Subject: Re: Morrison watch in effect
From: "Steve Brooks"
Newsgroups: alt.tv.farscape
>> [1] A Quantum Murder by Peter F Hamilton. The least good of the Greg
>> Mandel books IMO - But still pretty entertaining.
>
> Haven't come across any of those - should I add him to my "new
> authors to try someday" list? Is there a particular title you'd
> recommend as the first to read?
I'm not sure really. It depends what you like. With Hamilton you're probably
better to start at the beginning since his ideas have grown over the years.
There's a bibliography at
http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~susan/sf/books/h/hamilton.htm
I've read the Greg Mandel books, the Night's Dawn books and 'Fallen Dragon'.
And I do like them. But -
They are - IMO - a bit mannish. The technical ideas are excellent and
intriguing. The plots are mostly good. The Greg Mandel books are excellent
SF thrillers. Night's Dawn is rather more ambitious and works more often
than it doesn't. The prose is above average - but not by a huge amount. The
characterisation is less impressive. A lot of the time I don't really
believe in his characters. And I certainly don't like most of them.
But he is definitely growing as an author. Give him another decade and he
might just do something exceptional.
So when was the last time your Mac actually contracted a virus?
If you've only been a member of Macville for a few years, the odds are pretty good you just said "never"; if you've been around long enough to have used, say, System 7 extensively, maybe you caught one or two over the years. We're not counting Microsoft Office macro viruses, of course, which technically aren't Mac viruses, since they infect Microsoft's cross-platform macro engine and anyone who's used Mac Office in a Windows-type environment probably got hammered with six or eight of those infections a day. But those aside, actual Mac virus infections are almost ridiculously rare, and that's something to keep in mind for the next time people are making you say what you're thankful for before they'll let you at the turkey and stuffing.
After all, consider how bad things are for the "standard platform"; if you pulled a brand new Windows XP system out of its boxes, set it up, and plugged it into the Internet, how long do you think it'd survive before it got infected with something or other? Well, faithful viewer Ulmanor forwarded us a CNET article in which researchers at the Internet Storm Center claim that "an unpatched Windows PC connected to the Internet will last for only about 20 minutes before it's compromised by malware." And while that will only surprise you if you've had your head stuck in a bucket of concrete for the past couple of years, you still might find the sheer absurdity a little tough to come to terms with. After all, this is a pristine Wintel PC, fresh out of the box, connected to the Internet and then left to do nothing-- no surfing to dubious porn sites, no running illicit peer-to-peer software, no other just-asking-for-it sort of behavior. Nothing. Could it really be compromised in twenty minutes, just by sitting there?
According to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the answer is a big fat "Yuh-huh." Perhaps skeptical of the twenty-minute infection claim, the school decided to try the experiment for itself; it put two unpatched Windows systems on the 'net, and voilą-- "both were compromised within 20 minutes." So apparently this is a real metric and not just some sensationalistic scare tactic. (Not that there's anything wrong with that; some of our best friends are sensationalistic scare tactics.)
Note that just last year, the average infection time for a 'Net-enabled, unpatched Wintel system was apparently forty minutes, which doesn't bode well for 2005; if we're looking at a linear progression, here, next year an unpatched Wintel will become infected as soon as that network cable is plugged in and the link light goes green. By 2006, Wintels will contract viruses twenty minutes before they're connected. And by the end of the decade, the very act of purchasing a Wintel PC will result in the buyer himself coming down with cholera, syphilis, and the plague before he can get the thing into the trunk of his car. Yeah, yeah, "Service Pack 2," "Longhorn"-- whatever. Mark our words, people will be dissolving into goo in the aisles of Best Buy before the decade's out...
I don't know which aspect of this angers me more - the concept of women "weakening" a profession, or the snobbish assertion that medicine, as a profession, is entitled to maintain some above-average level of sociopolitical influence.
From the BBC:
A top female doctor has warned the medical profession's influence could be damaged by the number of women choosing to be medics.
Women doctors are expected to outnumber men within a decade.
But Professor Carol Black, president of the Royal College of Physicians, told the Independent that could affect how the medical profession was seen.
She said she believed female-dominated professions such as teaching no longer saw themselves as "powerful".
She added: "We are feminising medicine. It has been a profession dominated by white males. What are we going to have to do to ensure it retains its influence?
"Years ago, teaching was a male-dominated profession - and look what happened to teaching. I don't think they feel they are a powerful profession any more. Look at nursing, too."
Professor Black added: "In Russia, medicine is an almost entirely female profession.
"They are paid less and they are almost ignored by government. They have lost influence as a body that had competency, skills and a professional ethic.
"They have become just another part of the workforce. It is a case of downgrading professionalism."
Professor Black added: "What worries me is who is going to be the professor of cardiology in the future? Where are we going to find the leaders of British medicine in 20 years' time?"
She added women were unlikely to take top jobs, such as the dean of a medical school, because of the difficulties combining them with family life.
Professor Black warned many women avoided more "demanding" areas such as cardiology.
She said medicine had to face up to the problem and find ways of helping women doctors balance work and family.
Professor Black told BBC News Online: "I think it's a good thing that women are choosing the medical profession, but the problem is how to make it possible for them to be really effective.
"At the moment, women aren't going into specialties that are the more demanding. So we need to look at how those specialties are practised."
Professor Black warned that, in order for the medical profession's to retain its status, senior doctors needed to serve on government committees and regulatory bodies.
She said such as late night meetings would simply not be possible for women with children, unless they were given extra support with childcare and flexible hours.
"I think most women, although not all, want the opportunity to have a family.
"That may mean they won't perhaps be able to be as flexible as men who don't in a post."
She said she was pleased she was able to highlight the problem because of her position. "It's something that's very difficult for a man to say."
Dr Maureen Baker, honorary secretary of the Royal College of GPs, said it was "perfectly reasonable" to expect the status of any profession to be upheld by its workforce.
"Furthermore, if a higher ratio of men or women working within a profession is deemed to be reducing its status then there is a problem with the very way society views the abilities of the sexes," she said.
A spokeswoman for the British Medical Association said: "We would not want to see a return to the old quota system of admitting women to medical school - the BMA believes in equality of access and opportunity.
"However we agree with Professor Black that there is an under-representation of women at the most senior levels of medicine and medico-politics and we would like to see this changed."
And John Bangs of the National Union of Teachers said: "I would by no means agree that teaching views itself as a less powerful profession, and I find that a very concerning view."
He added: "If you have an all female profession, whether it be medicine or teaching, it means that the pool from which you're selecting those people is smaller than it should be."