March, 2008:
Self-Actualization: The Peak of Human Achievement
Dr. Abraham Maslow coined the term “Self-Actualization” as the
pinnacle in the hierarchy of human needs. Dr. Maslow summed up the concept as:“A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write,
if he is to be at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be.
This is the need we may call self-actualization … It refers to mans
desire for fulfillment, namely to the tendency for him to become
actually in what he is potentially: to become everything that one
is capable of becoming …”
Steve Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field
officially started on the Mac project on a Thursday afternoon, and Bud Tribble, my new manager and the only other software person on the project, was out of town. Bud was on leave of absence from an M.D.-Ph.D. program and he had to occasionally return to Seattle to keep up his standing in the program.
Bud usually didn’t come into work until after lunch, so I met with him for the first time the following Monday afternoon. We started talking about all the work that had to be done, which was pretty overwhelming. He showed me the official schedule for developing the software that had us shipping in about ten months, in early January 1982.
“Bud, that’s crazy!”, I told him. “We’ve hardly even started yet. There’s no way we can get it done by then.”
“I know,” he responded, in a low voice, almost a whisper.
“You know? If you know the schedule is off-base, why don’t you correct it?”
“Well, it’s Steve. Steve insists that we’re shipping in early 1982, and won’t accept answers to the contrary. The best way to describe the situation is a term from Star Trek. Steve has a reality distortion field.”
Casino Insider Tells (Almost) All About Security
Casinos are all about odds. If a player has shifted the odds into his favor, he can be asked to leave. But if a player simply wins a ton of money through sheer luck even though the odds are against him, the casino will do everything it can to lure the player back.
To Jonas, the example that may describe this phenomenon involves a private jet.
“There’s this one casino, one of their high rollers beat them for US$18 million,” Jonas said. “That’s actually going to show up on quarterly earnings. So they left with US$18 million. The casino sent a jet to their town and left a limo in front of their house on weekends and said ‘you know just in case you get the bug.’ And they got the bug and they took them up on it and they came back and lost something like US$22 million.”
How to Think Like an Online Con Artist
Con job, pretexting, social engineering – the art and science of manipulating human beings for nefarious ends – goes back as far as the origin of the species. The techniques have been practiced and perfected by a rogue’s gallery of flimflam artists, from legendary carnival operator P. T. Barnum to infamous FBI mole Robert Hanssen.
But in our modern, security-centric world, this ancient craft poses an ever-present danger: Despite technological advances that present an illusion of security, we are as vulnerable as ever to the con.
IT security pros frequently employ social engineering when analyzing a company’s overall security strategy. After all, even a completely locked-down computer network won’t protect your company’s secrets if someone can “tailgate” a group of employees through the front door, plug a remote-access device into an open network port, and walk out again.
7 Insane Conspiracies That Actually Happened
A nifty list of 7 conspiracies that are acknowledged to have occurred by the popular consensus.
In 1933, group of wealthy businessmen that allegedly included the heads of Chase Bank, GM, Goodyear, Standard Oil, the DuPont family and Senator Prescott Bush tried to recruit Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler to lead a military coup against President FDR and install a fascist dictatorship in the United States. And yes, we’re talking about the same Prescott Bush who fathered one US President and grandfathered another one.
