Snooping by laptop

You must have heard about the school district that issued laptops to the students and then remotely turned on the built in video cameras and sneaked photographs of the students at home?
Takeaways:
1. That school district had more money than brains to issue student laptops. No way would my district be so profligate. Students learn by studying, not by computering. Plus the students all have computers already. Why spend public money to give 'em a backup computer?
2. If a computer illiterate public school can turn a laptop into a video snoop camera, so can anyone else. A piece of duct tape over the camera lens (and perhaps another piece over the built in microphone) is your only guarantee of privacy. Good thing my antique 3 Gigahz desktop lacks cameras and microphones.
3. That school board has to be stuck on stupid. They can look forward to getting voted out of office next election time.

America is ungovernable?

I hear the Democrats whining this whine now that Obamacare seems to be dead. Probably true. I don't like being governed (bossed around) any more than the next American. America doesn't need or want governance. We like leadership instead. We don't like Obamacare, and we were able to resist the Democratic attempt to stuff it down our throats. I like that kind of ungovernable.
By the way, Obamacare is kinda like a snake. You can't depend upon a snake being dead until it's cut up into six inch lengths. I don't see Obamacare as being that kind of dead, yet. It's lying on the floor and not moving much, but it might come back to life and bite.

Why the Love Gene in cats?

Cats, at least modern house cats, love their humans. Nothing else explains why cats demand petting, sleep on favored human's beds, sit in laps, and purr when picked up and stroked. They get terribly lonely when left alone. But what is the evolutionary origin of this gene? Cats are solitary hunters, not pack animals. Before hooking up with humans back in Egyptian times, what good would a gene to love humans do for a cat? I have read of small African wild cats that cannot be tamed even today. Presumably that breed of cat lacks the love gene.
After hooking up with humans, the love gene is obviously a good thing. Compare well fed and sleek house cats with skinny, dirty, and miserable looking alley cats. It interacts successfully with the love animals gene in humans.
Perhaps the cat love gene is a mutation or only occurs in small numbers of cats in the wild. The love animals gene in humans prompts them to adopt kittens. Perhaps the adoptions proceeded unsuccessfully until some human got lucky and adopted a kitten carrying the love gene. Once settled in with humans the cats with the love gene would flourish and the cats that lacked it would go back to the wild.
Does this account for a origin of the species of affectionate cats?

Words of the Weasel Part XIV

"The aircraft was on final approach to Heathrow from Beijing when an uncommanded power reduction occurred in both engines."
We used to call that engine failure.
The aircraft augered in 984 feet short of the runway. Gotta watch them uncommanded power reductions.

Blame Shifting

On the radio (NHPR) this morning. The terrible Belgian train accident is blamed on lack of new technology automatic train brakes.
Wow!
Brakes won't save you in a head on collision. Something went wrong and put two trains on the the same track going opposite directions. A signal failed, an engineer ran a red signal, a dispatcher gave the wrong orders, or a turnout was thrown the wrong way. Once that happens you have two trains barreling right at each other. It takes a mile or more to stop a train, automatic brakes or no automatic brakes. The engineers cannot see that far ahead ahead. Blam.
The radio story went on to quote various Europeans pointing fingers at each other. The Belgians blamed the EU for failure to standardize automatic brake requirements. The EU blamed the Belgians for not installing automatic brakes anyhow. Money was mentioned, like 200,000 Euros per train and 25,000 Euros per mile of track.
This story is a smoke screen behind which the true culprits are escaping.

Archival Quality (photographic)

My fiftieth high school reunion is coming up this year. Old classmates are agitating for photos. So I though I might look thru my pile of slide trays, looking for high school photos.
Step 1. Fix the slide projector. A beefy Basch & Lomb at least 50 years old itself. At least it is fixable, it all came apart, with ordinary hand tools, and with a liberal anointment of 3-in-1 oil it started to cycle the slides in and out. The slide advance electric switch was broken and no replacement available. But there is a plug for a remote control switch. I made a remote control switch from scratch, and had a working projector. Good thing I had a lathe, bandsaw, drill press and radial arm saw in the basement, I used them all for this little DIY project.
Step 2. Try to read the labels on the slide trays. That didn't work. What ever it was had faded over the years and was unreadable. Note to self. Use black India ink to label anything you care about. Damn felt tips fade in less than five years.
Step 3. Show the slides. Got some real oldies here. Recognized the old family house that we moved out of in 1957. Shots inside the ski chalet that I am currently retired too. Some shots of relatives, now deceased.
Step 4. Agonize over the generally low quality of the slides. Out of focus, under exposed, over exposed. My low end point&shoot digital makes much better pictures.
I wonder if the digital photos will be viewable fifty years from now>

Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenburg

Cool story about software development at a silicon valley startup. Mitch Kapor, the man who created Lotus 1-2-3 years ago, decided to do another killer app. Rented office space, small team of experienced programmers, self financed by Mitch. The author, who is not a software guy, hung around the operation for it's first three years and wrote a book about it.
Software development hasn't changed much. Three years into the project and they had little to show for it, despite all the experience on the team, leadership by a silicon valley legend, and a booming economy.
Rosenburg gives a good layman's account of the various fads in software engineering, going back to the 1960's. Each new fad was supposed to create great software on time and on budget. Well, that hasn't happened yet.
The project was to create a super personal information manager that would hold contact information, to-do lists, appointments, photographs, and anything else, keep the home computer updated with the work computer, allow sharing with everyone and anyone, and perhaps travel faster than light as well.
Rosenburg, a non programmer, doesn't understand what specifications are for. He mentions that the project lacks specs. He doesn't understand that a spec is a trial run at the real program. If the programmer cannot explain what he is doing to other humans in his native tongue, he won't be able to explain it to a non sentient computer using a complex programming language. And, specs allow the others on the project to know what the program is going to do, and if it will fit into the rest of the project.
This project didn't understand "the minimum working set". Until code is running, you have nothing. To get the code running, you select the absolute minimum amount of code needed to make the program do something, even if something isn't very much. Get the minimum working set running and then add in the rest of the project, piece by piece. This project did "release" early versions, but it was a pro forma activity, the early releases crashed continuously and didn't do anything.
Anyhow, good to learn that software development hasn't changed since I retired.