I had the source for the original FORTRAN ADVENT for ages (running on CP/M) and am pretty sure I have seen it numerous times elsewhere over the years. Also, I had the source for some early (or initial) release of UCSD Pascal. Remember the P-machine?
This exploit isn't aimed at a Windows user who knows how to use the Task Manager. It's certainly not even aimed at a user who knows how to use NoScript.
Some days I wonder what's with you people. Actually, that's every day, and I've stopped wondering, because apparently being a n00b nerd makes you dense.
.. you would know that dust storms actually remove accumulated dust from the rovers' solar panels. The problem is that it's dark, not that the panels are covered with dust.
The Sojourner rover experienced a steady reduction of power due to accumulated dust, but it didn't operate long enough to have its panels "cleaned" by a dust storm. Until Spirit and Opportunity weathered their significant major storms, it wasn't known whether dust storms would increase or reduce accumulated dust.
But, of course I tell you this on a computer currently with 15-20 different windows open running a development environment, instant-messaging, multiple ssh sessions, browsers with multiple tabs, all connected to a global and local network.
That sounds like my Mac IIci. Of course, it was also running Unix and a high performance X server at the same time (MachTen).
A few authors have proposed futures where it is illegal for any entity to hide information. At first it's hard to see how this might be an improvement over a society where people are guaranteed privacy. But if you think about it carefully, being able to know everything about anyone and anything, and others knowing the same, is more nuanced than it would seem. It's the inequity in privacy that is responsible for many of its ill effects.
Did you know - inkjet printers actually print only 4 to 8 colors! Once people figure this out, lawsuits will end this deceptive practice, and the photo print market will be handed to Olympus (dye-sub) and Frontier/LightJet (laser photo process). I don't know about you but I'm buying the stock right now.
I just can't get over it... I'll have Photoshop open and suddenly the hard disk is thrashing so badly that it takes several minutes just to open a file. The culprit: always Firefox.
I don't get why Firefox needs hundreds of megabytes of RAM to do its thing. Part of it is, though, that Javascript in Firefox still has some hellacious leaks.
Just because something is legal and possible does NOT make it 'right'. If it was found that it was legal to kill people by some method, does that make it right for everyone to kill everyone they can by that method? Too extreme? How about a corporation that takes advantage of the tax system to pay as almost no taxes, so that everyone else has to pay their share? How about police that run reds lights in their cars because it's legal for them to, even when they don't have the need? How about a teacher that hands out religious pamphlets right outside the school grounds? How about someone standing outside a playground and screaming at the children?
I bet I just hit on the sensibilities of most of the people that read this. There's plenty of examples of things that are totally legal, but not 'right' in any way.
Amazon may be within their rights to attempt to patent this, but that does not mean they are 'doing the right thing' in any way shape or form. Amazon should be considering their customers in this. If it angers your customers, it's probably not a good idea. Since any global online retailer's goal is to have the whole world as customers, they should be thinking about everyone.
Well, excuse me.
As a practical matter, the percentage of Amazon's customers who care about, or even know of, the one-click patent is miniscule. The world cares that a bunch of nerds on Slashdot and a couple of other forums whine about it? And in what way has that patent harmed Amazon's customers? After all, if you're an Amazon customer, you have a One Click button! So I don't know where you're coming from there.
I don't see any moral or ethical problems with the one-click patent. I don't know where you're coming from there either. One company has a monopoly on one-click ordering. Big deal. If you printed out a top-down list of the world's moral and ethical concerns on fanfold paper and stretched it out into space, you'd walk halfway to the moon before you saw "One Click patent."
Where political contributions are concerned, once a company becomes large enough, it winds up contributing to all kinds of political interests, often ones that are apparently completely contradictory in intent. Some companies spend more, some spend less.
Anyway, what you are stubbornly overlooking is this: Amazon abandoning the one-click patent will change nothing about the patent system.
Corporations have never determined the direction of the patent system. Corporations are legally and ethically bound to pursue business practices that are in the interests of shareholders. When the software patent genie was let out of the bottle in the 1980s, software companies had absolutely no option except to pursue their own patents vigorously.
Amazon has never done the wrong thing by pursuing the "one-click" patent. Patents, especially software patents, are interpreted very narrowly. What sounds to a layman as a "patent on online sales" (for example) turns out to be much more specific in print, and more importantly has been interpreted very narrowly by Federal courts. You can't patent the process of online sales, but you can patent a detail of it. When a court sets out to determine the validity of such a detail, it doesn't examine it in the context of "is it a logical implementation of a larger, obvious system." The court sets out to determine whether it is a detail that someone else has used. Basically, as the law has been interpreted for the past two decades, whether something has already been patented is the greatest determining factor on whether it can be patented. That isn't how a layperson reads the law, and in fact it is probably contrary to the intent of the law. But that's how it is.
The US Supreme Court has indicated an interest in changing the interpretation of software and process patents so that courts must interpret patents and patent applications in a way that sounds more in the spirit of the law. I don't think most conventional companies oppose this, because the expense and uncertainty involved in patent applications, cross-licensing, and God forbid, litigation, is considerable. Patent holding firms are probably distressed about it, but I think most people perceive patent holding companies as an aberration.
The fact that Amazon has its "one-click" patent means that Amazon was doing the right thing as far as the system is concerned. It also means that the system is counterintuitive and, a majority of people probably think, out of whack with the original intent of US patent law.
With Blu-Ray, Disney can easily put an entire hour of un-skippable high-def commercials, trailers, disclaimers, warnings, notices, and animated logos in front of every movie, even if the next Pirates of the Caribbean is 3 hours long.
I don't know why it isn't being released in stages. I'm sure the idea has been floated once a month, or maybe once an afternoon. I've always had trouble accepting that a game this large and ill-defined can be completed in one fell swoop. If nothing else, maybe they could release one or two "preview" games as a kind of public beta test.
Why do I want an extra "hub" computer in my house when it's already a pain in the ass to keep a WEP-enabled wireless router working, and I actually know what I'm doing.
I'd rather let the guys at Google provide my word processor without my having to find room for another plug in my power strip. I've had enough DIY in my life. But y'all feel free.
Anytime you are on the phone with the telephone company, and you hear someone utter the word "kilofeet," you should know that you are about to spend a lot of money, and/or wait many months.
Way back when, my girlfriend and I had a killer deal on a point-to-point (as opposed to the inferior frame relay) T1 in the mid 90s to my house in Arizona. It was about $1200 a month (including charges from the ISP) when our mortgage was about $1050 a month. Normal commercial customers were paying about $2k/month at the time. Point-to-point means that there is an actual wire that carries your data, and only your data, from, um, point to point, with a guaranteed bandwidth. A frame relay T1 is a wire that goes into and comes out of a "cloud" and does not have the same guaranteed max bandwidth.
In order to set up a T1 you also needed a couple of relatively expensive pieces of equipment - a "modem" to convert the signal to a serial connection, and an honest to goodness router with a serial connection to turn it into Ethernet. We sprang for an Adtran and a slightly used 2500 for a total of something under $3000. Getting the line installed was an adventure that took months (pretty close to a year I think) and included watching people splice cables in the alley behind our house, then watching them splice them again later. Our phone company at the time was US "Worst" (now "Qworst") and several times we had the experience of having a "service date" a few weeks in the future, and on that date watching a couple of guys arrive, who after a few minutes told us "we don't do this," and leave. Eventually we wound up with a temporary "drop" cable between the splice box and our house, which was supposed to be buried, but never was. The cable was cut a couple of times when a freeway was built between us and our ISP. It was kind of an adventure.
There were few options. A 56k cost several hundred a month and was, well, a 56k.
We hosted a handful of web sites for friends for a few years, including stonehenge.com. Eventually that became a nuisance for all concerned, and the T1 became all ours.
Around 2000 we replaced the T1 with a couple of 256k symmetric DSLs that we bonded with an HP laptop used as a router. They were vastly cheaper ($200/month) and not all that much different. Also, they were from our cable company, and not Qworst.
The DSLs took months to get set up, but that's another story.
Something that many people may not realize is that the math (quantitative) on the GRE (the US "Graduate Record Exam," required for admission to most graduate schools) is not much more difficult than the math on the SAT. The GRE's verbal section, on the other hand, is really difficult - much harder than the SAT.
Please note - I am speaking of the GRE as it existed in the early 90s, because that's when I took it, and taught GRE and SAT prep. I think it's still fairly similar, although the SAT has changed considerably.
The reason? The GRE is taken by all prospective graduate students. Almost every college student has had some additional English the roughly four years spent as an undergraduate, but it's not unusual for a student to take no mathematics. Mathematics is not normally a core requirement for the humanities, but every degree program normally requires at least a couple semesters of English.
Because science and engineering majors can easily finish the GRE math with only a handful of incorrect answers, scores in the mid 700s are only in the mid 90s percentiles. The verbal is another story. The 99th percentile is somewhere in the low to mid 700s.
What all this is leading up to is that I am reasonably happy with the 780 I scored on the math section, but I am downright smug about the 780 I scored on the verbal.
Actually, what I am leading up to is something a little different, which is that I don't think students should be wasting time and money taking classes they aren't going to need. Frankly, literature majors don't need to know math to read Shelley. Forcing students to take courses they don't need can be incredibly awkward for everyone involved. I'm a believer in well-rounded "liberal" education, but having art majors spend a semester in macroeconomics is not going to improve the world in any significant way.
This idea has been afloat (so to speak) for decades.
It's a pretty good idea, as long as you can keep Al Qaeda out of it. I guess you just keep anyone who looks, you know, Arab or Persian, or generally suspicious out..... *cough*
A rail connection from Alaska to the lower 48 would be "interesting" and more of a challenge than the tunnel itself because of the amount of permafrost bog in the way. I've driven the Alaska Highway and Cassiar three times and can tell you all about permafrost and mosquitoes. However, a land route to Nome, a road anyway, has been planned for some time, and will probably be built one of these days. Currently the only way to reach Nome overland is via snow machine (or dogsled) during the winter. Actually there are a number of Alaskan villages of up to a thousand people that can't be reached overland during the summer.
There is a well-used railway link from Anchorage to Fairbanks. Otherwise, the rail infrastructure in Alaska, YT, and northern BC, is mostly nonexistent. I think around 1000 miles of rail would have to be built from Fairbanks to Dease Lake BC.
The transportation infrastructure in Siberia is terrible and a rail link, to anywhere, would be immensely useful. The best time of year to travel there is the winter, when the roads are frozen and smooth, and ice roads can be built over water - just as in parts of Alaska and northern Canada. In warmer weather, the roads are mud. Meanwhile, northeast Asia has immense natural resources just waiting.
The thing that people don't get about prior art and patents is that prior art is narrowly interpreted. A published discussion, even if broad and comprehensive, about voice over IP, is not necessarily likely to count against the issuance of a VoIP patent later on. In fact, the prior art may establish that the subject is actually of commercial interest.
Saying that a patent describes "just another way" to do some obvious thing, and is therefore trivial, is missing the point. It's exactly that "just another way" that a patent is intended to protect. Patents covering radical ideas are the exception, not the norm. If you have some obvious thing you need done, but you can't find "just another way" to do it that someone else hasn't already patented, and you don't have a license covering one of those other ways, you are S.O.L.
And as a final note: which do you think is easier to collect and recycle? Mercury in bulbs, or mercury nicely mixed into our atmosphere?
So, about mercury, an element that does deserve respect and caution, but which has an undeservedly bad rap:
While a very few mercury compounds are spectacularly toxic, in particular dimethylmercury (which exists basically only in laboratories, only few of which will allow it to be present), mercury is not even on the radar of modern environmental worries. The negative health effects of the levels of mercury that are nowadays found in food and the environment are somewhere between questionably measurable and nonexistent. Mercury is monitored to incredibly low concentrations. Mercury is eliminated from the body over a period of days to months depending on the type of mercury ingested - a constant level of mercury in the body indicates a continuing supply, not a permanent bioaccumulation. Note that there are natural sources of environmental mercury, including methylmercury (not to be confused with the above dimethylmercury).
Pure elemental mercury (the silvery stuff) is essentially safe to use and even handle (briefly) and, oddly, to eat, because it is insoluble. Mercury vapor is toxic, but not incredibly so, and tiny amounts of mercury vapor, like that evaporated from a small spill of metallic mercury in a room with any kind of ventilation at all, are unlikely to be harmful.
Also working in your favor, even if you ignore all the increasingly strict government controls that have been placed on its use, is that mercury is a very scarce metal, period, and people don't go using it when they don't have to.
Arguing whether using CF bulbs reduces the release of mercury into the environment is speculative, because significant amounts of mercury are scrubbed (and recycled) from coal power plant emissions, and the percentage that is scrubbed (even if only as a side effect of normal scrubbing) is only going to grow. I think CF bulbs are a great thing regardless.
Slashdot Mirror
I had the source for the original FORTRAN ADVENT for ages (running on CP/M) and am pretty sure I have seen it numerous times elsewhere over the years. Also, I had the source for some early (or initial) release of UCSD Pascal. Remember the P-machine?
This exploit isn't aimed at a Windows user who knows how to use the Task Manager. It's certainly not even aimed at a user who knows how to use NoScript.
Some days I wonder what's with you people. Actually, that's every day, and I've stopped wondering, because apparently being a n00b nerd makes you dense.
Dude, the guys at Exceptional Performance aren't some kind of secret cabal.
.. you would know that dust storms actually remove accumulated dust from the rovers' solar panels. The problem is that it's dark, not that the panels are covered with dust.
The Sojourner rover experienced a steady reduction of power due to accumulated dust, but it didn't operate long enough to have its panels "cleaned" by a dust storm. Until Spirit and Opportunity weathered their significant major storms, it wasn't known whether dust storms would increase or reduce accumulated dust.
Geez, hasn't anyone in the UK heard of "going postal"?
But, of course I tell you this on a computer currently with 15-20 different windows open running a development environment, instant-messaging, multiple ssh sessions, browsers with multiple tabs, all connected to a global and local network.
That sounds like my Mac IIci. Of course, it was also running Unix and a high performance X server at the same time (MachTen).
See?
A few authors have proposed futures where it is illegal for any entity to hide information. At first it's hard to see how this might be an improvement over a society where people are guaranteed privacy. But if you think about it carefully, being able to know everything about anyone and anything, and others knowing the same, is more nuanced than it would seem. It's the inequity in privacy that is responsible for many of its ill effects.
At least that's what I think. Sometimes.
Did you know - inkjet printers actually print only 4 to 8 colors! Once people figure this out, lawsuits will end this deceptive practice, and the photo print market will be handed to Olympus (dye-sub) and Frontier/LightJet (laser photo process). I don't know about you but I'm buying the stock right now.
I just can't get over it ... I'll have Photoshop open and suddenly the hard disk is thrashing so badly that it takes several minutes just to open a file. The culprit: always Firefox.
I don't get why Firefox needs hundreds of megabytes of RAM to do its thing. Part of it is, though, that Javascript in Firefox still has some hellacious leaks.
That's an excellent setup. :) Gadgets are not required.
Actually, anyone who's given implementation even a little thought will realize it's anything but nontrivial.
Get your head out of your ass for a moment.
Just because something is legal and possible does NOT make it 'right'. If it was found that it was legal to kill people by some method, does that make it right for everyone to kill everyone they can by that method? Too extreme? How about a corporation that takes advantage of the tax system to pay as almost no taxes, so that everyone else has to pay their share? How about police that run reds lights in their cars because it's legal for them to, even when they don't have the need? How about a teacher that hands out religious pamphlets right outside the school grounds? How about someone standing outside a playground and screaming at the children?
I bet I just hit on the sensibilities of most of the people that read this. There's plenty of examples of things that are totally legal, but not 'right' in any way.
Amazon may be within their rights to attempt to patent this, but that does not mean they are 'doing the right thing' in any way shape or form. Amazon should be considering their customers in this. If it angers your customers, it's probably not a good idea. Since any global online retailer's goal is to have the whole world as customers, they should be thinking about everyone.
Well, excuse me.
As a practical matter, the percentage of Amazon's customers who care about, or even know of, the one-click patent is miniscule. The world cares that a bunch of nerds on Slashdot and a couple of other forums whine about it? And in what way has that patent harmed Amazon's customers? After all, if you're an Amazon customer, you have a One Click button! So I don't know where you're coming from there.
I don't see any moral or ethical problems with the one-click patent. I don't know where you're coming from there either. One company has a monopoly on one-click ordering. Big deal. If you printed out a top-down list of the world's moral and ethical concerns on fanfold paper and stretched it out into space, you'd walk halfway to the moon before you saw "One Click patent."
Where political contributions are concerned, once a company becomes large enough, it winds up contributing to all kinds of political interests, often ones that are apparently completely contradictory in intent. Some companies spend more, some spend less.
Anyway, what you are stubbornly overlooking is this: Amazon abandoning the one-click patent will change nothing about the patent system.
Corporations have never determined the direction of the patent system. Corporations are legally and ethically bound to pursue business practices that are in the interests of shareholders. When the software patent genie was let out of the bottle in the 1980s, software companies had absolutely no option except to pursue their own patents vigorously.
Amazon has never done the wrong thing by pursuing the "one-click" patent. Patents, especially software patents, are interpreted very narrowly. What sounds to a layman as a "patent on online sales" (for example) turns out to be much more specific in print, and more importantly has been interpreted very narrowly by Federal courts. You can't patent the process of online sales, but you can patent a detail of it. When a court sets out to determine the validity of such a detail, it doesn't examine it in the context of "is it a logical implementation of a larger, obvious system." The court sets out to determine whether it is a detail that someone else has used. Basically, as the law has been interpreted for the past two decades, whether something has already been patented is the greatest determining factor on whether it can be patented. That isn't how a layperson reads the law, and in fact it is probably contrary to the intent of the law. But that's how it is.
The US Supreme Court has indicated an interest in changing the interpretation of software and process patents so that courts must interpret patents and patent applications in a way that sounds more in the spirit of the law. I don't think most conventional companies oppose this, because the expense and uncertainty involved in patent applications, cross-licensing, and God forbid, litigation, is considerable. Patent holding firms are probably distressed about it, but I think most people perceive patent holding companies as an aberration.
The fact that Amazon has its "one-click" patent means that Amazon was doing the right thing as far as the system is concerned. It also means that the system is counterintuitive and, a majority of people probably think, out of whack with the original intent of US patent law.
With Blu-Ray, Disney can easily put an entire hour of un-skippable high-def commercials, trailers, disclaimers, warnings, notices, and animated logos in front of every movie, even if the next Pirates of the Caribbean is 3 hours long.
So in their shoes I'd be thinking Blu-Ray too.
I don't know why it isn't being released in stages. I'm sure the idea has been floated once a month, or maybe once an afternoon. I've always had trouble accepting that a game this large and ill-defined can be completed in one fell swoop. If nothing else, maybe they could release one or two "preview" games as a kind of public beta test.
Why do I want an extra "hub" computer in my house when it's already a pain in the ass to keep a WEP-enabled wireless router working, and I actually know what I'm doing.
I'd rather let the guys at Google provide my word processor without my having to find room for another plug in my power strip. I've had enough DIY in my life. But y'all feel free.
I'd think that after the 90s, Apple wouldn't want anything to do with anything that had anything to do with AMD.
Anytime you are on the phone with the telephone company, and you hear someone utter the word "kilofeet," you should know that you are about to spend a lot of money, and/or wait many months.
Just a note.
Way back when, my girlfriend and I had a killer deal on a point-to-point (as opposed to the inferior frame relay) T1 in the mid 90s to my house in Arizona. It was about $1200 a month (including charges from the ISP) when our mortgage was about $1050 a month. Normal commercial customers were paying about $2k/month at the time. Point-to-point means that there is an actual wire that carries your data, and only your data, from, um, point to point, with a guaranteed bandwidth. A frame relay T1 is a wire that goes into and comes out of a "cloud" and does not have the same guaranteed max bandwidth.
In order to set up a T1 you also needed a couple of relatively expensive pieces of equipment - a "modem" to convert the signal to a serial connection, and an honest to goodness router with a serial connection to turn it into Ethernet. We sprang for an Adtran and a slightly used 2500 for a total of something under $3000. Getting the line installed was an adventure that took months (pretty close to a year I think) and included watching people splice cables in the alley behind our house, then watching them splice them again later. Our phone company at the time was US "Worst" (now "Qworst") and several times we had the experience of having a "service date" a few weeks in the future, and on that date watching a couple of guys arrive, who after a few minutes told us "we don't do this," and leave. Eventually we wound up with a temporary "drop" cable between the splice box and our house, which was supposed to be buried, but never was. The cable was cut a couple of times when a freeway was built between us and our ISP. It was kind of an adventure.
There were few options. A 56k cost several hundred a month and was, well, a 56k.
We hosted a handful of web sites for friends for a few years, including stonehenge.com. Eventually that became a nuisance for all concerned, and the T1 became all ours.
Around 2000 we replaced the T1 with a couple of 256k symmetric DSLs that we bonded with an HP laptop used as a router. They were vastly cheaper ($200/month) and not all that much different. Also, they were from our cable company, and not Qworst.
The DSLs took months to get set up, but that's another story.
Something that many people may not realize is that the math (quantitative) on the GRE (the US "Graduate Record Exam," required for admission to most graduate schools) is not much more difficult than the math on the SAT. The GRE's verbal section, on the other hand, is really difficult - much harder than the SAT.
Please note - I am speaking of the GRE as it existed in the early 90s, because that's when I took it, and taught GRE and SAT prep. I think it's still fairly similar, although the SAT has changed considerably.
The reason? The GRE is taken by all prospective graduate students. Almost every college student has had some additional English the roughly four years spent as an undergraduate, but it's not unusual for a student to take no mathematics. Mathematics is not normally a core requirement for the humanities, but every degree program normally requires at least a couple semesters of English.
Because science and engineering majors can easily finish the GRE math with only a handful of incorrect answers, scores in the mid 700s are only in the mid 90s percentiles. The verbal is another story. The 99th percentile is somewhere in the low to mid 700s.
What all this is leading up to is that I am reasonably happy with the 780 I scored on the math section, but I am downright smug about the 780 I scored on the verbal.
Actually, what I am leading up to is something a little different, which is that I don't think students should be wasting time and money taking classes they aren't going to need. Frankly, literature majors don't need to know math to read Shelley. Forcing students to take courses they don't need can be incredibly awkward for everyone involved. I'm a believer in well-rounded "liberal" education, but having art majors spend a semester in macroeconomics is not going to improve the world in any significant way.
HTH and HAND
http://www.arctic.net/~snnr/tunnel/
.... *cough*
This idea has been afloat (so to speak) for decades.
It's a pretty good idea, as long as you can keep Al Qaeda out of it. I guess you just keep anyone who looks, you know, Arab or Persian, or generally suspicious out.
A rail connection from Alaska to the lower 48 would be "interesting" and more of a challenge than the tunnel itself because of the amount of permafrost bog in the way. I've driven the Alaska Highway and Cassiar three times and can tell you all about permafrost and mosquitoes. However, a land route to Nome, a road anyway, has been planned for some time, and will probably be built one of these days. Currently the only way to reach Nome overland is via snow machine (or dogsled) during the winter. Actually there are a number of Alaskan villages of up to a thousand people that can't be reached overland during the summer.
There is a well-used railway link from Anchorage to Fairbanks. Otherwise, the rail infrastructure in Alaska, YT, and northern BC, is mostly nonexistent. I think around 1000 miles of rail would have to be built from Fairbanks to Dease Lake BC.
The transportation infrastructure in Siberia is terrible and a rail link, to anywhere, would be immensely useful. The best time of year to travel there is the winter, when the roads are frozen and smooth, and ice roads can be built over water - just as in parts of Alaska and northern Canada. In warmer weather, the roads are mud. Meanwhile, northeast Asia has immense natural resources just waiting.
I'd like to see it built in my lifetime.
The thing that people don't get about prior art and patents is that prior art is narrowly interpreted. A published discussion, even if broad and comprehensive, about voice over IP, is not necessarily likely to count against the issuance of a VoIP patent later on. In fact, the prior art may establish that the subject is actually of commercial interest.
Saying that a patent describes "just another way" to do some obvious thing, and is therefore trivial, is missing the point. It's exactly that "just another way" that a patent is intended to protect. Patents covering radical ideas are the exception, not the norm. If you have some obvious thing you need done, but you can't find "just another way" to do it that someone else hasn't already patented, and you don't have a license covering one of those other ways, you are S.O.L.
And as a final note: which do you think is easier to collect and recycle? Mercury in bulbs, or mercury nicely mixed into our atmosphere?
So, about mercury, an element that does deserve respect and caution, but which has an undeservedly bad rap:
While a very few mercury compounds are spectacularly toxic, in particular dimethylmercury (which exists basically only in laboratories, only few of which will allow it to be present), mercury is not even on the radar of modern environmental worries. The negative health effects of the levels of mercury that are nowadays found in food and the environment are somewhere between questionably measurable and nonexistent. Mercury is monitored to incredibly low concentrations. Mercury is eliminated from the body over a period of days to months depending on the type of mercury ingested - a constant level of mercury in the body indicates a continuing supply, not a permanent bioaccumulation. Note that there are natural sources of environmental mercury, including methylmercury (not to be confused with the above dimethylmercury).
Pure elemental mercury (the silvery stuff) is essentially safe to use and even handle (briefly) and, oddly, to eat, because it is insoluble. Mercury vapor is toxic, but not incredibly so, and tiny amounts of mercury vapor, like that evaporated from a small spill of metallic mercury in a room with any kind of ventilation at all, are unlikely to be harmful.
Also working in your favor, even if you ignore all the increasingly strict government controls that have been placed on its use, is that mercury is a very scarce metal, period, and people don't go using it when they don't have to.
Arguing whether using CF bulbs reduces the release of mercury into the environment is speculative, because significant amounts of mercury are scrubbed (and recycled) from coal power plant emissions, and the percentage that is scrubbed (even if only as a side effect of normal scrubbing) is only going to grow. I think CF bulbs are a great thing regardless.