I've used a href=http://www.justanswer.com/]JustAnswer.Com[/url] a couple of times for questions that fell in the grey zone where I really wanted to get an answer from a credentialled expert, but it wasn't really important enough to justify paying several hundreds of dollars.
That site is what it is, and you must judge it for what it is. You choose how much you want to pay for an answer... the suggested amounts be either $9, $15, and $30 or $15, $30, and $45, depending on some variable I don't understand... you don't have to pay unless you're satisfied with the answer.. and the people answering usually seem to have credentials, i.e. legal questions are usually answered by lawyers. Whether you think they're the right kind of lawyers or good lawyers is your own call, and of course the answers are subject to layers and layers of weasel-wording and disclaimers.
I like the site. I've found the answers I've gotten to be helpful... if not always the simple yes-or-no I'd have liked.
Chess has been a popular metaphor for war, life, strategic thinking, etc. for centuries, but I don't recall many national leaders drawn from the ranks of the Laskers, Capablancas, and Fischers.
Football (both U. S. and Rugby) are often thought to be good training for leadership. Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington, famously did not "The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton," but even if he had, I don't think there's much evidence for correlation between football prowess and skill at national leadership.
As with football, to the extent that video gaming is ubiquitous among today's youth, it is vacuously true that our future leaders will probably have played video games, with varying degrees of skill.
But in seeking our future leaders, one might just as well look to today's [ cell phone users | Harry Potter fans | bottled water drinkers ].
Best Buy has no way of knowing whether the guy is telling the truth. But it doesn't matter.
Unless they want to have their sales slowed down by every customer insisting that a salesperson open the box before the customer leaves the store... and plugging in it... and testing it... and initialling the sales receipt... which would add about half an hour to an hour's work time to every sale... they've got to believe the customer.
At least the first time.
If they've got records that show that this customer has been repeatedly returning items, each time claiming that the factory-sealed box had worthless contents, that's another matter... but one that should be handled by legal process.
There is no set of circumstances under which what Best Buy allegedly did was appropriate.
P. S.
When she was in college, my daughter once bought an item from L. L. Bean. UPS delivered it, not to my daughter, but to the front desk of the dormitory, and got an signature that wasn't my daughter's signature and that couldn't be identified. My daughter called UPS. UPS insisted there was nothing they could/would do, they'd delivered the package and got a signature. She called L. L. Bean. They said, "Oh, that's too bad, we're sorry, we'll send another one out right away." L. L. Bean made several customers for life that day.
Something really does feel different from previous Windows OS introductions.
My nontechnical friends and acquaintance do make light conversation about things they've heard of in the news, and will ask me, as a "computer genius," what I'm using at work. Previous Windows upgrades got mentioned in casual talk. Usually there are a least a few people who want to be the first kid on the block with it.
Not this time.
People talk about the iPhone, they talk about their newly-installed Verizon FiOS, their iPods, what brands of Wintel computers I trust, whether they can run Windows on the Intel Macs.
I don't detect any consumer excitement about Vista. Nobody has asked me if they should upgrade. And a couple of people have asked me whether I agree with friends of their who told them to avoid it.
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
"Asimov believed that his most enduring contributions would be his "Three Laws of Robotics" and the Foundation Series."Isaac Asimov article in Wikipedia.
OK, off-topic, but this is going to affect more people even more severely.
We're now barely a year away from the day when they pull the plug on analog TV, and despite statements at the FCC website saying that "you can buy set-top converter boxes now," none are to be had. Not unless they mean $200-$300 video recorders that incidentally provide that feature as a side-effect.
Like Ars Technica, I, too, have been "standing on the doorstep, wad of cash in hand, yelling, 'Please take my money! I want to buy!' but am turned away." Or more correctly, "you want a what?"
Ironically, every store that sells TVs has employees glad to explain that their remaining stock of analog TVs won't work in a year, but when you ask them to sell you one of the set-top boxes the FCC says are available, so the analog TV I already own will work a year from now, they act clueless.
I've tried asking for it under every name I can think of. "Digital-to-analog set-top converter box" (the FCC's own term). "Digital TV converter." "Downconverter." "Digital tuner." " No dice. The most clueful I've found was someone who said "You don't need one, all of our TVs and video recorders have one built in." "But I don't want to buy a new TV. I just want one of the standalone tuners, which the FCC says should sell for $50 to $70." "Well, you'd better buy one from the FCC, then, because we don't have any."
The FCC is full of great stories about wonderful coupons in the sky. I don't want a coupon, I just want to buy one of the set-top boxes the FCC is available now for the $50 to $70 the FCC says they should cost.
Amazon got started very, very early in the history of the Web. When I first started using Amazon, I was using Lynx. I am not sure whether Netscape 1.0 was even available yet; my recollection is that it was not, and that I tried and failed to get Mosaic to run.
When I first started using Amazon, I never even ordered books from them. I was too chicken. I had never ordered anything electronically before. I'm ashamed to say that I just used them as a handy online way to access Books In Print and look up ISBN numbers so that I could order them from a bookstore (at the time nobody would have bothered to say "brick-and-mortar bookstore").
I don't think I even need to say that it was a dialup connection, but perhaps I need to say that to the best of my recollection it was a 9600 bps connection, as 28K modems were new and expensive.
When I first ordered from Amazon, I certainly didn't give them my credit card electronically. I phoned them. Oh, wait, a phone is electronic, isn't it? Well, you know.
I give Amazon a lot of credit for virtually inventing online commerce as we know it. I remember admiring the "shopping cart" metaphor. I don't know if they were the first to use it, but they were among the first.
That doesn't mean that the shopping cart metaphor isn't obvious. It is obvious, but it is only obvious as the solution to a problem. Ditto one-click ordering.
Amazon was among the first companies to try to attack the problems of online commerce, so of course they were among the first to encounter some problems, and thus the first to see the nevertheless obvious solutions.
"Very few files have data streams, so the vast majority of users won't ever see a problem. Kaspersky choses to pollute every single file with a stream, however, which is why systems with it installed exhibit the problem."
Yeah, that's the typical Windows world attitude.
The operating system is specified to do certain things. It doesn't do them. Well, if not many people use this feature, so what? One of the way we make the feature list long is by including lots of features that don't work, but we figure nobody will use them and nobody will find out...
"All of Comcast's policies seem to follow the letter of the law, and seem to weigh customer privacy with law enforcement's requests. This is in apparent contrast to AT&T and a number of other telecommunication companies, which have been only too happy to give over subscriber records."
Apples and oranges. "Monk" is comparing Comcast's words to AT&T's actions..
It's nice to know that Comcast is able to write a policy manual that follows the law, but surely a written policy telling employees to break the law would trigger a minor scandal.
Anyone who's ever been in a large organization is familiar with lip-service CYA written policies.
How seriously does Comcast take this policy? Do they give training sessions to the people who need to implement it? Do they back up or undercut the people who go "by the book?"
When you move your finger to the left, I mean stage left, your virtual finger will move to the right... that is, virtual right... so if you're right-handed, it will be wrong. I suppose it will work OK for left-handed people, though. Could you turn it upside-down? But then when you move your finger upwards, the virtual finger will move downwards!
Wait, wait, that's wrong. If you turn it upside down you'll be touching the front of the screen instead of the back. The orientation will be correct, but you won't be able to see the screen, unless they can make the electronics transparent. To select objects, instead of pushing down, you'll have to push up, I mean lift down, I mean pull your finger away from the screen.
And what happens if you rotate it ninety degrees? Clockwise?
Or counterclockwise, if you're in the southern hemisphere?
These days, it's hard to find an important, legitimate topic on which Wikipedia doesn't already have fairly good coverage.
The days when e.g. you could discover that there was no article at all about the author Jessamyn West ("The Friendly Persuasion") and quickly throw in three paragraphs off the top of your head with a little bit of cross-checking, totally confident that you were improving Wikipedia, are gone.
Now, improving Wikipedia is hard work, and it's less fun, and it goes slowly.
In other words, it's now about quality, not quantity... and that's a Good Thing.
This is a very Good Thing. I actually believe AT&T when they say "We feel that the clarifying language better reflects our actual long-held policy." There's a very poisonous process that occurs when unwritten de facto policies are formalized. Very often, the de facto policies are fairly reasonable.
When the policy is written down and the lawyers get involved, they fence in a square mile in order to protect an acre. This is done because they don't think anyone will notice and there doesn't seem to be any real cost involved, so it's just prudent to include a fat safety margin around the "real" policy. As long as the same personnel continue to administer the real policy there's no big problem. The damage comes a few years later when new people come in and see no reason not to use the whole square mile.
Consumer pushback makes it clear that there is a cost involved in being overprotective, and that there is a benefit involved in having a written policy that simply spells out, rather than overextends, the real policy intention.
Surely Roger Ailes was the head propagandist for Richard Nixon's campaign? The one that designed the non-issues-oriented feel-good ads? The one that combatted Nixon's reputation for being an geeky, aloof guy by putting him into controlled situations where he appeared to be surrounded by ordinary citizens asking "spontaneous," scripted, softball questions?
Got a little rhythm, a rhythm, a rhythm That pitter-pats in my brain, So darn persistent, the day isn't distant When it'll drive me insane.
It's only a matter of time before Sony asserts that if you listen to a song and are able to remember it hours later, your brain contains an illegal copy and you owe them royalties every time you think of it.
And only a matter of time before the MPAA wants you to pay double if you watch a movie with both of your eyes.
I detest the transparent prevarications of companies (and governments and...) that claim a mile, but say "don't worry, we won't use more than an inch." I can understand that given the fuzziness of legal boundaries a prudent corporation might want to give himself a little extra wiggle-room, but my limited experience is that whatever is claimed will, eventually, be used... all of it.
There's a wonderful scene in a novel by John D. MacDonald's book Condominium in which a an agent pushes a legal paper at a condominium buyer saying it is "just a formality." A week later, the buyer is in the office trying to get action on various construction problems and glitches. The air conditioner won't work, for example. The agent says "You can handle that yourself; contact the manufacturer." After several serious complaints have been brushed aside, the buyer starts mumbling about withholding payments and legal action, and the agent tells him that he's basically signed all his rights away.
"But you said that was just a formality," says the buyer.
"That's right," says the agent, "it is a formal, binding, legal agreement."
To anyone my age, the bogeyman of "network interference" instantly calls to mind Ma Bell and all the reasons she gave why nobody but AT&T could be trusted with an RJ-11 jack.
Actually, it predated the RJ-11 jack.
Here we go:
The New York Times, February 17, 1951, p. 30: Phone Company Upheld In Ban on Hush-a-Phone
The Hush-A-Phone was a simple cup-like acoustic isolation device that snapped onto a telephone handset and provided a measure of privacy and quiet. No wires, no electrical connection. The phone company banned it as a "foreign attachment." In the Times story, the FCC agreed such devices were subject to A. T. & T. control. The punch line:
"Unrestricted use of the device could, in the commission's opinion, result in a general deterioration of the quality of telephone service."
Yes, seriously.
Later, the phone company was to claim that wired connections to third-party devices (answering machines and, later, modems) could not only bring down the network but put their linemen at risk of electrocution. Anyone who wanted to connect a computer had two choices: buy a very pricey "Dataphone"--never sold, of course, but leased by the month--or buy a third-party modem anduse a pricey phone-company-supplied "Data Access Arrangement" device, which was never sold but only leased by the month.
It took decades to get the FCC to agree that it had the regulatory authority to set specifications for third-party interconnects, and to allow them.
I recall an amusing Racal-Vadic advertisement showing "Ma Bell" depicted as a grandmotherly figure, staring out of her window in horror at a huge dump truck pouring hundreds of DAA boxes onto her lawn, now that Racal-Vadic modems no longer needed them.
...a nuclear plant official explained at a stockholders' meeting in the eighties.
They just needed to keep the waste in an onsite holding pool for a few years, and then the government would take over. He explained that the U. S. Government made a firm commitment (he may even have mentioned a contract) to accept the plant's waste starting in 1998, when the Yucca Flats facility would begin operating.
So, what's the problem? All we need to do is make it easy for consumers to mail their dead radioactive batteries to the Yucca Flats facility.
Oh, wait...
(If he were still alive consumers could also mail them to Ronald Reagan, who stated at one point that if properly processed a year's worth of nuclear waste from a nuclear power plant could be stored under a desk...)
As Euclid said, "as you go about proving a theorem, it's important to consider the consequences of examining various cases. While it can be easy to find cases that need to be examined, it is important to realize that all cases have real-world consequences for the theorem. At the end of the day, this process is about ensuring that the time the theorem is mostly true at those time when it's most important to be true. When we're deciding which cases be tested, we concentrate our efforts on those where the theorem's being false would cause the most damage."
Actually proving a theorem true, for all cases, is a nice aspirational goal, not a realistic one.
Slashdot Mirror
I've used a href=http://www.justanswer.com/]JustAnswer.Com[/url] a couple of times for questions that fell in the grey zone where I really wanted to get an answer from a credentialled expert, but it wasn't really important enough to justify paying several hundreds of dollars.
That site is what it is, and you must judge it for what it is. You choose how much you want to pay for an answer... the suggested amounts be either $9, $15, and $30 or $15, $30, and $45, depending on some variable I don't understand... you don't have to pay unless you're satisfied with the answer.. and the people answering usually seem to have credentials, i.e. legal questions are usually answered by lawyers. Whether you think they're the right kind of lawyers or good lawyers is your own call, and of course the answers are subject to layers and layers of weasel-wording and disclaimers.
I like the site. I've found the answers I've gotten to be helpful... if not always the simple yes-or-no I'd have liked.
Chess has been a popular metaphor for war, life, strategic thinking, etc. for centuries, but I don't recall many national leaders drawn from the ranks of the Laskers, Capablancas, and Fischers.
Football (both U. S. and Rugby) are often thought to be good training for leadership. Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington, famously did not "The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton," but even if he had, I don't think there's much evidence for correlation between football prowess and skill at national leadership.
As with football, to the extent that video gaming is ubiquitous among today's youth, it is vacuously true that our future leaders will probably have played video games, with varying degrees of skill.
But in seeking our future leaders, one might just as well look to today's [ cell phone users | Harry Potter fans | bottled water drinkers ].
Best Buy has no way of knowing whether the guy is telling the truth. But it doesn't matter.
Unless they want to have their sales slowed down by every customer insisting that a salesperson open the box before the customer leaves the store... and plugging in it... and testing it... and initialling the sales receipt... which would add about half an hour to an hour's work time to every sale... they've got to believe the customer.
At least the first time.
If they've got records that show that this customer has been repeatedly returning items, each time claiming that the factory-sealed box had worthless contents, that's another matter... but one that should be handled by legal process.
There is no set of circumstances under which what Best Buy allegedly did was appropriate.
P. S.
When she was in college, my daughter once bought an item from L. L. Bean. UPS delivered it, not to my daughter, but to the front desk of the dormitory, and got an signature that wasn't my daughter's signature and that couldn't be identified. My daughter called UPS. UPS insisted there was nothing they could/would do, they'd delivered the package and got a signature. She called L. L. Bean. They said, "Oh, that's too bad, we're sorry, we'll send another one out right away." L. L. Bean made several customers for life that day.
Something really does feel different from previous Windows OS introductions.
My nontechnical friends and acquaintance do make light conversation about things they've heard of in the news, and will ask me, as a "computer genius," what I'm using at work. Previous Windows upgrades got mentioned in casual talk. Usually there are a least a few people who want to be the first kid on the block with it.
Not this time.
People talk about the iPhone, they talk about their newly-installed Verizon FiOS, their iPods, what brands of Wintel computers I trust, whether they can run Windows on the Intel Macs.
I don't detect any consumer excitement about Vista. Nobody has asked me if they should upgrade. And a couple of people have asked me whether I agree with friends of their who told them to avoid it.
Unscientific sample? You bet.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
Windows apologists are always blaming any problems on users not keeping their drivers updated.
I'll be interested to see how they deflect criticism for this problem.
The issue of traffic shaping should be kept separate from the issue of:
--Comcast using forgery or masquerading
--Comcast deceiving customers about its true terms of service
--Comcast hiding what it is doing, thereby giving no means to complain or give them feedback about technical problems
Three Laws of Robotics:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
"Asimov believed that his most enduring contributions would be his "Three Laws of Robotics" and the Foundation Series."Isaac Asimov article in Wikipedia.
OK, off-topic, but this is going to affect more people even more severely.
We're now barely a year away from the day when they pull the plug on analog TV, and despite statements at the FCC website saying that "you can buy set-top converter boxes now," none are to be had. Not unless they mean $200-$300 video recorders that incidentally provide that feature as a side-effect.
Like Ars Technica, I, too, have been "standing on the doorstep, wad of cash in hand, yelling, 'Please take my money! I want to buy!' but am turned away." Or more correctly, "you want a what?"
Ironically, every store that sells TVs has employees glad to explain that their remaining stock of analog TVs won't work in a year, but when you ask them to sell you one of the set-top boxes the FCC says are available, so the analog TV I already own will work a year from now, they act clueless.
I've tried asking for it under every name I can think of. "Digital-to-analog set-top converter box" (the FCC's own term). "Digital TV converter." "Downconverter." "Digital tuner." " No dice. The most clueful I've found was someone who said "You don't need one, all of our TVs and video recorders have one built in." "But I don't want to buy a new TV. I just want one of the standalone tuners, which the FCC says should sell for $50 to $70." "Well, you'd better buy one from the FCC, then, because we don't have any."
The FCC is full of great stories about wonderful coupons in the sky. I don't want a coupon, I just want to buy one of the set-top boxes the FCC is available now for the $50 to $70 the FCC says they should cost.
Amazon got started very, very early in the history of the Web. When I first started using Amazon, I was using Lynx. I am not sure whether Netscape 1.0 was even available yet; my recollection is that it was not, and that I tried and failed to get Mosaic to run.
When I first started using Amazon, I never even ordered books from them. I was too chicken. I had never ordered anything electronically before. I'm ashamed to say that I just used them as a handy online way to access Books In Print and look up ISBN numbers so that I could order them from a bookstore (at the time nobody would have bothered to say "brick-and-mortar bookstore").
I don't think I even need to say that it was a dialup connection, but perhaps I need to say that to the best of my recollection it was a 9600 bps connection, as 28K modems were new and expensive.
When I first ordered from Amazon, I certainly didn't give them my credit card electronically. I phoned them. Oh, wait, a phone is electronic, isn't it? Well, you know.
I give Amazon a lot of credit for virtually inventing online commerce as we know it. I remember admiring the "shopping cart" metaphor. I don't know if they were the first to use it, but they were among the first.
That doesn't mean that the shopping cart metaphor isn't obvious. It is obvious, but it is only obvious as the solution to a problem. Ditto one-click ordering.
Amazon was among the first companies to try to attack the problems of online commerce, so of course they were among the first to encounter some problems, and thus the first to see the nevertheless obvious solutions.
"Very few files have data streams, so the vast majority of users won't ever see a problem. Kaspersky choses to pollute every single file with a stream, however, which is why systems with it installed exhibit the problem."
Yeah, that's the typical Windows world attitude.
The operating system is specified to do certain things. It doesn't do them. Well, if not many people use this feature, so what? One of the way we make the feature list long is by including lots of features that don't work, but we figure nobody will use them and nobody will find out...
"Waiter, there's a fly in my soup."
"What kind of soup?"
"The orange scented celery puree.
"Oh, hardly anyone orders that. You should expect flies in it. It's your own fault for being foolish enough to order it."
"All of Comcast's policies seem to follow the letter of the law, and seem to weigh customer privacy with law enforcement's requests. This is in apparent contrast to AT&T and a number of other telecommunication companies, which have been only too happy to give over subscriber records."
Apples and oranges. "Monk" is comparing Comcast's words to AT&T's actions..
It's nice to know that Comcast is able to write a policy manual that follows the law, but surely a written policy telling employees to break the law would trigger a minor scandal.
Anyone who's ever been in a large organization is familiar with lip-service CYA written policies.
How seriously does Comcast take this policy? Do they give training sessions to the people who need to implement it? Do they back up or undercut the people who go "by the book?"
...what sort of automatically-redacted copy will it make?
When you move your finger to the left, I mean stage left, your virtual finger will move to the right... that is, virtual right... so if you're right-handed, it will be wrong. I suppose it will work OK for left-handed people, though. Could you turn it upside-down? But then when you move your finger upwards, the virtual finger will move downwards!
:-) -----
Wait, wait, that's wrong. If you turn it upside down you'll be touching the front of the screen instead of the back. The orientation will be correct, but you won't be able to see the screen, unless they can make the electronics transparent. To select objects, instead of pushing down, you'll have to push up, I mean lift down, I mean pull your finger away from the screen.
And what happens if you rotate it ninety degrees? Clockwise?
Or counterclockwise, if you're in the southern hemisphere?
Note, smiley below
----->
These days, it's hard to find an important, legitimate topic on which Wikipedia doesn't already have fairly good coverage.
The days when e.g. you could discover that there was no article at all about the author Jessamyn West ("The Friendly Persuasion") and quickly throw in three paragraphs off the top of your head with a little bit of cross-checking, totally confident that you were improving Wikipedia, are gone.
Now, improving Wikipedia is hard work, and it's less fun, and it goes slowly.
In other words, it's now about quality, not quantity... and that's a Good Thing.
This is a very Good Thing. I actually believe AT&T when they say "We feel that the clarifying language better reflects our actual long-held policy." There's a very poisonous process that occurs when unwritten de facto policies are formalized. Very often, the de facto policies are fairly reasonable.
When the policy is written down and the lawyers get involved, they fence in a square mile in order to protect an acre. This is done because they don't think anyone will notice and there doesn't seem to be any real cost involved, so it's just prudent to include a fat safety margin around the "real" policy. As long as the same personnel continue to administer the real policy there's no big problem. The damage comes a few years later when new people come in and see no reason not to use the whole square mile.
Consumer pushback makes it clear that there is a cost involved in being overprotective, and that there is a benefit involved in having a written policy that simply spells out, rather than overextends, the real policy intention.
Surely Roger Ailes was the head propagandist for Richard Nixon's campaign? The one that designed the non-issues-oriented feel-good ads? The one that combatted Nixon's reputation for being an geeky, aloof guy by putting him into controlled situations where he appeared to be surrounded by ordinary citizens asking "spontaneous," scripted, softball questions?
... the IAU has decided that Jupiter is not a planet.
YOU can profit from the coming singularity! Singularity Investor has the answer!
Sure, it sounds bad, but with every big change comes winners and losers and you can be one of the winners if you act now!
Oh, wait, that's how to profit from that other singularity...
Got a little rhythm, a rhythm, a rhythm
That pitter-pats in my brain,
So darn persistent, the day isn't distant
When it'll drive me insane.
It's only a matter of time before Sony asserts that if you listen to a song and are able to remember it hours later, your brain contains an illegal copy and you owe them royalties every time you think of it.
And only a matter of time before the MPAA wants you to pay double if you watch a movie with both of your eyes.
I detest the transparent prevarications of companies (and governments and ...) that claim a mile, but say "don't worry, we won't use more than an inch." I can understand that given the fuzziness of legal boundaries a prudent corporation might want to give himself a little extra wiggle-room, but my limited experience is that whatever is claimed will, eventually, be used... all of it.
There's a wonderful scene in a novel by John D. MacDonald's book Condominium in which a an agent pushes a legal paper at a condominium buyer saying it is "just a formality." A week later, the buyer is in the office trying to get action on various construction problems and glitches. The air conditioner won't work, for example. The agent says "You can handle that yourself; contact the manufacturer." After several serious complaints have been brushed aside, the buyer starts mumbling about withholding payments and legal action, and the agent tells him that he's basically signed all his rights away.
"But you said that was just a formality," says the buyer.
"That's right," says the agent, "it is a formal, binding, legal agreement."
To anyone my age, the bogeyman of "network interference" instantly calls to mind Ma Bell and all the reasons she gave why nobody but AT&T could be trusted with an RJ-11 jack.
Actually, it predated the RJ-11 jack.
Here we go:
The New York Times, February 17, 1951, p. 30: Phone Company Upheld In Ban on Hush-a-Phone
The Hush-A-Phone was a simple cup-like acoustic isolation device that snapped onto a telephone handset and provided a measure of privacy and quiet. No wires, no electrical connection. The phone company banned it as a "foreign attachment." In the Times story, the FCC agreed such devices were subject to A. T. & T. control. The punch line:
"Unrestricted use of the device could, in the commission's opinion, result in a general deterioration of the quality of telephone service."
Yes, seriously.
Later, the phone company was to claim that wired connections to third-party devices (answering machines and, later, modems) could not only bring down the network but put their linemen at risk of electrocution. Anyone who wanted to connect a computer had two choices: buy a very pricey "Dataphone"--never sold, of course, but leased by the month--or buy a third-party modem anduse a pricey phone-company-supplied "Data Access Arrangement" device, which was never sold but only leased by the month.
It took decades to get the FCC to agree that it had the regulatory authority to set specifications for third-party interconnects, and to allow them.
I recall an amusing Racal-Vadic advertisement showing "Ma Bell" depicted as a grandmotherly figure, staring out of her window in horror at a huge dump truck pouring hundreds of DAA boxes onto her lawn, now that Racal-Vadic modems no longer needed them.
...a nuclear plant official explained at a stockholders' meeting in the eighties.
They just needed to keep the waste in an onsite holding pool for a few years, and then the government would take over. He explained that the U. S. Government made a firm commitment (he may even have mentioned a contract) to accept the plant's waste starting in 1998, when the Yucca Flats facility would begin operating.
So, what's the problem? All we need to do is make it easy for consumers to mail their dead radioactive batteries to the Yucca Flats facility.
Oh, wait...
(If he were still alive consumers could also mail them to Ronald Reagan, who stated at one point that if properly processed a year's worth of nuclear waste from a nuclear power plant could be stored under a desk...)
As Euclid said, "as you go about proving a theorem, it's important to consider the consequences of examining various cases. While it can be easy to find cases that need to be examined, it is important to realize that all cases have real-world consequences for the theorem. At the end of the day, this process is about ensuring that the time the theorem is mostly true at those time when it's most important to be true. When we're deciding which cases be tested, we concentrate our efforts on those where the theorem's being false would cause the most damage."
:-) ------- (denotes irony).
Actually proving a theorem true, for all cases, is a nice aspirational goal, not a realistic one.
Smiley ---->
Grand... combine this with the pain ray gun and you have the makings of a fully-automated interrogation device.