_ My friend, parting time is pending.
Farewell, democracy wall.
What can I say to you?
Should I speak of spring’s frigidity?
Should I say you are like the withered winter sweet?
No. I should instead talk of happiness,
tomorrow’s happiness.
Of pure orchid skies.
Of golden flowers.
Of child’s bright eyes.
We ought to part with dignity, don’t you agree?
– Anonymous(?), Beijing, 1976. _
* * *
If you know any more details about this poem, I would be happy to hear about it.
Quote:
“When I left Fort Knox, Ky., for Vietnam in 1967, the sergeant (a full-blood Navajo Indian) called me into his office and told me flat out, “Remember, Heinemann, this is not a white man’s war.”
>From this article in the NYT.
The first hit in Google for “failure” is this page. I think the google upper echelon are going to find themselves in Guantanamo bay really soon now.
In particular, I dont think they can continue claiming that the fact that `google’ means in Arabic “dancing jubilantly naked on top of the dead body of your infidel enemy” is a coincidence.
nud_nik n. [Slang] a dull, tiresome, annoying person
The child played on, and suddenly Janek was afraid. For the first time he felt suddenly afraid of death. A German bullet, cold or hunger, disease or capture – and he would disappear from this earth before he could received from the hands and souls of men all the beauty that they had achieved against all odds, against hatred and scorn, against massacre and oppression, all the tremendous beauty they had achieved and lifted above themselves, above their own fate, above their own death, a beauty that runs like a streak, a thread of light , through ages, and which human beings spun and preserved and defended with their own lives, in great anguish of body and spirit, under the anger of aloofness of heavens, answering the cruel challenge of death by creating beauty that shall outlast millenniums.
- **European Education, Roman Gary**
(And he is out of print in the US. You have to wonder how primitive and backward a country can be.)
[mahout]
ma_hout n. in India and the East Indies, an elephant driver or keeper
[cameleer]
cam_el_eer n. a camel driver
[skinner]
2. [Colloq.] a (mule) driver
Here is an interesting article about the luck of women in computer science/computer engineering (got it from slashdot).
1. abebooks – the best place to buy used books that are hard to get. Usually the shipment is more expensive than the books.
2. DVD player that can play all regions/PAL/NTSC/avi-files/subtitles, etc. And costs little more than regular DVD player. I have this one and it works very nicely. But you can find what is the “current” best here.
3. Rotten Tomatoes – which provides reliable information about movies.
4. Calvin and Hobbes – enough said.
5. The Internet Top 100 SF/Fantasy List – a very good list of SF books – just avoid the fatasy books.
6. Top 250 movies according to IMDB.
7. addall – a great site for comparing prices of books.
8. Wikipedia and especially the hebrew version.
9. KDE – which is a great window manager, supports hebrew input easily, not to mention kdvi, etc, etc, etc.
10. Project Gutenberg – which is what the typing monkeys wanted to type all along.
11. The pillow book – the mother of all lists.
(From Slashdot:) Hospitals are complaining about problems they are encountering with patching Microsoft operating systems used for Medical applications – see here for more details.
The basic problem is that those critical applications are connected to the network, and as such they are being hit by viruses. Thus, the patches are critical to keeping the system up. On the other hand, the companies manufacturing those products (rightly) refuse to give support after the systems are being patched, since there were cases where such patches made the system collapse.
I think there are several basic problems here:
1. Security – it does not matter what OS those machines are running – they should not have access to the internet. This is just pure stupidity as far as security. Those local networks should be disconnected from the internet, and if they need to be connected, only via very restricted interfaces.
2. Diversity – this is true in general – building all the computer systems with a single operating system, with monolithic components just make the whole network vulnerable. Arguably one of the lessons of evolution is that the more diversity you have, the better chances are that some specie would survive.
So, it is essentially only a question of time since somebody would be murdered by a hacker breaking into a hospital system. Frankly, I find the idea of getting a treatment in a hospital running critical applications on windows to be quite frightening.
So, are we ignoring the issues of security too much in CS? Should we start designing systems along military way of thinking about vulnerability of a system. (For example, the idea that local networks should not be connected to outside networks is a standard practice in military computer systems.)
**To acknowledge the corn**: This purely American expression means to admit the losing of an argument, especially in regard to a detail; to retract; to admit defeat. It is over a hundred years old. Andrew Stewart, a member of Congress, is said to have mentioned it in a speech in 1828. He said that haystacks and cornfields were sent by Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky to Philadelphia and New York. Charles A. Wickliffe, a member from Kentucky questioned the statement by commenting that haystacks and cornfields could not walk. Stewart then pointed out that he did not mean literal haystacks and cornfields, but the horses, mules, and hogs for which the hay and corn were raised. Wickliffe then rose to his feet, and said, “Mr. Speaker, I acknowledge the corn”.
- Funk, Earle. “A Hog on Ice and Other Curious Expressions”