Neil Rieck

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

Employment: I am employed as a computer technologist by Bell-ATS (Advanced Technical Services) which is a department within "Bell Canada". (Caveat: All my postings here are my own and have nothing to do with Bell Canada). I primarily develop applications for RHEL and AlmaLinux systems on the X86-64 platform, and to a lesser extent, OpenVMS applications on "Itanium and Alpha" platforms, and VMS applications on the VAX platform. (Click: here to view my OpenVMS resource page).

Vision 1: I often associate Wikipedia with the "Encyclopedia Galactica" mentioned in Isaac Asimov's "Foundation and Empire" novels although the author never envisioned it in this form (Asimov died just as the world-wide-web was taking off). I have financially contributed to Wikipedia every year since 2003 and challenge you all to do the same. Asimov fans might be interested in this: 15-Book Reading Order as Suggested by Asimov from "Author's Note" of "Prelude to Foundation"

Vision 2: I am convinced we can advance medical science while improving both the length and quality of our lives by participating in "user compute" projects like "folding@home". Click the next two links to learn more: Guaranteed Human Life Extension http://neilrieck.net/docs/folding_at_home.html (tips for Linux users)

Sports: I earned a Black Belt (Shodan) in Karate (GoJu-Ryu) and Kobudo on 2012-01-28 (what an ordeal). Read the details about my 6-hour black-belt grading

Food for thought: I recently learned that the final price for the manned space program up-to-the end of Apollo moon missions was US$25 Billion in 1970 dollars. After reading books like "Journey to the Moon: A History of the Apollo Guidance Computer" I came to the realization that the US$25 Billion was an investment in the future, and that Western life is now very different from what it would have been without Apollo. So why does the USA continue to waste money in foreign wars? Click: The $15 Trillion Dollar Wars for more information.
The US spent ~ $1000 billion (a.k.a. $1 trillion) in Afghanistan over 20 years. Money can be used either constructively or destructively. When will America wake up to the fact that no society can be handed democracy? Democracy is something a society seizes then nurtures when sufficiently mature for it. (American people know all about this when they dealt with British troops on their soil in 1776). Meanwhile, the world-wide-web (which you are using to read this post) was invented in 1989-1990 by European scientists in CERN who wanted to simplify document sharing. This is further proof that peaceful research is more productive than military force.