For those of you not paying attention a couple years ago, our current President spent (invested) two decades of his life building the Chicago Public School system up (as a community organizer and local politician) to what it is now - from the NY Times:
One of the biggest lessons Mr. Obama drew from his experiences in Chicago, associates said, is that student achievement is highly dependent on teacher quality.
In the two decades since Mr. Obama arrived in Chicago, its public schools have undergone a sweeping turnaround, from an education wasteland to a district that, while still facing major challenges, is among the most improved in the nation. The city has closed many failing schools and reopened them with new staffs, making it an important laboratory for one of the country’s most vexing problems
The mayor 'floated' two possible 'fixes' for what ails chicago's ailing school system (wasn't our 44th president a community activist trying to improve public education in Chicago? What happened? Why is it not better?) - a fifth year of high school and a brainiac academy. Neither addresses the problems and would likely impact the average Chicago Public School student.
A fifth year of high school would have little impact, as these children managed to avoid getting a proper education in the first 13 years of public school, plus some amount of 'Head Start' programs, how in the world can anyone think adding a 14th year make a difference? It would increase the number of teachers by 1/14th and would require 25% more high school classrooms. Why not simply enforce a 'no social promotion policy' and start to cull the ranks of the teachers weeding out those that aren't effective?
A brainiac academy ony supports/aids those already succeding, draining the teaching pool of all the good teachers, and leaving those most in need of help to fend for themselves without even the benefit of a smart kid to help them with their homework/copy off of during tests.
In these tough economic times, several states are looking at eliminating the requirement for a 12th grade/senior year of public school, since kids are able to complete their required studies in before their senior year. Iowa is considering granting a bit of money as a scholarship (of sorts) of $2,500 toward their freshman year of college.
Mayor, get your teachers to do their job in the first 13 years (K-12), don't punish the kids for one more year, and pulling the brainiacs out of the general student population only helps those that have overcome the challenges your schools pose to their students, it does nothing for those left behind.
ISO-9001 is not about specific steps, methods, techniques or policies, it is about that you have a plan/procedure, that you follow the plan, and that the following of that plan is documented (and includes a feedback loop for process improvement?).
I remember when I worked at a large telco equipment supplier that was going for ISO-9001 certification, we were told about a restaurant that was ISO-9001 certified - the owners did it as a lark, and it was quite simple. Your plans procedures can be quite thin, you just need to follow them and have documentation that shows you follow the procedures...
You know, the government has done stranger things to funnel money to folks it wanted to (Iran-Contra)
One of the things that make this conspiracy theory so hard to make is that it spans two administrations...
What if the only proof they had the group was a terrorist front, funneling money to terrorists, was from the intercepted calls, so they "convieniently" loose terrorist-group status (since the evidence is thrown out) just in time to collect their "damages" from Uncle Sam... "Isn't that so convieeeeeenient!?" (sorry, channeling Dana Carvey's Church Lady http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnCZxLvYXI8)
the judge said that the government was liable to pay them damages
Now, what if it is found that those damages payments are in fact funneled to a terrorist organization, could the government be tried for aiding our enemies by giving them money? That could make for some interesting blog posts on both the left AND the right!
...to the kid that "hacked" (and I use that term loosely) into Gov. Palin's Yahoo email accounts? Was he ever convicted? He was a domestic offender, this is a foreign offender, but seems fairly similar to me...
Also, as President, all communication is supposed to be archived, is the Gov't archiving all of them?
I can't believe those intrusive, brain-dead republicans, led by Karl Rove and his minions want to roll out a national ID card, just another intrusion into our privacy, things will be so different when Obama gets in office, that's for sure!
Why didn't we fix the problems now? Where are the medicare "fraud busters" in this reform bill?
All I heard about was the new IRS agents needed to enforce compliance with this bill.
I never even hinted that the CARE provided by Medicare was in any way inferior - I said there was rampant fraud, and I provided a link to support my fraud claim.
contrary to what Fox will tell you, it will not affect anyone who is currently happy with their insurance.
You believe that? Really? Put the doom and gloom aside, this bill will expand the definition of "covered children" to include adults up to 26 years old and will add all those millions of folks with pre-existing conditions to existing policies - both of those changes will drive up premiums.
Increased taxes, fines, and surcharges will also touch most Americans in their wallet.
It is also estimated to drive doctors out of the health care industry, not attract more doctors to field - that will impact many Americans as well.
You don't have to listen/trust Fox News, but you really should tune away from MSNBC from time to time...
I understand Medicare has among the highest rate of fraud and abuse in the insurance industry, expanding that "flawed" program to every breathing American would likely lead to unheard-of levels of fraud and corruption...
Aside from that likely reality, sounds like a fine idea.
Here's one example from the NY Times on a recent bust in Florida:
The raids came a week after a report that Miami-Dade County got more than half a billion dollars from Medicare in home health care payments intended for the sickest patients in 2008, more than the rest of the country combined, even though only 2 percent of those patients nationwide live there.
There are near and long-term changes to healthcare in this bill/soon-to-be law as I understand it, the near-term changes will require the definition of "child" to be expanded to age 26 and pre-existing conditions will no longer be a basis for exclusion. Fine, but I've also been told that these changes will somehow lower my health insurance coverage premiums, but I don't see how,,,
Does anyone care to explain to me how it is possible that doing such a thing is more cost effective than just purchasing stuff already on the market in bulk? I've been wondering it for years after seeing this.
Really?
Buying in Qty affords the buyer the ability to customize the items.
As I recall from a presentation about the servers at Google, while they are based on off-the-shelf items, most elements are customized - for example, the power supplies are built to runn of DC, simplifying the design and lowere electrical costs. They specify MB with very few on-board options, emphasising processor and RAM capacity, but ignoring USB, video, sound, other things usually included in consumer MBs.
Here is a link to an article on what appears to be the same generation "google server" your photos show - the text describes design choices made to produce highly-efficient compute clusters:
Luckily, Google's fiber infrastructure is "free" - they don't pay for right of way, to maintain the connections,oversee the network, etc...
These really silly interpretations of "analysis" by financial folks is pretty amusing, actually - I suspect the report actually said something like "ignoring the deployment and on-going costs of their infrastructure Google has essentially free internet access"...
Do they think fiber, routers, switches, networking professionals, and right-of-ways are "free"?
At the end, the code was assembler, and the compiler wasn't even called - just the linker. I can't say for sure where a C program ends and an assembler program begins, but I'm fairly certain that the last few iterations are assembler, based on the "let's do away with the compiler" suggestion.
Also, "Hello World" programs have to, you know, actually display the message "Hello World" - this is a program that isn't written in C, and doesn't write "Hello World" - care to revisit the title of this entry?
Mainframers have been using this most simple of all utilities for decades - literally. The Wikipedia entry on it has a good write-up about this (literal) do-nothing program. It's whole purpose is to provide a mechanisim to to exploit the various functions contained in JCL to create, delete, and otherwise manipulate datasets on mainframes.
so the FCC can rape comcast and FIOS already so we get the speeds we are paying for!
Picking a few nits, you are getting the speed you are paying for - you aren't getting the speed you were promised/thought you were promised.
All the FCC is gonna do is get the ISPs to scale down their promises, not lower monthly bills (to match your actual speed) or raise connection speeds (to justify your payment) based on what you think you were promised.
Too many consumers fail to grasp the meaning of "best-effort" and "up to" - all the ISP needs to prove is that the quoted speed is POSSIBLE, anything beyond that are the consumer's assumptions - nothing more.
FBI Hollow-Nickel Story
on
Hollow Spy Coins
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Hollow Nickel, Hidden Agent
What’s a nickel worth?
No, it’s not a riddle. It’s a case straight from the pages of FBI history.
It all started in June 1953, when a Brooklyn newspaper boy picked up a nickel he’d just dropped. Almost like magic, the coin split in half. And inside was a tiny photograph, showing a series of numbers too small to read.
Even if the boy kept up with the front page news on the papers he delivered, he probably never would have guessed that this extraordinary coin was the product of one of the most vital national security issues of the day: the growing Cold War between the world’s two nuclear powers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
The coin ultimately made its way to the FBI, which opened a counterintelligence case, knowing the coin suggested there was an active spy in New York City. But who?
New York agents quickly began working to trace the hollow nickel. They talked to the ladies who passed the nickel on to the delivery boy, with no success. They talked to local novelty store owners, but none had seen anything like it. A lot of shoe leather was ruined, but no hot leads emerged.
Meanwhile, the coin itself underwent expert examination. FBI Lab scientists in Washington pored over it. They immediately realized the photograph contained a coded message, but they couldn’t crack it. The coin did yield clues, however. The type-print, Lab experts concluded, must have come from a foreign typewriter. Metallurgy showed that the back half was from a coin minted during World War II. Ultimately, the coin was filed away, but not forgotten.
The key break came four years later, when a Russian spy named Reino Hayhanen defected to the United States. Hayhanen—really the American born Eugene Maki—shared all kinds of secrets on Soviet spies. He led FBI agents to one out-of-the-way hiding place, called a “dead drop,” where FBI agents found a hollowed-out bolt with a typewritten message inside. When asked about it, Hayhanen said the Soviets had given him all kinds of hollowed-out objects: pens, screws, batteries, even coins. He turned over one such coin, which instantly reminded agents of the Brooklyn nickel. The link was made.
From there, Hayhanen put investigators on the trail of his case officer, a Soviet spy named “Mark” who was operating without diplomatic cover and under several false identities.
After painstaking detective work, agents figured out that “Mark” was really William Fisher, aka Rudolf Abel, who was arrested on June 21, 1957. Though Abel refused to talk, his hotel room and office revealed an important prize: a treasure trove of modern espionage equipment.
Abel was eventually convicted of espionage and sentenced to a long jail term. In 1962, he was exchanged for American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers, who had been shot down over the U.S.S.R. and held prisoner there.
In the end, a nickel was worth a great deal: the capture of a Soviet spy and the protection of a nation.
Really, a scandal? From your description it could just as easily be that Flip Philips acted like a "whiny sanctimonious asshole" on the phone when asking about charging his CC before shipping the book. I wonder if Flip made a point of reporting on this grave injustice since using Tufte's name would likely drive traffic from google and other search engines to his little blog at Skidmore...
It's not the incompetent job they did registering voters,,, (Note, incompetent does not mean "criminal") It's not the money laundering charges... (Although they probably had a legal obligation to report someone planning to commit a crime, BIANAL)
What it is, is their financial structure, they way the bring in money from the federal government to, say, help lower-income folks secure affordable housing, but the federal funds wind up disappearing into the corporate structure and funding other activities (AIG executive homes bus tours in CT, paying for campaign activities, etc.).
The kids dressed up as pimps and ho's were simply the final straw that put ACORN on the radar of the mainstream media...
Slashdot Mirror
Here in Central NJ Comcast charges me $16.95/mo for a dual tuner HD cable box, able to record two HD programs at once.
If I had a TiVo I'd need what, two CableCards PLUS a monthly TiVo subscription?
Comcast's DVR service takes the place of a conventional digital cable box and adds about $7 month to give me dual-channel HD DVR service.
When I realized that, I turned in my conventional digital cable box and cancelled my TiVo subscription and saved over $20 month.
I miss TiVo's added features/interface, but saving $20/month is pretty good.
For those of you not paying attention a couple years ago, our current President spent (invested) two decades of his life building the Chicago Public School system up (as a community organizer and local politician) to what it is now - from the NY Times:
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/10/us/politics/10educate.html
Remeber, improvement is easy, if you're already at rock-bottom...
Lewis Black, on President Clinton's educational achievements: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7axLyrK12ms
The mayor 'floated' two possible 'fixes' for what ails chicago's ailing school system (wasn't our 44th president a community activist trying to improve public education in Chicago? What happened? Why is it not better?) - a fifth year of high school and a brainiac academy. Neither addresses the problems and would likely impact the average Chicago Public School student.
A fifth year of high school would have little impact, as these children managed to avoid getting a proper education in the first 13 years of public school, plus some amount of 'Head Start' programs, how in the world can anyone think adding a 14th year make a difference? It would increase the number of teachers by 1/14th and would require 25% more high school classrooms. Why not simply enforce a 'no social promotion policy' and start to cull the ranks of the teachers weeding out those that aren't effective?
A brainiac academy ony supports/aids those already succeding, draining the teaching pool of all the good teachers, and leaving those most in need of help to fend for themselves without even the benefit of a smart kid to help them with their homework/copy off of during tests.
In these tough economic times, several states are looking at eliminating the requirement for a 12th grade/senior year of public school, since kids are able to complete their required studies in before their senior year. Iowa is considering granting a bit of money as a scholarship (of sorts) of $2,500 toward their freshman year of college.
Mayor, get your teachers to do their job in the first 13 years (K-12), don't punish the kids for one more year, and pulling the brainiacs out of the general student population only helps those that have overcome the challenges your schools pose to their students, it does nothing for those left behind.
ISO-9001 is not about specific steps, methods, techniques or policies, it is about that you have a plan/procedure, that you follow the plan, and that the following of that plan is documented (and includes a feedback loop for process improvement?).
I remember when I worked at a large telco equipment supplier that was going for ISO-9001 certification, we were told about a restaurant that was ISO-9001 certified - the owners did it as a lark, and it was quite simple. Your plans procedures can be quite thin, you just need to follow them and have documentation that shows you follow the procedures...
You know, the government has done stranger things to funnel money to folks it wanted to (Iran-Contra)
One of the things that make this conspiracy theory so hard to make is that it spans two administrations...
What if the only proof they had the group was a terrorist front, funneling money to terrorists, was from the intercepted calls, so they "convieniently" loose terrorist-group status (since the evidence is thrown out) just in time to collect their "damages" from Uncle Sam... "Isn't that so convieeeeeenient!?" (sorry, channeling Dana Carvey's Church Lady http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnCZxLvYXI8)
That should get a few tin foil hats spinning ;^)
The offense was commited in 2004 - you only waited 6 years. (Ten years ago Bill Clinton was in the White House)
The excerpt said:
Now, what if it is found that those damages payments are in fact funneled to a terrorist organization, could the government be tried for aiding our enemies by giving them money? That could make for some interesting blog posts on both the left AND the right!
...to the kid that "hacked" (and I use that term loosely) into Gov. Palin's Yahoo email accounts? Was he ever convicted? He was a domestic offender, this is a foreign offender, but seems fairly similar to me...
Also, as President, all communication is supposed to be archived, is the Gov't archiving all of them?
I can't believe those intrusive, brain-dead republicans, led by Karl Rove and his minions want to roll out a national ID card, just another intrusion into our privacy, things will be so different when Obama gets in office, that's for sure!
Wait, what?
Oh crap... Never mind.
They didn't have a flag! (Eddie Izzard can explain for you here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTduy7Qkvk8 )
Why didn't we fix the problems now? Where are the medicare "fraud busters" in this reform bill?
All I heard about was the new IRS agents needed to enforce compliance with this bill.
I never even hinted that the CARE provided by Medicare was in any way inferior - I said there was rampant fraud, and I provided a link to support my fraud claim.
You believe that? Really? Put the doom and gloom aside, this bill will expand the definition of "covered children" to include adults up to 26 years old and will add all those millions of folks with pre-existing conditions to existing policies - both of those changes will drive up premiums.
Increased taxes, fines, and surcharges will also touch most Americans in their wallet.
It is also estimated to drive doctors out of the health care industry, not attract more doctors to field - that will impact many Americans as well.
You don't have to listen/trust Fox News, but you really should tune away from MSNBC from time to time...
Obviously referring to Steve Jobs - nice. ;^)
I understand Medicare has among the highest rate of fraud and abuse in the insurance industry, expanding that "flawed" program to every breathing American would likely lead to unheard-of levels of fraud and corruption...
Aside from that likely reality, sounds like a fine idea.
Here's one example from the NY Times on a recent bust in Florida:
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/16/us/16fraud.html
There are near and long-term changes to healthcare in this bill/soon-to-be law as I understand it, the near-term changes will require the definition of "child" to be expanded to age 26 and pre-existing conditions will no longer be a basis for exclusion. Fine, but I've also been told that these changes will somehow lower my health insurance coverage premiums, but I don't see how,,,
Really?
Buying in Qty affords the buyer the ability to customize the items.
As I recall from a presentation about the servers at Google, while they are based on off-the-shelf items, most elements are customized - for example, the power supplies are built to runn of DC, simplifying the design and lowere electrical costs. They specify MB with very few on-board options, emphasising processor and RAM capacity, but ignoring USB, video, sound, other things usually included in consumer MBs.
Here is a link to an article on what appears to be the same generation "google server" your photos show - the text describes design choices made to produce highly-efficient compute clusters:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html
Luckily, Google's fiber infrastructure is "free" - they don't pay for right of way, to maintain the connections,oversee the network, etc...
These really silly interpretations of "analysis" by financial folks is pretty amusing, actually - I suspect the report actually said something like "ignoring the deployment and on-going costs of their infrastructure Google has essentially free internet access"...
Do they think fiber, routers, switches, networking professionals, and right-of-ways are "free"?
At the end, the code was assembler, and the compiler wasn't even called - just the linker. I can't say for sure where a C program ends and an assembler program begins, but I'm fairly certain that the last few iterations are assembler, based on the "let's do away with the compiler" suggestion.
Also, "Hello World" programs have to, you know, actually display the message "Hello World" - this is a program that isn't written in C, and doesn't write "Hello World" - care to revisit the title of this entry?
Mainframers have been using this most simple of all utilities for decades - literally. The Wikipedia entry on it has a good write-up about this (literal) do-nothing program. It's whole purpose is to provide a mechanisim to to exploit the various functions contained in JCL to create, delete, and otherwise manipulate datasets on mainframes.
The wikipedia entry is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEFBR14
Uhm, no, it COULD produce child porn, or adult porn, or a reality TV show, etc...
Presumably, optional proprietary laptops and mandatory open-source laptops are OK?
That's right, only closed-source software is used for nefarious purposes, right?
Picking a few nits, you are getting the speed you are paying for - you aren't getting the speed you were promised/thought you were promised.
All the FCC is gonna do is get the ISPs to scale down their promises, not lower monthly bills (to match your actual speed) or raise connection speeds (to justify your payment) based on what you think you were promised.
Too many consumers fail to grasp the meaning of "best-effort" and "up to" - all the ISP needs to prove is that the quoted speed is POSSIBLE, anything beyond that are the consumer's assumptions - nothing more.
Hollow Nickel, Hidden Agent
What’s a nickel worth?
No, it’s not a riddle. It’s a case straight from the pages of FBI history.
It all started in June 1953, when a Brooklyn newspaper boy picked up a nickel he’d just dropped. Almost like magic, the coin split in half. And inside was a tiny photograph, showing a series of numbers too small to read.
Even if the boy kept up with the front page news on the papers he delivered, he probably never would have guessed that this extraordinary coin was the product of one of the most vital national security issues of the day: the growing Cold War between the world’s two nuclear powers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
The coin ultimately made its way to the FBI, which opened a counterintelligence case, knowing the coin suggested there was an active spy in New York City. But who?
New York agents quickly began working to trace the hollow nickel. They talked to the ladies who passed the nickel on to the delivery boy, with no success. They talked to local novelty store owners, but none had seen anything like it. A lot of shoe leather was ruined, but no hot leads emerged.
Meanwhile, the coin itself underwent expert examination. FBI Lab scientists in Washington pored over it. They immediately realized the photograph contained a coded message, but they couldn’t crack it. The coin did yield clues, however. The type-print, Lab experts concluded, must have come from a foreign typewriter. Metallurgy showed that the back half was from a coin minted during World War II. Ultimately, the coin was filed away, but not forgotten.
The key break came four years later, when a Russian spy named Reino Hayhanen defected to the United States. Hayhanen—really the American born Eugene Maki—shared all kinds of secrets on Soviet spies. He led FBI agents to one out-of-the-way hiding place, called a “dead drop,” where FBI agents found a hollowed-out bolt with a typewritten message inside. When asked about it, Hayhanen said the Soviets had given him all kinds of hollowed-out objects: pens, screws, batteries, even coins. He turned over one such coin, which instantly reminded agents of the Brooklyn nickel. The link was made.
From there, Hayhanen put investigators on the trail of his case officer, a Soviet spy named “Mark” who was operating without diplomatic cover and under several false identities.
After painstaking detective work, agents figured out that “Mark” was really William Fisher, aka Rudolf Abel, who was arrested on June 21, 1957. Though Abel refused to talk, his hotel room and office revealed an important prize: a treasure trove of modern espionage equipment.
Abel was eventually convicted of espionage and sentenced to a long jail term. In 1962, he was exchanged for American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers, who had been shot down over the U.S.S.R. and held prisoner there.
In the end, a nickel was worth a great deal: the capture of a Soviet spy and the protection of a nation.
Link: http://www.fbi.gov/fbihistorybook.htm
Really, a scandal? From your description it could just as easily be that Flip Philips acted like a "whiny sanctimonious asshole" on the phone when asking about charging his CC before shipping the book. I wonder if Flip made a point of reporting on this grave injustice since using Tufte's name would likely drive traffic from google and other search engines to his little blog at Skidmore...
It's not the incompetent job they did registering voters,,, (Note, incompetent does not mean "criminal")
It's not the money laundering charges... (Although they probably had a legal obligation to report someone planning to commit a crime, BIANAL)
What it is, is their financial structure, they way the bring in money from the federal government to, say, help lower-income folks secure affordable housing, but the federal funds wind up disappearing into the corporate structure and funding other activities (AIG executive homes bus tours in CT, paying for campaign activities, etc.).
The kids dressed up as pimps and ho's were simply the final straw that put ACORN on the radar of the mainstream media...