Most places prohibit this for a reason, not just caprice. Cables are buried under the streets. If you had five local cable companies instead of one, then you have five times as many street-digging projects and five times as many patched-over paving jobs.
Assuming you have enough competition, some of those companies will go under and leave your city or town with this mess on their hands.
Not sating I think this is a *good* reason, but I keep my TV to that "off" channel anyway
The river was closed for shipping the last time around. They had to dredge many billions of tons of ash and debris from the explosion and mud flows before the river was navigable again. No rioting or starvation last time, and presumably none the next time. I'll grant that it wasn't radioactive mud, but the fish still left in this watershed are tough SOBs after what they've been through for the last 150 years.
I actually rather like the new and improved version of St. Helens. Perfect geometry is boring. I highly recommend, once the mountain settles down, the long hike up to the rim of the crater. You come to it with a suddeness I can't describe, after hours of trudging through snow fields. All of a sudden you see the terrible beauty that destruction can bring, with, on a clear day, Mount Rainier and Mount Adams looking impossibly close by.
Even if there are no volcanoes in your backyard, mountains are great, symmetrical or smashed. Go visit some.
I'm with you also. I started with Snowcrash and loved it, backtracked to Zodiac and the Big U, and liked The Diamond Age better each time I read it. But Cryptonomicom just never hooked me. My theory was that his target audience narrowed with each book he wrote, eventually leaving me outside of it.
I'm not a hacker, or a guy. His previous books nevertheless had characters that I could relate to and find interesting. In Cryptonomicon, when the hero saves the day and receives the dreadful wounds of carpel tunnel I thought it was the most hilarious parody I've read in a long time. Don't get me wrong, I've had carpel, and it sucks, but it sucks in such an unheroic way.
But I eventually decided it was not meant to be parody, when the hottie scuba instructor succumbs to our hero's charms. That's when I realized this was a fantasy novel directed at an audience whose fantasies I don't share. Nothing wrong with picking an audience and writing to them, but you'll lose readers outside that audience. I haven't read a book of his since then.
And something I've *never* understood -- Why was setting up a money laundering operation supposed to be such a noble goal? I was baffled by this. All that death and struggle and intrigue for such a mean goal? Are there any reason outside of "sticking it to the man"?
You should look into getting some rainbarrels. They are cheap, easy to find in Portland, and usually have wheels on the bottom so that you can roll them away from the downspout and put an empty one in place, if you want more storage. It is also possible, although a beaurocratic hassle, to get cisterns approved for household water supply. They are making huge investments to separate the sewer systems, but every little bit helps.
A really good website that chronicles one Portland couple's adventures in sustainable housing is http://users/easystreet.com/ersson. It details how they converted their house to use water from a roof system, including for drinking water. It also shows a small house they built along the lines of the one in the article - almost closed cycle for energy and water. It's got lots of technical details and cool examples.
True, you can die from caffeine, and it has happened. Probably seven years ago, when I lived in Boston, there was a widely publicized case of an MIT student who OD'd on NoDoze, after taking some unbelievable amount on a dare. Most of the talk was that MIT students should know better, and it interested me as anecdotal proof that intelligence and common sense do not necessarily equate.
I hesitate even to call regular egg-donors mothers. I've thought about this a lot, as I have been an egg donor for two different couples. I don't consider myself the mother of anybody, although there may well be three or four genetically-related-to-me children out there by now.
I always rather enjoyed considering myself a "father" since it seems more applicable to the one-time genetic material donation role that many fathers have. Plus it amuses me, since I'm a girl.
Because of egg donation I got to play the heredity game, even without any desire to be a parent, and I think it's a cool option. As for the actual parents using donor eggs, I'm sure they'd be overjoyed to be able to have their "own" child, related to both of them. That's why most of them are seeking fertility treatments and donor eggs instead of adoption in the first place, they desperately want to either experience pregnancy and birth or have genetically related children. I find this urge very strange, but I respect the intensity of it, as what the mother has to go through is even more painful than what I did, and more expensive than you might believe. I'm sure they'll keep trying until they get decent odds with this technique. They'll make a fortune, some parents will get what they hope for, and some won't. Pretty much just like conception the old fashioned way, except, of course, for all the money.
Yeah, most of the euphorbiaceae are really poisonous and weird looking. But the taste is reputedly so caustic and horrible that I don't imagine an animal would be tempted to eat enough to be injured, so you should be safe.
My botany teacher used to tell hilarious (in retrospect) stories of his childhood when his cousins would dare him to do this or that. Most memorable in his mind was when he licked the sap from a euphorb. Yuck.
I know you're just joking, but I've always found it kind of interesting that older plants, like these and other conifers, ferns, etc, really don't have any use for us animals, and so never developed parts (fruits, tubers, nuts, greens, whatever) that we like to eat. These families were mature a long time before mammals were around, and use other arrangements, chiefly wind and water, to reproduce.
The flowering plants developed alongside animals and insects, and the ways we use and benefit each other are amazing. Many botanists think that's why flowering plants diversified so quickly and spread so widely. They found ways to benefit from animal mobility and all the tastiness of fruit, the beauty of flowers (sometimes in UV patterns for the benefit of insect vision), and the nutrition found in cereals came about because they found partners who value those things, and thus helped the plants reproduce, intentionally or otherwise.
So finding an "unchanged" relic from that time is pretty cool. These are plants that don't need us, but at the same time their ranges and numbers have shrunk over millenia, because they can't use us either. The flowering trees, plants and grasses have exploded in number and diversity, and the older families hang on here or there, in specialized conditions.
There's a great book I recommend on the interaction of people and plants called The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan. He traces four plants closely tied up with human culture - apples, tulips, potatoes, and cannabis - and traces how we have changed each other.
So yeah, don't count on these being edible, since having edible parts wasn't a useful survival trait in the time of its prime. But they're still cool.
Keep in mind that the Amazon river runs through the Amazon Rain Forest, which is an enormous carbon *sink*. Lots of plants, all taking CO2 and making wood out of it. Of course, now that this area is being burned to clear land for crops and pasture, all that wood turns back into CO2, so this sink is becoming a source soon enough.
Re:That forgotten god from American Gods..
on
Ask Neil Gaiman
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· Score: 1
I can't think of an actual god that has this quality (but then, I wouldn't be able to) but Clive Cussler, a beach-reading adventure book author, makes cameo appearances in each of his novels.
After Clive gives his save-the-day help, advice, or information, the "real" characters wander off asking each other; Who was that old guy? What was his funny name again?
The earliest of his books I've read was from the early 90's, but I'm sure he's been around longer than that.
My Dad worked in the IT department at one of those banks, across the street from the WTC. I found it interesting that according to him, the year-2000 bug scare turned out to big a big help when the real disaster struck. Of course, their systems were orders of magnitude more complex than this ISP's, but then they, had that much more redundancy built in to everything.
Prior to 2000, they built an entirely new system and ran it in parallel with the current one, for six months. Every transaction went through both systems with the results compared to ensure compliance. They had run so many data recovery scenarios that even having to abandon their headquarters did not mean that service was interrupted for more than minute amount of time.
So the article has a good point when it says you may not know what disaster will hit, but a good plan has flexibility built in. Total system failure can happen in oh so many ways, these days.
I'm with you on this one. I wasn't yet born in 65, and too young to remember much of 77, but the blackouts I've been in have all been really fun. One was caused by a hurricane, and two by squirrels, I can't bring myself to jump on the purposely caused bandwagon, just yet.
I know it isn't universally the case, but each time I've been a blackout, it brought all the neighbors together, just like your experience in 77. Take advantage of this time when people let down their usual social boundaries, and everyone wants to be in it together. Two of my now best friends I first got to know in a small blackout four years ago in Portland, OR. One of my favorite blackouts lasted three days in Cape Cod, in the wake of hurricane Bob. The supermarket gave out free ice cream and took you around by flashlight to do your shopping.
People don't always behave badly just because they can.
Just off the phone with my Dad in NYC, and the local scuttlebutt is that the trouble isn't that the power is still "broken", but that such a large region has been shut down, it's freakin hard to start turning it back on without unbalancing the rest of the grid.
A rough esitmate of the people in the area affected is probably between 30 and 50 million. When the power went off, most of them didn't go around turning off their light switches, TVs, air conditioners or whatever else was running. Not to mention traffic lights, street lights, subways etc.
So even if the power is fixed or alternate sources are routed in, turning the lights back on is really hard. It may take a while, even if they already fixed the original problem.
But blackouts aren't all bad. In the 1965 NYC blackout, My dad walked five miles across Manhattan to check on my Mom, and ended up proposing. So all you east coasters, pull the batteries from those laptops, check on your friends and neighbors, and go make some stories to tell your kids, when in happens again in another thirty - forty years.
About four million people live in Oregon. More than three million of us live in the Willamette Valley, an astonishingly temperate, level, well-paved region. We even have streetlights out here! It has snowed (I'm talking trace levels) maybe three times in the last five years.
I own a honda civic and a pair of chains. I drive up to 7,000 feet to ski, take it on way-scary "roads" in places like the Kalmiopsis Wilderness and the Steens, and never missed whatever it is SUVs are supposed to give you. I mean, I'm sure some people have a real use for high-clearance 4-wheel drive vehicles, but not just because we live in Oregon.
There is also the problem of cars that don't run on gas whoes owners under the current system won't pay any tax. And what about your lawnmower? Your paying taxes for services your not even using!
Actually, under the current system in Oregon, if you drive a non-gas car, you do indeed get to pay a special extra tax. It's ironic, they'll give you a tax incentive to buy a non-polluting car, but then they double your registration fee because you aren't buying enough gasoline.
You can also apply for refunds when you buy gasoline you aren't planning to drive with.
A great book by Sean Russell called The Initiate Brother, and its sequel The Gatherer of Clouds. Actually, I recommend absolutely anything by Sean Russell.
Most of his books are set in alternate pasts, and the two above take place in an empire similar to ancient China, full of both internal and external conflict. Some arises from dissent within a religion similar to bhuddism, whose monks have attained near-magical abilities through their meditation and training practices. There are rumors of invasion from the barbarian North, intrigue within the court is causing trouble for everyone, and all kinds of interesting things are going on.
His characters are really compelling and act, think and speak in ways that make you really feel you are experiencing a different culture, not just your own culture dressed up in another time and place.
The writing is great, the story is interesting, you want to know what happens to everyone, and although all of the events are fictional "history", you get a great feel for what that part of ancient China could have been like.
I looked into this at the time, and it is illegal to withdraw or even keep the money. There was a case of a woman in New York whose bank account was one number off from that of a UN relief organization. She got stray money into that account for about ten years before someone noticed.
She was prosecuted, fined and I think even had to do a little jail time. Her defense was that she thought she had "won" the money from some sort of sweepstakes. The prosecution claimed that a reasonable person would have known the money didn't belong to them, especially since she had not actually entered a sweepstakes.
In my case, the waters were muddied further by a clause in the brokerage contract. It said that any errors in your account statement that are not challenged by you in writing within 30 days become final, whether they are really wrong or not. This clause was obviously designed for the benefit of the brokerage, and probably not legally enforceable anyway, but by their policy (if not in law) I could have made arguments that the money was mine.
I think the stock was real, but belonged to another person who perhaps had a similar account number. A reasonably competant organization would have discovered the error and been able to fix it. This organization was not reasonably competant. $140,000 is a huge amount of money to me, but it wouldn't surprise me if the brokerage just ate it and got new stock for the correct account, or if they'd siphoned this stock out of a *really* large grant to an executive type who might not notice the "small" discrepency within the 30-day period, hoping to take it back later. But all the brokerage switching that followed immediately after bollixed the plan. No real way to know.
They have been able to push each and every pet policy of theirs in the name of "homeland security" and patriotism.
With the exception of their pet arctic oil-drilling project, which went down in the Senate yesterday. They were pushing that one hard in the name of "energy security" from evil foreign oil producers.
Their "free ride" may not be over, but it is certainly slowing down.
Then again, there aren't cute migrating caribou on the net to turn into a rallying point against wire tapping.
Here's an example that happened to me. I was working for a dotcom, and we had a discounted employee stock purchase plan. To participate, we had to sign up through a broker who seemed (to me) incredibly incompetent if not corrupt. But it was use them or don't participate, and since I was only investing a very token amount, I crossed out all the dubious clauses in their contract, and signed up.
Two or three months later I got an account statement that showed me with a balance of $140,000 of stock in a company that I'd never heard of, plus the tiny amount of stock in my own company. I called the broker and left a message that there was a mistake in my stock statement. They never called me back.
A week later, the brokerage was bought out by another company, and all the accounts were transferred. Three weeks after that, my company switched to yet another brokerage after we got acquired, and the account was transferred again.
Throughout all of these changes, all that fully vested stock that I was not entitled to remained in my account. It had a beautiful 52-week graph too, unlike my own company's stock. And I had *tried* to do the right thing.
It was incredibly tempting. I could buy a house. Quit my job and go back to college. Or just leave it there for five years, ten years, and see if anyone ever noticed. After all, the stock had stayed with me through three brokerages. And the first brokerage were idiots, there was probably no trail.
In the end, I couldn't do it. I am very risk averse, and the original broker had always struck me as crooked. I had a half-formed worry that they were using my account as part of some complicated scam, hoping I'd go along with it a la Nigerian money-transfer schemes. I finally took to calling them up saying "There's $150,000 of stock in my account that doesn't belong to me! (its value had gone up by then) It must belong to a different customer! Take it out."
They never even thanked me.
I resisted, but it physically *hurt* to get my statement every month, and a lot of my friends told me I was being stupid to keep trying to give it back. If it would not have tempted you too, you're not human.
David Brin is another author whose work has several times dealt with societies where cloning of some sort is the norm. He explores many of the possible consequences for the structure of the societies involved. He is way smart, and a lot of the ideas he envisions are startling but plausible. He also spins a good tale.
His book Glory Season shows a world where about 80% of the people are (female) clones. In this world, cloning is just as easy or hard as getting pregnant the normal way, and whether you have a clone or a mixed-gene child mostly depends on the season. The story revolves around a young mixed-gene child trying to make a place in the world, and a visitor from a more normal human world, whose arrival sets the whole social order boiling. You can find an excerpt from the book at Brin's website here
His most recent book, Kiln People deals with a society where you can create disposable mental clones. How convenient! Make a copy of your mind, load it in a blank, and have it study calculus while you're on a date. At the end of the day you download the new memories, the "clone" degrades, and you have essentially been in two places at once.
Of course, sometimes the copies of you don't want to degrade, or be the one who is stuck studying calculus. Lots of ethical questions explored here, within the framework of a murder-mystery.
So, in not-very short, if you're interested in exploring possible societal effects of cloning, read these books!
I found that they had my current address also, and I was really surprised, since I have never given them that information.
For all those saying "Who would give yahoo their real address?" Well, was a time, say 1996 when I signed up for my account, when yahoo was way cool and we were all a bit more wide-eyed and naive. I gave them my real address.
Which does not explain why they have my current one, five years, two apartments, and one state later. I've bought airline tickets and books online, and used my yahoo mail for the confirmation notice.
To join the objections bandwagon: My biggest issue with GPS is that it doesn't work reliably under tree cover or in canyons, something most manufacturers don't go out of their way to advertise. In the Pacific Northwest, where I do most of my hiking, this means GPS isn't that useful. I mean, it can be sort of fun, and you can download maps and see a little "X marks the spot" right on the trail where you're standing, but I would *never* leave my compass at home.
My favorite example of this was a 4 day outing I did last summer. Two of my friends brought their new GPS toys to play with, and were placing bets on which was better. Due to terrain and heavy tree cover, they were only able to get a reading from one spot the first day. Two spots on the second, and from nowhere (except the parking lot) on the last two days.
Map and compass are easy to master, cheap, always reliable, and weigh less than two ounces. Sure, you can bring your GPS, but I'm still not leaving my compass at home.
Re:Here's another great link
on
Digital Biology
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· Score: 3, Insightful
This one is my favorite. You can watch the flocking boids, and it explains flocking algorithms very clearly and easily.
Plus, it's got links to about 50 other really interesting biological modeling and application sites.
There are some interesting ones out there you might consider looking at as a model. My favorite one is for California Botany. They're trying to list and collect electronic pictures of every plant species found in California.
The major problem I have with some of the online sites (although this one is pretty flexible in how it lets you search) is if you find some cool-looking plant but don't know what it is, it is very difficult to find out, since the data is organized by species name or common name. Or if you know it by a different common name than whoever listed it, you may also not be able to find your plant.
That would be a good, and still plenty difficult, project: make a scheme to make it easier to identify an unknown plant. Maybe make it so you can pick what you can search by: size, or color, or altitude where you found it, or click on a state map to get a sub-list of species there... The possibilities are endless. Every field guide I have is organized along a different principle, but that's the beauty of a database. No reason why you shouldn't be able to search by whatever characteristic you want.
So yeah, build a better search tool for one of these projects, or like you said, add food-web data, make links from one database to another correlating where stuff is found, or what eats it, or whatever. There's lots of room for improvement and connectivity in this field.
Slashdot Mirror
Most places prohibit this for a reason, not just caprice. Cables are buried under the streets. If you had five local cable companies instead of one, then you have five times as many street-digging projects and five times as many patched-over paving jobs.
Assuming you have enough competition, some of those companies will go under and leave your city or town with this mess on their hands.
Not sating I think this is a *good* reason, but I keep my TV to that "off" channel anyway
I actually rather like the new and improved version of St. Helens. Perfect geometry is boring. I highly recommend, once the mountain settles down, the long hike up to the rim of the crater. You come to it with a suddeness I can't describe, after hours of trudging through snow fields. All of a sudden you see the terrible beauty that destruction can bring, with, on a clear day, Mount Rainier and Mount Adams looking impossibly close by.
Even if there are no volcanoes in your backyard, mountains are great, symmetrical or smashed. Go visit some.
I'm not a hacker, or a guy. His previous books nevertheless had characters that I could relate to and find interesting. In Cryptonomicon, when the hero saves the day and receives the dreadful wounds of carpel tunnel I thought it was the most hilarious parody I've read in a long time. Don't get me wrong, I've had carpel, and it sucks, but it sucks in such an unheroic way.
But I eventually decided it was not meant to be parody, when the hottie scuba instructor succumbs to our hero's charms. That's when I realized this was a fantasy novel directed at an audience whose fantasies I don't share. Nothing wrong with picking an audience and writing to them, but you'll lose readers outside that audience. I haven't read a book of his since then.
And something I've *never* understood -- Why was setting up a money laundering operation supposed to be such a noble goal? I was baffled by this. All that death and struggle and intrigue for such a mean goal? Are there any reason outside of "sticking it to the man"?
A really good website that chronicles one Portland couple's adventures in sustainable housing is http://users/easystreet.com/ersson. It details how they converted their house to use water from a roof system, including for drinking water. It also shows a small house they built along the lines of the one in the article - almost closed cycle for energy and water. It's got lots of technical details and cool examples.
I had wondered if this "perfect" woman was named after that perfect listener, but you captured the spirit of it, well, perfectly.
Sadly, no mod points today.
I always rather enjoyed considering myself a "father" since it seems more applicable to the one-time genetic material donation role that many fathers have. Plus it amuses me, since I'm a girl.
Because of egg donation I got to play the heredity game, even without any desire to be a parent, and I think it's a cool option. As for the actual parents using donor eggs, I'm sure they'd be overjoyed to be able to have their "own" child, related to both of them. That's why most of them are seeking fertility treatments and donor eggs instead of adoption in the first place, they desperately want to either experience pregnancy and birth or have genetically related children. I find this urge very strange, but I respect the intensity of it, as what the mother has to go through is even more painful than what I did, and more expensive than you might believe.
I'm sure they'll keep trying until they get decent odds with this technique. They'll make a fortune, some parents will get what they hope for, and some won't.
Pretty much just like conception the old fashioned way, except, of course, for all the money.
My botany teacher used to tell hilarious (in retrospect) stories of his childhood when his cousins would dare him to do this or that. Most memorable in his mind was when he licked the sap from a euphorb. Yuck.
The flowering plants developed alongside animals and insects, and the ways we use and benefit each other are amazing. Many botanists think that's why flowering plants diversified so quickly and spread so widely. They found ways to benefit from animal mobility and all the tastiness of fruit, the beauty of flowers (sometimes in UV patterns for the benefit of insect vision), and the nutrition found in cereals came about because they found partners who value those things, and thus helped the plants reproduce, intentionally or otherwise.
So finding an "unchanged" relic from that time is pretty cool. These are plants that don't need us, but at the same time their ranges and numbers have shrunk over millenia, because they can't use us either. The flowering trees, plants and grasses have exploded in number and diversity, and the older families hang on here or there, in specialized conditions.
There's a great book I recommend on the interaction of people and plants called The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan. He traces four plants closely tied up with human culture - apples, tulips, potatoes, and cannabis - and traces how we have changed each other.
So yeah, don't count on these being edible, since having edible parts wasn't a useful survival trait in the time of its prime. But they're still cool.
Keep in mind that the Amazon river runs through the Amazon Rain Forest, which is an enormous carbon *sink*. Lots of plants, all taking CO2 and making wood out of it.
Of course, now that this area is being burned to clear land for crops and pasture, all that wood turns back into CO2, so this sink is becoming a source soon enough.
After Clive gives his save-the-day help, advice, or information, the "real" characters wander off asking each other; Who was that old guy? What was his funny name again?
The earliest of his books I've read was from the early 90's, but I'm sure he's been around longer than that.
Prior to 2000, they built an entirely new system and ran it in parallel with the current one, for six months. Every transaction went through both systems with the results compared to ensure compliance. They had run so many data recovery scenarios that even having to abandon their headquarters did not mean that service was interrupted for more than minute amount of time.
So the article has a good point when it says you may not know what disaster will hit, but a good plan has flexibility built in. Total system failure can happen in oh so many ways, these days.
I know it isn't universally the case, but each time I've been a blackout, it brought all the neighbors together, just like your experience in 77. Take advantage of this time when people let down their usual social boundaries, and everyone wants to be in it together. Two of my now best friends I first got to know in a small blackout four years ago in Portland, OR. One of my favorite blackouts lasted three days in Cape Cod, in the wake of hurricane Bob. The supermarket gave out free ice cream and took you around by flashlight to do your shopping.
People don't always behave badly just because they can.
A rough esitmate of the people in the area affected is probably between 30 and 50 million. When the power went off, most of them didn't go around turning off their light switches, TVs, air conditioners or whatever else was running. Not to mention traffic lights, street lights, subways etc.
So even if the power is fixed or alternate sources are routed in, turning the lights back on is really hard. It may take a while, even if they already fixed the original problem.
But blackouts aren't all bad. In the 1965 NYC blackout, My dad walked five miles across Manhattan to check on my Mom, and ended up proposing. So all you east coasters, pull the batteries from those laptops, check on your friends and neighbors, and go make some stories to tell your kids, when in happens again in another thirty - forty years.
About four million people live in Oregon. More than three million of us live in the Willamette Valley, an astonishingly temperate, level, well-paved region. We even have streetlights out here! It has snowed (I'm talking trace levels) maybe three times in the last five years.
I own a honda civic and a pair of chains. I drive up to 7,000 feet to ski, take it on way-scary "roads" in places like the Kalmiopsis Wilderness and the Steens, and never missed whatever it is SUVs are supposed to give you. I mean, I'm sure some people have a real use for high-clearance 4-wheel drive vehicles, but not just because we live in Oregon.
Actually, under the current system in Oregon, if you drive a non-gas car, you do indeed get to pay a special extra tax. It's ironic, they'll give you a tax incentive to buy a non-polluting car, but then they double your registration fee because you aren't buying enough gasoline.
You can also apply for refunds when you buy gasoline you aren't planning to drive with.
A great book by Sean Russell called The Initiate Brother, and its sequel The Gatherer of Clouds. Actually, I recommend absolutely anything by Sean Russell.
Most of his books are set in alternate pasts, and the two above take place in an empire similar to ancient China, full of both internal and external conflict. Some arises from dissent within a religion similar to bhuddism, whose monks have attained near-magical abilities through their meditation and training practices. There are rumors of invasion from the barbarian North, intrigue within the court is causing trouble for everyone, and all kinds of interesting things are going on.
His characters are really compelling and act, think and speak in ways that make you really feel you are experiencing a different culture, not just your own culture dressed up in another time and place.
The writing is great, the story is interesting, you want to know what happens to everyone, and although all of the events are fictional "history", you get a great feel for what that part of ancient China could have been like.
I looked into this at the time, and it is illegal to withdraw or even keep the money. There was a case of a woman in New York whose bank account was one number off from that of a UN relief organization. She got stray money into that account for about ten years before someone noticed.
She was prosecuted, fined and I think even had to do a little jail time. Her defense was that she thought she had "won" the money from some sort of sweepstakes. The prosecution claimed that a reasonable person would have known the money didn't belong to them, especially since she had not actually entered a sweepstakes.
In my case, the waters were muddied further by a clause in the brokerage contract. It said that any errors in your account statement that are not challenged by you in writing within 30 days become final, whether they are really wrong or not. This clause was obviously designed for the benefit of the brokerage, and probably not legally enforceable anyway, but by their policy (if not in law) I could have made arguments that the money was mine.
I think the stock was real, but belonged to another person who perhaps had a similar account number. A reasonably competant organization would have discovered the error and been able to fix it. This organization was not reasonably competant. $140,000 is a huge amount of money to me, but it wouldn't surprise me if the brokerage just ate it and got new stock for the correct account, or if they'd siphoned this stock out of a *really* large grant to an executive type who might not notice the "small" discrepency within the 30-day period, hoping to take it back later. But all the brokerage switching that followed immediately after bollixed the plan. No real way to know.
They have been able to push each and every pet policy of theirs in the name of "homeland security" and patriotism.
With the exception of their pet arctic oil-drilling project, which went down in the Senate yesterday. They were pushing that one hard in the name of "energy security" from evil foreign oil producers.
Their "free ride" may not be over, but it is certainly slowing down.
Then again, there aren't cute migrating caribou on the net to turn into a rallying point against wire tapping.
Here's an example that happened to me. I was working for a dotcom, and we had a discounted employee stock purchase plan. To participate, we had to sign up through a broker who seemed (to me) incredibly incompetent if not corrupt. But it was use them or don't participate, and since I was only investing a very token amount, I crossed out all the dubious clauses in their contract, and signed up.
Two or three months later I got an account statement that showed me with a balance of $140,000 of stock in a company that I'd never heard of, plus the tiny amount of stock in my own company. I called the broker and left a message that there was a mistake in my stock statement. They never called me back.
A week later, the brokerage was bought out by another company, and all the accounts were transferred. Three weeks after that, my company switched to yet another brokerage after we got acquired, and the account was transferred again.
Throughout all of these changes, all that fully vested stock that I was not entitled to remained in my account. It had a beautiful 52-week graph too, unlike my own company's stock. And I had *tried* to do the right thing.
It was incredibly tempting. I could buy a house. Quit my job and go back to college. Or just leave it there for five years, ten years, and see if anyone ever noticed. After all, the stock had stayed with me through three brokerages. And the first brokerage were idiots, there was probably no trail.
In the end, I couldn't do it. I am very risk averse, and the original broker had always struck me as crooked. I had a half-formed worry that they were using my account as part of some complicated scam, hoping I'd go along with it a la Nigerian money-transfer schemes. I finally took to calling them up saying "There's $150,000 of stock in my account that doesn't belong to me! (its value had gone up by then) It must belong to a different customer! Take it out."
They never even thanked me.
I resisted, but it physically *hurt* to get my statement every month, and a lot of my friends told me I was being stupid to keep trying to give it back. If it would not have tempted you too, you're not human.
David Brin is another author whose work has several times dealt with societies where cloning of some sort is the norm. He explores many of the possible consequences for the structure of the societies involved. He is way smart, and a lot of the ideas he envisions are startling but plausible. He also spins a good tale.
His book Glory Season shows a world where about 80% of the people are (female) clones. In this world, cloning is just as easy or hard as getting pregnant the normal way, and whether you have a clone or a mixed-gene child mostly depends on the season. The story revolves around a young mixed-gene child trying to make a place in the world, and a visitor from a more normal human world, whose arrival sets the whole social order boiling. You can find an excerpt from the book at Brin's website here
His most recent book, Kiln People deals with a society where you can create disposable mental clones. How convenient! Make a copy of your mind, load it in a blank, and have it study calculus while you're on a date. At the end of the day you download the new memories, the "clone" degrades, and you have essentially been in two places at once.
Of course, sometimes the copies of you don't want to degrade, or be the one who is stuck studying calculus. Lots of ethical questions explored here, within the framework of a murder-mystery.
So, in not-very short, if you're interested in exploring possible societal effects of cloning, read these books!
--payslee "fangirl"
I found that they had my current address also, and I was really surprised, since I have never given them that information.
For all those saying "Who would give yahoo their real address?" Well, was a time, say 1996 when I signed up for my account, when yahoo was way cool and we were all a bit more wide-eyed and naive. I gave them my real address.
Which does not explain why they have my current one, five years, two apartments, and one state later. I've bought airline tickets and books online, and used my yahoo mail for the confirmation notice.
Somebody's been telling secrets...
To join the objections bandwagon: My biggest issue with GPS is that it doesn't work reliably under tree cover or in canyons, something most manufacturers don't go out of their way to advertise. In the Pacific Northwest, where I do most of my hiking, this means GPS isn't that useful. I mean, it can be sort of fun, and you can download maps and see a little "X marks the spot" right on the trail where you're standing, but I would *never* leave my compass at home.
My favorite example of this was a 4 day outing I did last summer. Two of my friends brought their new GPS toys to play with, and were placing bets on which was better. Due to terrain and heavy tree cover, they were only able to get a reading from one spot the first day. Two spots on the second, and from nowhere (except the parking lot) on the last two days.
Map and compass are easy to master, cheap, always reliable, and weigh less than two ounces. Sure, you can bring your GPS, but I'm still not leaving my compass at home.
This one is my favorite. You can watch the flocking boids, and it explains flocking algorithms very clearly and easily.
Plus, it's got links to about 50 other really interesting biological modeling and application sites.
There are some interesting ones out there you might consider looking at as a model. My favorite one is for California Botany. They're trying to list and collect electronic pictures of every plant species found in California.
The major problem I have with some of the online sites (although this one is pretty flexible in how it lets you search) is if you find some cool-looking plant but don't know what it is, it is very difficult to find out, since the data is organized by species name or common name. Or if you know it by a different common name than whoever listed it, you may also not be able to find your plant.
That would be a good, and still plenty difficult, project: make a scheme to make it easier to identify an unknown plant. Maybe make it so you can pick what you can search by: size, or color, or altitude where you found it, or click on a state map to get a sub-list of species there... The possibilities are endless. Every field guide I have is organized along a different principle, but that's the beauty of a database. No reason why you shouldn't be able to search by whatever characteristic you want.
So yeah, build a better search tool for one of these projects, or like you said, add food-web data, make links from one database to another correlating where stuff is found, or what eats it, or whatever. There's lots of room for improvement and connectivity in this field.