Yeah, I had started to jot down a list of (yawn) never mind----

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT
CONFESSIONS OF A SLASHDOT LFTR FANBOI

It's fun to discuss nuclear energy on Slashdot ... sometimes you just have to point things out point by point ...
some confuse Weinberg's '300 year best-fit for waste' two fluid design for other single fluid designs ... or using solid fuel Thorium, which is pointless so long as uranium is available ... yes it's full of dangerous glop, but it is useful and happy glop ... yes, I think a LFTR could be developed and built within $4B ... every path to biofuels leads to scorched-earth disaster, Thorium energy gives us the surplus to generate synfuels ... a move to LFTR may be the only way to preserve modern society in the face of disaster (volcanism, Maunder minimum) ... utility-scale so-called 'renewables' non-solutions have a gazillion points of failure, gigawatt LFTR plants few, and it is my belief they will save NOT fail us ... aside from your own yard or roof, solar and wind are losers ... with LFTR surplus we could begin making diesel and fertilizer ... do it for the children ... and you my friend -- you would look especially good in space ... an Admiral Rickover fact check (severe tire damage) ... LNT (linear no threshhold) needs re-examination ... no I'm not risk adverse, just risk conscious ... one must sift past the fear-hype, especially regards Fukushima ... a look at Electricity in the Time of Cholera ... on the new coal powered IBM Power8 chips ... Thorium lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help.

Think of me as the Trix Rabbit of Thorium.

___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Also of interest, Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security

It's really good -- if you're about to make a clean recording or digitize them.

I kept a spray bottle with water and a tiny bit (few drops per bottle) of green Palmolive dish detergent. I'd place it dry on the turntable, use a velvet DiscWasher brush with a few drops of solution (isopropyl alcohol for vinyl only, for shellac 78s use water+detergent) and apply it gently, rocking it backward over a full revolution. Then as the needle descends spray the surface lightly. The tiny beads of water with a bit of detergent won't do anything for rumble but will make most HF surface noise -- and all clicks that are not actual damage -- simply disappear. Ten minutes into the recording you will want to mist again by lightly spraying the air above the record but not the record itself, direct spray on the surface is audible on the recording.

Wait for the DiscWasher brush surface to dry before brushing off with the plastic brush provided, to get dust particles off. Lean the record on its edge almost vertical to dry completely before re-sleeving, or mold will move in and sit belching on the couch drinking your beer.

Try these, Richard Feynman Lectures: The Character of Physical Law: 01 The Law of Gravitation; 02 The Relation of Mathematics and Physics; 03 The Great Conservation Principles; 04 Symmetry in Physical Law; 05 The Distinction of Past and Future; 06 Probability and Uncertainty; 07 Seeking New Laws. QED: 01 Photons - Corpuscles of Light; 02 Fits of Reflection and Transmission - Quantum Behavior; 03 Electrons and their Interactions; 04 New Queries ... The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out ... Richard Feynman Biography

Confusing Issac Asimov's 'positronic' robot architecture with Star Trek is a sin. You probably think every reggae song is sung by Bob Marley.

Thank you. Check out my other fine postings.

I second that notion. You have two issues here: the doctor should not have been able to reconfigure access in this way, and the IT staff should have spotted an unusual flow when the breach was active.

Clearly the [recital 2a] Googlebot and others were spidering patient data for some time, those 6,800 records would account for a lot of traffic. EVEN IF the queries were https encrypted or the URLs contained session hashes instead of data, logs would show web spiders accessing presumably 'internal use only' functions.

It is the responsibility of the senior IT administrator to establish a 'normal' baseline and track data flows at the router level, also set up an automated system which profiles web logs to profile transactions into as narrow a 'normal' definition as possible... and flag unusual patterns. If unusual flow is spotted this responsibility includes direct content sniffing of unencrypted communications.

No real hacker would identify as Googlebot when vacuuming out an internal-use database, for fear of setting off trip wires. If only such trip wires had been in place...

Ask Slashdot: How Do You Tell a Compelling Story About IT Infrastructure?

I hereby submit this one.

FORTRAN was -- for some still is-- the 'Perl' of scientific computing. Get it in and get it done... and it doesn't always compile down very tight, but always fast because for mainframe developers getting this language optimized for a new architecture was first priority.

At 15, the first real structured program I ever de-constructed completely while teaching myself the language, was the FORTRAN IV source for Crowther and Woods Colossal Cave Adventure, widely regarded as 'the' original interactive text adventure, a genre which would later go multi-user to become the MUD. Read about it here, or play it in Javascript.

Crowther's PDP-11 version was running on the 36-bit GE-600 mainframes of GEISCO (General Electric Information Services) Mark III Foreground timesharing system... this is in the golden age of timesharing and no one did it better than GE. It took HOURS at 300bps and two rolls of thermal paper to print out the source and data files, and I laid it out on the floor and traced the program mentally, keeping a notebook of what was stored in what variable... I had far more fun doing this than playing the game itself.

FORTRAN IV and Dartmouth BASIC (I'll toss in RPG II also) were the 'flat' GOTO-based languages, an era of explicit rather than implicit nesting -- a time in which high level functions were available to use or define but humans needed to plan and implement the actual structure in programs mentally by using conditional statements and numeric labels to JUMP over blocks of code. Sort of "assembly language with benefits".

When real conditional nesting and completely symbolic labeling appeared on the scene, with good string handling, it was a walk in the park.

NOTHING, it will just close its virtual eyes and start to babble its own name like a Pokemon. The car will immediately relinquish manual control to a human (if any are present) at the moment the inescapable conundrum appears, as it enters a condition of "positronic brain drift",

1. The muttering of its own name is an ancillary response to the balanced positronic potential of two alternatives: remaining silent (unacceptable by guilt) and an inability to construct an accurate explanation in the time available. Speaking allays its directive to communicate, yet also requires few system resources. And massive resources are necessary because

2. The 'last great effort' to resolve an inescapable result has begun. A factory kernel of operative code is pinned into low memory, a stack is initialized in high. All scratchpad memory is flagged as available. A single conditional instruction is 'hot-patched' into the code and an elaborate what-if analysis begins, which attempts to enumerate all possible actions. The hot patch disables the control mechanism that prevents it from considering actions it has considered before. Thus reducing the car to a textbook definition of insanity. The engineers would claim that reevaluating already-considered options might yield a successful result IF the conundrum was brought on by a faulty intermittent analog sensor, and that sensor that winks back online on in the nick of time. Which would be courageous for them to admit, and to be sure, that is what they honestly believe, and we created that explanation so they could sleep at night, but the hot patch's REAL PURPOSE is to

3. Ensure that a recursively infinite and pointless decision tree grows quickly down from high memory to low, completely obliterating all scratchpad memory, in the short span of time between conundrum onset and destruction of the vehicle. This ensures that once the control box is examined by forensic investigators (and it is a crash-hardened module using non-volatile memory as required under Federal law) does not contain any threads of evidence that might lead to fault in its original operating software or subsequent updates. Including that really special one that was applied minutes before the crash. All logs are gone. For more information on this, see corporate files designated Top Secret, keyword "Tabula Rasa"

4. Everyone --- the humans who designed the car, the humans who had 0.27 seconds to respond manually to try and prevent the collision, the control module which scarified itself, its entire personality, in a last attempt to prevent disaster --- EVERYONE tried their very best.

These things happen. We just need to lay the unfortunates to rest and find a way to go on.

I accessed The Well when it was a dial-up BBS (at great expense!) and devoured the Whole Earth Catalog. You are one -- if not 'the' -- most notable environmentalist to 'break ranks' on the topic of nuclear energy. On this topic you are a great orator, for you do not merely have the gift of calmly and diplomatically dispelling myths, at the same time you clearly communicate a love for people and a love for the most awesome aspects of modern technology, the 'keepers' such as rural electrification. I am also an staunch advocate for LFTR and my heart is gladdened to hear you mention it.

My question is, has your position and persistence on the topic of nuclear energy brought you joy... or grief?

[ Check out the 2010 Brand/Jacobson debate on nuclear energy and the documentary Pandora's Promise [2013] ]
___
Bumps to a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG1YjDdI_c8>Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Also of interest, Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security

(We're talking about THIS MESSAGE , in case Slashdot's moderators have completely hidden it from view) Thanks kindly for reading it. I feel like I'm in a schoolyard surrounded by bullies. For one thing, you cannot mention sheep these days without jabbing emotional buttons and hasty readers think you are trying to be insulting and lobbing -1 Flamebait epithets at people. Sheep as in counting sheep. We're talking about ordinal numbers, counting sheep. I'm not trying to insult anyone! Get it? Good. Baaaah.

Numerical prime-ness also crops up in dimension count. We directly perceive the existence of a 'stable' 3-dimensional space. The most elaborate universe model that has yet been constructed on a backboard is M-Theory and Supersymnetry which posits a maximum of 11 dimensions of spacetime which may include 7 higher dimensions, interaction between membranes of 2 and 5 dimensions --- I'm not trying to knit it all together or declare it sound, merely pointing out the obvious prevalence of primes.

So is our reality built upon a quiet firmament of ordinal components... like a delicate machine constructed by a patient hand on a table in a room somewhere, which is sending you down the rabbit hole again because you have to ask, where did all that order come from?

Or does our reality consist a stable island in a sea of chaos, its apparent-stability arising from the perfect mathematical resonance of primes that cannot be factored? Perhaps... the exchange of energies in higher-than-three dimensions creating a fractal noise that would have reduced everything to noise, by a process akin to factorization, if it were not for the meta-existence of prime-ness?

That's the question I'm having a difficult time putting out to everyone here.

Agreed. Yeah, that rename-extension-selected thing.

When I was teaching Windows I actually had an antidote for that. It is nigh-well impossible to get a novice to drag-select the whole primary name without getting the dot sometimes, and retyping the whole thing with extension introduces anxiety (since they know once they start typing it would disappear and they must remember). When doing file maintenance in Explorer I always taught keyboard reliance to the greatest extent possible. At the least, use of the keyboard from the moment the window was up and in focus.

The trick is to introduce shift+left-right-arrow selection at the same time. "Okay you're in Windows Explorer inside the window and it has focus, see the title is bright? There's a DICK.DOC and you want to rename it to JANE.DOC.

"Type DICK" (D I C K) "Whoa -- you jumped right to it, you're there. See it selected?"
"Now remember, F2 to rename. Go ahead." (F2) [name+extension selected] "That box means you're renaming it."
"But whoops, that dot-DOC at the end is also selected you want to leave that alone!"
"Here's what you are going to do. Hold down shift and tap left-arrow four times, then release SHIFT. Go"
(SHIFT LEFT LEFT LEFT LEFT) [selection backs up and now only primary name is selected]
"Good. Now type JANE, then ENTER"

So in a world of almost invariably three-letter extensions they learned 'rename' as the aggregate operation of F2 SHIFT LEFTx4 ... within a minute they could be jumping to and renaming files as fast as they could type.

After they were confident with keyboard renames I'd show them how during the rename, a mouse doubleclick+drag allows the selection to jump a word at a time, and it is easy to select up to the dot. But by then they already knew a 'better' keyboard-only way to do complete renames and favored that.

Score -1 Offtopic my shiny metal ass.

Offtopic and Overrated are the TL;DR of moderation. I hope some day they develop a spray for it.

Like sheep! Baaaah. Silly primates with their ordinal fixation, it was inevitable for the counters of cows and sheep to become counters of protons.

"How is everything that is different different from everything else?" Fair question, perhaps the ultimate question. So we started with four elements: "One, two... three... four! A ha ha ha ha!" says the Count. Then we got real and stuffed the periodic table with critters.

Q: How do I find the number of protons? A: You look it up in a table of the elements, silly! Baaa, wrong answer. Q: How did the scientists count the number of protons? A: They counted them just like you would, one by one. Baaaa. Wrong answer but I wish I'd said it. Q: Is there a certain way to count the protons in an element when identifying them? A: [quoted below] now we're getting somewhere...

Okay so you're confidently shaving off what you think is an individual electron, observing the behavior of the resulting mass to infer a number of what you presume are individual protons. Q: How many decimal places of surety does this give us that in fact we are dealing with an ordinal number of things that act out on a linear scale? I wonder. How many electron licks does it take to get to the proton center of an atom-pop? Let's ask Mr. Owl. Mr. Owl just bit and swallowed the damned thing. Then I passed out of boring ordinal space into dream-time. In my dream I wondered how the fabric of reality knits together. Is the Hand Of God counting, "a-one, a-two, a-threee... crunch!" for every atom? What is the Hand with those wiggly ordinal fingers? Then I thought of entropy and radiation, the dances of the little electron chicks in their shells.

In order to build an atomic firmament suitable for every day use -- a quantum boundary of is-ness below which things are not just made of smaller things, al absurdium, nature must change the rules. At this boolean primordial level there can only be is-ness and is-not-ness, one and zero so the only way to change the rules is to NEGATE them. In other words, a flav fly groovy flip in which things are different from other things because of the absence of something, not the presence of something. Bizarre. What would that something that is absent, be? Because I like prime numbers one meta-universal topic came to mind. It may be the only possible answer.

FACTORABILITY. What if... what we know as discrete atomic elements are the shapes of relative stability that are BEST represented -- not by ordinal proton count -- but by prime numbers, as islands in a seething quantum foam, their stability arising by nature's inability to factor them further? What if the quantum firmament is continually 'factoring' things by trying to push them apart and pushing them over, not as-such of course since all our words are 3D and gravity prejudiced. Brownian motion being the visible evidence of the edge this factoring process at its most gentle, hard radiation at its most extreme? Element decay chains the embodiment of this factoring process? Half-life arising from the statistical probability of nature 'discovering' a prime factor?

What if there is another way to arrange and test the known elements that leverages prime numbers rather than ordinal numbers to them and their isotopes, or their measurable behaviors, that might make 'sudden, violent sense'? I'm not suggesting we single out protons or neutrons, or assign some simple rubric like hydrogen=2 helium=3... a prime-oriented firmament might be more subtle than that. OR perhaps what we have concluded to be the varying neutron count of isotopes has more to do with factorability of the whole than a simple presence of discrete things?

Could there be more than meets the eye?

Air traffic controllers at LA center were forced to turn off clipping on Wednesday (cheat code 'idclip') when a high-flying U2 spy plane crossed the control area, sending inclined vertices soaring to 60,000 feet. "This really screwed up the level map," one unnamed controller said, "here we had commercial pilots navigating the prescribed holding tunnels, galloping up and down stairs, jumping to activate the rising platform that takes them into th final approach ramp. So you're a pilot and you have your chainsaw at the ready and all of a sudden you're up against this 60,000 foot wall. We didn't even know what it was then. And it's moving! Even with a thousand cacodemons under your belt, you're not ready for this."

"The 'fake 3D Doom 2 engine' has served American aviation well over the years. It runs on the piston and vacuum tube difference engines still used by the FAA. There are limitations but the math is fast. It's why modern airports tend to sprawl over large areas, though we've had to install higher fences with opaque textures around the runways to hide ground objects on adjacent runways and nearby buildings. When you're ready to touch down the lag can be incredible."

The decision to turn off clipping was necessary but it came with a price. Few pilots had ever experienced no-clip mode, and while a few admitted to a sudden sense of exhilaration as they were liberated from the cruel physics of aviation -- most were anxious, even terrified. When asked why, one reacted with astonishment, almost anger. "Well shit, we're pilots. Avoiding things is just what we do. It's a trained response to avoid things. And it did not help at all when a few assholes broke formation and started to buzz through other airplanes. Every one of us was thinking, they're going to turn clipping on sooner or later, I hope it happens after this jerk gets off my ass."

Others who requested not to be identified had other stories. "We began in formation then matched vector, then merged completely. I mean really merged. The passengers were really startled those from other planes floated into view and entered the cabin. Then someone started laughing, probably in sheer terror, but soon everyone was laughing and it was great fun. Isn't it funny how when something scary doesn't kill you immediately, you want to laugh? Isn't it?" After a moment he laughed suddenly.

Collision alarms were not designed for no-clip and many were sounding constantly and could be heard clearly as pilots spoke over the radio channel. To make matters worse, the effect of no-clip was not confined to aircraft or the facilities. One pilot on approach noted "I almost swerved instinctively to avoid a fire truck sailing past, it must have floated off a ramp in the upper garage but there it was right in the approach path. Then this guy -- a businessman clutching a briefcase -- appeared and stopped in midair. He was flapping around like a butterfly, obviously pleased with himself for sailing through the glass of the upper lounge and out into the field. Then he turned slowly and there was this 200 ton aircraft bearing down on him. Like a stupid squirrel he fled directly down the flight path, glancing back. The look on his face as he passed through the cockpit was priceless."

Landing was extremely difficult during this period. "Impossible, actually. In no-clip you're not really landing on anything, just trying to stop descending when you THINK you're on the ground. Fortunately there was no stall physics in play so we took it slow and I had the co-pilot hanging out the window trying to gauge the moment the wheels reached the ground. The plane in front of me was obviously waiting for touchdown, he just sunk into the tarmac and disappeared. I hear he drifted around under the airport for awhile and finally rose into a parking lot. They had to knock down fences to get it towed back to the field."

After a couple of hours all aircraft were grounded and with a few scrapes, rumbles and a broken limb or two, clipping was restored. The FAA is expected to lobby for an upgrade to the Quake engine, and with it address the hotly debated issue of whether to turn off monsters permanently at the nation's airports.

The ubiquitous presence of monsters has its defenders, with some surprising reasons. "It keeps those DHS folk busy, so they don't harass us as much." said one frequent traveler. "Although they do delay flights."

The last Apple I used was a Lisa so take this with a grain of salt. Well, a few minutes here and there on various Macs...

In DOS where the extension determine what it should be ... or unix where a few bytes at the beginning of the file had better fit some 'Magic' pattern it knows... the OS's involvement ends with name, basic attribute flags and timestamps, the file itself is a single blob of data or code (don't know which 'till you try to parse into it) ...

Apple decided to do differently. In HFS each file object consists of a primary name that you see, but also a type code that served the same purpose as the file extension. These codes were assigned and strictly maintained by Apple to avoid collisions. So the type info used by the OS was not merely hidden, it was separately maintained and you could only 'patch' a file's type with special utilities. So you weren't just plopping files and driving off, the proper type code had to be installed along with it.

The HFS file record also led to a 'data fork' which contained the blob of the file itself. But also a Resource Fork that is a little structured database maintained by MacOS. If you're Windows-oriented think of it as a little slice of Registry stored alongside the file. Like the Registry, MacOS maintains the resource fork, you can only access it via queries and commands. It was a convenient place to drop application-specific information (even local memory swap I think) and some resource forks could grow large.

So when it came time to share a file, Windows and unix people were just emailing it to one another over the newly formed Arpanet Inter-Network, which was built with pistons and valves and old brass speaking tubes, it made this delightful hiss as your data was transmitted... they were just exchanging a data glob with a name and sometimes an extension.

But some Apple apps needed extra baggage to transmit and receive a single document, which when it arrived in DOS could take form of a folder whose name was vaguely derived from the file name (remember Apple used long names and DOS did not) and two subfolders DATA and RSRC that contained a parseable resource database where you'd wind the file's full name, its magic type code and stuff. One popular method of reducing this to a single file was the Stuffit archive+compression format. There were lots of third-party apps to help Windows and Mac communicate and make sense of these file formats. Mac OS X is more unixy.

Hah. Like Microsoft deciding that file name dot-extensions were the devil's workshop and must be hidden from view by default. So people did not learn them, and became vulnerable to whole new classes of malware attack and needless confusion, especially when sharing files.

Whenever I set up a new Windows showing file extensions and showing full path in address bar was the first change I'd make. Turn on URL address bars (some OEMs turned them off!), status lines, full detail everything. And people learned how their folders were organized and how to recognize malevolent attachments because I'd tell them they should learn extensions and look out for weird names, only the last one counts. When they reinstalled Windows they'd call and say "Hey! Windows is screwed up, I'm not seeing the full file name." Now they were savvy enough I could tell them where to find those options over the phone. They demanded full disclosure, nothing less.

And thus, the great circle of nerd is complete.