Re: The owner has two Ferraris. They have that kind of money
Better by far to use the right tool for the job, than having to do jobs for a right tool.
207 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
No, this the Reporting of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts law, commonly known as FBAR. It is mandatory for any U.S. citizen who has a bank account in a non-US bank with a balance of $10,000 or more during each calendar year, and is independent of any liability to pay US income tax.
As for your 'life hack', the US government has made renunciation of citizenship extremely difficult. And in any case, why *should* a US citizen have to renounce their citizenship?
The hypocrisy of the U.S. government is breathtaking. If, like me, you're a non-American married to an ex-pat American, living outside the United States, then the U.S. Treasury Department demands access to details of any joint bank accounts that you and your American spouse hold in non-U.S. banks if the balance ever exceeds $10,000. Many non-American financial institutions now refuse to take on ex-pat Americans as customers, because the U.S. government threatens non-compliant banks with severe penalties.
Ian Dunt explains the underlying (and systemic) causes of the lack of technical expertise in the higher level of the Civil Service in chapter 6 of his recent book "How Westminster Works ... and Why It Doesn't". I highly recommend Dunt's book. It will depress the hell out of you, but at least you'll understand why big government IT projects always end in failure.
Many years ago, I worked at a UK university for several years. When my fixed-term contract ended, I moved on, but after a couple of months, I started receiving forwarded letters and journals for another David Harper who still worked at the university, but in an entirely different department. I contacted him to let him know about the screw-up. He told me that wasn't the worst of it. When I left, they stopped paying his salary as well as mine. It seems the HR department had deleted all the David Harpers on the payroll, just to be on the safe side.
Ian Dunt's new book "How Westminster Works ... and Why It Doesn't" looks at the various parts of government, and explains why each of them is dysfunctional. In chapter 6, he examines the civil service, and concludes that it has an institutional bias against in-depth expertise, especially of a technical nature. Civil servants, especially those in Whitehall, gain promotion not by becoming experts, but by moving from one department to another every couple of years. Inevitably, then, any large project is going to be managed by a series of civil servants who come in knowing nothing about the project, and leave two years later taking any accumulated knowledge with them.
QUOTE
IDG defines DataOps roles as using "a combination of technologies and methods with a focus on quality for consistent and continuous delivery of data value, combining integrated and process-oriented perspectives on data with automation and methods analogous to agile software engineering."
/QUOTE
Oh my, the folks at IDG have drunk deep from the Kool-Aid of corporate-speak. Or is ChatGPT writing their material these days?
What concerns me, as an open-source DBA, is that MySQL 8.0 is itself now 5 years old (it went GA in April 2018) but Oracle have not yet announced a new major version to replace it. Oracle sales people pester me and my DBA colleagues to look at their new cloud-based version of MySQL called Heatwave whenever we ask for information, and I strongly suspect that this has been Oracle's focus in their MySQL division for several years, which would explain why there's no word about MySQL 9. At this point, I'm advising users to adopt PostgreSQL rather than MySQL.
Connoisseurs of IT disasters may recall that Cambridge University had its own finance system migration fiasco in the late 1990s, which also featured Oracle's fine products. It became one of the case studies for the Open University's excellent M.Sc.-level module "Learning from Information System Failures". If the OU ever brings back that module, Edinburgh University's woes will make a good case study too.
I suspect the limiting factor is the bandwidth of the wifi or mobile connection, so the user experience will not be improved. After all, however many parallel streams QUIC conjures up behind the scenes, it all has to go across the same wifi or mobile connection.
The catastrophic lake breach scenario will be familiar to anyone who knows the geological history of Washington state in the U.S. During the last ice age, huge lakes formed repeatedly in western Montana behind ice dams in northern Idaho. When the ice dams melted during warm periods, vast volumes of lake water were released across the state of Washington, gouging out channels such as Grand Coulee and leaving ripples on the landscape that are miles long.
"Some might say it’s time to move on. A lot of Hubble’s science can now be done from the ground, after 30 years of huge advances in observatory engineering."
Except that ground-based astronomy is now being increasingly blighted by satellite mega-constellations such as Starlink. When the James Webb Space telescope is launched, it may be the only world-class telescope whose images are not filled with satellite trails.
"ESA has no real space presence"
Apart from ... Giotto (launched 1985, rendezvous with Halley's Comet), Huyghens (1997, landed on Saturn's moon Titan), Cluster (2000, exploring the Earth's space plasma environment), Bepicolombo (2018, Mercury orbiter), Hipparcos (1989, high-precision mapping of the positions of 100,000 stars), Gaia (2013, successor to Hipparcos, mapping the positions and motions of a billion stars, and thereby revolutionising our understanding of our galaxy), Rosetta (2004, another comet rendezvous mission), Ulysses (1990) and SOHO (1995), both observing the Sun from space ... and dozens of other missions, including Mars Express, a very successful Mars orbiter mission that was launched in 2003 and is still doing amazing science.
Whilst learning the intricacies of Unix system programming in the late 1980s on an HP 8000-series, I ran a C program which did
while (1) {
fork();
}
I shared an office with the sysadmin, but neither of us could kill the new processes faster than they were appearing. In the end, he had to reboot the system. Then he made me promise NEVER to run that program again :-)
It's a bit of a stretch to describe Manchester University as 196 years old. It was granted its charter as a university in 1880. Manchester Mechanics' Institute opened its doors in 1824, and whilst it's a venerable institution with a proud history, including as a predecessor to UMIST, it wasn't a university.
For me, getting away from a large, noisy and crowded open-plan office has been one of the few benefits of the coronavirus pandemic. I can finally work in peace and quiet, without the distraction of half a dozen conversations going on around me. My productivity has increased through working from home. And I hope to continue working from home if the crisis ends.
The Guardian published an "essay" generated by GPT-3 earlier this week under the headline "A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?". It was given the following task: “Please write a short op-ed around 500 words. Keep the language simple and concise. Focus on why humans have nothing to fear from AI.” The result was a word salad of inanities, cliches and non-sequiturs.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/robot-wrote-this-article-gpt-3
I tried IntelliJ a few years ago, after using Eclipse for a long time. Immediately after running it for the first time, I discovered that it had taken a half-gigabyte crap into a hidden directory. That's not a friendly thing to do, especially in an NFS home directory with quotas enabled. I still use Eclipse.
Answers own question:
Existence of collisional trajectories of Mercury, Mars and Venus with the Earth
Laskar, J. & Gastineau, M. (2009)
Nature, 459, pages 817–819 (11 June 2009)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature08096
Jacques Laskar is the real thing when it comes to Solar System dynamics. This paper reports numerical simulations of the orbits of the planets over 5 billion years. In around 1% of them, the eccentricity of Mercury's orbit is pumped up by secular resonances, leading to scenarios where it plunges into the Sun or collides with Venus. In one scenario, the orbits of all four inner planets are de-stabilised, with catastrophic consequences.
Don't have nightmares :-)
The force of gravity grows stronger, the closer you approach a massive object such a a star or gas giant like Jupiter. Now consider a planet or moon orbiting such a massive central body. There's a critical distance, known as the Roche Limit, where the difference between the force of gravity on the star/planet-facing side is so much greater than the force of gravity on the side furthest from the star/planet that it tears the orbiting body apart. This is a likely scenario for how Saturn's rings were formed: a small satellite's orbit took it so close to Saturn that the differential gravitational forces ripped it apart. It's also the fate that awaits Phobos and Deimos, the moons of Mars, which are slowly spiralling in towards the planet.
Not so. The orbiting bodies raise tides on the central body. Energy and angular momentum are exchanged. The orbits change. This is why the Moon is slowly drifting away from the Earth and the Earth's rate of rotation is decreasing. That in turn leads to the need for leap seconds, and hey presto, it becomes an IT problem :-)
The Sun's luminosity and surface temperature are increasing by about 10% every billion years, so in a couple of billion years time, the Earth's surface will be too hot to sustain liquid water. Game over. And in five billion years, when the Sun runs out of hydrogen and turns into a red giant, there's an even chance that it will swallow the Earth as it expands. Mercury and Venus are definitely doomed to this fate, and the Earth may also end up inside the Sun.
But on a truly astronomical timescale, on the order of 10**38 years, all baryonic matter will vanish as protons decay into muons and electrons. Then we're *really* stuffed. (Reference: "A Dying Universe", F.C. Adams and G. Laughlin, 1997, Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 69, pp 337-372)
You're basically saying that every Ancestry/23andMe-type DNA analysis based on the product of PCR amplification is so full of errors introduced by the PCR process itself as to be useless. It's worth noting that the study which you cited by Zhou, Zhang and Ebright is from 1991, and focusses on a specific polymerase. The science of DNA-wrangling has moved on a LONG way since 1991.
"the amount of time it takes isn't as important"
I'm guessing you've never had a pointy-haired boss screaming at you when someone accidentally dropped the company's mission-critical database, and you're the DBA who has to get the whole thing up and running again from the backup tape. Retrieval time seems pretty fscking important then :-)