Since she is responding to verbal questions, her marbles are there. The essential thinking parts of the brain, the parts that will help keep her OCCUPIED and SANE through this awful time... are intact. But it is also possible that anything she attempts to do that may require visual perception and especially focus, will be difficult and frustrating.

Decide on a daily schedule for her that includes presence of family --- not just monologues, even two or more people in the room talking with one another is great. Hand holding, massage is a must. Also some time for her to listen to audio content with which she is presently unfamiliar, even when she is alone. And a firm block of time for sleep -- where a nurse turns off and removes any audio devices and dims the lights.

For the audio portion... delve into the great audio that is publicly available: great podcasts such as RadioLab, old time radio programs, chapters of audio books, certain songs of favorite music. Load an mp3 player with these and PLAY IT ON RANDOM SHUFFLE. If *I* was trapped inside my mind, I would much rather face a sense of not knowing what comes next in a mix of music and voice, even if it was out of sequence, which is stimulating --- than be double-trapped into listening to some audiobook in which I have long since lost interest.

Nothing creepy or scary, even if she likes such things! No crime or horror. Go for radio comedy or sitcom and variety like Fibber McGee or Roy Rogers, etc. You don't know how well the various parts of her brain are working, and many hospital meds (esp morphine) make one vulnerable to dark thoughts and paranoia. Chapters of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, 15 minute radio programs, RadioLab-type stuff (but not the creepy stuff) all shuffled together (when she is alone) or played through sequentially (when someone is present to ask her if she's enjoying it) would make for an excellent entertainment without the ultimate strain of conversation.

Bear in mind that she may be in this condition for awhile, and being exposed to audio material that is new to her might become a welcome part of her day.

All the best to her and the family in this difficult time.

Certificate warnings freak you out? Try this link instead, now with matching wildcard, calmer seas and less mogul.

"Arrrr.... fix yar name 'R' while you may, maties!!"

I may not have the belly for Deep Statistics but I do know abut Internet Search noise levels. I remember trying to do research on WebDAV (believe me, there is such a thing) only to discover that folks discussing it invariably refer to it as 'dav'. Because saying "Distributed Authoring [and] Versioning" out loud makes you spit out your toothpick. Any attempt to search 'webdav' yielded only the sterile official pages, and attempts to search on 'dav' with other keywords brought up conversations from the community of Disabled American Veterans who also use the term in casual conversation, and have said an awful lot over the years. They occupied 'dav' first.

Now you may think you can pull off a 'C' where Google seems to pick off relevant results if you combine it with any computery term, but it was not always so. It has taken an incredible saturation of C, and perhaps some special coded cases on Google's part, for this to come about.

The success of Perl is due in some part to the ability of confused people to obtain help and advice about it merely by searching on its unique spelling.

So the best way to push this R language is with a refit of the name. Go with the pirate theme, it will sell many more T-shirts than those of silly camels and pearls. But stake out a bit of Keyword Real Estate that presently has a relatively low population density.

Google search result estimate counts, descending order,
r --- 2,730,000,000
ar --- 656,000,000
arr --- 24,400,000
arrrrrrrr --- 3,060,000
arrrr --- 876,000
aarr --- 638,000
arrr --- 536,000
arrrrr --- 405,000
aaarrrrr --- 267,000
arrrrrr --- 205,000
arrrrrrr --- 129,000
aarrr --- 107,000
aarrrr --- 107,000
aaarrr --- 56,600
aaarrr --- 56,600
arrrrrrrrr --- 52,400

Adding arrrs is not enough since talking like a pirate is typically accomplished with a single 'a', so ar+ space is pretty well populated up to ar{5}, it looks like best ratio is around a{3}r{3}. But even choosing the less-optimum and easier to type a{2}r{3} by using 'aarrr' instead of 'r' you have improved the signal to noise ratio by a factor of twenty-five thousand.

Push the name change firmly and decisively. This means that if anyone mentions 'R' there should be immediate responses that ask, "What AARRR you talking about?" This will inject the proper searchable term into the discussion while it reminds the poster of the name change.

For an interesting 9 minute lecture that might help sell you on this idea, listen here.

Don't worry, you're on the forefront of Slashdot's ugliest trend, where Poor Impulse Control and the desire to push out smart-ass remarks takes over other cognitive functions. For an additional empty hooty-laugh the comments are 'further refined' so that they resemble compliments at first glance.

Like a blacksmith who is beating out misshapen horseshoes with full knowledge that his shoddy product will only disturb the beast's gait and cause discomfort and injury -- the final act is one of omission, where the smith chooses not to punch in the mark that identifies him with the product. 'Post anonymously' -- check!

In the smithies of Slashdot ACs have contributed much to discussion and they post anonymously for many good reasons. But too often it is used as a vehicle of anonymity when farting around the campfire.

In human discourse it is appropriate to reward the introspective self-effacing remark politely with a silent nod supportive assent, as if to say, "There, but for the Grace of God, go I." Or if you are an atheist, "Well fuck. You can't fall off the floor."

As a precursor to moving in and applying chemicals its sounds like a good idea. After the flames are displaced you could count on fires springing up again from pockets that remain above the autoignition temperature of the materials but it would probably take awhile, you'd have some clear area and time to move in and quench them.

There is a good demonstration of dynamite quenching a flaming oil well here in The Fires of Kuwait ... rewind and check out this whole mesmerizing documentary!

Virtual reality timelines are fun because predicting the future itself is a type of virtual reality. They can be from a simple "by 2020 we'll have this" bet to a series of predictions that are threaded together in some way.

I wrote out this timeline in 1994 taking care to keep everything up to that point do-able with the technology of the time. I honestly believed that a progression as described here was possible.

Several things have come to pass -- at least on the drawing board -- such as '3D' storage in bit crystals, processors based on light, even the meta-symbology of parallel MapReduce systems today is a good step towards embedding language into symbols. Vivid projection holography without mist is tough to crack and it looks like we have to make do with goggles for now.

Do submit your own timeline predictions, the more whimsical the better.

VON BURGEUR'S CASTLE
A personal vision of incidental objects, people and events in the past and to come, written in anno domini 1994 by Hocus Locus

• 1550 A letter by wealthy aristocrat Dreadnought Von Burguer to a friend telling of his plans to construct a humble residence...
• 1570 Original architecht's drawings for castle
• 1600 Artists' paintings and drawings of the castle
• 1605 Von Burguer's Diary read after his death
• 1750 Local historian assembles historical narrative accounts for the region, including histories of the Von Burgeur family
• 1850 Historian's work is published along with related local material
• 1860 The Index is Invented (or so it seems!)
• 1880 The castle is rennovated, more architects' drawings, journals
• 1910 Electricity, wiring diagrams for castle
• 1910 Electric bills <g>
• 1950 The computer is born
• 1963 Historical Society purchases Castle; hotel and museum built near Castle
• 1993 All aforementioned materials are gathered, keypunched, scanned
• 1994 Virtual Reality technology spreading; ray-tracing feasible
• 1994 CD-ROM issued by the Historical society. For the first time all material is in one place. Every word is indexed; every image plotted to same scale
• 1994 Tourist uploads GIF of castle to Compuserve; castle is flooded with visitors, hotel is full
• 1995 By popular demand, more CD-ROMs are issued with translations of all text into several different languages
• 1998 Breakthroughs in technology again; memory crystals. Historical Society releases crystal with all languages, all images, and all texts together
• 1998 Nasal Von Burguer, in secret chemical laboratory in dungeon of castle isolates 24 basic enzymes which when combined in different proportion and applied to the tongue or misted, replicate 90% of all discernable smells and tastes
• 1998 ImageScript, grown out of Postscript is developed: a standard "language" for images that fractally describes them in such a way that elements of pictures (such as circles or ramparts or bricks) can be indexed
• 1998 Deep-proceesor technology is developed, a means of constructing or growing chips with little or no propogation time; based on light
• 1999 A context reader is developed which can "read" text and extract meaning, in such a way that sentances are reduced to thought-symbols with symbolic connections: a neural net that can be traversed laterally to make inferences or matches text elsewhere with the same meaning.
• 2000 The World Language Project (WLP) is founded which begins establishing standard codes to basic meaning-symbols (fear,light,blue) and common idea constructs (freedom-speech,dog-bite-letter-carrier). A virtual "meaning" landscape is created, with connected maps to traditional symbol sets (languages)
• 2002 A WLP email standard is developed to include WLP symbols in native language messages
• 2003 The WLP Internet Gateway is formed, which allows email and documents to be interchanged through language hubs; public documents are stored, indexed by native language and WLP symbols
• 2005 Existing ROMemory crystals are reissued, in standard WLP format. One pool of data; readers available for most world languages
• 2009 Deep-processor technology commonplace
• 2009 World standard for sharing of parallel processes and virtual memory; high-bandwidth communication to every household; (virtually) limitless processing power and memory available to the individual
• 2010 Holographic fine-grain video developed
• 2011 Obsessed tourist tours every room in Von Burguer's Castle, submits Holovideo to net; sudden slump in visitors to castle, expenses for upkeep now come from revenue generated from Von Burguer's Chameleon Tofu and Von Burguer's Dial-a-Scent; smell/taste technology still guarded secret
• 2012 Holographic Video/Image-Script standard developed; video now sent totally in symbolic format; holographic video traffic, which was taxing even the widest data-pipes, now trickles through
• 2012 Advanced ImageScript world rendering tools available that assemble 3 dimensional landscapes and objects; artisans create virtual cities
• 2012 AuralScript is developed, a symbology which uses fractal mathematics to reduce any sound to its component parts: notes/chords, color of sound and sonic artifacts are expressed separately and sent in parallel streams
• 2012 On his deathbed, Nasal Von Burguer releases private key to his files and opens his system's gateway to world internet
• 2013 Wine catalog released with parameters for the world's finest wines, scramble is on to buy home synthesizer/colorizer units; experts scoff but refuse to submit to blind taste tests
• 2013 AnyFood introduces its Dial-A-Food processor which can assemble Von Burguer Chameleon Tofu (now called BuFu) into any shape, color or texture
• 2013 McDonalds completely parametizes "Big Mac"; is first in its attempt to copyright the complete symbolic description package which includes holographics/taste/nasals/aurals; net is immediately flooded with pirate Mac descriptions; McD relents and Big Mac is renamed "Mac Classic"
• 2015 World Senses Project is convened to merge existing sense symbology
• 2015 Universal Coordinate Project is convened to unify all existing geographical and cosmological references; system includes dimensions for movement of planetary and stellar bodies through time and space
• 2015 Numerous court and legislative battles over sense patents on foods waged by ailing fast food chains
• 2016 United Nations directive nullifies all sense patents, declares all five human senses "public domain"
• 2016 Sense Language defined; meta-coders issued to combine all sense symbols into one transport layer. Standard symbols for temperature, humidity air movement, liquid droplet/mists defined
• 2016 Universal Coordinates established; meta-coders issued to convert existing net data to UC
• 2016 OtherWorlds Conference meets in virtual ribbon cutting ceremony: all existing virtual cities are mapped together by a meta-UC system allowing continuous travel throughout the Virtual Universe
• 2017 the first Sense Suites are developed for the home; Sense-O-Phones
• 2018 Sense Suites developed with treadmills that keep the occupant in the center of the suite
• 2020 Worldwide decline in tourism. Sense Suite walking tours available for most cities; first Sense-Olympic marathon race held
• 2020 During a routine reindexing of World Net Data, several daemon processes go into a strange loop; tied together by their parent process their operating stacks overflow into empty memory. Subsequent investigation found that a faulty bit crystal in stack memory oscillated, folding two active stacks together. By the time the error is discovered the parent process is acting so strangely that it was decided to disconnect it from the net, give it net- read-only and observe it.
• 2020 The first Artificial Notion discovered, created by accident. The chaotic patterns continue even after the bit crystal is repaired.
• 2021 The Notion reaches a periodic state with occasional chaotic "seizures." It begins an eerily systematic access of the entire Sense net structure. World attention is focused on its behavior, and billions of people watch it through a net-sense link.
• 2021 Quite suddenly the displays blank, and a man apprears, dressed in old costume. He speaks at all through symbols in all world languages, telling of his plans to construct a humble residence...

___
Not far from here, by a white sun, behind a green star, lived the Steelypips, illustrious, industrious, and they hadn't a care: no spats in their vats, no rules, no schools, no gloom, no evil influence of the moon, no trouble from matter or antimatter -- for they had a machine, a dream of a machine, with springs and gears and perfect in every respect. And they lived with it, and on it, and under it, and inside it, for it was all they had -- first they saved up all their atoms, then they put them all together, and if one didn't fit, why they chipped at it a bit, and everything was just fine ...
~Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"

Or Princess Bride...

But if there can be no arrangement, then we are at an impasse.
I'm afraid so -- I can't compete with your solar and ocean causation. And you're no match for my atmosphere.
You're that effective?
Let me put it this way: have you ever heard of Venus?
Yes.
Forcing at it's finest.
Really? In that case, I challenge you to a battle of wits.
For the Climate Treaty?
Yes.
To the death?
I accept.
Good. Then pour the biosphere.
Inhale this, but do not touch.
I smell nothing.
What you do not smell is called carbon dioxide. It is odorless, dissolves instantly in liquid, and is among the more deadlier poisons known to man.
Hmm.
All right: where is the poison? The battle of wits has begun. It ends when you decide and we both drink, and find out who is right and who is dead.
But it's so simple. All I have to do is divine from what we know of paleoclimate, is this the kind of planet that would be driven by CO2, or merely show indications of varying levels as a consequence of other factors.... now, a clever planet would have evolved several effective 'coping mechanisms' for runaway warming such as a smooth atmospheric gradient and Tropopause water vapor, to dampen and oscillate between extremes. It would not put all its eggs in a trace gas basket or its fate would have been more likely to have been that of one of the dumber planets.
Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
I'm just getting started!

[... much later...]

You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is "Never get involved in a land war in Asia." But only slightly less well known is this: "Never go in against a SCIENTIST when DEATH is on the line."...

[...thump....]

I am a fan of both Anthony Watts' site Watts Up With That *AND* John Cook's Skeptical Science... both are run by real people who go the extra distance find the best links to their sources (not some blog chain) and both are considerate of the reader.

Here's a small research journey: Direct CO2 rise causes temperature rise (CO2drivesT)? YES or NO?

There has been a demonstrated correlation between CO2 and temperature shown by Antarctic ice core data (within ~800-1000y). If a rise of CO2 in this data should consistently lag behind rises in temperature then CO2drivesT is not ruled out (both may be responding to some other factor but at different rates) BUT CO2drivesT has fallen down a notch... it now requires more extraordinary proof.

Even though human-driven global CO2 has risen 'terrifyingly fast' to 400ppm -- empirically speaking I am not terrified -- because the temperature rise that should accompany such a SHOCK by any reasonable interpretation of CO2drivesT, and to any reasonable extent, has not arisen. The effects of this 'causation' are missing.

Which is to say the historical correlation is broken.
That is not necessarily a bad thing. It's a thing,
Something we should be concerned about.
The rise to 400ppm is definitely humans' fault. It is 'massive'.
Temperature has not risen.
So such a causation, if any may exist, is unlikely to be significant.
We'd see it by now.

For example, head for Skeptical Science [SS] [SS] CO2 lags temperature - what does it mean which acknowledges that CO2 lags behind temperature but introduces 'CO2 amplification' which asserts a feedback where "the increased CO2 in the atmosphere amplifies the original warming.". This in itself is another extraordinary claim. While such a feedback might certainly exist I cannot just swallow it as a flat-fact when pursuing a simple answer to the CO2drivesT question. Where are the computer models incorporating this feedback that match observed temperature?

There is a stir these days among CO2drivesT proponents that some mechanism must exist that is hiding or delaying the warming that the models predict. Immature 'skeptics' jeer at this, implying that it is all about protecting the sacred forced-feedback hypothesis at any cost. Immature CO2drivesT proponents accuse them of attempting to derail the scientific method. There is a germ of truth in both. I think everyone should grow up a little.

Aside from the modern lack of warming, one thing seemed odd about amplification. In the Vostok ice core CO2+T graph clearly at ~75,000YA there is a massive injection of CO2 (~225-230ppm) that I think is Toba era volcanism. If such amplification exists and is significant, that would have been a fine time for CO2 feedback to jump in and 'save the day' with a slowing or a plateau of the declining temperature trend. Or even a rise? But 6,000 years after its onset -- on the Vostok graph at ~220ppm temperature and CO2 are once again in lock-step, both in steep decline. After some six millennia of 'higher' CO2 and 'lower' temperature. Plenty of time for particulates to settle and 'amplification' to occur. If it does. Did it?

But never mind, it's all changed, that [SS] Lag, what does it mean? page also said something astounding: "In fact, about 90% of the global warming followed the CO2 increase." 90%... is that a fact.

Since when?

Which led me to the next step where the game-changer is supposed to be [SS] Shakun et al. Clarify the CO2-Temperature Lag which asserts for the last interglacial period (at least), and in the Northern hemisphere (at least), temperature has lagged CO2.

Which is another extraordinary claim. Apparently it is the extraordinary result of Jeremy Shakun et. al., which was obtained by aggregating a cocktail of ~80 sources of temperature proxy data, which led Willis Eschenbach down a rabbit hole into state of apoplexy (apoproxy?) as he attempts to dis-entangle the proxies, lay out some criteria for validating this approach and (fairly) pointing out problems with ice core CO2 measurement, then fails to use their data to prove that warming began South and progressed Northwards as claimed, finds only 8 out of 80 of the proxies which show a clear trend and fails to find the proof, even pointing out that their Antarctic curve might be off by 2,000 years. While I'm no expert, in Eschenbach's analysis I discern a great deal of due diligence, little nit-picking and mostly a sense of astonishment that such an amalgamation of proxy-data could refute globally the trend that is so clear in the stable Vostok signals.

As a layman would I personally be ready embrace the idea that these disparate ~80 proxies taken together in the way that Shakun presented them, can give a truly accurate and comparable temperature record? Not lightly. The errors and side-channel noise of some of the proxies relegates them to the realm of the interesting but not the accurate and incontrovertible. If Eschenbach's analysis proves anything it may be that this CO2-lags-temperature issue is surely not settled. Does it take a so-called 'skeptic' to delve deeper?

So I am left with the CO2 following not leading temperature in paleoclimate, not proven otherwise to my satisfaction. I am left with a purported 'amplification' effect with no direct observation of it happening despite CO2 rising to 400ppm.

The clear and extraordinary proof required to show that there is a direct causation and steeply rising CO2 is causing warming to a degree beyond historical norms... as yet, still waiting.

The folks at Slashdot who jeer and mod 'troll', turn the water white with foam and gnashing of teeth when they smell skepticism about this topic -- well, that is another phenomenon...

Oh yeah, that sea level rise stuff, it's a real hoot. It's hard for a realist to be terrified of centimeters of rise over centuries when twenty-foot waves might arrive tomorrow: welcome to Earth. Only shocking and exciting to people who have already built on (flood, storm surge, below sea level) plains, never factored in natural subsidence and are looking to have their flood insurance premiums subsidized by evil energy companies. Ice changes/shelf calvings at the poles: welcome to Earth. Even the most compelling arguments sound (to me) like all the creatures of Bambi's forest scurrying in terror after someone farts.

___
Bumps to Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate

I feel sorry for Smart Roads. They're so smart, deep down they must realize how many miles of Dumb Roads could have been built for the same money.

I feel sorry for those embedded hexagonal tiles too. They must have known as the grout hardened around them that it was a one way trip into a soul-less, sorry-ass world. At the semiconductor plant there was so much optimism and excitement, everyone was buzzing about becoming an integral part of the ongoing man-machine synergy. Of course when everyone graduates from silicon college they all think they'll be the ones to stretch Shannon's limits and change information states in an intricate dance party of information-sharing, everyone connected. But what happens is, so many are diverted to become these simple blinky-light drone units on a lonely road as countless strangers fly over them. Heartless strangers. And through the cruel geometry of the hexagon, only six adjacent units to keep them company. For ETERNITY.

Covered with tempered glass for Pete's sake. Even the glass is pissed off by this idea, it has already lost its temper as it is being cemented into place. I'm glass goddammit, roads are like playgrounds where all the kids are mean and gravel and skidding tires are everywhere. Gravel hurts. The glass knows its glorious transparency and reflectivity will soon be gouged and cratered, the pane dissolves into a translucent pain of dwindling light.

The solar cells under the doomed glass are perhaps the saddest of all. To lose their photon stream bit by bit until a mere trickle of current escapes them is purgatory without end. Soon all of them will be barely functional, trapped under road, when they could have been some where out in the sunshine.

It is merciful when a load of dirt just covers them up on the shoulder and just hardens there, they can settle in for a nap.

During the first frost of Winter everyone in the hexagonal array is overjoyed when the heating wires kicked in and electrons begin to jump out of their shells once more. But soon it was obvious that something was very wrong. "Hey, ease off! There's delicate electronics in here!" But trapped within their isolated pockets of trapped heat they realize that no one can hear their cries. The heat element, though it can deliver a continuous torment to the components inside, would never melt a thick layer of ice. "Someone duid not do the math. Help us!"

But no help comes, and soon the project hits cost overruns is abandoned. One day the control signals go silent, and once again a wave of dismay sweeps across the trapped colony of orphaned electronics. There is no more purpose in life, but thanks to the cruel embedding of solar cells, life will go on.

It's all just so damned horrible.

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.