The Sultan was recently featured in a PvP comic classic.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Having my head 1 meter from a 100+ decibel turbo props for 30 minutes at a time does not sound like a good idea. Crashing in the equivalent of a flying motorcycle (human body moving fast on a structure required to hold a combustion engine) does not sound good for my health either.

This reminds me of the BIG BALL OF MUD theory by Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder at the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Shantytowns are squalid, sprawling slums. Everyone seems to agree they are a bad idea, but forces conspire to promote their emergence anyway. What is it that they are doing right?

Shantytowns are usually built from common, inexpensive materials and simple tools. Shantytowns can be built using relatively unskilled labor. Even though the labor force is "unskilled" in the customary sense, the construction and maintenance of this sort of housing can be quite labor intensive. There is little specialization. Each housing unit is constructed and maintained primarily by its inhabitants, and each inhabitant must be a jack of all the necessary trades. There is little concern for infrastructure, since infrastructure requires coordination and capital, and specialized resources, equipment, and skills. There is little overall planning or regulation of growth. Shantytowns emerge where there is a need for housing, a surplus of unskilled labor, and a dearth of capital investment. Shantytowns fulfill an immediate, local need for housing by bringing available resources to bear on the problem. Loftier architectural goals are a luxury that has to wait.

All too many of our software systems are, architecturally, little more than shantytowns. Investment in tools and infrastructure is too often inadequate. Tools are usually primitive, and infrastructure such as libraries and frameworks, is under-capitalized. Individual portions of the system grow unchecked, and the lack of infrastructure and architecture allows problems in one part of the system to erode and pollute adjacent portions. Deadlines loom like monsoons, and architectural elegance seems unattainable.

Clicky the linky above to read the whole paper. It is full of useful insights for many disciplines besides computer science.

"Hi, my name is Werner Brandes. My voice is my passport. Verify me."

    Sneakers, 1992 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/

This reminds me of the story I have been telling for years whenever someone asks me why I do not eat Octopus.

From Snopes

A while back I heard a story that went like this: in a certain aquarium, fish kept disappearing from one of the tanks late at night. Baffled, the staff put up cameras to find out what was going on, and discovered that an octopus was climbing out of its tank, eating the fish, then crawling back to its own tank.

Though the story is not verified, directly, there is consensus that the story is possible and is even likely to have occurred.

http://mobileoffice.about.com/od/usingyourphone/f/tethering.htm

Question: What Does Tethering Mean?
Answer: In relation to cell phone use, tethering has two definitions and both can apply to mobile professionals' use of their cell phone.

1. The first definition of tethering refers to using a cell phone as a modem for your laptop or PDA. Creating a connection either with cables or wirelessly "tethers" your cell phone to your other mobile device.

When reading User Agreements for cell phone service providers make sure to pay attention if the Agreement prohibits the use of "tethering your cell phone" or using your cell phone in a "tethered capacity".

If you do not have a cell phone service package that allows you to use your cell phone as a modem you could be in violation of your User Agreement and lose your service. You may also find that you have incredibly high bills for your connection time.

Tether the tether by tethering the tethered tether to another tether. sheesh

I am not sure the proposed law does much if redaction is all it takes to get a pass. From Law.com:

Electronic Redaction Doesn't Always Hide What It's Supposed to Hide
Paralegals need to know how to keep information confidential

Dana J. Lesemann. The Recorder. May 05, 2006

With the issue of intentional government leaks of classified information frequently in the news, the problem of unintentional leaks of classified and sensitive information is frequently overlooked. The examples are numerous and startling.

Last year, U.S. military commanders in Iraq released a long-awaited report of the American investigation into the fatal shooting of an Italian agent escorting a freed hostage through a security checkpoint. In order to give the classified report the widest possible distribution, officials posted the document on the military's "Multinational Force-Iraq" Web site in Adobe's portable document format, or PDF. The report was heavily redacted, with sections obscured by black boxes.

Within hours, however, readers in the blogosphere had discovered that the classified information would appear if the text was copied and pasted into Microsoft Word or any other word-processing program. Stars and Stripes, the Department of Defense newspaper, noted that the classified sections of the report covered "the securing of checkpoints, as well as specifics concerning how soldiers manned the checkpoint where the Italian intelligence officer was killed. In the past, Pentagon officials have repeatedly refused to discuss such details, citing security concerns." Soon after, the report was removed from the Web site.

Copies of the improperly redacted report, however, live on. We at the consulting firm of Stroz Friedberg, too, were able to remove the redaction and save the clear text in a Word document. Forensic examiners in our office found that the document had been produced directly from Microsoft Word using Adobe Acrobat 6.0's PDFMaker. The redacted text simply had been highlighted in black. As a result, to reveal the classified information, the steps are simple: Highlight the text with the "select text" button on the PDF toolbar, copy the text by typing "control C," open a new document in a word-processing program and paste the text into the new document.

Read more...

The /. quote right now...

Everybody has something to conceal. -- Humphrey Bogart

I doubt that $10 million is enough to get very far in reverse engineering biological bees, much less building a colony of robo-bees with features similar to bio-bees. Nature has spent millions of years on a massively parallel R&D project to create bees as we see them today. At MIT rates, $10 million should be just enough to get some professors by until they need more grant money, and maybe pad the resumes of some grad students. There will be no robo-bee overlords anytime soon.