Re: "rather phallic Martian pod"
EJACULATE! EJACULATE!
2131 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Sep 2008
FISA's role was greatly expanded and made dramatically more covert with the PATRIOT Act. The original FISA was brought in as a a result of the Church Committee's report on the criminal activities of the CIA & NSA, and was an honest attempt to oversee them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_committee
Carter was dealt a shitty hand, post-Watergate, oil crisis, stagflation and Iran. Few people could have been re-elected in those circumstances. Still, in terms of standards of living and income inequality, we've not had it so good since his time. See for example:
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/09/04/opinion/04reich-graphic.html
Interesting that they're presumably allowed to mention where they work. In the early days of social media (when FriendsReunited was the new thing) we (working at a certain aerospace company with close ties to the MoD) were warned not to mention our employer publicly on such sites.
I notice that nowadays LinkedIn offers me several company-themed communities to join, based on my links to my ex-colleagues, so presumably that policy has changed.
Amusingly, I heard recently that the company intranet had started its own internal social network. This was several years after the unofficial one (based on newsgroups that had existed under the radar for some time) had been closed down for fear of creating an (uncontrollable) subculture (i.e., employees sharing news that had only been released to certain parts of the company at certain times). Other Imscers (I'm sure there must be some around here) will know to what I am referring...
'Briefly, Singh was sued by the British Chiropractic Association over an article in the Guardian in which he criticised chiropractors for claiming they can treat children's colic, sleeping and feeding problems, ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, by manipulation of the spine. He said these interventions were "bogus", with "not a jot of evidence".'
( from http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/17/bad-science-chiropractors )
Even in the 80s we were recommended not to bother with "computer science" O and A-levels - they only seemed to consist of binary arithmetic anyway. Maths/Further Maths is definitely the way to go. The Oxford SMP O-level syllabus was particularly good for this, as it put a lot of stress on matrix operations.
I considered doing Cybernetics at Reading (this was in pre-Kevin Warwick days) as the department had a nice mad-scientist vibe going on (but promised to be too much like hard work - long hours of practicals and open-book exams).
My elder daughter seems set on computer science, though in France. I was very happy to hear that C is still being taught.
Most of my programming was self-taught anyway (since ZX BASIC on the Speccy) with the exception of Fortran 77 at uni (standard for Physics degrees back then). I can still knock out the occasional Excel VBA macro, proving that one can write Fortran in any language...