Cheap Therapy

An interesting analysis of US National Debt by President.

If you become (in)famous, people might one day auction off your Ph.D., just like Wernher von Braun’s.

Although it’s probably a hint if your government classifies the thesis and someone like Kubrick puts a caricature of you in a film… (or someone like Tom Lehrer puts you in a song)

In case there’s anyone not a member of the UCC who’d like to be a cyber-spook with Australia’s Defence Signals Directorate.

We are looking for passionate technical people who are interested in:
* Programming in high and low level languages
* Responding to incidents on critical networks
* Computer forensics to help find the really bad guys
* System administration to support our specialist networks
* Penetration testing, including tool and exploit development
* Software reverse engineering for malware analysis
* Computer and network vulnerability analysis and discovery
* Secure system and network architecture design and risk management

The campaign will run from July to September, with electronic
applications closing on 17 August 2008. During September, DSD will host
a fully-paid 2 day assessment centre in Canberra for those applicants
found suitable during the first phase. This will also give applicants an
opportunity to meet our staff and see the exciting range of work
available at DSD.

More information and details of how to apply can be found at
http://www.dsd.gov.au/cyberoperations

If you have any queries, please email cyber-ops@dsd.gov.au

Kind Regards,
David Lane
CNO Branch
DSD

I’m guessing you’d probably wind up working in sunny Canberra

Just awesome, check out the NASA photo archive (via Slashdot).

I’ve just finished reading Andrew Smith’s book “Moondust”, in which he attempts to interview the 9 remaining Apollo landing astronauts. (In one way it was strange because it kept referencing various popular artists I’d just been reading about in the previous book I’d started reading (“Culture Club” by Craig Shuftan )).
I guess the interesting bits I found were:

• Astronaut Edgar Mitchell shared a house with Arthur C. Clarke for a week
• Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Norman Mailer watched the Apollo 14 launch together
• The entire Apollo programme cost $24 billion dollars. At the time Vietnam was costing $30 billion per year.
• Armstrong took Dvorak’s “New World” symphony on the trip, along with a theremin piece. (The author was constantly haunted by Also Sprach Zarathrustra throughout researching the book!)
• Real programmers patch the Apollo LEM computer inside a 30 minute hard deadline
• How the Apollo toilets actually worked!
• Landing on the moon effectively ended the astronaut careers of Armstrong and Aldrin, after that they were too valuable to risk on any future space missions
• The alternative for most Apollo astronauts (many ex-Korea pilots) would have been flying missions in Vietnam
• Most of the astronauts were younger than I am now. The average age of staff in Mission Command was 26.

With only 9 remaining people alive who have walked on another world, it is amazing to read about how their lives were changed forever, being able to look at Luna and say to themselves “Hey, I was up there”. Mingling in the crowd at SF cons are people who have actually been into deep space, or walked on the Moon. Pretty much all of them agree they were the best moments of their lives, and everything since then has been learning to cope with the fact that the rest of their existence will be hard to compare to those moments.
Moondust is definitely worth a read if you’re a space fan or, perhaps more importantly, if you wonder what the effect of standing on another world and looking back at ours would be like and how that would affect rest of your life.

Random places in the US are lamenting that petrol has now reached US$4 per gallon. To put that in a more local perspective, it’s 99 Australian cents per litre.

Welcome to Canberra!

Sporting chivalrous contest helps knit the bonds of peace between nations. Therefore may the Olympic flame never expire.

At the first Olympic torchlighting ceremony, Berlin, 1936 - Adolf Hitler

Japanese toilets. Who knew?

“Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.” — Commissioner Pravin Lal

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own — a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. -Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (1879-1955)

You don’t seem to realize that a poor person who is unhappy is in a better position than a rich person who is unhappy. Because the poor person has hope. He thinks money would help. – Jean Kerr

When the rich wage war it is the poor who die. - Jean-Paul Sartre

Being Poor means sitting on your rooftop while your house is submerged, seeing helicopters rescuing those around you and knowing that you “cannot afford” to be rescued by one. A lady said that in NO two weeks ago, and that made me cry. - blog commenter on John Scalzi’s Being Poor

It is not life and wealth and power that enslave men, but the cleaving to life and wealth and power. -Buddha (c. 563-483 BCE)

This morning Triple J were playing “The King is Dead” by The Herd, a song celebrating the downfall of John Howard. Highly recommended. IIRC “We partied like it was new years’ eve”