In the old (U.S., at least) way, you either mark a ballot and
shove it in the box, or pull levers behind a
curtain. In either case, there's no reasonable way
for anyone to know how you voted. If someone's
offering a 6-pack of decent beer in exchange for
your vote, just say ``Sure.'', take the beer, and
vote however you please. On the darker side, you
just tell the extortionist you'll do as asked,
then vote as you please. The
secret ballot, plus the public nature of the
polling place, make you proof against such
shenanigans.
On the other hand, if you vote from the privacy
of your own home, the briber/extortionist can make
sure he's getting value for money/threat.
A someone pointed out recently, to continue to
guarantee this freedom, we've got to ban camera
phones from the voting booth.
The Us papers have not been following the situation in Iran very closely but currently there is a major politica struggle between the democrats and the clique of clerics.
The U.S. papers have not been following the situation in America very closely, but currently there is a major political struggle between the Democrats and the clique of fundamentalist clerics.
It shouldn't be difficult for those of us with open source browsers to find tools to block these things.
Funny you should mention that---I just checked over at MSN, pottered about randomly for a few minutes, and saw nothing like the commercials being discussed here.
Could it have something to do with me running
the Junkbuster proxy, and surfing with Mozilla configured to disable Java and Javascript?:-)
If they can't get their ideas across without that stuff, they don't really want to talk to me.
Criminal guilt which is what were talking about isn't about proving beyond a reasonable doubt, it's about actual hard evidence. If there is any doubt, in this case because the files technically are not the same, then you cannot convict.
Umm, that's wrong. If a criminal conviction required total absence of doubt, there wouldn't be any. It's definitely about hard evidence, but that evidence need not prove that it couldn't have been the defendant's previously-unknown evil twin. In the U.S., at least, a juror is instructed that if the evidence
presented is convincing ``beyond a reasonable doubt'' (i.e., anyone saying otherwise would be
advancing an unreasonable argument), she must vote
to convict. This is for criminal cases, where we're trying to protect ourselves against ideological prosecutors or a grasping government.
You don't imprison someone unless you're damn sure you've got the right person.
(That's the theory, anyway. It's rapidly eroding under the Bush administration.)
By way of contrast, in a civil suit (where the only thing at risk is cash, not being sent up the river), the juror is told to vote based on ``the preponderance of the evidence'', which means over fifty percent. If the case is close, but one side makes a slightly better case than the other, vote for the better case.
This
fascinating paper (also available in easy-to-read
MS Word format) postulates that any real attempt
at suppression will lead to a samizdat-like
interlinking of P2P nets, each comprising a small
group of people who trust each other. That ``web
of trust'' will still get the info through.
My Scots ancestors would be rolling in their
graves if the knew I was wasting over sixteen
million addresses! I'll stay with the thrifty
192.168.x.x, thanks, and save the rest for a rainy
day.
Yes, stuff hitting you in the face would be notably limited, but the wedge doesn't stop at the LCD screen---it extends away from you to infinity.
The effect (and the affect, for you psychologists out there:-) comes from your eyes/brain applying what they know about parallax to the funky display. The larger the shift in position (relative to each half-LCD frame), the closer the synthesized object appears. At some point, the delta is great enough that if you believed your eyes/brain, the object would be behind you; that way lies headache.
The smaller the shift in position, the farther away it seems, until they're in the same location (again, each wrt its own half-screen), and the object seems to be at infinity (or however far away something must be for binocular vision to be of no help judging distance).
The result is that the technique can generate the sort of images you could see by looking through a piece of cardboard with a hole the size and shape of one-half your laptop's screen. It's a lot larger than a stage as seen from the cheap seats.
If you're truly bored, you can make such crossed-eye 3-D images on paper, with pencil, ruler, and a lot of fiddly proportionality calculations. I used to do it in school (well before computers were playthings for seventh-graders) in the dull classes.
For you Americans out there who plan to talk with their Senators &
Representative (or staffers thereof), it'll probably be a good idea to
tell them the problem is with
DARPA Grant F30602-01-2-0537,
and would they please get you an answer as to why money is being kept
from this worthy cause. Maybe even mention that it's in aid of
cyberspace security. (If you need a pointer, see the House of Representatives and the Senate websites; they'll point you
to the people you want to get in touch with.)
After the phone calls (or instead of, for The Majority Of The
World), send money to the OpenBSD donation
site (It's the third ``purchase'' from the
top). You can even buy yourself a goodie or two while you're
there.
My money's on the way already. I wonder how much of the grant we can
replace. Now for those phone calls...
I subscribe to a couple of lists that use
Stripmime.
Basically, it enforces plaintext-only semantics on list postings. All.exes
vanish, it tries to convert HTML to text, and numerous other
impediments to clear, straightforward, communication are deep-sixed. The license
appears
to be an Old-BSD model (w/advertising clause), and
the author warns it's not so hot on foreign
character sets.
Nonetheless, it's certainly a major goodness
in my eyes, and you needn't change anything else
about your setup.
The site also points to a program called
Demime,
which I'm unacquainted with.
A quick way to tell whether you're talking to a mathematician, a physicist, or an engineer, is to ask ``Are all odd numbers prime?''
A mathematician will observe
``One's prime, three's prime, five's prime, seven's prime, nine is composite---the hypothesis is false.''
A physicist will think
``One's prime, three's prime, five's prime, seven's prime, nine is composite, eleven's prime, thirteen's prime. Throwing nine out as observational error, we can say the hypothesis is probably true.''
From the site: "Providing industry-leading, standards-based support such as HTML 4.0, CSS 2.0, DOM 2,0, Javascript 1.4 and Flash 4 with a small code size, FirstView Connect was designed specifically for the emerging Information Appliance market and is ideally-suited for adding new value to both traditional and next-generation digital devices."
In short: It's a small-footprint web browser. <sarcasm>Gee, that's *totally different* than the Mozilla project's Phoenix, which is a small-footprint web browser.</sarcasm>
Hrmmm...that does add a bit to the mix. But their words are ``designed specifically for the... Information Appliance market and is... suited for... digital devices.''
They're embedding the thing---a very different operation from building an end-user application for a general-purpose computer. (Would you consider embedding Phoenix?:-)
Now the interesting points are:
Their trademark says nothing about the HTML, &c., part of their output
They call it FirstView Connect, not Pheonix, the embeddable browser
When did Phoenix-the-browser start up vs. when did Phoenix-the-company start making HTML-enabled embeddable goodies?
Phoenix-the-browser released 0.1 all of two months ago (September 2002), but there's a reference to a (likely unrelated) ``Phoenix browser'' dated 6 January 2000. (It's about half-way down the page.) If anyone has cause to gripe, it's those folks!
I still claim there's zero point zero chance of the products being confused in the minds of their customers, in either of the two completely-separate target markets. And trademark protection is supposed to be
about confusion and mis-perception, not attempted ownership of a word.
The question of ``trademarks for competing
products'' is addressed in Trademark Acceptable Identification of
Goods and Services Manual , which lists all
the different categories which will be considered
for registration, from `Abacuses' to `Wholesale
travel agencies'. (What, no zippers?:-) They've
got five (5) subcategories of `Computer cursor
control devices'---go look it up.
The one that looks closest to Phoenix, the
browser, is
Computer software for
accessing information directories that may be
downloaded from the global computer network
Their full name is Phoenix Technologies,
giving absolutely no clue as to what they actually
make or do. We find mondo marketing
buzzwordmanship (``Connect with Phoenix
Technologies for Strategy2003'' ``undisputed
device-enabling and management software leader'',
&c.). The divisions listed on that front page are
OEM/ODM
System Builder
Distributor/Reseller
Software Developer
Digging deeper reveals: Sonofabitch!, they're the
Phoenix BIOS people, gone all upscale and gooey.
Searching
on ``Phoenix Technologies'' turns up three
entries. two of which are still in use (``live''),
with serial numbers
Both are our pals', and both descriptions
specify ``all sold to original equipment
manufactures.'' The second one adds user manuals
into the mix. As mentioned in an earlier post,
there's a claim for ``interpretation of page
description languages'', which I suspect means the
BIOS can phone home for upgrades from a web site.
It certainly doesn't sound like a general-purpose
browser.
(The raw entries (not the links above) also include:
Disclaimer NO CLAIM IS MADE TO THE EXCLUSIVE
RIGHT TO USE "TECHNOLOGIES" APART FROM THE MARK AS
SHOWN
Too bad they didn't add ``Phoenix'' to it.)
Thus, they build stuff no normal human would
ever go looking for, so only a geek would have to ``care for the differentiation'', which is why it counts. Any conflict between
the two Phoenixes is purely in the minds of the
greedy.
That said, of course, ramming it down their
throats in a court of law is a lot more costly
than a name change. However, if they could find a
lawyer to write a letter pro bono, it might be
enough to do the job.
I certainly hope the browser folks give the
letter a try.
Admittedly it was maybe 15 years ago, but when
my wife and I visited London/York/environs, I'd
just walk into a pub and ask for a half pint of
their ``best bitter''. Got a great taste every
time, and some real variability---none of this
universal taste nonsense.
Can I hope there are still enough bastions of
decent beer that I won't have to use a guidebook
to find them next trip?
Now there was a chip the TAO VM could scream on. It had 128 (!) registers (real, on-chip, full-speed, directly-addressable registers), of which 64 were local, organized as a circular queue, but accessed as the top of stack. Sounds like pretty close to an ``unbounded register set'' to me.
<reminisce mode>
Want to call a function? Stash your arguments in registers, and bang!, you're there. Of course, when you got to the edges (few used, or most used), you had to ``fill'' or ``spill'' from RAM (or cache), but it was all but invisible to the programmer. They had separate instruction and data memory (``Harvard'' architecture), so you could access both simultaneously.
IMHO as a programmer (not architect), the only shortcoming was their condition-code setup. There was no CC register---you did a comparison, and stashed the result in whatever register was handy, branching later on testing that reg. true or false. They missed a bet---they should have stashed a full set of conditions in the register, so you could compare once, then test as many conditions as your little heart desired, instead of: compare LT, jp T, compare EQ, jp F,..., do: compare, jp LT, jp EQ,.... Ah, well...
AMD introduced it as a general-computing chip, for high-end Unix boxes, workstations, &c. Unfortunately, they did it just as the IBM PC juggernaut was coming up to speed, and the x86 flood swept it away. AMD tried to convert it into an embedded-system chip (which is where I met it), but like so many others (88000 [Honeywell?], 32000 [National?]), they faded away. AMD officially dropped support for it a few years ago. Damn, that was one sweet chip.
(Of course, the Harvard architecture was fit to give HW engineers apoplexy, but that wasn't my problem.:-) If this interests you, just do a Google search on "AMD 29000". I'm not the only one still carrying the torch for it. So many of those 32-bit efforts were funcionally superior to what's left today.
I've become something of a bike geek myself (though rather than racing I've gotten into long-distance riding).
A boss started me riding by his enthusiasm (and desire for a riding partner to work), and I shortly found out why---it's very enjoyable for me. I'd tried running, walking, and karate, and skipped swimming because I couldn't hack the hassle (drive to pool, change clothes, shower, change clothes,...). But with cycling I don't mind the hassle, and best of all I live about five miles from work, and so commute by bike most days (~four out of five), plus weekend rides.
As my title indicates, that exercise has to be something fun for you, or you won't do it regularly (unless you have a will of iron, in which case you probably don't need any of this).
So, I took the list below (making your own exercise machine) and stopped after item one. Works for me, but keep trying things until you find one that works for you. I've lost 25 pounds in under a year, and haven't had to change my eating at all.
[And if you're biking, go toJohn Forester's site and buy Effective Cycling. He can be crusty, but he's earned the right, and tells you how to ride to prevent accidents, rather than what to wear when you're having one.]
I pray they can't touch Dow-Jones's assets here, though I'm not too sure, given the treaties the U.S. has been pushing/signing lately. They could also make it very hard for any DJ execs to take a nice vacation in Sydney.
The real problem, though, comes up should DJ have any significant assets in Oz. Those are definitely at risk, just as the U.S. freezes or takes the local assets of foreign organizations it doesn't like. I suspect an operation like DJ prints an Australian edition, and has local staff for reports on the Aussie stock market(s?), in which case they've definitely got something to lose.
We can only hope the Supreme Court can see what the country, and society, have to lose if they let this stand.
Interesting---is there a town called ``Cape Cod''? I've always used it to refer to that whole chunk sticking out of the left side of Massachusetts. Or is the site not on the Cape at all, and my memory is fading faster than I fear?
When we visited some years ago, it consisted of some rusted stumps of antenna legs, lotsa sand, and a well-written poster of why this is an interesting spot. We (well, I anyway:-) enjoyed the visit for its historical ambiance, but you're not going to see Marconi's power supply or anything...
Problem:
Hydrogen sensor has detected a fuel leak. The AirGen will cease operation immediately.
Action Required:
Move mode switch to MANUAL position, depress reset button, open doors and windows in the vicinity and evacuate the area. Call Customer Service at 1-800-445-1805 for further instructions.
Anyone remember the Bloom County strip in which the black genius kid asks his parents to ``Move away from the basement'' while he tests his nuclear experiment? When asked ``How far?'', he suggests New Jersey.
``[B]enefits...not much better than a bicycle''?!
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 1
Aside from the coolness of the way it moves, the practical benefits are not much better than a bicycle. You move about as fast, but without the exercise. Its footprint is shorter, but just as wide. It's just as heavy and you still have to lock it up when you get where you're going.
If your bicycle weighs anywhere close to 80 lbs. your name is Steve Roberts. Any single-person bike you buy today will weigh no more than 30 lbs., and a reasonable commuting bike will come in at closer than 20. (Forget those carbon-fiber-framed Lance Armstrong specials---they're only useful to L. A. and his peers.)
The real benefits of a bicycle are fun and health. If you're of the mindset that likes bicycling, you'll gleefully take more time to go by bike. As you do so, you're getting more exercise than easily 90% of your fellow citizens, which translates into better health. 12 mph is an an average speed for an average cyclist, not a top speed.
You can buy a decent bicycle for under US$1000, and an excellent one for around US$2000, a good bit cheaper than the HT. Then you needn't spend anything for electricity, though your food bill will probably go up.
Overall, there's no comparison---bicycling is miles ahead of HTing.
[In response to Microsoft's call for security-through-obscurity.
Original is an LWN letter]
> By analogy, this isn't a call for
> people for give up freedom of speech;
> only that they stop yelling fire in
> a crowded movie house.
Another wonderful analogy!
Security professionals have been yelling "fire" in crowded movie
houses for years. Most of the actual patrons fail to pay any
attention, despite the fact that the seats are made of explosively
flammable materials, the management allows patrons to smoke cigarettes
in the theatre, and occasionally the movie is interrupted by ushers
dousing patrons with fire hoses if they are noticeably ablaze.
Patrons who do catch fire are not offered a refund, nor a credit for
those parts of the movie that they miss, nor even so much as an
apology.
Slashdot Mirror
It can't defend against vote-buying.
In the old (U.S., at least) way, you either mark a ballot and shove it in the box, or pull levers behind a curtain. In either case, there's no reasonable way for anyone to know how you voted. If someone's offering a 6-pack of decent beer in exchange for your vote, just say ``Sure.'', take the beer, and vote however you please. On the darker side, you just tell the extortionist you'll do as asked, then vote as you please. The secret ballot, plus the public nature of the polling place, make you proof against such shenanigans.
On the other hand, if you vote from the privacy of your own home, the briber/extortionist can make sure he's getting value for money/threat.
A someone pointed out recently, to continue to guarantee this freedom, we've got to ban camera phones from the voting booth.
The U.S. papers have not been following the situation in America very closely, but currently there is a major political struggle between the Democrats and the clique of fundamentalist clerics.
Plus ca change...
Funny you should mention that---I just checked over at MSN, pottered about randomly for a few minutes, and saw nothing like the commercials being discussed here.
Could it have something to do with me running the Junkbuster proxy, and surfing with Mozilla configured to disable Java and Javascript? :-)
If they can't get their ideas across without that stuff, they don't really want to talk to me.
Umm, that's wrong. If a criminal conviction required total absence of doubt, there wouldn't be any. It's definitely about hard evidence, but that evidence need not prove that it couldn't have been the defendant's previously-unknown evil twin. In the U.S., at least, a juror is instructed that if the evidence presented is convincing ``beyond a reasonable doubt'' (i.e., anyone saying otherwise would be advancing an unreasonable argument), she must vote to convict. This is for criminal cases, where we're trying to protect ourselves against ideological prosecutors or a grasping government. You don't imprison someone unless you're damn sure you've got the right person. (That's the theory, anyway. It's rapidly eroding under the Bush administration.)
By way of contrast, in a civil suit (where the only thing at risk is cash, not being sent up the river), the juror is told to vote based on ``the preponderance of the evidence'', which means over fifty percent. If the case is close, but one side makes a slightly better case than the other, vote for the better case.
This fascinating paper (also available in easy-to-read MS Word format) postulates that any real attempt at suppression will lead to a samizdat-like interlinking of P2P nets, each comprising a small group of people who trust each other. That ``web of trust'' will still get the info through.
They'll have to try harder than that.
My Scots ancestors would be rolling in their graves if the knew I was wasting over sixteen million addresses! I'll stay with the thrifty 192.168.x.x, thanks, and save the rest for a rainy day.
Yes, stuff hitting you in the face would be notably limited, but the wedge doesn't stop at the LCD screen---it extends away from you to infinity.
The effect (and the affect, for you psychologists out there :-) comes from your eyes/brain applying what they know about parallax to the funky display. The larger the shift in position (relative to each half-LCD frame), the closer the synthesized object appears. At some point, the delta is great enough that if you believed your eyes/brain, the object would be behind you; that way lies headache.
The smaller the shift in position, the farther away it seems, until they're in the same location (again, each wrt its own half-screen), and the object seems to be at infinity (or however far away something must be for binocular vision to be of no help judging distance).
The result is that the technique can generate the sort of images you could see by looking through a piece of cardboard with a hole the size and shape of one-half your laptop's screen. It's a lot larger than a stage as seen from the cheap seats.
If you're truly bored, you can make such crossed-eye 3-D images on paper, with pencil, ruler, and a lot of fiddly proportionality calculations. I used to do it in school (well before computers were playthings for seventh-graders) in the dull classes.
For you Americans out there who plan to talk with their Senators & Representative (or staffers thereof), it'll probably be a good idea to tell them the problem is with
and would they please get you an answer as to why money is being kept from this worthy cause. Maybe even mention that it's in aid of cyberspace security. (If you need a pointer, see the House of Representatives and the Senate websites; they'll point you to the people you want to get in touch with.)After the phone calls (or instead of, for The Majority Of The World), send money to the OpenBSD donation site (It's the third ``purchase'' from the top). You can even buy yourself a goodie or two while you're there.
My money's on the way already. I wonder how much of the grant we can replace. Now for those phone calls...
I subscribe to a couple of lists that use Stripmime. Basically, it enforces plaintext-only semantics on list postings. All .exes
vanish, it tries to convert HTML to text, and numerous other
impediments to clear, straightforward, communication are deep-sixed. The license
appears
to be an Old-BSD model (w/advertising clause), and
the author warns it's not so hot on foreign
character sets.
Nonetheless, it's certainly a major goodness in my eyes, and you needn't change anything else about your setup.
The site also points to a program called Demime, which I'm unacquainted with.
And to you real mathematicians out there: Yes, I know one is neither prime nor composite, but it doesn't help the joke. Now go away.
A quick way to tell whether you're talking to a mathematician, a physicist, or an engineer, is to ask ``Are all odd numbers prime?''
Hrmmm...that does add a bit to the mix. But their words are ``designed specifically for the ... Information Appliance market and is ... suited for ... digital devices.''
They're embedding the thing---a very different operation from building an end-user application for a general-purpose computer. (Would you consider embedding Phoenix? :-)
Now the interesting points are:
Google finds nothing for ``firstview connect 1'' (or 1.0), the earliest to turn up is 2.0 in a Real Networks press release dated 1 November 2001.
Phoenix-the-browser released 0.1 all of two months ago (September 2002), but there's a reference to a (likely unrelated) ``Phoenix browser'' dated 6 January 2000. (It's about half-way down the page.) If anyone has cause to gripe, it's those folks!
I still claim there's zero point zero chance of the products being confused in the minds of their customers, in either of the two completely-separate target markets. And trademark protection is supposed to be about confusion and mis-perception, not attempted ownership of a word.
To be told more than anyone but a trademark lawyer would want to know, check out the USPTO's trademark page, or their FAQ.
The question of ``trademarks for competing products'' is addressed in Trademark Acceptable Identification of Goods and Services Manual , which lists all the different categories which will be considered for registration, from `Abacuses' to `Wholesale travel agencies'. (What, no zippers? :-) They've
got five (5) subcategories of `Computer cursor
control devices'---go look it up.
The one that looks closest to Phoenix, the browser, is
With that background, we can now check out Phoenix(the bozo)'s site.
Their full name is Phoenix Technologies, giving absolutely no clue as to what they actually make or do. We find mondo marketing buzzwordmanship (``Connect with Phoenix Technologies for Strategy2003'' ``undisputed device-enabling and management software leader'', &c.). The divisions listed on that front page are
Digging deeper reveals: Sonofabitch!, they're the Phoenix BIOS people, gone all upscale and gooey.Searching on ``Phoenix Technologies'' turns up three entries. two of which are still in use (``live''), with serial numbers
- 2625542,
and
- 2484133
Both are our pals', and both descriptions specify ``all sold to original equipment manufactures.'' The second one adds user manuals into the mix. As mentioned in an earlier post, there's a claim for ``interpretation of page description languages'', which I suspect means the BIOS can phone home for upgrades from a web site. It certainly doesn't sound like a general-purpose browser.(The raw entries (not the links above) also include:
Too bad they didn't add ``Phoenix'' to it.)Thus, they build stuff no normal human would ever go looking for, so only a geek would have to ``care for the differentiation'', which is why it counts. Any conflict between the two Phoenixes is purely in the minds of the greedy.
That said, of course, ramming it down their throats in a court of law is a lot more costly than a name change. However, if they could find a lawyer to write a letter pro bono, it might be enough to do the job.
I certainly hope the browser folks give the letter a try.
Admittedly it was maybe 15 years ago, but when my wife and I visited London/York/environs, I'd just walk into a pub and ask for a half pint of their ``best bitter''. Got a great taste every time, and some real variability---none of this universal taste nonsense.
Can I hope there are still enough bastions of decent beer that I won't have to use a guidebook to find them next trip?
...in which less-scrupulous team members would make up citations out of whole cloth, knowing no one would care enough to actually consult them.
<reminisce mode>
Want to call a function? Stash your arguments in registers, and bang!, you're there. Of course, when you got to the edges (few used, or most used), you had to ``fill'' or ``spill'' from RAM (or cache), but it was all but invisible to the programmer. They had separate instruction and data memory (``Harvard'' architecture), so you could access both simultaneously.
IMHO as a programmer (not architect), the only shortcoming was their condition-code setup. There was no CC register---you did a comparison, and stashed the result in whatever register was handy, branching later on testing that reg. true or false. They missed a bet---they should have stashed a full set of conditions in the register, so you could compare once, then test as many conditions as your little heart desired, instead of: compare LT, jp T, compare EQ, jp F, ..., do: compare, jp LT, jp EQ, .... Ah, well...
AMD introduced it as a general-computing chip, for high-end Unix boxes, workstations, &c. Unfortunately, they did it just as the IBM PC juggernaut was coming up to speed, and the x86 flood swept it away. AMD tried to convert it into an embedded-system chip (which is where I met it), but like so many others (88000 [Honeywell?], 32000 [National?]), they faded away. AMD officially dropped support for it a few years ago. Damn, that was one sweet chip.
(Of course, the Harvard architecture was fit to give HW engineers apoplexy, but that wasn't my problem. :-) If this interests you, just do a Google search on "AMD 29000". I'm not the only one still carrying the torch for it. So many of those 32-bit efforts were funcionally superior to what's left today.
</reminisce mode>
Does two years count? That's how long I've been riding a bike, and there are no signs of it coming back.
A boss started me riding by his enthusiasm (and desire for a riding partner to work), and I shortly found out why---it's very enjoyable for me. I'd tried running, walking, and karate, and skipped swimming because I couldn't hack the hassle (drive to pool, change clothes, shower, change clothes, ...). But with cycling I don't mind the hassle, and best of all I live about five miles from work, and so commute by bike most days (~four out of five), plus weekend rides.
As my title indicates, that exercise has to be something fun for you, or you won't do it regularly (unless you have a will of iron, in which case you probably don't need any of this).
So, I took the list below (making your own exercise machine) and stopped after item one. Works for me, but keep trying things until you find one that works for you. I've lost 25 pounds in under a year, and haven't had to change my eating at all.
[And if you're biking, go toJohn Forester's site and buy Effective Cycling. He can be crusty, but he's earned the right, and tells you how to ride to prevent accidents, rather than what to wear when you're having one.]
The real problem, though, comes up should DJ have any significant assets in Oz. Those are definitely at risk, just as the U.S. freezes or takes the local assets of foreign organizations it doesn't like. I suspect an operation like DJ prints an Australian edition, and has local staff for reports on the Aussie stock market(s?), in which case they've definitely got something to lose.
We can only hope the Supreme Court can see what the country, and society, have to lose if they let this stand.
Can you say lysdexic? I knew you could!
On a separate note, an attempt to reach the Marconi site's website, resulted in a repeated ``www.nps.gov could not be found'' error. I guess they know too much about the Dept. of Interior's Indian Trust Fund. The link to the Cape Cod site in the story takes you to Google's cache.
If you really wanna know, their advice (from this fascinating page is:
Anyone remember the Bloom County strip in which the black genius kid asks his parents to ``Move away from the basement'' while he tests his nuclear experiment? When asked ``How far?'', he suggests New Jersey.
If your bicycle weighs anywhere close to 80 lbs. your name is Steve Roberts. Any single-person bike you buy today will weigh no more than 30 lbs., and a reasonable commuting bike will come in at closer than 20. (Forget those carbon-fiber-framed Lance Armstrong specials---they're only useful to L. A. and his peers.)
The real benefits of a bicycle are fun and health. If you're of the mindset that likes bicycling, you'll gleefully take more time to go by bike. As you do so, you're getting more exercise than easily 90% of your fellow citizens, which translates into better health. 12 mph is an an average speed for an average cyclist, not a top speed.
You can buy a decent bicycle for under US$1000, and an excellent one for around US$2000, a good bit cheaper than the HT. Then you needn't spend anything for electricity, though your food bill will probably go up.
Overall, there's no comparison---bicycling is miles ahead of HTing.
> By analogy, this isn't a call for
> people for give up freedom of speech;
> only that they stop yelling fire in
> a crowded movie house.
Another wonderful analogy!
Security professionals have been yelling "fire" in crowded movie houses for years. Most of the actual patrons fail to pay any attention, despite the fact that the seats are made of explosively flammable materials, the management allows patrons to smoke cigarettes in the theatre, and occasionally the movie is interrupted by ushers dousing patrons with fire hoses if they are noticeably ablaze. Patrons who do catch fire are not offered a refund, nor a credit for those parts of the movie that they miss, nor even so much as an apology.
--- Zygo Blaxell (zblaxell, feedme.hungrycats.org)