana wrote an excellent essay on this subject. Beauty is important to many people, and success in any field will require that you get along with and understand people.
For the same reason, study some psychology, history, geography, literature, and related subjects. It helps the prodigy to understand people. There is no need to ovedo it, but a year or two of each will broaden the prodigy's viewpoint, and lead to the understanding of people and their motives, even if said prodigy disagrees with them.
The prodigy will probably find a specialty while a student. This should be something enjoyable, because the amount of time devoted to it will eventually overwhelm all else. Do not be in a hurry to reach this state. Beauty delights the eye, music pleases the ear, and a good book delights and relaxes the brain. Lose appreciation of this, and it may be time for the prodigy to review priorities.
Try to learn from the past. Remember, Oliver Heaviside antagonized just about everyone. He flatly refused to do rigorous proofs of his mathematics. He just stated that his methods worked, and those of his peers did not.
It was a few years before some mathemeticians realized that his methods were good, and conducted the rigorous proofs. Robert Turing, a brilliant man, whose work with computers advanced computer science and cryptology at a critical time, had his life ruined because he was a homosexual, and was unable to cope with the existing bigotry at the time. It does not matter who one is, or what knowledge or education is possessed,the person must be able to relate with people. A good negotiator can tell people to go to Hell, then get them to stand in line to buy tickets for the trip.
There is so much knowledge today that a prodigy must concentrate effort to master any subject or field. On the other hand, Robert Heinlein made a pretty good case for the renaissance man, stating that specialization was for insects. The prodigy must understand as many viewpoints as possible, then choose the correct path. Success should be measured as happiness, whether this means money, power, prestige, love, or personal satisfaction with a life well done.
There are plenty of tough environments, and computers designed to withstand them. Try working on the deck or in the superstructure of a ship at sea, or in a busy machine shop. My only objection to this pointing device is price, and if the company pays, the objection disappears.
This difficulty in getting accounts cancelled is a carryover from GTE dialup accounts. The only way to cancel a GTE dialup account was to dial a specific number. This number was always available, but only if the user knew how to locate it. Calling any other GTE business number would get you a promise of action, but no results. I finally found the right number after three months of being billed for a service I did not use.
The Nova episode covers ocean navigation, not just the search for longitude. I had the privilege of visiting the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, and seeing John Harrison's clocks. Other comments cover this well.
I also worked at Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, and saw how the Marshallese use a knowledge of winds, current, and stars to find very small islands in a very large ocean. The islanders are aware that a stationary island in a steady wind and steady current has a wake, like a motorboat on a lake. The trade winds and ocean currents provide the environment. Marshallese, and other islanders, use a chart of sticks and cowrie shells as a guide, and feel the wave motion with their hands to search for island wakes.
A friend, Virgil Stennit, a telemetry technician, made a trading voyage on a ship navigated in this manner. He was suitably impressed when they unknowingly passed an island during the night. The crew spotted the discrepancy in currents, then the Captain turned the ship around to find the island's wake and the island. The Captain dipped his hand in the water to check the currents, and found landfall easily.
Increasing FBI monitoring powers is wrong because the court that hears wiretapping requests always agrees with the FBI that a suspected criminal is anyone the FBI says is suspect. Meanwhile, protecting yourself from the keyboard monitor is trivial. Never type anything critical on a computer electrically connected to anything else. Need to communicate? Use sneakernet to carry a disk with the encrypted message to a computer that is connected. Think you need more protection? Have a nice day.
I viewed and enjoyed some nude pictures of Australian Olympians posted in a newsgroup. It is highly unlikely the well-made pictures were approved by the IOC. The pronouncements of such high sounding groups are as irrelevant to Internet viewers as the pronouncements of the Soviet Communists when they tried to sack Gorbachev. Information is free, and attempts to control it are doomed. Banning information just assures it the widest possible dissemination. Denmark removed all forms of censorship, and the country still thrives. There was a brief flurry of porn sales until curiosity was satisfied, then life returned to normal, and the Danish police turned to matters far more important than small bookstores with limited numbers of customers. The control freaks have lost, although it may take them a few years, or centuries, to realize it.
People who fight changes in language are Luddites. Languages always change, and linguists have even figured out how they change well enough to determine how the proto-Indoeuropean language must have sounded. I will list a few examples:
Separate two groups speaking a common language, and in about six hundred years the two groups will speak mutually unintelligible languages. Several examples exist (Spain and Portugal, Scandinavia, Roman Empire, etc.) This fact was used to determine that the Amerindians were here a lot longer than the Clovis flint relics indicate.
Kill a language through corruption? Rabelais (1494-1553) deplored the way students were latinizing French. French survived. Latin alnost disappeared. The separate groups speaking Latin evolved their own languages.
If you feel English is static, try reading the King James Bible, Canterbury Tales, and Beowulf in the original text. Now, take a trip to England and read the road signs while you are there. Go to a pub, and listen to a Cockney and a Yorkshireman. Come back to the USA and listen to a mother from Yonkers talk to a Texas rancher.
Communications are now better than ever, and communications do promote a common language. It can also backfire. Stalin insisted on Russian throughout the USSR. It worked as a means of communication, but antagonized so many people that Russian as a common language is not very likely in the future.
Chinese ideographs are used as a means of communication by many peoples in the Orient. They are not a common language. The ideographs used by many nations are classical Chinese, comparable to Shakespearean English. The Chinese are several generations past that. They still understand the ideographs, but seldom use them in daily communication. Also, the meanings have changed over the years. The ideograph for engineer later meant technician, then later still meant skilled laborer.
My last trip to Europe included layovers in Sweden and Denmark. My Texas English worked until I tried to buy a dictionary. I went through the bookstore and found one. The lady was delighted to sell me a lexicon. Also we shorten "automobile" to "auto". The Swedes prefer "bil" (pronounced beel).
Language is a tool of communication. When it fails, it is changed or discarded. As in a popular science fiction series, resistance is futile. Go with the flow, and use whatever works.
Mr. Abagnale sounds like a man described by a fraud officer of the era as, "A man that could hand you a check on The Left Bank of the Missippi, signed by U. R. Hooked, get you to cash it, and be long gone before anything was suspected". If so, his health was broken by a long stay in a European prison, where the local authorities have a very limited sense of humor.
When I last read about him, Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Jr. was a Justice of the Peace in New Jersey, using his real name. In an interview, he pointed out that, as a medical doctor and surgeon, he never lost a patient, no matter what. He met many doctors that could not match this record.
I worked oveseas and at sea for US firms on Department of Defense contracts and foreign military contracts for over ten years. The biggest requirement here is a DoD security clearance at the proper level, even if you are working for a foreign military force. Generally, the worker is under military protection, and must behave per the desires of the base commander, and according to local custom. This means a great deal in countries like Saudi Arabia. In any case, avoid any political statement about any country or person. This is critical to your well being.
Foreign employers are a different matter. They work under their own rules, which usually bear little resemblance to US labor laws. Job requirements are clearly stated, including age, education, sex, marital status, and physical condition. Most employers will insist on a curriculum vitae (a detailed resume and life history), and several references. Do not submit these until asked. Get the IRS publications for expatriate workers and read them. Physical presence in a foreign country is easy to prove, but allows no deviations. Residence in a foreign country is difficult to establish, and will be disallowed for any of many listed, and some not so obvious, reasons.
Life can be very good in foreign countries, but it will be different. Be very adaptable, and enjoy all the good things. You will learn. Hopefully, you will also benefit.
I have known for a long time that I cannot distinguish yellow and blue very well. It is not a handicap in daily living, just a nuisance. Other people distinguish color differences better than I do, and those that work for commercial sewing thread distributors are awesome. It is not a reason to tell them to shut up, or to belittle them, which merely marks the speaker as a loser, and a handicapped one at that. As for four-color vision, tell your local sewing thread distributor about it. The distributor will actively search out these women, and do whatever is necessary to add them to the staff.
Paranoia means that you believe people are out to get you. When you know they are, it is called realism. The funny taste in your mouth is a side effect of both states.
My own time is more like 250 seconds, but my conclusions are the same. There will be no bomb found on the initial move with M$ and some other versions. Only a very few games can be solved with pure logic. It helps if the initial move uncovers a sizeable space with several bombs clearly indicated. Midgame may force one or more guesses, and end game may force a 50 percent, or less probable guess, on four or more spaces.
On the bright side, a cheat of the "easter egg" type does exist. I did not copy or remember it, and forgot the URL in a few minutes.
BadDoggie and Alioth both raise good points. The dream is an ordinary person strapping on a backpack and flying to a chosen destination without any worries. Reality is much uglier than that.
The means: a propellor-driven machine that will allow control in three dimensions. Helicopter and autogiro history tell us that this is not trivial, even under the best of conditions.
The medium: Air. Not nice, stable, dry, clean air found in laboratories and student problems, but that nasty stuff outside, full of water, dirt, bugs, and other pollutants. It varies constantly in density and velocity. Note that velocity includes direction and speed. In addition to the bearings to your destination, these other variables will affect your journey. They will probably be controlled by Murphy's Law. Have a nice day.
Other people: Some people drive as if they were sole owners of the road. Others attempt to follow the law, modified as necessary by changing conditions. Many people attempt to do other things while driving, with varying degrees of success. Add this to the items pointed out in The medium. This is real life. Hazards abound.
Past attempts: There have been limited successes in the past. The air car did fly, but only a few people had the money for a hand-built prototype and the time to master the skills necessary to pilot it. There were several reasons it did not succeed in the market, and blaming only politics, or science, or economy, or human nature, is short sighted. Back pack aircraft have flown. They had problems, too.
In spite of it all, I would buy a personal flying machine in a minute, if I could afford it. Take off and flight are fairly simple at low speed and altitude. It is the landing that worries me.
I was able to get Red Hat 5.2 working on an IBM 365CSD without problems. I had a PCMCIA 33.6K modem and 16MB of optional add-in memory installed already. Red Hat Linux works well. Battery life is not long, but I use it near wall sockets and telephone plugs. Bad is using a 640x480 window on an 1024x768 virtual screen, but only money for a new computer can fix that. This ancient device should be available on the used market for a reasonable price.
R.J. Hansen is ignoring a vital point on on signatures that should be brought up. It does not matter what name, if any, is used when signing a contract. If the signer can be identified, the signature is valid. That is why an "X" can be used by an illiterate person, and is still a valid signature. Signing a document as "Mickey Mouse", then trying to disclaim it, will show the miscreant what "expensive mistake" means.
I am indebted to Willy Robertson, PE, for the following: In a three way conversation, All participants admitted to no schooling, but Alf said he knew how to sign with an "X". Bill said that his mother told him that his birth certificate showed a first, middle, and family name, so Bill signed with "XXX". Charlie then showed them his own signature, "XXX,XX". The others asked him, "Why five x's?" Charlie replied, "Charles D. Evans, Professional Engineer".
The short answer at the time was,"Processor of a micro, price of a mini, distribution of a main frame". Also, at the time, several computers died in the market because they lacked a color monitor. No color meant no sale. Color was added to the Next, but the originals did not have it and it came too late to save the machine. Also, Steve Jobs made the same mistake that brought down Ken Olsen of DEC, another brilliant man. Both men had the attitude,"Do it my way or not at all." The market does not like this attitude, and will look for an alternate solution as soon as possible. In the case of Ken Olsen, that was several years.
Spoken like a true member of the Flat Earth Society. Mathemeticians proved this logic faulty centuries ago. If you do not understand retrograde motion and elliptical orbits, study. Ignorance can be fixed, but stupidity is just a waste. You should be reluctant to display either.
You state that government is different now than it was in 1948. I respectfully disagree. It has not changed in any significant way since representative democracy was instituted by Caeser Augustus in Rome. Per Alistair Sims, Caeser Augustus looked to the Senate for advice and consent. He listened to a lot of advice and received a lot of consent. Extending suffrage to all citizens and to women are mere blips in history. The shift of power from one ruler to a group has been slower, and it is still happening. Lobbying and bribes have existed since the first day in Rome.
Note that this is about representative democracy, described by Winston Churchill as the worst form of government in existence, except for every other form. Direct democracy, as practiced in ancient Greece, is pretty much limited to Switzerland and to town meetings in some of the United States.