I'd be interested in your source for this particular tidbit, particularly how it shows blacks are any worse than whites in this regard.

I went to high school with a lot of tough white guys from South Boston and Charlestown in Boston, back when Whitey Bulger was still a big deal in Southie. Let me tell you most of them didn't see intellect as their path into the middle class. A few did, but not many. I've also worked with PhD scientists who were black and came from urban black neighborhoods. You get a mix of attitudes everywhere, whether it's in a black ghetto or white ghetto or a middle-class white neighborhood, but usually being academically advanced doesn't make you popular unless you live in town with a big Jewish population.

Speaking of Whitey, his people used to spread the myth that he kept drugs off the street in Southie. In fact he was kicking the Italian mob out of Southie so he could have the drug trade all to himself. Whitey wasn't a hero, he was a parasite. So why did people believe the lie? Wishful thinking. The people who got education and became professionals moved out of the neighborhood, so the one example of guys who rose in life that you saw every day were the mob. And you had to hope they were good lads at heart, because they had the neighborhood by the balls.

There's often a "we're all in this together" thing going on in poor, downtrodden neighborhoods. Part of that is a resentment of anyone who acts like their above the rest, and that includes people who flaunt their education or sophistication. But that's because intellectual accomplishments don't seem to be within the reach of everybody. You don't get that attitude in cultures which believe in self-improvement.

So let's *not* talk race. Let's talk education and economic opportunity. If people have a way up, see that way, and believe they can do it, they will rise.

Of course. But putting your servers behind a separate firewall isn't the same as putting them on the same network as the clients with *no* firewall.

In any case, we're talking about an in-store POS system with TWO clients. We're not talking about an Internet facing server that has to handle thousands of connections per hour. Even if the server had FIFTY client terminals the impact on performance would be nil.

Well, I think the first two films are a mixed bag. I rather liked getting meet Radagast, and to see what Gandalf was up to in Dol Guldur.

A screenplay adapted from a book has to stand on its own as well as live up to the book. Where the movies have fallen down is living up to the book. The consensus of my writer friends is that the screenwriting team (Walsh, Boyes, Jackson and del Tormo) doesn't trust Bilbo to carry the story, which deeply undercuts the themes of THE HOBBIT. Lack of respect for THE HOBBIT novel is pretty common among LotR fans. They often dismiss it as "just" a fairy-tale -- an attitude which would have disgusted Tolkien himself. It would have been better if writing this screenplay had been entrusted to someone who loved THE HOBBIT for itself, and understood it better.

Surprisingly, I thought the non-canonical character Tauriel was one of the best parts of the movies. Yes, she was there to give the story a so-called "strong female character", but that's a silly objection. Writers always put characters in stories for some reason; the question is whether they fit in and come to life. I think adding a strong non-canonical character is better than giving so much screentime to a weak but canonical one: Legolas. No disrespect to Orlando Bloom, but the writers dont' give him much to work with. The part could have been played by the CGI model they used in the action scenes.

One of the reasons I'm accepting of the whole Tauriel subplot is that it carries a deeply Tolkienian theme: the love between mortal and elvenkind. That was a profound part of Tolkien's personal mythology. On the gravestone he shares with his wife Edith, he added "Luthien" to her name and "Beren" to his. So I don't view weaving that theme into a dramatic treatment of the HOBBIT story as disrespectful to the author at all.

Here's the interesting thing, though. Let's agree that bottom-feeding is the natural ground state of a corporation; what that means is that nearly everybody is doing it, which means bottom-feeders on average don't make any more profit than you'd get investing in a mutual fund, but involve a lot more risk.

If you want to make *more* profit, you have to be about something *in addition to* profit. A great company has an identity which has value. This, by the way, is how Carly Fiorina ruined HP. She re-imagined HP as something more generic.

Air gapping the sensitive information is one of those things that looks easy on paper but runs afoul of the fact that people don't like to work that way. It's inefficient. It's not like people have *two* jobs, one sensitive the other not. They have one job in which sensitive bits are intertwined with regular bits, so in practiced people tend to cheat and do *some* sensitive work on the non-sensitive network.

Even if the users are unrealistically conscientious about never doing anything sensitive on their non-secure PCs, this intertwining of sensitive with ordinary information means that you can probably deduce a lot from apparently innocuous data. Imagine you discover the following information from poking around on an engineer's "non-sensitive" computer:

(1) He is exchanging email with certain university researchers setting up face to face meetings.
(2) He has downloaded datasheets for several families of exotic electronic components.
(3) He has telephone appointments in his calendar with salesmen from Unobtanium Corp.
(4) His browsing history shows he's been reading up on certain mathematical topics on Wolfram Alpha.

Now put this all together and another expert in his field might be able to deduce a lot more than you'd expect than if you looked at any one of these factors. The interconnected nature of an engineer's work means that if you remove all the sensitive bits it leaves a hole of a characteristic shape.

Until someone install something else on the network segment. Like a wireless access point. Or until malware takes over one of the trusted hosts.

Security vulnerabilities always involve violations of some assumptions you make, e.g. that anything coming from a certain set of hosts is benign, or that if a process on a server opens up an IP port it's *supposed* to do that. You want the security of a system to depend on as few assumptions as possible. If it does no harm in day to day operations and offers protection when your assumptions fail, why *not* run a software firewall?

It doesn't have to be linear to be useful. It simply has to be able to sort a set of choices into order -- like movie reviews. Nobody thinks a four star movie is "twice as good" as a two star movie, but people generally find the rank ordering of movies by stars useful provided they don't read to much into the rating. In fact the ordering needn't be unique; there can be other equally useful metrics which order the choices in a slightly different way. *Over certain domains of values* minor differences in orderings may not matter very much, especially as your understanding of your future requirements is always somewhat fuzzy (e.g. the future cost of bandwidth or computing power).

The problem with any metric occurs outside those domains; some parameters may have discontinuities in their marginal utility. A parameter's value may be good enough and further improvements yield no benefit; or the parmater's value may be poor enough to disqualify a choice altogether. In such cases such a metric based on continuous functions will objectively misorder choices.

For example Suppose A is fast enough but has poor compression ratios; B is not quite fast enough but has excellent compression ratios. There's really only one viable choice: A; but the metric may order the choices B,A.

On the other hand suppose A has better compression ratios than B; B is faster than A, but A is already so fast that it makes no practical difference. The rational ordering of choices is A,B but the metric might order them B,A.

This kind of thing is always a problem with boiling choices down to a single composite number. You have to understand what goes into that number and how those things relate to your needs. You have to avoid making your decisions on one number alone. But some people *will* fasten on a single number because it makes the job of choosing seem easier than it does. Just don't be one of those people.

Well, if you put yourself in his shoes you might well play hardball with other games in the hobby.

D&D as a system wasn't really all special; there were competing systems back in the days he was at TSR which were every bit as enjoyable and arguably easier to play. But D&D had two big things going for it. First, when the three basic manuals for AD&D were published it had by far the best organized and written materials. The Monster Manual was particularly useful. Second it had the network effect: it was the best system to learn to play because everyone else knew how to play it. You could start a campaign at a drop of a hat -- no need to bring everyone up to speed on yet another set of rules.

So put yourself in his position. The future success of D&D is contingent on no other game reaching critical mass. You're completely dependent on D&D, you have no other marketable skills or assets. You have a company with over a hundred employees (which is surely a mistake on your part), and that company has nothing else bringing in cash *but* D&D products. You've made D&D your life work. It's not a situation to bring out the best in people.

Different requirements drive different designs. Before WW2 seaplanes were common because of the lack of runways. After WW2 airports proliferated, and seaplanes couldn't keep up with technical advances due to the compromises involved in allowing them to land and take off from water. But that doesn't mean there aren't applications for aircraft with a flying boat's capabilities, it just means there isn't enough of a market in places like the US to support an industry. Even so, here in North America there are some 70 year-old WW2 Catalinas being used in aerial firefighting. China is a vast country which is prone to many kinds of natural disasters that could make airlifting in supplies difficult, so they may see potential applications we don't.

It's also interesting to note that seaplanes were highly useful in the pacific theater of WW2, and there hasn't been a protracted struggle for sea control *since* WW2. Also, China is a country with no operational aircraft carriers; aside from its training ship the Liaoning, it has a handful of amphibious assault ships that can carry a few helicopters. The US by contrast has ten supercarriers and nine amphibious assault ships that dwarf the aircraft carriers of WW2. The technology and expertise to run a carrier fleet like America's would take many years for China to develop. It's conceivable that the manufacturers imagine a military market for aircraft like this in the interim.

...or if he's using shell style wildcards, he could mean "pure and utter sherbet."

Reports of trains *not* running on time certainly decreased, but that's not quite the same thing...

Indeed, it carries MUCH more precision than just "Ebola", which can mean any of the following:

"Ebola River" is a tributary to the Congo River.

"Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever" was the name of a disease first discovered in people living in the remote Ebola River watershed.

"Ebola Virus" (abbrev. "EBOV") is the infectious agent that causes "Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever"

"Ebolavirus" is the taxonomic genus to which the "Ebola virus" belongs.

"Ebola Virus Disease (abbrev. "EVD") is now the more common name for Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever. We can call it that because we have definitively identified the infectious agent that causes the disease (EBOV). Changing the name pre-emptively differentiates EVD from other hemorrhagic diseases that might arise from the same area.

Laymen simply say "Ebola" and let their audience sort out what they mean -- if indeed they mean anything precisely. I once had this conversation with an elderly relative.

Relative: 90% of bats have rabies.

Me: That's hard to believe.

Relative: It's true! I read it in the paper.

So I went to the paper and found out that she had it hopelessly garbled. TEN percent of bats SUBMITTED FOR TESTING had positive SCREENING tests.

I worked in public health informatics for many years, and it's a longstanding tradition to use three letter codes. I think this is the legacy of old systems which provided three or four character fields for codes, but it certainly speeds things along when you're keying data into a spreadsheet.

The tradition isn't formalized, and so it's application is somewhat irregular, but it's important in this case to realize that public health surveillance makes a strong distinction between a *disease* (a disorder of structure or function in an organism like a human) and an *infectious agent* (the parasite, bacterium, virus or prion that transmits the disease). That's because you can find the infectious agent without finding any cases of the disease -- for example in an asymptomatic human, in a disease carrying vector like a mosquito etc. Non-specialist use the same terms to refer to either the disease or the agent (this naming by association is called "metonymy", a word every system designer should be familiar with). So of course the abbreviations experts use seem nonsensical to non-specialists.

The abbreviation "EVD" maskes perfect sense -- it is the *disease* caused by the Ebola Virus (EBOV). A non-specialist uses terms loosely and would say things like "They found Ebloa in Freetown." A specialist wouldn't use such loose language. He'd say "We found a human case of EVD in Freetown," or "We had a serum with a positive titer for EBOV from Freetown."

There's only one thing you need to know about the H-1B program to see that it's not about providing skilled labor *here*: after 6-10 years of working the visa holder is kicked out of the country to make room for a less experienced visa holder.

If H-1B led automatically to a green card, then we'd be keeping the *most* expert workers here, rather than replacing them with less experienced ones. Change that *one* aspect of the program, and it's be an asset to the US as a nation.

I went back and got a degree after 25 years. It's not the *degree*, it's the *education* that matters, and I got a lot more out of the education than my younger peers. This was a new perspective on things I was already familiar with, and I was able to connect a lot of dots I wouldn't have been able to when I was eighteen. I could immediately see what stuff was good for, and I discovered a number of things that would solve commonplace problems I'd seen occur over and over again, even with personnel wit advanced degrees.

Then I got out and discovered that the world didn't want to hire a fifty year old who'd been "out of work" (going to school) for three years....