For quite a long time now, I've been explaining to everyone who will sit still long enough to listen that the term "computer" is a bad name for what these boxen do.

While strictly speaking they do carry out mathematical operations, that's not what most people use them for. They got the name "computer" because one of the earliest uses of computers was the numerical solution of differential equations. For example the Von Neumann architecture was developed by Dr. Von Neumann for use in designing hydrogen bombs. The Difference Engine was Charles Babbage's fat defense contract for the purpose of calculating firing tables, that is, how to aim a cannon, taking into account the wind and so on.

Really these boxen are instruction following machines. I was able to finally explain to my mother what I really do, and what a programming language really is, by asking her to compare her applications that I might have written, to her writing down the recipe for chocolate chip cookies. That recipe could be written in English, or in German or what have you. English and German could then be taken to be recipe languages, much as Java and C++ can be considered programming languages.

Why just the other day, I told a good friend that I wanted to return to graduate school to complete my Physics Doctorate, but had forgotten all my math. This because it is exceedingly uncommon for programmers to need to know much more than very basic arithmetic on the job. It is actually uncommon for me to use floating point on the job, or fractions. I cannot recall the last time I used a trigonometric function on the job.

However coders do need very strong verbal reasoning skills. If you could win on the debating team, or you studied philosophy in college, I assert you could be a good coder.

I have Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder.

My father's part-time job during high schools was performing mineral assays for the Sierra Nevada, California gold mining industry, so he was accepted to study chemistry at UC Berkeley with wild enthusiasm, right out of high school at the age of eighteen.

Unfortunately he realized just before the last day to withdraw without any grades being recorded, that he'd blown off his entire first term of school by partying with the UCB marching band. He played the sax in the marching band, and was always heavily into music. So he withdrew just before the deadline. When I was a boy, he quite sadly told me that his Berkeley transcripts just say he "attended". No grades, no credit, no fails, but he is recorded to have attended.

He returned home to Grass Valley, and took up the traditional trade of the men in his side of the family, that of carpentry.

When he was twenty-three or so, he joined the Navy as an enlisted man. The Navy sent him to study EE at the U of Idaho, in a program meant for enlisted men who were recognized to have leadership potential. He wasn't actually in the U of I's NROTC, but he studied along with the NROTC students.

When I was born in 1964, he had a BSEE and was a lieutenant in the Navy.

In 1970, a couple of his fellow officers were visiting our home. "Your father is very smart," one of them said to me. "You should ask him questions."

One of my happiest memories is of a contest he proposed, where he and I spent all day long attempting - but both of use failing! - to make working telephones out of random stuff we found lying around the house.

I was accepted to study Astronomy at Caltech in 1982. I was the third coauthor on some Astrophysical Journal articles during the Summer of 1983, as a result of my summer job with Jeremy R. Mould, who is now regarded as the world's most highly-cited Astronomer. I later changed my major to Physics.

I was PERSONALLY tutored in Quantum Mechanics by Richard Feynman.

I was forced to leave the Institute due to my mental illness, but transferred to University of California Santa Cruz, where I earned a BA in Physics. I received an Energy Department grant to write my undergraduate - UNDERGRADUATE now! - thesis at CERN, in Geneva. My advisor Clem Heusch was searching for non-conservation of Lepton number. That was very exciting work; had Clem found what he was looking for, he would have earned the Nobel Prize, and my name would have been on the paper.

I've been a coder now for twenty-six years. My resume is seven pages long.

Could I have done all that had I been born before my father joined the Navy? There's no way to really know but for sure I had many advantages over what I would have had available to me, had he fathered me much younger than he did.

Swiss Child Psychologist Alice Miller devoted twenty years to treating the very worst kinds of child abuse, then decided to stop all treatment of actual patients in hopes of putting a permanent end to that child abuse by writing a great many profoundly insightful books.

Her book For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty In Child-Rearing And The Roots Of Violence has just four chapters. One of the chapters makes a pretty good case for Adolf Hitler, World War II, NAZI Germany and the Holocaust all being to the fact that Alois Schicklgruber beat the young Adolf Schicklgruber every single day of his young life.

One day when he was thirteen or so - I don't clearly recall when - Adolf stood stoically and calmly for his beating, then at the end of it, told his father how many times his father had hit him, thanked him then calmly walked away. Everyone who witnessed this thought Adolf had gone insane. Perhaps he had.

Most of Miller's books are hugely popular with mental health professionals. Powells always has a whole bunch of copies of each book on its shelves in Portland, Oregon.

Quite likely you can find For Your Own Good in any decent bookstore.

I expect they've been translated to many languages. I'm not sure but I think Miller's Mother Tongue was German. She spoke English, but not very well, so the English-language editions of her books are all translated by experts.

Within the US you can take Amtrak. (No "c" in "Amtrak".)

Don't believe the prices on the Amtrak website. It's a rather lo-budge operation, so they don't have advance purchase pricing available from the site. The site does work correctly for determining where and when you can go, but then go down to the station for your ticket purchase. If you purchase so much as one day in advance, quite likely you can get a discount.

For example, last I checked, to fly one-way between San Jose, California and Portland, Oregon is about $250. Last Summer I took the Coast Starlight from Diridon Station in San Jose to Union Station in Portland, one day advance purchase for about $80.00.

My Aunt just recently paid about $250.00 for a round-trip from Spokane, Washington to Portland. With two-week advance purchase, that's $86.00 on Amtrack.

The trains don't go everywhere they really need to, so there is some chance you'll make part of your trip on an Amtrak bus. That was the case when I travelled from LA to San Jose. Rather oddly, I took a bus from the HUGE train station in downtown LA to Bakersfield, then the train from there to San Jose. However the busses are quite nice.

Their only "security" is that they want to see your ID when you purchase a ticket. You don't need to show ID when you board the train. There is no X-Ray, no metal detector.

The seats are spacious, there are lots of 110 VAC power sockets. Most but not all trains have WiFi, however the train itself gets onine via a 3G connection that's shared by the whole train, so they limit downloads to 10 MB and do not permit streaming video at all.

Because 3G is a cell phone protocol, you can only get online when the train is within range of a cell tower. Sometimes the trains are way out in the sticks so you cannot get online.

My only gripe is that the food is scanty and very expensive, although it is quite tasty. Pack some sandwiches.

Recall that at least the original license agreement for Sun Java specified that it must not be used to operate nuclear power plants. That got a lot of ridicule but was arguably a good idea.

From time to time I see posts for medical device coding jobs on craigslist and the like. Quite commonly they require one to have experience with C# .Net.

That doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Heart disease runs in my family. If I get a pacemaker, is it going to be running Microsoft Windows?

Warp Life is a particularly fast implementation of the Conway's Game of Life Cellular Automaton.

However it is not in the App Store yet. I'm the only one who can play it at present because I wrote the source.

I hocked my iPad when I needed the money. Someone stole my iPhone 4 when I left it on the table at McDonald's while using the can. I've been out of work for a long time so now I don't have the $99.00 for the Apple Tax, nor to buy a new iDevice.

If you gave me like four hours of consulting work I could buy a used iPhone and renew my IOS ddeveloper program membership. Then I could get Warp Life into the App Store in short order.

If I had but one App in the App Store, then I wouldn't be out of work anymore. There is a huge demand for iOS coders, but no one wants to touch me because I don't have an App in the App Store yet.

I have already started the Android build but have put that on hold until the iOS version ships.

There are some competitors presently in the App Store. Golly may be faster but due to its more complex UI it only runs on iPad. Warp Life runs on iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, with a very simple, minimalist UI.

When it actually hits the App Store, the source code will be bundled with the App, and published under the Affero General Public License v3. I'll be providing a git repository, that after I set it up, will be here.

I know this because a client I once consulted for, sold 400,000 licenses for their Windows product to the Navy.

Windows isn't so bad if it's properly locked down, but it's not really possible to do that unless all of your application are Windows Logo-compliant, for example they don't store end-user documents in the Program Files folder. I expect the military has a lot of homebrew software they absolutely need to use, that prevents Program Files from being locked down.

Also everyone who actually administrates a windows box, has to actually know how to lock it down.

• USS Yorktown Dead In Water After Divide By Zero

The Navy's Smart Ship technology is being considered a success, because it has resulted in reduced manpower, workloads, maintenance and costs for sailors aboard the Aegis missile cruiser USS Yorktown. However, in September 1997, the Yorktown suffered a systems failure during maneuvers off the coast of Cape Charles, VA., apparently as a result of the failure to prevent a divide by zero in a Windows NT application. The zero seems to have been an erroneous data item that was manually entered. Atlantic Fleet officials said the ship was dead in the water for about 2 hours and 45 minutes. A previous loss of propulsion occurred on 2 May 1997, also due to software. Other system collapses are also indicated. [Source: Gregory Slabodkin, Software glitches leave Navy Smart Ship dead in the water, Government Computer News, 13 Jul 1998, PGN Stark Abstracting from http://www.gcn.com/gcn/1998/Ju... ...

``Using Windows NT, which is known to have some failure modes, on a warship is similar to hoping that luck will be in our favor,'' said Anthony DiGiorgio, a civilian engineer with the Atlantic Fleet Technical Support Center in Norfolk.

this was clearly explained to me by the principal author of the HMI/SCADA program that I'd just been hired to work on. I later resigned in protest.

It's been long enough I figure they've fixed their security holes by now.

Despite their taking industrial safety very seriously, to company owner thought it was quite fucking funny that his product was totally shot through with security holes.

HMI/SCADA: Human-Machine Interface / Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition. That's the proper name for what most would call industrial control systems.

The Stuxnet and Flame worms attacked our competitor Siemens' HMI/SCADA, but only when the installations were in Iran. Particularly they spun the Uranium Hexafluoride Gas Turbine Centrifuges far faster than the could tolerate them, thereby damaging them.

It's not like the Iranians don't know how to write computer programs. Maybe right now would be a good time to move way the Hell out into the countryside, and invest in some HEPA filters and lots of solar power.

HEPA filters can get plutonium dust out of the air you see.

... on North Vietnam, it was always willing to pass the funding bills for it.

To defund the FCC would require that Congress leave it out of the budget resolution, or reduce the funding provided by the resolution.

That's not something a White House petition would affect.

Rather oddly, I don't know why but have some theories, remote work is available today that was not just a year ago.

If more of us worked remotely, and more business owners hired more workers, then there would be far less need to live near our places of work.

Then as sea levels rose, or it got too hot to live, or too dry to grow food, or so humid that rains caused constant flooding, both the remote workers and those who employ us could just go somewhere else.

The world is not as overpopulated as it looks. There are vast amounts of completely undeveloped land, with abundant resources of water and energy. The problem is that there are some countries that are very populous, that are poor agriculture, or poor education.

Were we to more equitably distribute our food, education and jobs, global warming would be far less of a problem, because it would be easier for more of the population to migrate to better climes.

... that is, should he have chosen to sign the laws, the laws passed without his signature while Congress was in recess, or the congress overrode his veto.

Strictly speaking, President Obama cannot just declare that ISPs are Common Carriers. I expect the law says that the FCC determines that, and FDR or some such signed the law that established the FCC, at the time the Common Carrier status was to regulate the phone companies.

However the president does have a lot of power, as I said, to present evidence to the FCC during hearings, to write friend of the court briefs, to petition the courts and so on.

But I'm pretty sure he could not just sign an executive order.

Were that the case, that an executive order could just overturn a law, we'd see a lot more executive orders than we presently do.

This.

Is.

A.

Test.

When I click on my username, a drop-down menu appears with "Options" and "Account". Actually both items permit me to set preferences; the posting format switch is under Account and not Options. That's a poor design.

But thank you!

The Jewish faith does not in fact consider it disrespectul to write "God" as "G" "o" "d". What it considers disrespectful, is to spell the word "God" correctly, then destroy the document that it is written on.

-nch? Now there are indeed laws by which the FCC must operate. There is for example a law or are laws that define what a common carrier is. So how about hurling metric boatloads of attorneys, engineers, sociologists or what have you, at the FCC, to convince them that ISPs are really common carriers? At one time an ISP was arguably an information provider, say when they all provided Usenet feeds. But it has been more than ten years since I've been able to get a feed from any ISP. I don't even get my email from my ISP anymore. I get connectivity, that's it. I don't even use their DNS. So from my point of view at least, as well as those of many common types of Internet users, the ISPs are common carriers now, even if they weren't before.

My own log file analysis quite clearly tells me that to understand my overall site performance, I must average over seven-day periods. This because some visitors visit while at work, others in the evenings, others on the weekends. But the overall shape of the traffic periodic, with a period of seven days. This would be easy to do, but rather tedious: Go back over the last few months, since at least a month before the beta was announced, and enter into a spreadsheet the timestamp of each story, and how many comments it got. For extra credit, count how many comments had each possible moderation score, from -1 to 5. Now tally those up weekly, and compare the trends both before the Slashcott - february 10 through 17 - and during it. Eventually you'll get significant data for after the Slashcott as well. I haven't actually done this but my vague impression is that an insignificant number actually participated. I did. It was sorely tempting just to peek a little, being a nerd I need news that matters on a daily basis, but no, I never visited the site from the 10th until midnight this morning, on the 18th.