It seems it was a tip-off, not Echelon, that ultimately led to Mohammed's capture. Read the article, and you'll see that some lucky Al-Quayda grunt turned coat and pocketed a cool $25 million dollars.
It's in the US's interests to hype Echelon ("Woooo! We can seeeeeee you!") rather than admit they really got their man through good old fashioned bribery and traitors. Sure, Exchelon helped once they KNEW THE GUY'S STREET ADDRESS. But it was pretty much useless until they were told where to look.
Still, good catch. Here's hoping there's another footsoldier of god out there who'll take $25mil in small bills in exchange for Osama's current location.
Not really. They can do it based on Zip code. If they can narrow it down to 5+4 zip, it's even better. The census data is quite comprehensive, you know, and zip code marketing is a tried and tested technique. They can deduce average household size, income, transcience... and they'll be able to tell from your subscription information which channels you like. Get the ESPN channels? Chances are, you like sports.:)
My only hope is that the laser will be powerful enough to go through dense fog and also not be affected by rain/moisture as well.
It will fly above the clouds. No fog or rain at 40,000 feet. It will also target missiles that have cleared the cloudbank, while they are still on ascent.
Yes! My wife's given name is awfully close to Mei Ling, and she's from Singapore (just like the character in the book, only without the incredible wealth - that's the other side of her family, unfortunately) and she was very upset by Joyce Mei-Ling's name.
She (my wife, not Joyce Mei-Ling) did some consults for a friend who wrote a gaming supplement based on Chinese culture that ended up so badly mangling the Chinese names that she said she didn't want her name mentioned in the credits. She was put in anyway, but the author (an otherwise great guy, by the way) said he changed the names from the suggested ones using a Chinese-English dictionary he picked up at a fire sale because they "sounded better". It also means that some of the names are hilariously bad when read in the original Chinese.
So it could well be the case that Niven and Pournelle *knew* they were mangling, but decided it sounded better as "Joyce Mei-Ling" (plus it hints that the character is asian. Although I'd think that Joyce Wang-Trujillo does that too).
Either way, I blame Jerry, because he's not here.:)
Most spam originates from a small group of die-hard spammers that move between ISPs. It's not the same thing. And then there's 'direct-to-MX' spam from dialup and cable/broadband accounts. So, while folks like ROKSO and Spamhaus.org do provide blacklists, they're not 100% effective and there's always the risk of false-positives.
They're not being disengenuous. The insulating foam is porous, and while it is light and fluffy initially, over time it becomes saturated with condensing water vapor which, in turn, freezes to ice. Hence you end up with a foam/ice mix, or "Foam with ice in it".
The trick is working out how much ice is in your foam - the longer the tank is left fuelled, and the colder the weather, the more ice you'll get in the foam. Also, when the foam breaks off, it may allow ice that was *under* the foam to come with it. The whole purpose of the foam was to stop ice chunks from the fuel tank from breaking off and striking the orbiter, after all.
We had a confirmed strike on the orbiter's left wing by debris from the main tank.
Best guesses for the point of impact were around the left wheel well.
The orbiter then experiences a thermal breakup, apparently originating around the left wheel well.
We have Boeing engineers in California saying that the folks at Boeing Houston were inexperienced at doing the risk analysis (this was their first 'live' outing since they moved the office out to Houston), and *ignored* the results of the CRATER impact simulator because it predictated Orbiter destruction. This is the program the Boeing California engineers (who have all the experience doing strike analyses) wrote.
Occam's razor suggests that the simplest explaination is the most likely. Something hit the wing, the tiles were damaged, the orbiter was destroyed. The only thing remaining is whether or not the damage was detectable *before* re-entry. And it's looking like it was, based on e-mails that have been released and interviews given by California Boeing engineers. Everything else is a Cover Your Ass Squaredance between NASA and Boeing, neither of which will admit that the orbiter was lost because of budgetry cutbacks and bad management.
That's the best guess for the speed and mass of the foam that hit Columbia, based on the size of the chunk and Columbia's acceleration at the time.
I bet your head would hurt if *that* hit it...;-)
Of course, now it turns out there may have been *three* foam strikes, not just one. And it may have been more than foam: add a bit of ice in there, and the weight goes up dramatically. That's not an unlikely hypothesis, since the foam is there to prevent ice condensate from hitting the orbiter on launch.
I don't think that matters, although obviously it'll need a court case to set precedent. But my (IANAL) reading of the law is that if they do business in the UK, and interact with UK citizens, then the DPA apples to them. Ditto the EU Privacy Directive.
Well, I'm no statistician, but a close relative of mine is. And he works for a Certain Military Agency.
Anyhoo. He says that, given the crash rate to date, the chance of a shuttle going down is between 0.7 and 5.2%, with a 95% confidence rate.
The rate of failure for commercial (satellite, unmanned, supposedly less safe) launches hovers around 4%. This means the shuttle is starting to look unfavorable as a human delivery vehicle. Certainly Soyuz has a better safety record, although it has a much reduced capability and capacity.
So stick it to apple while you're at it, eh? Of course if you're smart, buy the extended warranty. It will cost apple a lot more money to give you an extra battery every 3 months for 3 years than it will to fix/replace your ibook probably. Might as well teach them a lesson...
Alas, the Extended Warranty doesn't cover batteries. See here (PDF).That falls under 'consumables and wear and tear', along with worn out keys and sticky mouse pointers. To quote:
The plan does not cover:
repair, replacement, or maintenance of items that have been subject to wear and tear, such as cases, key caps, knobs, handles, batteries or mechanical parts.
So don't expect them to warranty-replace a flat battery unless they issue a recall notice for a defective batch (like Dell did back in 2000 for some of their Latitude batteries).
You'd think the DMA would be all for a national opt-out list. Especially when they already run one themselves for paper mailings.
After all, what's the point of sending adverts to people who have taken the time and effort to opt out? Surely such people are not your target audience.
Problem is, telemarketing is big big business that relies on pressure selling. They're probably worried that children will put their aged parents on a no-call list, which will undermine the lucrative direct-to-seniors funeral insurance market.:)
Plus, if MA is anything to go by, it could be more than half of all residential numbers may opt out of calls. That's a much higher percentage of opt-outs that for the DMA member's paper mailings. They're probably reasoning that such a high opt-out rate *must* have some negative effect on sales.
No, they didn't. 'Bomb-proof' bins are alive and well, and are in use in the UK and the USA. Example: check out the trash cans on the Boston Metro system, or (I think - memory's a bit fuzzy) most of the bins around central London. Large, concrete affairs with a flimsy top. The ones in Boston are about two feet wide and square,with a conventional bin inside the concrete frame. They're designed to deflect the blast upwards rather than turning a thin steel trashcan into a very large fragmentation grenade.
Of course, they're only useful for small devices as a means to minimise injury - they're not a panacea.
Yup, the 5xxx series adds VBR. 'Standard' quality is up to 2Mbit/sec MPEG2 352x240, 'Medium' is up to 4Mbit/s 720x480, and 'High' is up to 8Mbit/s 720x480. 'Medium' is beaten only by Tivo's 'Best' setting, which in turn is not as good as ReplayTV's 'High'. Of course, the quality of the capture depends on the signal strength of the source; but given the same source, ReplayTV produces better captures. There are many owners on Avsforum who own both Tivo and ReplayTV who attest to this.
I got a WD1200JB 120GB drive for $150. That was the sweet spot for me in price/capacity. Going from a 5040 (40GB drive) to a 120GB increases my capacity from 20 hours of 'medium' (virtually indistinguishable from broadcast) quality to 60 hours. Which is more than enough for me at the moment.:)
I plan to upgrade the drive again in 12-18 months, when $150 can buy me something over 250GB.:)
replaytv isn't as "hackable" so you can't add space
Oh, dear. I wish I knew that before I added that new 120GB hard drive to my ReplayTV yesterday. I guess it must have been faking the extra 60 hours of recording capacity that it said it gained...;-)
Sorry, but it's really easy to add space to ReplayTV. Even easier than adding an space to a Tivo, as you don't have to worry about 'blessing' the drive.
This a case of Tivo going as close as they can to the line without being sued by Hollywood. If 30 second skip buttons are determined to be illegal, Tivo can drop the unsupported feature and nobody can say Tivo every promised it to anybody. On the other hand, it's there and you can use it for now.
I guess that's why I didn't buy Tivo. You know it's majority shareholders are the networks, right? The networks control Tivo's featureset so as not to disrupt their current business model, and sue ReplayTV (whom they do not own stock in) to force them out of the market. It's all about control, and I resent that. I resent that they're giving us a feature 'on the sly', to those in the know, as a way to get buy-in from technically-aware customers who would otherwise choose ReplayTV.
I have a ReplayTV. It's the PVR for folks who like more features, but less stability.:)
Built-in LAN access. Ability to offload shows (MPEG2, no funky wrappers or encryption) to PC. Stream shows from one ReplayTV to another, or (with third-party GPL software, like DVArchive) stream to a PC. Or stream from a PC's archive of shows back to your ReplayTV. Better quality video capture than Tivo, better search. Not so good season / show recording options as Tivo (the inability to determine if a show is a repeat or not, or even if you already have a copy of that show on the unit, is a stupid oversight). But there's strong indication that ReplayTV is going to add features in the near future via software upgrade.
ReplayTV also has Commercial Advance (works 70% of the time; I don't use it) and 30-second skip, which I use religiously. Tivo also has 30s skip, but it's an unsupported software hack that they could disable at any time.
Sounds like you want a ReplayTV, then. Using a niftly little utility called 'ReplayPC' (see sourceforge for details) and your out-of-the-box LAN-enabled ReplayTV 5xxx series, you can download shows recorded in DVD-compliant MPEG2 streams, edit them with the vid editor of your choice, and burn them to DVD. Lots of folks do this already.
You can also upgrade Replay hard drives without hacing to "bless" them.:)
Yes, indeedy. But I can't even claim unemployment. If I lose my job now, and I can't get a new one in two weeks, I'm deported. So I'd wager us H1-Bs are in a slightly worse boat than most Americans in that regard.:-)
Still, if I manage to stay in the US and become a PR or Citizen, I'm not planning on Social Security for anything. Got my own 401K, disability insurance, and starting up an IRA...
Your argument is basically flawed. The H1B was designed as a work visa, not as a method of immigration. If you want to move to the US and become a naturalized citizen, there's already a process for that.
It may not have been designed as a method of immigration, but the fact of the matter is it is used as a transitional method for skilled workers to immigrate. I know, because that's what I'm doing. I have a current H1-B, and an almost-complete green card app.
I am a skilled, well educated, English-as-native-language IT worker, with both US and UK degrees. I want to live in the US. The fact of Green Card immigration is simple: unless you win the lottery, marry an American citizen, have $500,000 around to buy one (a green card, not a US citizen, although I hear senators are pretty cheap), or are a Nobel prize winner, you cannot just ask for a green card. H1-B is a necessary first step. I'd like that to change.
By the way; despite the fact that I'm a 'temporary worker', and can make no claim against Social Security or Medicare, I still must pay SS and Medicare taxes. I wouldn't mind paying if I could claim, or not paying if I couldn't, but the current model is precisely the worst solution. Very unfriendly, if you ask me.;-)
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It seems it was a tip-off, not Echelon, that ultimately led to Mohammed's capture. Read the article, and you'll see that some lucky Al-Quayda grunt turned coat and pocketed a cool $25 million dollars.
It's in the US's interests to hype Echelon ("Woooo! We can seeeeeee you!") rather than admit they really got their man through good old fashioned bribery and traitors. Sure, Exchelon helped once they KNEW THE GUY'S STREET ADDRESS. But it was pretty much useless until they were told where to look.
Still, good catch. Here's hoping there's another footsoldier of god out there who'll take $25mil in small bills in exchange for Osama's current location.
Not really. They can do it based on Zip code. If they can narrow it down to 5+4 zip, it's even better. The census data is quite comprehensive, you know, and zip code marketing is a tried and tested technique. They can deduce average household size, income, transcience... and they'll be able to tell from your subscription information which channels you like. Get the ESPN channels? Chances are, you like sports. :)
It will fly above the clouds. No fog or rain at 40,000 feet. It will also target missiles that have cleared the cloudbank, while they are still on ascent.
Yes! My wife's given name is awfully close to Mei Ling, and she's from Singapore (just like the character in the book, only without the incredible wealth - that's the other side of her family, unfortunately) and she was very upset by Joyce Mei-Ling's name.
:)
She (my wife, not Joyce Mei-Ling) did some consults for a friend who wrote a gaming supplement based on Chinese culture that ended up so badly mangling the Chinese names that she said she didn't want her name mentioned in the credits. She was put in anyway, but the author (an otherwise great guy, by the way) said he changed the names from the suggested ones using a Chinese-English dictionary he picked up at a fire sale because they "sounded better". It also means that some of the names are hilariously bad when read in the original Chinese.
So it could well be the case that Niven and Pournelle *knew* they were mangling, but decided it sounded better as "Joyce Mei-Ling" (plus it hints that the character is asian. Although I'd think that Joyce Wang-Trujillo does that too).
Either way, I blame Jerry, because he's not here.
Most spam originates from a small group of die-hard spammers that move between ISPs. It's not the same thing. And then there's 'direct-to-MX' spam from dialup and cable/broadband accounts. So, while folks like ROKSO and Spamhaus.org do provide blacklists, they're not 100% effective and there's always the risk of false-positives.
They're not being disengenuous. The insulating foam is porous, and while it is light and fluffy initially, over time it becomes saturated with condensing water vapor which, in turn, freezes to ice. Hence you end up with a foam/ice mix, or "Foam with ice in it".
The trick is working out how much ice is in your foam - the longer the tank is left fuelled, and the colder the weather, the more ice you'll get in the foam. Also, when the foam breaks off, it may allow ice that was *under* the foam to come with it. The whole purpose of the foam was to stop ice chunks from the fuel tank from breaking off and striking the orbiter, after all.
We had a confirmed strike on the orbiter's left wing by debris from the main tank.
Best guesses for the point of impact were around the left wheel well.
The orbiter then experiences a thermal breakup, apparently originating around the left wheel well.
We have Boeing engineers in California saying that the folks at Boeing Houston were inexperienced at doing the risk analysis (this was their first 'live' outing since they moved the office out to Houston), and *ignored* the results of the CRATER impact simulator because it predictated Orbiter destruction. This is the program the Boeing California engineers (who have all the experience doing strike analyses) wrote.
Occam's razor suggests that the simplest explaination is the most likely. Something hit the wing, the tiles were damaged, the orbiter was destroyed. The only thing remaining is whether or not the damage was detectable *before* re-entry. And it's looking like it was, based on e-mails that have been released and interviews given by California Boeing engineers. Everything else is a Cover Your Ass Squaredance between NASA and Boeing, neither of which will admit that the orbiter was lost because of budgetry cutbacks and bad management.
That's the best guess for the speed and mass of the foam that hit Columbia, based on the size of the chunk and Columbia's acceleration at the time.
I bet your head would hurt if *that* hit it...;-)
Of course, now it turns out there may have been *three* foam strikes, not just one. And it may have been more than foam: add a bit of ice in there, and the weight goes up dramatically. That's not an unlikely hypothesis, since the foam is there to prevent ice condensate from hitting the orbiter on launch.
Last time I checked, national law trumped private party contracts. But thanks for playing!
I don't think that matters, although obviously it'll need a court case to set precedent. But my (IANAL) reading of the law is that if they do business in the UK, and interact with UK citizens, then the DPA apples to them. Ditto the EU Privacy Directive.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/
. ht ml
It appears they have a presence in the UK. Therefore the Data Protection Act applies to them. They make no mention of this in their Privacy Policy:
http://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/community/png-priv
Oh, dear. Looks like someone should shop them to the Data Protection Registrar...
I desribed the film to my friends thus:
"Like Star Trek 2. Only crap."
Well, I'm no statistician, but a close relative of mine is. And he works for a Certain Military Agency.
Anyhoo. He says that, given the crash rate to date, the chance of a shuttle going down is between 0.7 and 5.2%, with a 95% confidence rate.
The rate of failure for commercial (satellite, unmanned, supposedly less safe) launches hovers around 4%. This means the shuttle is starting to look unfavorable as a human delivery vehicle. Certainly Soyuz has a better safety record, although it has a much reduced capability and capacity.
Alas, the Extended Warranty doesn't cover batteries. See here (PDF).That falls under 'consumables and wear and tear', along with worn out keys and sticky mouse pointers. To quote:
So don't expect them to warranty-replace a flat battery unless they issue a recall notice for a defective batch (like Dell did back in 2000 for some of their Latitude batteries).You'd think the DMA would be all for a national opt-out list. Especially when they already run one themselves for paper mailings.
After all, what's the point of sending adverts to people who have taken the time and effort to opt out? Surely such people are not your target audience.
Problem is, telemarketing is big big business that relies on pressure selling. They're probably worried that children will put their aged parents on a no-call list, which will undermine the lucrative direct-to-seniors funeral insurance market.
Plus, if MA is anything to go by, it could be more than half of all residential numbers may opt out of calls. That's a much higher percentage of opt-outs that for the DMA member's paper mailings. They're probably reasoning that such a high opt-out rate *must* have some negative effect on sales.
No, they didn't. 'Bomb-proof' bins are alive and well, and are in use in the UK and the USA. Example: check out the trash cans on the Boston Metro system, or (I think - memory's a bit fuzzy) most of the bins around central London. Large, concrete affairs with a flimsy top. The ones in Boston are about two feet wide and square,with a conventional bin inside the concrete frame. They're designed to deflect the blast upwards rather than turning a thin steel trashcan into a very large fragmentation grenade.
Of course, they're only useful for small devices as a means to minimise injury - they're not a panacea.
Yup, the 5xxx series adds VBR. 'Standard' quality is up to 2Mbit/sec MPEG2 352x240, 'Medium' is up to 4Mbit/s 720x480, and 'High' is up to 8Mbit/s 720x480. 'Medium' is beaten only by Tivo's 'Best' setting, which in turn is not as good as ReplayTV's 'High'. Of course, the quality of the capture depends on the signal strength of the source; but given the same source, ReplayTV produces better captures. There are many owners on Avsforum who own both Tivo and ReplayTV who attest to this.
I got a WD1200JB 120GB drive for $150. That was the sweet spot for me in price/capacity. Going from a 5040 (40GB drive) to a 120GB increases my capacity from 20 hours of 'medium' (virtually indistinguishable from broadcast) quality to 60 hours. Which is more than enough for me at the moment. :)
:)
I plan to upgrade the drive again in 12-18 months, when $150 can buy me something over 250GB.
Oh, dear. I wish I knew that before I added that new 120GB hard drive to my ReplayTV yesterday. I guess it must have been faking the extra 60 hours of recording capacity that it said it gained...;-)
Sorry, but it's really easy to add space to ReplayTV. Even easier than adding an space to a Tivo, as you don't have to worry about 'blessing' the drive.
I see that Discovery and NBC have board representation, along with a former AOL vp. And about half of SGI. :)
Check out the full list.
I guess that's why I didn't buy Tivo. You know it's majority shareholders are the networks, right? The networks control Tivo's featureset so as not to disrupt their current business model, and sue ReplayTV (whom they do not own stock in) to force them out of the market. It's all about control, and I resent that. I resent that they're giving us a feature 'on the sly', to those in the know, as a way to get buy-in from technically-aware customers who would otherwise choose ReplayTV.
I have a ReplayTV. It's the PVR for folks who like more features, but less stability. :)
Built-in LAN access. Ability to offload shows (MPEG2, no funky wrappers or encryption) to PC. Stream shows from one ReplayTV to another, or (with third-party GPL software, like DVArchive) stream to a PC. Or stream from a PC's archive of shows back to your ReplayTV. Better quality video capture than Tivo, better search. Not so good season / show recording options as Tivo (the inability to determine if a show is a repeat or not, or even if you already have a copy of that show on the unit, is a stupid oversight). But there's strong indication that ReplayTV is going to add features in the near future via software upgrade.
ReplayTV also has Commercial Advance (works 70% of the time; I don't use it) and 30-second skip, which I use religiously. Tivo also has 30s skip, but it's an unsupported software hack that they could disable at any time.
Sounds like you want a ReplayTV, then. Using a niftly little utility called 'ReplayPC' (see sourceforge for details) and your out-of-the-box LAN-enabled ReplayTV 5xxx series, you can download shows recorded in DVD-compliant MPEG2 streams, edit them with the vid editor of your choice, and burn them to DVD. Lots of folks do this already.
:)
You can also upgrade Replay hard drives without hacing to "bless" them.
Yes, indeedy. But I can't even claim unemployment. If I lose my job now, and I can't get a new one in two weeks, I'm deported. So I'd wager us H1-Bs are in a slightly worse boat than most Americans in that regard. :-)
Still, if I manage to stay in the US and become a PR or Citizen, I'm not planning on Social Security for anything. Got my own 401K, disability insurance, and starting up an IRA...
It may not have been designed as a method of immigration, but the fact of the matter is it is used as a transitional method for skilled workers to immigrate. I know, because that's what I'm doing. I have a current H1-B, and an almost-complete green card app.
I am a skilled, well educated, English-as-native-language IT worker, with both US and UK degrees. I want to live in the US. The fact of Green Card immigration is simple: unless you win the lottery, marry an American citizen, have $500,000 around to buy one (a green card, not a US citizen, although I hear senators are pretty cheap), or are a Nobel prize winner, you cannot just ask for a green card. H1-B is a necessary first step. I'd like that to change.
By the way; despite the fact that I'm a 'temporary worker', and can make no claim against Social Security or Medicare, I still must pay SS and Medicare taxes. I wouldn't mind paying if I could claim, or not paying if I couldn't, but the current model is precisely the worst solution. Very unfriendly, if you ask me. ;-)