Well-Laid Plan

A well-laid business plan is no guarantee against the disappearance of the industry on which it is based.

-- Tim Cavanaugh, American libertarian writer and editor, Reason Online, May 2003

Plenty There

We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.

-- Alan Turing (23 June 1912 - 7 June 1954), British mathematician and cryptographer, Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950)

LHC Day 1

Don't cross the streams.

-- Harold Ramis as Dr. Egon Spengler, Ghostbusters, 1984

--

You can think of each experiment as a giant digital camera with around 150 million pixels taking snapshots 600 million times a second.

-- CERN's Ian Bird, who leads the LHC Grid project, a network of 60,000 computers to analyze what happens when protons are hurled at each other

--

If you can read this, then the Large Hadron Collider did not create any earth-consuming black holes today.

Surreal

When I started Oracle, what I wanted to do was to create an environment where I would enjoy working. That was my primary goal. Sure, I wanted to make a living. I certainly never expected to become rich, certainly not this rich. I mean, rich does not even describe this. This is surreal.

-- Lawrence J. Ellison (born 1944), CEO and founder, Oracle Corporation, from Smithsonian Institution Oral and Visual Histories


Java Developer's Journal (28 August 2008) adds: Technology's highest paid CEO currently is also America's highest paid CEO, namely Larry Ellison of Oracle - who with a fiscal 2008 pay package of $84.6M is the top earner at any of the Standard & Poor's 500 companies. Noting that annual pay totals are "based on salary, bonuses, incentives and perks," the Associated Press reports that Ellison's pay in 2008 was 38% higher than the $61.2M pay package he received in 2007.

Too Depressing

The Current State of Copyright Law is too depressing

I regard myself as a centrist. I believe very much that in proper doses copyright is essential for certain classes of works, especially commercial movies, commercial sound recordings, and commercial books, the core copyright industries. I accept that the level of proper doses will vary from person to person and that my recommended dose may be lower (or higher) than others. But in my view, and that of my cherished brother Sir Hugh Laddie, we are well past the healthy dose stage and into the serious illness stage. Much like the U.S. economy, things are getting worse, not better. Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together again: multilateral and trade agreements have ensured that, and quite deliberately.

-- Google's copyright man, William Patry, on ending his blog on copyright

Borrowing To Buy To Burn

We're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that has to change.

-- Former Vice President Al Gore, urging that the United States abandon the use of carbon-based fuels for electricity within 10 years, New York Times, 18 July 2008

Fryer Grease

Fryer grease has become gold. And just over a year ago, I had to pay someone to take it away.

-- Nick Damianidis, an owner of the Olympia Pizza and Pasta Restaurant in Arlington, Wash., on grease thefts, New York Times, 30 May 2008

Code For The Maintainer

Always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live.

-- From theC2 Wiki Page, http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CodeForTheMaintainer

269m

Eddy Merckx: 49.431km in 1 hour.

In 1972 Eddy Merckx flew to Mexico City to attempt one of the most challenging monuments in sport: the hour record.

Before the advent of advanced carbon materials, disc wheels and lightweight components, the hour record stood as the ultimate measure of man-powered machine.

The day's effort has only been topped twice by traditional bicycles as recognized by the UCI. In 36 years the distance traveled in one hour has grown only 269 meters.

-- Spoke 'N' Word blog

Ethanol Gold Rush

This is a bit like a gold rush. There are unintended consequences of this euphoria to expand ethanol production at this pace that people are not considering.

-- Warren R. Staley, chief executive of Cargill, the multinational agricultural company, New York Times, 25 June 2006

Probably Not Food

I'd probably give up my cellphone. Probably not food. That's really tough. I like food.

-- Ryan Holt, 21-year-old student at the University of Northern Colorado, on the sacrifices he would make to buy a great video game, NY Times, 29 April 2008

RIP Albert Hofmann

Deliberate provocation of mystical experience, particularly by LSD and related hallucinogens, in contrast to spontaneous visionary experiences, entails dangers that must not be underestimated. Practitioners must take into account the peculiar effects of these substances, namely their ability to influence our consciousness, the innermost essence of our being. The history of LSD to date amply demonstrates the catastrophic consequences that can ensue when its profound effect is misjudged and the substance is mistaken for a pleasure drug. Special internal and external advance preparations are required; with them, an LSD experiment can become a meaningful experience. Wrong and inappropriate use has caused LSD to become my problem child.

-- Albert Hofmann (11 January 1906 - 29 April 2008), Swiss scientist best known for first synthesizing Lysergic acid diethylamide, "LSD: My Problem Child" (1980) Foreword

New Questions

The New Questions to ask your physician:

1. If I don't have any symptoms, how are you going to keep me healthy?

2. How would you treat me if you didn't have your prescription pad?

3. How are you going to find and treat the cause of my disease, not just the symptoms?

4. Will changing my food habits and life style contribute to healing me faster?

5. Do you keep records of the treatment prescribed by you to me?

-- Dr. Amit K. Saiya, 2 April 2008, blog excerpt

http://dailymusingsofamit.blogspot.com/2008/04/new-questions-to-ask-your-physician.html

Satellite TV Networks, Cell Phones, and GPS, Oh My!

As you may know, my main interest in [communications] is in the use of satellite relays, which I think may revolutionise the pattern of world communications. To the best of my knowledge, I was the first to suggest this possiblity (see "Extraterrestrial Relays", Wireless World, October '45). ... My general conclusions are that perhaps in 30 years the orbital relay system may take over all the functions of existing surface networks and provide others quite impossible today. For example, the three stations in the 24-hour orbit could provide not only an interference AND censorship-free global TV service for the same power as a single modern transmitter, but could also make possible a position-finding grid whereby anyone on earth could locate himself by means of a couple of dials on an instrument about the size of a watch. (A development of Decca and transistorisation.) It might even make possible world-wide person-to-person radio with automatic dialling. Thus no-one on the planet need ever get lost or become out of touch with the community, unless he wanted to be. I'm still thinking about the social consequences of this!

-- Arthur C. Clarke, anticipating international TV networks, GPS, and ubiquitous phone access, letter to Andrew Haley, August 1956

Spam Nation

I use Google Mail (gmail) as a simple way to get ubiquitous access to my email with good spam filtering. They leave stuff in the "spam" folder for 30 days. And they display how many messages are in your spam folder, so it's easy to tell (roughly) how many spam messages were received per day over the past 30 days

I'm just guessing here, but I seem to get a lot of spam, and I'm awfully glad gmail is good at catching it. For the first time today, my spam folder hit >10,000 messages. It currently stands at 10,251 (it was 10,249 when I started typing this), for an average of 341.7 spams per day, which works out to 14.2 spams per hour, or one spam every 4 minutes, 12 seconds.

Now it's at 10,254, up about 300 since yesterday, which indicates a *lot* of spams in the last 24 hours.

XLink ITC-BT Bluetooth Gateway

Last night I installed the XLink ITC-BT Bluetooth Gateway. It works as advertised, which is very cool. And I got it from TheNerds.net for just $124.99, which is also very cool.

Here's the deal -- I ditched my land line ($65 per month) for an additional cell phone on my Family Share Plan with Verizon Wireless ($9.99 per month). Now, this creates the problem of having a two-storey house plus basement with a single cell phone ringing somewhere inside it when someone calls the house line.

This device is the solution. It connects to your cell phone via bluetooth. It has a phone jack on the back. You connect your house phone(s) to the jack on the back of the device. It delivers a dial tone for calling out via house phones, rings the house phones when a call comes in, and passes through Caller ID, all using the cell phone for connectivity (remember, I dropped my land line).

As a bonus, it can connect to as many as 3 cell phones at once, provides differential ring tones for those cell phones, and allows you to switch among the cell phones as if on a multi-line phone system. It also implements call waiting on your house phones in case of multiple incoming calls to different cell phones.