Diesel-electric hybrids (like how a locomotive works) are actually just starting to show up in heavy equipment like articulated wheel loaders. There are some huge advantages. The electric motors are quieter which means the operators can work closer to existing population and work more hours of the day. The combustion engine only ever runs at peak efficiency to generate electricity. Fuel savings is around 30% compared to mechanical drive. Packaging is much easier due to flexibility of routing cables instead of moving shafts.

An all electric beast is probably a ways off, but a diesel electric hybrid with even a trivial all-electric low speed cruising range before firing up the diesel is probably an interesting possibility.

It'll get "stuck" trying to get out of NYC.

So, government creates a problem (employer involvement in health insurance), makes it worse (subsidizes employer involvement with health insurance) and then tries to fix it by making it illegal for employers to provide insurance that is too good, and illegal to provide insurance that is too bad, and too expensive to provide any insurance at all, with the predictable effect that lots of employers are simply dropping insurance.

So, it is a fantastic outcome that some peoples insurance situation is being divorced from their employer / employment situation -- this is goodness -- but it is costing people more money, in many cases.

In my case, if I tried to buy health insurance on the BCBS ND exchange, it would be hugely expensive compared to the reduced, employer subsidized coverage I have, and, it would be much worse coverage.

In my state, many more people have lost their existing coverage than have gained coverage due to ACA.

Basically, if the feds hadn't gotten involved in this mess in the first damn place, back during WW2, I think a lot of teeth gnashing could have been avoided.

Instead, the feds are trying to claim a great achievement for maybe partially a little bit addressing a problem that is their own damn fault.

If the point is to look for pathogens in other peoples fluids...

well, I'm not real excited about holding the thing mm from my eye :)

(somehow having a giant metal/glass column as a buffer seems less creepy)

haha.

Oops :)

Ok, Feynman ridiculed NASA about the _other_ shuttle disaster :)

My apologies :)

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tuf...

I've read the booklet and I found it persuasive.

Tufte (and iirc, Feynman) also cited reliance on Powerpoint on the Columbia disaster

I think it's important to understand what powerpoint is good for. It is good for helping an average presenter guide the delivery of low-bandwidth information into a low-attention span audience who are not subject matter experts.

In other words, it's good for 90% of the people, 90% of the time.

If you are trying to send people to space, or create controlled black holes on the European mainland, do not use it.

Another situation where PP can be used effectively is to present visual information - photos, charts, etc.

Ironically enough, I borrowed the Tufte powerpoint rant from the Microsoft Library here at work :)

AMEN.

No, that is not ironic.

That's very much the ideal of the SAT, to draw out kids who are bright but haven't shown in through grades. It does happen. Statistically however, GPA is still a better predictor. It's just not the only one, and the SAT is overrated—hence even its creator talking about reform (again). My (totally unscientific) experience has been that a lot of the super-groomed kids don't come across so great. Having a soul is valuable too.

Ideally of course you have good grades *and* SAT scores! My kid has, to put it mildly, a very wide spread between SATs and GPA. I have no idea what the schools will think. They *are* in fact looking to GPA more and more. I think they are aware of the reputations of a great many schools and of grade inflation. Like you, I went to a prep school where everyone went to college, and its reputation stood for a lot. And straight A's in all AP classes at a school people have heard of is a fair criterion.

I think most admissions decisions are made on relatively little info and reflection. A lot of schools admit half or more of their applicants, and only a fraction actually matriculate. I doubt the 20-somethings doing most of the review are working too hard at analyzing the applicants. None of the schools my son applied to, for example, had interviews. On the other hand, yes, some schools get into it a little harder.

Oh BTW—congrats on pulling through the morass!

No. My scores for example were "so what" at Harvard. At those schools, the SAT scores of many applicants tend to be so good that they don't matter. The school can admit all the 800 scores they want, but do go looking for other qualities. The statistical validity of the SAT above 700 or so is not very good and is not useful for distinguishing among candidates—the test is designed around the much lower and heavily populated mean. Moreover, the SAT is technically not an IQ test any more, rather a measure of scholastic "achievement." (The "A" in SAT used to stand for aptitude, until 1992 or so. Mensa no longer accepts SAT scores I think. I'm not endorsing IQ tests here either.)

Consider http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

While they debate what to do ... the Board itself should be challenged for its power and profiteering. They overcharge for things that should be dirt cheap like score reporting, keep pumping out more and more tests, and have surprisingly little proof of the validity of the tests themselves. Meanwhile the test prep industry is making millions, providing (or insinuating) false claims of what they can deliver, and helping wealth discrimination.

Closely timed fill-in-the-bubble test-taking skills are not valuable life skills, in college or elsewhere. FWIW I'm speaking as someone who got near-perfect SAT scores, as did my son, and have to admit it's a scam. The scores do mean *something,* but it's all gotten out of control. GPA is the single best predictor of performance. (But don't get me started on grade inflation....)

Ok, so your premise, from one email altercation, is that Theo's attitude is so intense, so "he can never be wrong", that openbsd has no security advantages. Never mind that the premise is ridiculous.

But the actual evidence suggests that internet arguing aside, openbsd eventually adopts valuable security practices and technologies that Theo initially disagrees with.

So, what was the point of your first post, exactly?

Are you going to modify your position on openBSD, now that you know the project incorporates outside feedback, even when they publicly disavow it at first? I mean, you're a rational guy, right?

I look forward to reading a paper from you where you show, factually, that your use of source analysis tools finds vulnerabilities that the OpenBSD team missed.

It should be easy, right?

You'll be a hero. The first person, apparently, to ever look at OpenBSD critically. The first person to test it.

Get over yourself. Accept that they've put out a great product, your butthurt notwithstanding.

You're not the first person to suggest something to Theo, only to have him shoot down your idea.

In my case, I suggested a profiler that you'd run an exe under, and it would catalog the syscalls that the binary made, and all the syscall arguments. That profile would be stored for that program in a repository.

After the profile was created, if the program ever deviated from its syscall profile, the syscalls would fail and the binary would be terminated.

The goal here would be to holistically stop programs from misbehaving when under control of an attacker.

Theo's comment was, basically, "this will never be part of openbsd, and you are perhaps the 10th person to suggest such a thing"

Well, sometime later, something similar to what I suggested did in fact become part of OpenBSD. I think it appeared on Linux first.

Did I begrudge Theo at the time? No. Do I begrudge him now? No.

Even Heroes are fallible people. Theo is just a guy. He's made my life remarkably better because ever since someone remote-rooted my IRIX box, I've had his Operating system as my edge device, and I've not detected any remote-roots ever since. All I did was buy a T-shirt and a couple CDs from him. Hell, I even contributed a fix (Back in the 2.x days).

I think your assessment of OpenBSD's security is shit. Go look at old bugtraq posts. They made a good point of cataloging who was affected. Notably absent was OpenBSD -- almost always. And not because nobody tried -- but because OpenBSD didn't fail.

These guys are serious about security, and the results are self evident. Your personal beef with Theo is your problem; not a reflection of lack of results on their part. The fact that you're editing Wikipedia about this indicates a legendary amount of butt-hurt.

The OpenBSD project has given us lots of goodness, above and beyond OpenBSD itself.

I have no idea why you would question his technical expertise. He has brought up a BSD kernel on countless different pieces of hardware. How many people can say that? How many unix kernel engineers can even say that?

Note this little gem buried in the article:
"All were allowed to eat as much as they wanted."

I think that's a pretty big caveat.

Eat healthy. It's really not that complicated. Fruit, veg, meat, salad, carbs that aren't refined. The more processed it is, the worse it is for you