Re: Engineers in U.S. vs. India
Jim Dixon wrote: The term 'engineer' is far from precise; in the UK most people who work with tools can be called engineers but people who write software generally are NOT called engineers. There are further complications: for example, in I have had jobs as a software engineer in the UK and since the dot com bubble this hasn't been an uncommon job title. The UK tends to follow US fashions very closely importing in titles like CEO and CTO and the term software engineer is no different. As for your comments that my impression is that India has a few excellent institutions and a vast number of unbelievably bad schools I suspect this is true but applies equally to the UK and USA and indeed any country with a university system. Neither is graduating from a top engineering school such as Stanford any automatic guarantee of quality as anyone who has worked with these people knows. India has an excellent tradition in mathematics and some of the best software engineers I have worked with in the UK have been Indian graduates, since it's the most enterprising and highly qualified ones which tend to emigrate. O Reilly Associates recognise the importance of the Indian market by suppplying special low priced editions of their books to the Indian market. They are occasionally available as grey imports in the UK. -- 1024/D9C69DF9 Steve Mynott [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Engineers in U.S. vs. India
Jim Dixon wrote: On Wed, 7 Jan 2004, Steve Mynott wrote: The term 'engineer' is far from precise; in the UK most people who work with tools can be called engineers but people who write software generally are NOT called engineers. There are further complications: for example, in I have had jobs as a software engineer in the UK and since the dot com bubble this hasn't been an uncommon job title. Go to Jobserve and count. I did, about a year ago. I found 612 references in a 5-day period, as compared with 1651 for Java and 1889 for C++. What to call people who write software is problematic. software engineer is a job title like programmer or developer (often with senior or junior as a prefix). Senior meaning that you get paid a little more since you have more experience rather than being a manager. I never had a programming job where the language was specified in the title. I am talking here of permanent work rather than contract style. Searching on jobserve (the main UK IT job site) I get 3123 hits for developer 2009 engineer 806 software developer 803 software engineer 766 programmer 201 software programmer So programmer is the unpopular job title not engineer, probably because it seems to have a bit of an outdated 1970s punched and magnetic tape type reputation. My point is not that there are no software engineers in the world, but that the term engineer is often used quite loosely and means vastly different things in different places. Agreed The term 'software engineer' is becoming less common in the States these days. I have watched the job title wax and wane for more than twenty five years. I think that it was most fashionable in the early 1980s. Any Americans care to comment on this? You don't understand. I have never ever heard of any school in the UK or the United States, no matter how bad, where degrees are routinely and rather openly sold, or where riots on campus, usually in response to examinations, frequently involve lethal weapons and deaths. Unbelievably bad means just that. I think people can still get a good education even in unstable and poorer nations. You don't need to spend many dollars to run Linux and print out downloaded PDFs. There were campus deaths in the American and French student riots of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Oxford and Cambridge Universities openly sell masters degrees. The examinations systems in many British influenced countries in the east resemble 1950s UK ones in their high standards and there doesn't seem to be much doubt that British examinations have been dumbed down since the 1980s to improve pass percentages. It doesn't seem to me likely a doctor's son in Bangalore is automatically going to get a worse education than the average street kid in South Central LA or Hackney. The Asperger enhanced asian engineering, physics and maths geeks shut in their rooms with an internet link won't be the ones running around killing people. They are more likely to be hacking NASA via abuse of their local inband trunk signaling and gaining an excellent education in C buffers, UNIX and international telecommunications systems. And hopefully subscribing to this list and reading Murray Rothbard. I am not India-bashing. I just think that the people who are so concerned about the threat of India wiping out the US software industry are uhm let's say a bit unrealistic. It might be a concern 30 years from now, although I am skeptical even of that. Agreed. They will get a bigger slice of a bigger pie but still a smaller serving than the US. I remember the Americans being scared about the Japanese Are Coming With Their Expert Systems hype of the early 1980s. And they never came despite many yen being wasted by MITI. The only currently popular Japanese computer language Ruby is pretty much a copy of a European one (python). -- 1024/D9C69DF9 Steve Mynott [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Silly wiccan, tricks are for kids!
Tyler Durden wrote: Well, I think there's an obvious disconnect on this issue. Clearly, pre-Christian religious practices survived Christian persecution throughout the ages. From the little I know, some of the practicing Druids actually have received a nearly unbroken chain of tradition. The modern druid traditions, as followed by Willian Blake, only date back to the eighteenth century. There is no unbroken chain of tradition. Very little is known about the real pre-Roman druids, since they left no written traces. The little that is known (mistletoe and oaks) has come from Roman reports. The Romans also claim the druids burnt livestock and humans alive in huge wickermen. I doubt these practices would survive unnoticed in most modern European societies. But the fact that Wicca (as the movement is known today) does not necessarily represent anything authentic doesn't mean that authentic practicing pagans don't exist today (which was Harmon's main point, I believe). The burden of truth lies with you and Harmon to prove authentic pagans exist. Given that, again, virtually nothing is known about pagan practices your proof would be quite impossible.
Re: Trials for those undermining the war effort?
Harmon Seaver wrote: On Sun, Mar 30, 2003 at 01:25:47PM -0500, stuart wrote: [..] Apparently you know nothing of the history of Britain and Ireland. No, I do. No you don't. But of course, the problems really pre-date all that, going back to when the christer Romans came and killed off the Druids and Wiccans who wouldn't bend the knee to conversion, as they did in the rest of Europe. Three problems with that:- 1. The Romans never invaded Ireland 2. The Romans which invaded mainland Britain weren't Christian (if that's what you mean by christer). They worshiped many Gods with the cult of Mithras being popular with the army. 3. Wicca is a modern invention. -- Steve -- Steve
Re: The Train Wreck is Proceeding Nicely
On Tuesday, Feb 18, 2003, at 12:01 Europe/London, Eric Cordian wrote: The space plane could be flying now, if the tanks didn't require a complete redesign from composite to aluminum. It could have gotten funded to be finished, instead of put into storage. Maybe in 10 years, someone will do it, like the shuttle. Maybe they won't. Maybe another group will do something similar. Maybe no one will care. A prediction (so probably wrong). The US space program will continue to be underfunded since there is no competition until the Chinese manned space program really gets underway and the US get scared. Maybe history will then repeat itself almost exactly in a Space Race and the US end up on Mars. The Chinese spacecraft look a lot like the old Soviet ones only better, more modern and almost as if the old Russian engineers had done them but with more money. Also compare the annual GDP growth rate of China with that of the US. -- Steve Mynott [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: My favorite line from the DOJ's latest draft bill
On Tuesday, Feb 11, 2003, at 21:25 Europe/London, Harmon Seaver wrote: On Tue, Feb 11, 2003 at 02:34:54PM -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: Except that there are so few of those no one has ever been able to quantify/qualify them, so we don't know what that really consists of. When you say those are you referring to bad acid trips? (Don't tell me you've never had one!) [..] experiences which caused me to decide to stop taking LSD. And very clearly remember someone locally who died in the emergency room after freaking out on the same batch of acid that seemed quite weird to us, they gave him thorazine and it killed him. Obviously it wasn't LSD. LSD has virtually zero physical toxicity but it's possible someone could die as a result of being hysterical or choking due to psychological stress. Not that likely to happen but there are cases. It has been claimed that DOM (STP) reacts badly with thorazine but this is now not thought to be the case. It's far likely he died from the thorazine alone since it can cause cardiac arrest. I then came into a large quantity of peyote -- shazaam, no more weirdness. Likewise mushrooms, ayahuasca, etc. And that is why, essentially, blotter acid came into being, because you can't get enough of anything else but LSD on that tiny piece of paper to do *anything*, so it's safe. There have been documented seizures of DOB on blotter (particularly in Australia with its traditionally high street cost of LSD). DOB is a psychedelic which both closely resembles LSD in its effects and approaches LSD in potency (a few hundred micrograms). DOB, unlike most psychedelic drugs like LSD, can be physically toxic but at a massive overdose level (~100 milligrams) which probably wouldn't fit on a blotter. There are a lot more known drugs active at the LSD level in 2002 than 1967 but as a rough rule of thumb you are probably still basically right. The blotter is most likely to contain LSD (often as the freebase) or nothing at all. BTW blotter is unstable and likely to have a short shelf life. Microdots (containing salts) are likely to last for years. I'll grant, however, that bad trips seem to occur much more on 'cid than on natural substances. I think you are just generalising from your personal experience which may not hold for others. It's just the same as some people claiming particular alcoholic drinks are better or worse than others. The key thing about these drugs is the effects are intensively subjective and highly unpredictable. The dosage level is more likely to be related to adverse effects than the particular psychedelic drug used. In double blind tests, where neither the doctor nor the subject knows which drug is which, people can't distinguish major psychedelic drugs anyway. The only clear distinction is the duration of drug effect which does vary. This is usually denied by users of these drugs despite numerous studies supporting this since the late 1960s. Set and setting have more to do with it than anything. People who partake in Sure. Leary was right on that one. -- Steve Mynott [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Passenger rail is for adventurers and bums
Bill Stewart Tim commented about railroad stations being in the ugly parts of town. That's driven by several things - decay of the inner cities, as cars and commuter trains have let businesses move out to suburbs, and also the difference between railroad stations that were built for passengers (New York's Grand Central, Washington's Union Station) In the UK at least railway stations tend to have been built in the ugly parts of towns for good reason -- simply because land is a lot cheaper in the low rent parts of town. Also railways stations and the associated cheap hotels with a large transient population tend to attract undesirables such as drug dealers, muggers and hookers and the sort of thing which pushs the value of your house down and nice middle class people don't want on their doorstep. The people in richer areas tend to have more political clout and more effectively oppose development of this sort. -- Steve
Re: Palm Pilot Handshake
From: Tyler Durden [EMAIL PROTECTED] I'd like to be able digitally shake hands using a Palm Pilot. Is this possible? I think you mean public key based authentication. Is this possible within the memory constraints of a Palm device? What about with a booster pack of memory? If not, is some sort of Public Key Masking possible so that a 'less secure' handshake is possible using a subset of the public key? I doubt memory is likely to be an issue with this since decade old DOS handhelds ran PGP 2.x fine and if you google for palm pilot crypto you will find 2000 vintage ports of OpenPGP and OpenSSL. The Palms do have fairly slow processors so checking keys may take a while and generating them probably quite a long time. More modern PDAs such as the Zaurus or iPaq have processors which are an order of magnitude faster and run linux so PGP (or GPG or whatever) should work. Also the new generation of mobiles which run Java are probably the future once the standards settle down and the phones become more reliable. I can see little point in trying to use shorter keys which would be a very broken solution to a probably non-existent problem. People should be using longer keys rather than shorter ones, since most of the news about short key lengths isn't good (google DJB RSA). And for extra credit, when might the chipsets be available for incorporating this functionality into, say, a wristwatch so that the protocol runs automatically (giving you a beep, for instance, only if there's a mismatch)? It's more a software issue than a hardware issue. It's not much of a software problem since RSA can be written in a few lines of code. If you have a high level language running on (or compiler) for the hardware then you can easily port open source crypto. This is probably a safer solution from a security aspect than relying on potentially backdoored or legally restricted chipsets. Suitable hardware has been available for 10 years or longer with a lot of publicity for the Java ring and iButtons about 5 years back. (This I'm sure the feds must already have.) It's possible the US Govt. uses iButtoms but I would very much doubt it's used much in production. State agencies tend to be *very* conservative with authentication and rely on physical identity cards, individually issued (and revocable) PIN numbers and the like. They are run by grey men rather than techno-fetishist computer geeks. -- 1024/D9C69DF9 Steve Mynott [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Security cameras are getting smart -- and scary
On Wednesday, Jan 8, 2003, at 22:10 Europe/London, Tyler Durden wrote: Tim May wrote... Cowboy hats are much more common in Cypherpunks Bay Aryan meetings Uh...do you actually hold Aryan meetings? Is this a white supremist thing, or will the following be welcome: Iranians Afghans Most people hailing from Northern India Turks I would imagine so since ironically the Aryans came from what is now Northern India and Iran up to about 1000BC. The word is even derived from Sanskrit. Read the Rig Veda and break out the soma (if you know what it was). -- Steve Mynott [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: sleep deprivation was Re: Torture done correctly is a terminal process
On Monday, Nov 25, 2002, at 22:18 Europe/London, Harmon Seaver wrote: I've also worked with self hypnosis quite a bit, and it's useful, but I'll say again, anyone fairly adept at yogic meditation would not have much problem with sensory or sleep deprevation torture techniques. Of course, beatings, electric shock, burning, etc are a different story. But beatings are usually used as part of sleep deprivation torture and it's often how the victim is kept awake. A Briton who was arrested and imprisoned for a series of bomb explosions in Saudi Arabia and who confessed. They psychologically brainwash you, he said. You are deprived of sleep, you are constantly bombarded with abuse physically, mentally. To me your body just shuts down and says you can take no more. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1802600.stm Looking at a page of yogic meditation advice it talks of sitting comfortably and using breath control techniques. http://www.yogabasics.com/meditation/yogaMeditation.html You are hardly in an environment conductive to yogic meditation in an uncomfortable stance and with loud noise played into your ears. Attempts to breath deeply and slowly and relax would be easily spotted and probably punished. Even if it were possible (which I doubt) what's the point in even mentioning it since most people tortured aren't are yoga experts anyway? -- Steve Mynott [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: sleep deprivation was Re: Torture done correctly is a terminal process
On Monday, Nov 25, 2002, at 21:14 Europe/London, Harmon Seaver wrote: On Mon, Nov 25, 2002 at 12:58:55PM -0800, Steve Schear wrote: I should think that a bit of practical training in self hypnosis could thwart sensory deprivation. I read some books in my youth on SH and found I could put myself in a self-induced altered reality state from which I could not be easily awakened. I imagine you could make yourself lean up against a wall until your muscles failed without much of a problem. I've heard surgery without anesthetic is possible, so physical abuse might be thwarted as well for the well conditioned. Practioners of yoga should have a ball. Just another yogic meditation exercize. Neither of you appear to understand what psychological torture is. Read some of the reports on the web about what happens. These techniques are employed by governments the world over to break fanatical and trained terrorists. It's not some New Age weekend camp when you imprisoned and beaten by your captors. -- Steve Mynott [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RMS on Treacherous Computing
Who should your computer take its orders from? Most people think their computers should obey them, not obey someone else. With a plan they call trusted computing, large media corporations (including the movie companies and record companies), together with computer companies such as Microsoft and Intel, are planning to make your computer obey them instead of you. Proprietary programs have included malicious features before, but this plan would make it universal. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.html -- Steve Mynott [EMAIL PROTECTED]
