Then again, somebody's gotta clean the CEO's toilets. There aren't enough Liberal Arts majors in one country alone to do that.
'Course, there's a decent chance that the CEO whose toilet needs sanitizing was a liberal arts major him or herself. A couple of examples from the article: Michael Eisner of Disney (English and theater), Carly Fiorina of HP (medieval history and philosophy).
Not to mention hepatitis-C, which is another blood-borne, debilitating (usually) or fatal (CDC says 1-5%) disease spread pretty much the same way as HIV... and which is 4x more prevalent than HIV in the U.S. population.
Why is it important to develop a way to allow people who have little regard for their own health to remain healthy?
Because compassion is one of the things that makes us human?
(Leaving aside cold-blooded economic arguments about how you'd much rather have healthy productive workers contributing to your economy than sick people who are draining it. AIDS doesn't make business sense.)
I'll look forward to a cure to cancer the minute I develope a fetish for old people
Or the minute you're diagnosed with cancer yourself. Presumably your dislike for high birth rates doesn't extend to yourself, since there are ways you could take care of that ex post facto if you wanted to.
(By the way, there are plenty of cancers that mainly develop in young to middle-aged people. Two examples are testicular and breast cancer. I know a number of people in their 20's and 30's who've had cancer.)
Interesting. That's the only plausible explanation I've heard yet for why official info about this case smells so funny, other than the oft-repeated ones than our security people are either clueless or deliberately fear-mongering.
It seems pretty unlikely that open-out doors would still be in service. I'd guess that swapping out an open-out door would be fairly small potatoes compared to some of the major maintenance they have to do periodically on passenger aircraft.
That said, I don't make a habit of tugging on the door handle when I fly.
OK, so you make a little hole to depressurize the cabin, then you open the door. Then what? here's my post to a different thread talking about why cabin de-pressurization isn't as scary as it sounds.
If you read the linked article from my post you responded to, the author also directly addresses the not-so-very-much risk of open airplane doors.
There's reality-based experience that says cabin de-pressurization won't have anything like the effect you describe. Doesn't anyone remember Aloha 243? The top of the plane peeled right off (not just a wussy little window blow-out) at altitude. There was one fatality, a flight attendant who wasn't strapped in. The pilots landed the plane safely.
As for mixing the explosives being "certainly possible" I think you should look at the Perry Metzger article I've also cited elsewhere.
Not quite sure what your point was, but the idea of opening an airplane door in mid-flight has been thoroughly debunked. For example, see Patrick Smith's Salon Article on the subject (mind-bending advertisements or oppressive money-grubbing subscription may be required). In short, you can't open the door because there's a lot of air pressure holding it shut. From the cited article,
At a typical cruising altitude, as many as 8 pounds of pressure are pushing against every square inch of interior fuselage. That's 1,152 pounds of weight against each square foot of door. Flying at low altitudes, where cabin-pressure levels are lower, even a differential of 2 pounds per square inch is still more than anyone can displace -- even after six cups of coffee and the frustration that comes with sitting behind a shrieking infant for five hours.
Of course, if you don't believe him you can try it for yourself. Remember to pack a hydraulic jack in your carry-on.
Perry Metzger wrote an excellent post to the interesting-people mailing list last Friday. He goes into more detail than the Register article does, offers first-hand information, and packs in more irony and sarcasm besides.
a week in the stocks* out the front of their office building, with a sign saying what they did wrong, and a basket of old fruit nearby. Of course, a mimimum fruit-throwing distance will need to be marked, but that's not a real problem.
In the days when stocks were actually in vogue, apparently it was commonplace for objects somewhat firmer than old fruit to be thrown, e.g. broken glass, rocks, and so on. A day in the stocks could be rather dangerous (even fatal), not just humiliating. My impression is that onlookers were generally motivated more by a sense of light-hearted fun than by a desire to revenge any wrong they had personally suffered. Our ancestors had a rough-and-tumble sense of fun.
I don't think one should be able to get a patent on the idea of an intermittent wiper. A particular implementation, sure.
I tend to agree (although general concepts that are obvious are sometimes only so in retrospect). In any case, I glanced at the actual patent in question and based on a cursory skim, it appears that it does pertain to a specific implementation -- for instance, the application talks about how many capacitors, zener diodes, etc the apparatus requires.
I had the idea of a wiper that would automatically do one wipe based on a sensor that would determine how fast the rain was falling.
Yes, rain-sensing wipers are nice (and have been around for years). In some countries they seem to be standard equipment on all cars (e.g., the econobox I rented in Scotland once had 'em).
Doing it manually is actually a step BACKWARD from what I "invented".
Not sure what your point is considering that Kearns' patent application was filed in 1969. I suspect the sensors required to build an economically feasible rain-sensing wiper didn't exist then.
Ignoramuses keep bringing this issue up as if it's going to KILL THE INTERNET, so we MUST CHANGE INTERNET POLICY. They tried this back in the early 90's when IBM was running the T-1 Internet backbone through some subsidiary.
As for who did the running, the NSFNET was a consortium of IBM, MCI and Merit. IBM provided routers, MCI provided pipes, Merit provided network engineering and operations. If any of the organizations could be said to have been the one "running the Internet backbone" I'd say it would be Merit. Later -- after the T1 network had been transitioned to T3 -- the three partners formed the non-profit ANS (Advanced Network and Services) and handed the management role over to them. It may be ANS you're thinking of, and indeed ANS leadership was largely ex-IBM. Eventually ANS's assets got sold to AOL. Looks like Al Weis is still drawing a salary from the non-profit holding company that was left. Googling "NSFNET history" will get you most of this.
While there are some parallels between today's situation and the kerfuffle around Internet commercialization and privatization in the early 90's, I think there are more differences than there are similarities. From my POV the central problem at that time was that with the NSFNET the government really was paying for the backbone, which made things complicated for those in the hot seat -- if the GAO asked, you wanted to be able to say with a straight face that the taxpayers weren't subsidizing J. Random Commercial User's pr0n downloads. Clearly that's not the issue today. You're right, though, that one part of what went on then had to do with many parties trying (and failing) to figure out how to determine (and charge for) value flow.
Historical quibbling aside, I agree with your post.
I bounced my 15" AlBook off a hard floor. Everything continued to work fine, except for the latch. It would catch -- sort of -- but sometimes the lid would jiggle open when I was transporting it, which is bad since then the computer wakes up and commences generating heat and running down the battery. Sometimes I'd get it home and find out by looking at the log that it had had tens of wake/sleep cycles.
Anyway, I eventually decided to send it in for repair, fully expecting to billed for it. To my great surprise, they fixed it free under AppleCare. The case is still dented, but the latch works fine now.
And also because people with cameras (flash or no flash) often seem to fall under the delusion that they are the only people in the world -- hogging the best viewing angles, moving around to frame their shot with no regard to the people around them, getting annoyed if you get in the frame, and so on. Tripods make it twice as bad. All for a snap that's almost certain to be inferior to what they could get in a decent art book or possibly even on a postcard in the museum store. I have no problem with photographers in museums unless the museum is crowded (e.g., the MoMa on a Friday after 4 p.m.) at which point they become traffic hazards.
The telephone company was not supported or built by tax payers, nor were the cable systems.
This is (for the most part) true insofar as tax dollars didn't directly flow to AT&T et al. It's more broadly false though -- the government (or rather, governments, federal and local) granted both AT&T and the cable systems monopolies. See for example the "National Monopoly" section of the wikipedia article on AT&T ; take note of phrases like "...rates were regulated..." and "... competitors were forbidden from installing new lines...".
So while these systems may not have ben directly built by tax dollars, they were certainly built using the coercive power of the government.
there is no need to encapsulate ethernet frame in ATM,
True, but since when has lack of need prevented new networking technologies from being invented? Try googling "ethernet over ATM".
I don't blame you, from the perspective of 2006 who'd'a thunk that somebody would actually do that? Hopefully your dissertation defense won't hinge on a detailed knowledge of misbegotten networking technologies.
the Intel Mac mini is simply a retool of the same offering on a faster chip.
Not really. It's a retool on a new processor family. Might not matter to everyone, but in my case I didn't want to spend any more money on PPC gear when it became clear that it was moving in the direction of obsolescence.[*] I'd been waiting to buy a Mini-class machine and the Intel Mini (IMini? Minitel?) served to make that possible for me. Getting that money off the table and into their hot little hands presumably matters to Apple.
[*] Yes I've heard the "don't worry, buy PPC, Universal Binaries will make it OK forever" argument. I wouldn't bet the farm on it. I'm sure I'm far from the only one.
apart from a few dollars and taking up a bit more space in your laptop bag
...and being one more thing to forget when I go on a trip. Because it won't be in my laptop bag except when I'm traveling (why carry the extra junk back and forth to the office where I don't need it there).
Unlike others who've posted about this, I do find that it's not uncommon for me to use a modem when I'm traveling, especially in the third world or even in many of the less... upscale... parts of the U.S..
Although faxing is kinda a thing of the past, it's still the only option for sending hardcopies of contracts/ getting them back signed, and similar.
I've done work with several different attorneys recently, and all of them were willing (happy, actually) to accept an emailed PDF instead of a fax.
That still leaves you with the problem of scanning the document, but that's orthogonal to the modem issue. (I wonder if the built-in iSight has enough resolution to produce a legible image of a full page. Probably not but I didn't see resolution listed when I glanced at the MacBook Pro specs page.)
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Then again, somebody's gotta clean the CEO's toilets. There aren't enough Liberal Arts majors in one country alone to do that.
'Course, there's a decent chance that the CEO whose toilet needs sanitizing was a liberal arts major him or herself. A couple of examples from the article: Michael Eisner of Disney (English and theater), Carly Fiorina of HP (medieval history and philosophy).
Not to mention hepatitis-C, which is another blood-borne, debilitating (usually) or fatal (CDC says 1-5%) disease spread pretty much the same way as HIV... and which is 4x more prevalent than HIV in the U.S. population.
I hate to be a dink
Doesn't show.
Why is it important to develop a way to allow people who have little regard for their own health to remain healthy?
Because compassion is one of the things that makes us human?
(Leaving aside cold-blooded economic arguments about how you'd much rather have healthy productive workers contributing to your economy than sick people who are draining it. AIDS doesn't make business sense.)
I'll look forward to a cure to cancer the minute I develope a fetish for old people
Or the minute you're diagnosed with cancer yourself. Presumably your dislike for high birth rates doesn't extend to yourself, since there are ways you could take care of that ex post facto if you wanted to.
(By the way, there are plenty of cancers that mainly develop in young to middle-aged people. Two examples are testicular and breast cancer. I know a number of people in their 20's and 30's who've had cancer.)
Interesting. That's the only plausible explanation I've heard yet for why official info about this case smells so funny, other than the oft-repeated ones than our security people are either clueless or deliberately fear-mongering.
P.S.: Who are the other 99?
It seems pretty unlikely that open-out doors would still be in service. I'd guess that swapping out an open-out door would be fairly small potatoes compared to some of the major maintenance they have to do periodically on passenger aircraft.
That said, I don't make a habit of tugging on the door handle when I fly.
OK, so you make a little hole to depressurize the cabin, then you open the door. Then what? here's my post to a different thread talking about why cabin de-pressurization isn't as scary as it sounds.
If you read the linked article from my post you responded to, the author also directly addresses the not-so-very-much risk of open airplane doors.
There's reality-based experience that says cabin de-pressurization won't have anything like the effect you describe. Doesn't anyone remember Aloha 243? The top of the plane peeled right off (not just a wussy little window blow-out) at altitude. There was one fatality, a flight attendant who wasn't strapped in. The pilots landed the plane safely.
As for mixing the explosives being "certainly possible" I think you should look at the Perry Metzger article I've also cited elsewhere.
Of course, if you don't believe him you can try it for yourself. Remember to pack a hydraulic jack in your carry-on.
Perry Metzger wrote an excellent post to the interesting-people mailing list last Friday. He goes into more detail than the Register article does, offers first-hand information, and packs in more irony and sarcasm besides.
a week in the stocks* out the front of their office building, with a sign saying what they did wrong, and a basket of old fruit nearby. Of course, a mimimum fruit-throwing distance will need to be marked, but that's not a real problem.
In the days when stocks were actually in vogue, apparently it was commonplace for objects somewhat firmer than old fruit to be thrown, e.g. broken glass, rocks, and so on. A day in the stocks could be rather dangerous (even fatal), not just humiliating. My impression is that onlookers were generally motivated more by a sense of light-hearted fun than by a desire to revenge any wrong they had personally suffered. Our ancestors had a rough-and-tumble sense of fun.
Well, their current illegality is just a welfare program for the legal, judicial, and criminal system.
And a price support system for the existing network of distributors.
I don't think one should be able to get a patent on the idea of an intermittent wiper. A particular implementation, sure.
I tend to agree (although general concepts that are obvious are sometimes only so in retrospect). In any case, I glanced at the actual patent in question and based on a cursory skim, it appears that it does pertain to a specific implementation -- for instance, the application talks about how many capacitors, zener diodes, etc the apparatus requires.
I had the idea of a wiper that would automatically do one wipe based on a sensor that would determine how fast the rain was falling.
Yes, rain-sensing wipers are nice (and have been around for years). In some countries they seem to be standard equipment on all cars (e.g., the econobox I rented in Scotland once had 'em).
Doing it manually is actually a step BACKWARD from what I "invented".
Not sure what your point is considering that Kearns' patent application was filed in 1969. I suspect the sensors required to build an economically feasible rain-sensing wiper didn't exist then.
The big suits settled a bit more than 10 years ago, but Robert Kearns, inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper, fits the description.
The government will never be on its own, there are too many corporations sucking at its teat who will need to step into line.
Good point, that worked really well with GOSIP which is why we're all using OSI now.
What, we're not? Hmm.
Ignoramuses keep bringing this issue up as if it's going to KILL THE INTERNET, so we MUST CHANGE INTERNET POLICY. They tried this back in the early 90's when IBM was running the T-1 Internet backbone through some subsidiary.
As for who did the running, the NSFNET was a consortium of IBM, MCI and Merit. IBM provided routers, MCI provided pipes, Merit provided network engineering and operations. If any of the organizations could be said to have been the one "running the Internet backbone" I'd say it would be Merit. Later -- after the T1 network had been transitioned to T3 -- the three partners formed the non-profit ANS (Advanced Network and Services) and handed the management role over to them. It may be ANS you're thinking of, and indeed ANS leadership was largely ex-IBM. Eventually ANS's assets got sold to AOL. Looks like Al Weis is still drawing a salary from the non-profit holding company that was left. Googling "NSFNET history" will get you most of this.
While there are some parallels between today's situation and the kerfuffle around Internet commercialization and privatization in the early 90's, I think there are more differences than there are similarities. From my POV the central problem at that time was that with the NSFNET the government really was paying for the backbone, which made things complicated for those in the hot seat -- if the GAO asked, you wanted to be able to say with a straight face that the taxpayers weren't subsidizing J. Random Commercial User's pr0n downloads. Clearly that's not the issue today. You're right, though, that one part of what went on then had to do with many parties trying (and failing) to figure out how to determine (and charge for) value flow.
Historical quibbling aside, I agree with your post.
I bounced my 15" AlBook off a hard floor. Everything continued to work fine, except for the latch. It would catch -- sort of -- but sometimes the lid would jiggle open when I was transporting it, which is bad since then the computer wakes up and commences generating heat and running down the battery. Sometimes I'd get it home and find out by looking at the log that it had had tens of wake/sleep cycles.
Anyway, I eventually decided to send it in for repair, fully expecting to billed for it. To my great surprise, they fixed it free under AppleCare. The case is still dented, but the latch works fine now.
unless you're doing some leftover-1980s hackery like implementing TCP over ISO CLNP
Actually TUBA was early to mid-90's.
(At least we ended up with IPv6 instead which is way, way, better because... um... never mind.)
And also because people with cameras (flash or no flash) often seem to fall under the delusion that they are the only people in the world -- hogging the best viewing angles, moving around to frame their shot with no regard to the people around them, getting annoyed if you get in the frame, and so on. Tripods make it twice as bad. All for a snap that's almost certain to be inferior to what they could get in a decent art book or possibly even on a postcard in the museum store. I have no problem with photographers in museums unless the museum is crowded (e.g., the MoMa on a Friday after 4 p.m.) at which point they become traffic hazards.
if you like free internet so much
Everyone likes free stuff but if that "you" was directed at me personally, I don't have a strong opinion on that subject as such.
If the telcos/cable companies tried to use government to shut you down then, they would be in the wrong.
Well I'm sure that would be a great comfort.
The telephone company was not supported or built by tax payers, nor were the cable systems.
This is (for the most part) true insofar as tax dollars didn't directly flow to AT&T et al. It's more broadly false though -- the government (or rather, governments, federal and local) granted both AT&T and the cable systems monopolies. See for example the "National Monopoly" section of the wikipedia article on AT&T ; take note of phrases like "...rates were regulated..." and "... competitors were forbidden from installing new lines...".
So while these systems may not have ben directly built by tax dollars, they were certainly built using the coercive power of the government.
there is no need to encapsulate ethernet frame in ATM,
True, but since when has lack of need prevented new networking technologies from being invented? Try googling "ethernet over ATM".
I don't blame you, from the perspective of 2006 who'd'a thunk that somebody would actually do that? Hopefully your dissertation defense won't hinge on a detailed knowledge of misbegotten networking technologies.
the Intel Mac mini is simply a retool of the same offering on a faster chip.
Not really. It's a retool on a new processor family. Might not matter to everyone, but in my case I didn't want to spend any more money on PPC gear when it became clear that it was moving in the direction of obsolescence.[*] I'd been waiting to buy a Mini-class machine and the Intel Mini (IMini? Minitel?) served to make that possible for me. Getting that money off the table and into their hot little hands presumably matters to Apple.
[*] Yes I've heard the "don't worry, buy PPC, Universal Binaries will make it OK forever" argument. I wouldn't bet the farm on it. I'm sure I'm far from the only one.
...and being one more thing to forget when I go on a trip. Because it won't be in my laptop bag except when I'm traveling (why carry the extra junk back and forth to the office where I don't need it there).
Unlike others who've posted about this, I do find that it's not uncommon for me to use a modem when I'm traveling, especially in the third world or even in many of the less... upscale... parts of the U.S..
Although faxing is kinda a thing of the past, it's still the only option for sending hardcopies of contracts/ getting them back signed, and similar.
I've done work with several different attorneys recently, and all of them were willing (happy, actually) to accept an emailed PDF instead of a fax.
That still leaves you with the problem of scanning the document, but that's orthogonal to the modem issue. (I wonder if the built-in iSight has enough resolution to produce a legible image of a full page. Probably not but I didn't see resolution listed when I glanced at the MacBook Pro specs page.)