I think you missed the point. Your bunch of angry students will reform the politics that are so screwed up, thanks in large part to CU. All they have to do is grow up and VOTE. And that doesn't mean voting a straight ticket for either of the current parties in power, it means voting for the person who understands the root of the problem and has a determination to fix it, or becoming that candidate themselves.

But first , in order to do that, the education system baby MUST be thrown out with the dirty bath water. The intelligent child, the one who can think and fix things, is now held back to the lowest speed of learning that the slowest child is capable of. So now we get high school grads who can't read the evening fishwrap, or make change at the fast food window without the computer in the cash register. Their experience in school was the most boring you can imagine.

This is NOT a new phenomenon by any means. It was being imposed on me, and I could see the end result forming in my own mind in the late '40's when they had decided to remove phonics from the system, lock, stock and even its roots were excised, although I did get that as one of the last to get it in the early 40's. So what did I do? First I tried to sit in on the high school senior physics class as a freshman, but that blew up when I corrected the teacher about Newtons 3rd Law. IMNSHO that was so damned basic he should have been fired for incompetence. So I could see that my education was essentially frozen in time, but that wasn't me. I still had lots to learn and knew that in my field of interest, I likely would never stop learning until I wasn't able to any more. My field of interest? Radio, then tv, electronics in general, and now for the last 35 years, computers.

So I quit, and with only an 8th grade diploma, I started fixing radio's then tv's for a living. Switching to specialize in broadcasting in the early 60's by passing the 1st Phone test, by then I already had fingerprints in places only a few others could claim as I helped build the tv cameras that were on the Trieste when it went down into the mohole in Feb 1960.

Since that time, the sign on the office door has said Chief Engineer most of the time, and I am also a Certified Electronics Technician since '72. I'd heard, while I was the EIC at KXNE, that the community college was testing for that as a passing grade for a 2 year course they were teaching, so I walked in and plunked down the money and sat for the test, passing it with a good enough grade I could skip the apprenticeship requirements, while down with the flu & never cracked a study guide. All that stuff came easy for me. It started at 1:15PM, and I noted that when I turned in the test at 2pm, eyebrows went up and he asked if I was sure? Sure as I'll ever be. He said most don't finish the test in the 3 hours allocated. I said I'm not most. 10 days later I had a card from the N.E.C., and that got me more respect than the 1st Phone ever did.

Now retired and 78 YO, I am proof that being good at electronic ditch digging has its rewards. Not a millionaire, but I have enough, and I don't owe anybody a cent except yearly taxes etc. And I keep busy, currently building the stuff to put a 3x stronger, servo controlled motor in my table top, and cnc converted lathe, with my already cnc'd (by me) table top milling machine.

Keeps me out of the bars don'tcha know. :)

Education is great, but I have met university profs who, when discussing relativity, did not believe it was a phenomenon, a source of distortion in a UHF tv transmitter employing klystron amplifiers. Those folks amaze me, having obtained the sheepskin, they stop learning, they know it all! That's BS folks. Living itself is learning.

It is criminal to treat the gifted youngster as a nuisance to be tolerated, and not fed the knowledge being sought, particularly when the teacher is incompetent to teach the subject and teaches it wrong. Fix the educational system to stop that bull shit, and the results of that will fix everything else. It won't be over night, more like 2 generations, and will be accompanied by much kicking and screaming as the incompetents are weeded out, but the net result will be an improved society as a whole.

And that's my $0.02, in 1934 dollars, but you'll need to adjust for inflation since. ;-)

Cheers, Gene

That is also a possibility. A language barrier of sorts.

I am reminded of a phrase I saw years ago, that said England and America were two great countries, separated by a common language. ;-)

Cheers, Gene

Yes, that is the generally accepted practice, diddled only by the endian-ness of the processor.
Personally I have trouble with big endian hardware, but that's just me. There is no reason it can't work just as well as long as the compiler knows about it. But what little programming I do today is both on smaller cpu's, and in assembly. Or for stuff on this linux box, a bash script seems to work well too.

Cheers, Gene

Where I am talking about the address of the data, which may actually live in any address the hardware can access. So you still aren't fully grokking the concept.

And I am sad because I can't seem to explain it any better.

Cheers, Gene

Then it sounds like you don't understand the term "pointer" either. To summarize a bit, a pointer is usually of a size (number of bits) that is a native size for the hardware at hand, and could be as much as 256 bits in currently working hardware, but typically 64 bits in consumer hardware.

Secondly, it is considered to be (usually) a pointer, which if used as a memory address to be read, would result in the reading of the data at that address.

But there are nuances to what you do with that data, because its possible that the data you just read from that pointers address, is in fact a real address, the pointer, that the next stage of this 'indirection' will be read from.

Hardware is generally limited to just one of these indirections, but software is free to use as many as the programmer can keep track of, with some 'databases' being organized around doing just that for the programmer.

This is not a new concept by any means, it could be done on the early cpu's from 30 to 35 years, maybe even 40 years ago. The 1802 from rca could do it as an assembly macro, so could the dane bramaged Z-80's & 6502's, and the 6809, which could do it in hardware in addition to its Program Counter Relative addressing, made heavy use of that ability nearly 30 years ago. Even the TI-9900, which had only one internal register, used that register as an index into the structure of a register stack held in memory, so that changing context on the 9900 was a simple reload of this register with the master address of the register stack of the next process to be given some time to run. Simple, fast context switches, an architecture that should have had more industry support than it got. I think, because its speed limit was real time memory access, the simplicity of it got thrown out like the baby with the bath water but today's cache memory speeds, right on the die with the cpu, could make the concept workable again. .2 nanosecond IRQ service anyone? But it would likely take several millions of dollars to bring a modern, 64 or 128 bit version of the 9900 to life.

Cheers, Gene

About as tired as you would expect a 78 yo diabetic to be. I just changed the blades on my 30 yo rider, which I had to jack up on a set of ramps, then pickup the front end about 20 inches so I could get my 1/2" impact wrench on the spindle bolts, and it will be about 1/2 an hour before my burning legs will feel like forking it and actually doing some of the first mowing of the year.

Getting old is not for wimps, I don't recommend it at all. ;-)

Cheers, Gene,

I'll agree with the comments about there being zip lights. I checked all the so-called space weather sites I could think of, and absolutely no one was even aware of it. Here in north central WV, DC is about 150 miles due east of me, I went out several times to check, and while the sky was clear enough I found Polaris instantly, the only skylight was the usual glow from a 50k pop city 20 miles north.

As one commenter above said, we got bupkiss.

I can remember back in about '50 or '51, when we were testing nukes at high altitudes, we had some truly glorious northern lights in the farm country west of Des Moines, but its generally been pretty slim pickins since. So this turned out to be someone's wishful thinking ANAICT.

Cheers, Gene.

cover their sorry asses. There, I fixed it for you.

Obviously that place was dying before you ever walked in the door. We all have dreams of making things better, but the first time you were sold out should have been the day you 'went out for lunch' and interviewed for a better outfit. You will never get a good recommendation from a$$holes like that, so why waste your time when we're only allotted so much of it & the only way to stretch it is to go fishing? (I've been told repeatedly that time spent fishing is when that clock is unplugged)

I know, hindsight is usually 20-10 or better. You sound young enough and savvy enough to catch up though. I think I can look back on 50+ years working in electronics and say I've had a pretty good ride for a guy with a grammar school diploma and a GED.

Cheers, Gene

I'd differ with that. I was fresh on the job, just 2 or 3 months, long enough to get the feeling I would be the scapegoat. The owner came in, and a deal the GM had made in a bar 2 weeks back hadn't worked out, and as the 3 of us were walking to the back of the garage to look at what we had, The GM tried to say it was all my idea.

Wrong, I skipped out in front, spun around and said this stops right here and now, I was just following orders. The owner looked at the GM, looked at me, gave a barely perceptible nod, and started walking again. I didn't get pushed to take the blame again, but I did get pushed in every other way it seemed.

Owners didn't get to be owners without a sense of who's right and who's wrong in boss/employee differences. Tell the truth even if you lose, because if you lose, that job was looking for somebody to do it when you walked in. I'd a hell of a lot prefer to stand my ground if I'm right, and admit it if I'm wrong, and I've done quite a bit of both in my 78 years. Honesty has paid off handsomely several times.

About 2 years later another situation came to a boil, and I was the first one called to the owners office when he arrived. He wanted to know what it would take to fix it. I said 2 things, the gear these people are using is just plain worn out, its been on the road non-stop for at least 5 years, I can't get parts because the parts bills aren't being paid. I need 10 grand in parts, and I can't get a P.O. for more than $200 a month, COD. Hell of a way to run a train. Besides that, the technology has moved on. Its time to upgrade.

His next question floored me, he wanted to know if he needed a new GM. I had to say it looked like he was, at the end of the day, the biggest roadblock to making things run smoothly. Then he had another dept head paged, 3 all told in the next 30 minutes. Years later he said they all agreed with me, so we had a new GM by the next morning. That and $150,000 in new gear put out the fire. That GM didn't work so well either after a couple years, but that's another story I am not directly involved in. The 3rd one is a pussy cat and we sometimes get into very noisy arguments even now, just to entertain the troops. He's a decent man, a motivated manager, but in a war of wits with me on technical stuff, he is unarmed and knows it very very well.

Bottom line to this story is that I had already proved my worth from the 1st day on the job because they had about half the gear packed up to go back to the factory shop, expected 2 to 3 grand each for repairs with a 2 week turnaround time. I canceled that, unpacked them and handed in parts orders at about 10% of that per machine. All were back in service inside of 10 days, half that waiting on FEDEX or UPS.

So it was a question of who was worth more to the person who owns the place. I stayed there 18+ years, have now been retired for 11 years, and the owner and I are still friends.

Cheers, Gene

Not from fetchmail:

But I had to turn it on in .fetchmailrc & when I did, without the prescan by mailfilter, it worked, its sucking over 100 old mails dating back to March 1 now. So we wait and see if it will accept the next pull request. This gives me a list of lists whose subscriptions I need to move. lkml and mplayer for starters. Now I have re-enabled mailfilter too.

fetchmail's latest does have a new error message though, which for here make zero sense, not multidrop. everything goes to me although I do have a few /dev/null destinations in my procmailrc.

fetchmail: awakened at Tue Mar 12 11:46:52 2013
fetchmail: restarting fetchmail (/home/gene/.fetchmailrc changed)
fetchmail: warning: multidrop for pop.gmail.com requires envelope option!
fetchmail: warning: Do not ask for support if all mail goes to postmaster!
fetchmail: starting fetchmail 6.3.9-rc2 daemon

And the docs for 6.3.9-rc2 do not appear to discuss this. In any event, if mailfilter doesn't nuke it on the server before fetchmail pulls it, its handed off to to procmail SA and clamav. I see what survives that.

Anyway after 12 days, its working again, until gmail gets another fart stuck crossways I guess. As to when that might be, I haven't the foggiest.

Cheers, Gene.

Tell that to google. I have no access by any method. End of discussion. I didn't even call them until after my username and passwd known to be good, was rejected trying to login via FF.

I don't use webmail. Ever. Its a solution promulgated because they can wrap it up in so damned much advertising that you sometimes can't find the frigging message. Why folks, mostly winders users I suppose, use it, and put up with the hassle of spending 5 minutes to log in using a browser, when that is an automatic function of fetchmail that takes less than 100 milliseconds when committed to a background script. If the login is successful, then that waiting mail is downloaded to my hard drive at 400kb/sec & 30 seconds later I'm gone. I hit the + key and read it.

Now, if they wanted to cull the accounts that are not seeing their advertising, that's fine by me, as I have access to other mail servers. But no, they can't be honest, they have to lie like a used car salesman, telling me my machine is infected. There are 2 or 3 mailing lists, one of them a 500 msgs/day list still being fed into it. But they'll probably not notice as they have probably and old message culler that kicks in when the mailbox is at 95%. And I have no clue how much space that is.

In short, but at length in this reply, it is googles problem. They can fix it. If they were changing something that required I change a fetchmail option, they could have issued a broadcast to all users message. They did not.

Cheers, Gene

Damn, isn't there anybody here but me who has been locked out of their gmail account for about 2 weeks now? I have not changed a thing in my fetchmailrc or mailfilterrc's, and have been sucking my gmail account dry at 3 minute intervals with fetchmail for damned near 5 years.

2 weeks ago, both fetchmail and mailfilter started reporting password failures. It worked about 30 minutes a day for 5 or 6 days, but has not worked since the last week of February.

I call them up, get some yahoo whose command of English sucks dead toads through soda straws, he leaves to go get someone who speaks English, but the next guy isn't a hell of a lot better, and he finally speaks clear enough that he is telling me the account is blocked because my machine is compromised. I object, its a linux box, behind a router running DD-WRT. Doesn't make squat to him, my machine is compromised.

Seeing as how everything that comes in here has to run the clamav gauntlet, and that this is a linux machine which has not had java enabled anywhere near firefox in months, currently at V-19.0.2, AND that its behind a router running DD-WRT, AND neither chkrootkit nor rkhunter can find anything to complain about, I seriously doubt it has been compromised.

I had been gradually weaning my mailing list activities, moving them to other servers precisely because of their no dups policy, so that was all the impetus I needed to just move all my subs. I still scan them on schedule just in case they actually get someone who reads english wondering why a fetchmail instance is failing to login, telling fetchmail the password is toast when its the same pw I've been using for years, and its long enough John didn't get it in 6 hours of grinding on it when I last checked with john the ripper.

Until that happens, screw gmail, and the camel that rode in on them.

Cheers, Gene

I can't make a serious argument that disagrees with that. The major point being that the individual programmer is at the library's author(s) mercy, and in spite of his best efforts, 95% or more of his 10 megabyte masterpiece written in Java, will be spent, not in his code, but in the interpreter which he has no control over.

All they can do, after exercising due diligence, is go ahead and wear the Java T-shirt, the one with the target rings on the back. They have managed to have a working app in 25% of the time it would have taken it to be written in C, or perhaps 10% of the time it would have taken in HLA dialect for that cpu.

It just, to me, confirms that old saw about getting what you pay for, where time to market is the holy grail the payment is judged by. :)

Cheers, Gene

Because that would cost (gasp) money, and Larry would have to put off buying the rest of Hawaii for another 3 weeks.

Seriously, from the vantage point of having first coded in assembly back in '78, (also my age now) on an RCA 1802 MPU, one of the things I learned early on was to write a small executable that called the program piece I was working on, feeding it data up to the size of the cpu's registers, and let it run long enough its all been tried, without any crashing or incorrect output.

You can't do that to the whole thing where its tied to machinery you might cause to break or injure people, but you can damned sure stick some leds on the output bus, both as an activity indicator, and as a correctness verification. That means the guy writing the code must also be capable of picking up a soldering iron and fabricating his own test tool hardware, and I don't believe for a millisecond that a coder can call himself a coder or programmer if he can't do that. The hands MUST fit the tools IOW.

Engineering at a tv station was my paycheck for 48 years, and I have played cowboys and electrons for a living since the tail end of the 40's, quitting school to go fix tv's for cigarette money at the end of the 8th grade & still do the hot soldering iron scene but more as an aid to my hobbies, one of which is cnc controlled machining tools.

Some of the code I wrote, to run on hardware I also built, has lasted as long as the technology that required it, in 2 cases in excess of a decade, and one of those 2, the decade was after I had gone on down the road to a greener pasture. Neither ever crashed except when the battery ran down because the power failure was longer than the battery's holdup time.

Yes, dependable code seems like its also secure, but that is achieved by testing that data for validity BEFORE using it to for something so mundane as detecting when someone has gotten up from the shitter and is putting himself back together, at which point you close a switch and effectively pull the flush handle.

What is so difficult about understanding that? Just because your prof in CS101 was a pompous ass and didn't do it, I mean how dare you question MY judgement?, didn't do it, what makes you think you don't need to? I have done things in a higher level language quite a few times, but AFAIAC, that higher level language just makes it that much easier to shoot your code in its one tenuous space connected to reality, aka its foot.

My 2 cents for today.
Cheers, Gene