Arthur Clarke has been reported to say that Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories. I find that in most sci-fi works there are lot of food for thought, be it the message given by Star Trek back in the 60s about common values of the mankind going beyond the exterior differences in race or sex, or be the capital letters warnings issued by Blade Runner in the 80s about a looming dark future.I just bought the first season of Battlestar Galactica and started watching episodes. The background is about a robot rebellion and the attempt of a bunch of survivors to seek for a new home while escaping the continuous attempt of the machines to destroy them.
So the scenario is this, the humanity has been mostly wiped out, billions are dead, there are just 50 thousands, grouping and recovering. The freshly named president is trying to figure out what are the best chances for surviving. Time for harsh choices, she has just opted to leave behind those aboard of starships not able to perform faster than light travel.
In the fleet there is a prison ship with 1500 convicts on board. Supplies are scarce and rationed, so the commander of the prison ship is asking what to do about his passengers. There could be plenty of good reason to save food, air, water and fuel. The president reads the requests, seems to ponder it for just a split second, and promptly dismisses by stating – No. We’re not going to start doing that. They’re still human beings. Tell the captain I expect daily reports on his prisoners’ well-being and if there are any “mysterious” deaths, the Astral Queen may find herself on her own and without the Galactica’s protection..
I think this is a profound message, we are all humans and we all deserves the same rights and duties. It is just sad to split humanity in those better and those worse purporting that the first has more rights than the latter.
Behind schedule
I know, I tend to live faster than my blog updates. So there are a number of things I haven’t posted about. For example I read several books, I had some interesting experiences with shell script programming and I found some clever sites I’d like to share with you.Moreover the whole site needs some freshening and I discovered that the gallery page of Naxos island is not correctly displayed.
Don’t worry, I am here to get back on track. One of the blog I’m reading this day is Coding Horror. I found it very insightful and worth. You can have it served via RSS feed. I feel really attuned with the writer, at a point that I myself could have written something like this. So today he wrote about how defining a sustainable schedule and attaining to it is a key factor for success (and, more specifically for a successful blog).
Well my schedule is something like – fill the slack time, and I precisely attain to it. Maybe that’s why I have a few selected high quality readers that keep reading my rants. Thank you.
So here is a list of books I should write the review: Yourdon’s Death March, Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, Pratchett’s Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch, Zattoni Gillini’s Paquito’s story, Chistolini’s School and Adoption.
If you are involved on a understaffed, under budget project with tight deadlines, just don’t wait for my review of Death March, grab your copy now. Although most of it could be considered just common sense, it is nonetheless a well organized, well written common sense. And when you are under the pressure of a Death March kind of project, common sense has been usually left behind.
Putting captcha to work
Quite a long ago, an unfriendly Mr. Spam exploited my blog system to put his (maybe her) unwanted advertising into my website. I resorted to a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), but also found that the test was harmless for the clever and determined spammer.In fact such a guy could forward the CAPTCHA test to another website so that clueless users could put their brainpower to unlock the test. Let’s rephrase that. A clever spammer could set up an high traffic website (such as something with pictures… you guess which) where users are requested to solve the CAPTCHA in order to access the content. This website doesn’t forge CAPTCHA tests, rather it forwards the tests from a target site that the spammer want to access. Once the CAPTCHA is solved by the unaware gif-watcher, the spammer’s system is able to spam the target site.
Fortunately this solution is limited by the number of people willing to solve CAPTCHA to access a content that has as a stringent requirement to be cheaply collectible. I guess that that constraint limits the application of this solution just to a few, high traffic, blogs or websites.
I read today on slashdot that not only spammers are that clever. At Carnegie Mellon University researchers have found a way to exploit CAPTCHA to data-entry large volume of ancient manuscripts. The CAPTCHA proposes two handwritten words. The first is already decoded and is the real locking system, the second is a word to decode. The result, if confirmed by other users of the system, is then turned into the manuscript digital translation.
Split
Yesterday morning I felt somewhat split, as I would be in two places at the same time. I reckon that one of me in the multiverse went down one leg, while the other me went down the other leg of the Trousers of Time. One of me decided to change work and yesterday started his new job working on the next chart-busting video-game for mobile phones; the other one of me decided to keep the old job and now he is working with home automation appliances.
This leg of the Trousers is the latter, the other me is writing something very similar on his blog in his Universe.
Unfortunately I have no imp-powered dis-organizer to check what’s happening to the other one and to ultimately tell what has been the Right Decision.
How to upset Italian people at drive
A sure way to really upset Italians driving their cars and trucks is to strictly obey to speed limits. Just try to stick with 10km/h limit near road works and you can learn a whole new dictionary of insults.
2nd level outsourcing
This is funny, I was joking last Saturday with two friends of mine about the fact that outsourcing to India is no longer convenient and that Indians may outsource tech-jobs back to US, and this morning I found this news: Indian Software Firm Outsourcing Jobs To US. I hope this could reverse this odd trend of relocating tech jobs in the far east, and provide for a better distribution of the wellness in the world. A friend of mine told me that Indian programmer salaries are low for young and/or inexperienced, but rise steeper when compared to western programmer. In other words inexperienced programmers are cheaper in India, while experienced programmers are cheaper in western countries (while being more expensive than inexperienced programmers everywhere :-)).
And Italian programmers are cheaper than other western countries’ programmer because Italy has the lowest salaries among the industrialized countries of the EU. That’s to say it is viable and worthing for a US company to outsource tech jobs to Italy. I just recommend to provide their management because local workforce has serious trouble in grasping tech-projects management 101.
Are we sure we have to be in UE?
According to this research, Italy is quite prone to corruption, scoring well below all western countries. This is something that we cannot blame our politicians for. Corruption is endemic, it involves two parties – the corrupted and the corrupter. It cannot happen just because of politicians. It is a consensus. It has to do with habits and connivance. Is it possible and how long would it take for Italy to gain a corruption-free status like the rest of Europe?
Jet Lag
Jet lag is when your body pretends to be awake (while sleeping) and your brain pretends to be sleeping (while awake), during the day.
U.S.A. and back
I’m back from a long holidays in the U.S.A. More than 3 weeks spent there with my wife and Matteo, our 14 years old nephew.The places are wonderful and amazing. We landed at San Francisco, then moved to Utah, Colorado and Arizona, visiting most of the parks we encountered, hiking around on moderate/strenous trails, and then we get back to California to catch our flight from Los Angeles.
We shot about 500 analog slides, about twice digital pictures and two hours and half of digital video. My log ran about 23 pages though composed by brief notes that have to be expanded in order to be human-readable.
All this will take some time to be ready for making it on-lineable.
I’ll be back before with some travel impressions.
One more rant
Oh, I forgot yesterday, maybe it wasn’t yet clear in my mind and I needed some more dig and headscraping on laws and funds to have it more vivid. Our government is trying to protect Italians from harming themselves by not subscribing an integrative pension fund. This is for sure a laudable intention – I warn you, if you want to survive the 3rd age, you have to put aside some money.
The problem is that this strongly contrast with the current fund schemes that offer several lines of investment with different aggressiveness and features. In other words the money that the government forces you to put aside to grant a wealthy old age are allowed to go into the slot machine of the financial trades and you could end with empty hands even emptier than if you had put money in the mattress. The law requires only the most conservative line to grant the sum you put into (that is 0% interest, you are nonetheless wasting money in taxes and losing power of purchasing because of the inflation). The law set the TFR interest rate as a goal, not as a requirement for the most conservative line. Nothing happens if the goal is not reached.
Even worse the law allows to chose more aggressive investment that could bring higher positive rates or dragging you into losing money, maybe helping fund managers interests but going against the noble goal to avoid social problems when the current working class will reach the retirement age.
There is an underlying problem of trust, lacking of trust. If the government wants Italians to trust this new pension form, then the new form must grant everything the old one granted. The law must grant at least the same rate and at least the chance to get all the money at retirement.
After all if everyone is so staunch about the TFR performing worse than the financial fund why don’t they grant the fund to perform at least as bad as the TFR?