This isn't a contradiction of anything, it's just for the sake of getting it off my brain and onto yours. But that's your fault, as you shall see:
Say a pornographer places a billboard of a beautiful naked woman near the border between his agnostic nation with its liberal sex and speech laws, and a fanatically religious one with censorious blue laws and no freedom of speech. But he covers it up during the day and uncovers it only on cloudy, moonless nights.
Then say a person from the tyrannical nation starts showing up at the border on those nights with a flashlight and a pair of binoculars.
Who's breaking the law, here?
The pornographer has done nothing to cause the image to be transmitted across the border other than to place it where the viewer can, through his own actions and emissions across the border, cause the image to be reflected to him.
This is how internet works. All connections are client-server. Nothing gets done until the server receives that first SYN packet is sent by the client. After that, it can devolve to many kinds of virtual protocols, but that first connection has to be initiated by the client host.
Within a nation, laws that say things like "making such-and-such material available for viewing" would be relevant. But across international boundaries, you'd have to have it written into a treaty or it wouldn't mean a damned thing.
--Blair
"If the French banned websites about every culture that ever beat them up, all they'd be left with is www.babar.com..."
They didn't post this year's yet, but the problem set for last year's contest is all mathematical and crunchy.
Wimps.
Back in 19[fumfer] when I entered one of these things at [Mumble] U., they included some measure of ascii graphic manipulation. You'd figure that now there would be something to do with multidimensional graphical buffering snafus or distributed client-server p2p neural interface instead of these textual brain teasers...
And when I say "I" I mean "I", as in, when I walked into the room the morning of the contest I realized only then that the format was to be Teams Of Four and I had come alone. Plus, I'd been up all night newsing and hacking already. But maybe that was a blessing because, totally zoned and running on momentum, I tied for first. Three other teams, I outright beat. I won fitty bucks to spend at the campus bookstore. I forget what I bought with it. Probably beer and a sweatshirt.
It's not that hard. He took the perpendicular bisectors of the sides, and instead of giving them both the inverse and negative of the slope, he gave them just the inverse (so they're no longer perpendicular to the side, just a reflection about a slope=1 line through the midpoint).
They still pass through the midpoints of the sides they're reflecting. This also works if you use the negative slope, but you get a different point in the triangle (the negative-slope lines are a reflection about a horizontal line through the midpoint).
The well-known theorem goes something like "the perpendicular bisectors of all three sides of a triangle meet at a single point". Substitute "inverse-slope" or "negative-slope" for "perpendicular", and Hilbert's your uncle.
I don't know about Morley (except it's the brand the CSM tokes) and I don't know what it has to do with parallel lines and nine-point circles and pentacles and runes...
This kid's discovery is astonishingly simple. Like it's something that someone really should have found before. Like it's something that maybe several people have found before, and never bothered to publish because it was so simple it must have been discovered, published, and lost to the obscurity warehouse where all grade-school theorems go to die.
--Blair
"Insert something here about watery bints distributing swords."
I remember ten years ago reading about a crystal a cm or so on a side that was being used to hold enormous amounts of data holographically. Probably the LiNb they were talking about.
The problem of read-erase is easy to solve: use twice the amount of crystal and write one half with the bits you read from the other. It's still two orders of magnitude more bit-density than anything else. And it's not like there aren't a dozen other examples of dynamic RAM devices that needed some sort of refresh or constant cycling during access (bubble memory, bloch-line memory, mercury SAW memory, that thing the Canucks are doing storing data in the laser beams on their token ring...)
The demurrer about how to read materials with a laser? Please. CD, DVD, etc., etc. Throw in a micromirror array and a spindle, and you can do anything and watch TV on your wall.
Shrink, Schmink. If the reader system can't handle minor variations in process parameters, it was designed by monkeys. Or Ballmer. Same thing.
Nature kills me...they post a story about using multiple lasers to twiddle the orbitals in a supermaterial, and help you understand by reminding you (really, telling most of you for the first time) that varnish turns brown! Ya gotta love those mooks.
--Blair
"Has anyone ever actually seen a molecule of dihydrogen monoxide?"
Peer-to-peer as used for data sharing is still client-server, with an extra layer of directory serverness to permit discovery of the data server. Distributing the directory and data make the protocol and pattern richer, it doesn't change them into something they're not.
True P2P is something like AIM, which still involves a C-S directory layer, or its grand old ancestor, talk(1), which does not, but relies on the well-known-service paradigm to handshake the connection to life. You see here how hard it is to get the C-S out of any computational commo.
But that's all technical, and should make a difference only to someone interested in the internals. Perceptionally, his point holds. Computerized Client-Server P2P looks and feels like real P2P, and it changes the way people interact with the net and with each other on the net, to make it more like the way we interact with and in the real world.
SVs at all altitudes are required to remain within control boxes a few km on a side.
The thing that decays orbits faster at LEO is that there is actually a little bit of atmosphere out there, constantly braking the orbit. But that's still pretty small.
What makes all the control really necessary is the difficulty of computing trajectories more than a couple of days out from feedback data that is only good to 3-6 significant figures. Today's corrective bump is next week's broken crosslink. And as long as you're going to have to do all that control, and make and break links semi-randomly, you might as well justify it by putting the birds right on the deck where you can get good signals and short propagation times.
Now if only they can find a real market.
--Blair
"Damn. I was gonna bid $26 million, but my browser hanged..."
The story implies that the "codes" were stolen, but the code that was stolen was source, not encryption keys.
It implies that a lone hacker in a foreign land got through a high-security installation to steal sensitive data. A team of hackers broken into what was probably a semi-secured system and got something that's probably been superseded by code changes already.
It states that the source code stolen is Top Secret. OS/Comet is not Top Secret. It's not Secret. It's not even Confidential/NOFORN. It might be used by some installations for Top Secret stuff, but I doubt it, and if they did it would be like saying "swedish teen-aged janitor steals Top Secret floor buffer!" When did Reuters become the Weekly World News?
It implies that the script kiddies can use it to control satellites. Well, yes, but only if they happened to steal the OTP, too. And if they did it's really easy to confound them by replacing the OTP. They can't control anything.
Someone else here posted that Exigent had "just deployed" OS/Comet. Huh. Heh. I've seen the insides of Comet, years ago, and baby, there's stuff in there that's older than most people here.
Now, that's not to say that Exigent should blow them off. It's proprietary software, and they make millions per year off of it. Mostly by selling consulting support to wedge the elephant into whatever hatbox it's being bought to drive, but still.
It must be 20 years ago now that Carver Mead was talking about having a machine on your desk that would fabricate silicon integrated circuits for you.
Anyone who's seen a fab line knows it's not that simple. The closest anyone came was e-beam lithography, but those machines are still the size of your bathroom, and still only do some of the processes.
It's pretty interesting to think about printing chip layers like a multi-pass color laser printer.
But can you imagine the toner-cartridge spam you'll get when there are ten kinds of toner material needed, and some run ten bucks a pass?
--Blair
"Dammit! I left my TiVo folded up in my pocket and it went through the wash again..."
Next time they try to get you to sign a non-compete clause, whip out one of your own for them to sign that says they will not hire anyone who does what you do for 12 months after you leave...
I'm looking for a good Gyro place in the South Bay area. If you know of one, please let me know.
There's a place called Ylassoo (sp?) in what looks like an old, tiny Taco Bell on Saratoga-Sunnyvale (not Saratoga) down near where it hits 85, in the south lobe of Cupertino, iirc.
I got an above-average souvlaki there. I don't know how their gyros are. But you're right. There's not enough Greek deli around here.
--Blair
"This is not a hate-crime for souvlaki transaction."
>> And we're not just talking about ordinary >> crime. We're talking about hate crimes. >
> I fail to see how you're any more dead if > the man who kills you hates all people of > your skin tone, not just you.
And his punishment can't make you any less dead, so why should we bother to punish him?
As any cop will tell you, the law is not meant to protect you as a person, but us as a society.
The purpose of designating some crimes as hate crimes is to dissuade terrorists; to demonize their beliefs; and to popularize the notion that hate is not ennobling or bonding, it's just plain bad.
Punishing someone only for murder when their real goal was to injure a community isn't enough. You have to punish all the crimes related to a criminal act or closure doesn't occur in that community. If closure doesn't occur, hate rebounds, society is disrupted, and the terrorists win.
Another thing to keep in mind is that DARPA is a government agency, and as such has a mandate to diseminate their findings as far as possible within the federal government. I actually worked on a liason project with FEMA, where we were trying to help kick-start FEMA's web-based emergency-mitigation effort.
Did they do anything about it? Because today, when the quake hit Olympia, the net up there went blooey. Probably just overload, but even so, that's the kind of fault that fault-tolerance should have handled.
...or maybe I was emergency-managed way down in their QoS...
Someone asked the Q in the subj, and Oztun repeats: "Hiura suggests...and the silicon cage would protect it from corruption."
Well, that's what he suggests. He doesn't give the mechanism. Protect it from what sort of corruption? Onanism?
Seriously, this is the point of basic research. Who knew that twisted ribbons of bubble walls in magnetic media could be used to create memories until someone poked around at it?
Was it Einstein or Pauli who said "the only real science is physics, the rest are stamp collecting"? In chemistry it seems you need a new theory for every five or six materials. The pharmaceutical industry fleshes this out, trying every combination of molecule and malady until they find an effect they can sell, and not really caring about why unless there's a patent they need to circumvent.
Likewise in materials for data storage. They found a toy that might be able to maintain a state. They need to find out if they can control the datum, if it is BIBO-stable to various kinds of perturbation, and if the entire memory apparatus can be built for a few bucks per gigabit. (Only geeks care what's under the hood, so the new technology has to compete on price/performance with the old one in some market, niche or broad).
1. Read Slashdot.com a lot.
2. Wait for safeWeb.Com banner ad at top of Slashdot.com.
3. Click safeWeb.Com banner ad at Slashdot.com.
4. Browse around, or enter "slashdot.com" in safeWeb.com Go box.
5. Click on Configure button.
6. Check "Block pop-up windows" under Miscellaneous, and click on "set these options permanently".
7. Bookmark slashdot in safeweb window.
8. From now on, use bookmark to get to slashdot. (You may have to log in again. Poor baby.)
9. Bliss out.
I think the distinction you seek is "those humans who are really damn tired of breathing in smoke they can't control" versus "inconsiderate smokers". This latter group does not appear to include you, which is wonderful. How nice it would be if other smokers were as thoughtful as you are.
Unfortunately, this can backfire. In places such as poker rooms, smokers often go to great lengths to keep their neighbors from getting smoke in their faces. They generally hold the cigarette down and behind them when they aren't actively dragging on it. That helps the people to their left and right. And almost always puts it right next to the three people sitting at the table behind them, with nowhere to go but up and into their seats.
There's nothing more noxious than the smoke coming directly from a cigarette three feet away. Most smokers I've discussed it with refuse to remain in that situation. Almost none would hold the cigarette so that it goes directly into their eyes and nose. And if you're on the end of a table with a smoker next to you and two at the table behind you, just get out the cell phone and schedule a chest x-ray.
A poker room is an extreme situation, but you would be amazed how many people notice and enjoy when a whole table and the tables surrounding it are free of smokers.
And then there's the guy who goes to his car to smoke and comes back into the office with a lungful and smelling like he'd bathed in half-charred cats. The diffusion constant of the stink of smoke must be some sort of p-chem record. Even in a stiff wind it seems to be able to propagate omnidirectionally.
And add "downstairs" to the "across the hall and two doors down" effect. Many buildings are designed to expand and contract, which means air gaps in the floors that allow smoke to go up. One man's ceiling is another man's seive.
So basically, it's nice that someone tries to be considerate, but the physics of smoke don't allow you ever to be considerate enough in the vicinity of other people. Which is why laws are being changed to take proximity completely out of the equation.
Couldn't you just "support it" buy asking the company to charge you more for it, so the rest of us don't need to get sucked into buying something we don't want?
I assure you they won't mind taking more dollars per unit instead of selling more units.
Eric Raymond stopped being relevant for me when he stole the Jargon File and published it for his own profit without compensating either those who contributed or redirecting a nickel to any open-source organizations.
After that, anything he has to say about communal efforts is the height of hypocrisy.
Very Interesting. I'd never seen the resolution of this.
If you go to the interview and search on "Hyatt" you come to the point where Hoff belittles Hyatt's patent, gives some lame implied demurrer about the design not being the implementation, blames the PTO for doing its job, and then admits that "royalties are being paid" to Hyatt, presumably by Intel and everyone else who constructs microcomputers.
It's pretty easy to believe that if Hyatt's patent had no merit, or limited scope, or even if it had a disqualifying claim, then Intel, Compaq, IBM, Dell, Apple, and all those other 8,000-ton gorillas would have fought it in court, successfully, and they would not be paying Hyatt anything nor citing his numbers on their plastic.
--Blair
"In your patent application for The Universe, it is not necessary to provide a working model."
If you're a musician, don't sign with a record label, sign with Napster. Now that they're going to be a pay service, they can pay you instead of the fat, oily jerk with the cigar. And since he's not taking his industrial size cut, they can offer you more money while selling your songs for a fraction of their Label price. You win, Napster wins, the fans win.
You say Napster doesn't develop and promote? Well, shoot. They'll just have to open an A&R office.
--Blair
"Business is the art of doing everything you can get away with. For money."
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't a contradiction of anything, it's just for the sake of getting it off my brain and onto yours. But that's your fault, as you shall see:
Say a pornographer places a billboard of a beautiful naked woman near the border between his agnostic nation with its liberal sex and speech laws, and a fanatically religious one with censorious blue laws and no freedom of speech. But he covers it up during the day and uncovers it only on cloudy, moonless nights.
Then say a person from the tyrannical nation starts showing up at the border on those nights with a flashlight and a pair of binoculars.
Who's breaking the law, here?
The pornographer has done nothing to cause the image to be transmitted across the border other than to place it where the viewer can, through his own actions and emissions across the border, cause the image to be reflected to him.
This is how internet works. All connections are client-server. Nothing gets done until the server receives that first SYN packet is sent by the client. After that, it can devolve to many kinds of virtual protocols, but that first connection has to be initiated by the client host.
Within a nation, laws that say things like "making such-and-such material available for viewing" would be relevant. But across international boundaries, you'd have to have it written into a treaty or it wouldn't mean a damned thing.
--Blair
"If the French banned websites about every culture that ever beat them up, all they'd be left with is www.babar.com..."
They didn't post this year's yet, but the problem set for last year's contest is all mathematical and crunchy.
Wimps.
Back in 19[fumfer] when I entered one of these things at [Mumble] U., they included some measure of ascii graphic manipulation. You'd figure that now there would be something to do with multidimensional graphical buffering snafus or distributed client-server p2p neural interface instead of these textual brain teasers...
And when I say "I" I mean "I", as in, when I walked into the room the morning of the contest I realized only then that the format was to be Teams Of Four and I had come alone. Plus, I'd been up all night newsing and hacking already. But maybe that was a blessing because, totally zoned and running on momentum, I tied for first. Three other teams, I outright beat. I won fitty bucks to spend at the campus bookstore. I forget what I bought with it. Probably beer and a sweatshirt.
--Blair
"In space, nobody can hear you brag."
...tender flaky golden cakey out-side...
wrap the inside in the outside what you get? darn tootin!
it's the FUCKING...
...APPLE...
NEWTOOOOOOOOOOON!
(Someone tell NCR they were beaten to it by a guy in a fig-suit.)
--Blair
It's not that hard. He took the perpendicular bisectors of the sides, and instead of giving them both the inverse and negative of the slope, he gave them just the inverse (so they're no longer perpendicular to the side, just a reflection about a slope=1 line through the midpoint).
They still pass through the midpoints of the sides they're reflecting. This also works if you use the negative slope, but you get a different point in the triangle (the negative-slope lines are a reflection about a horizontal line through the midpoint).
The well-known theorem goes something like "the perpendicular bisectors of all three sides of a triangle meet at a single point". Substitute "inverse-slope" or "negative-slope" for "perpendicular", and Hilbert's your uncle.
I don't know about Morley (except it's the brand the CSM tokes) and I don't know what it has to do with parallel lines and nine-point circles and pentacles and runes...
This kid's discovery is astonishingly simple. Like it's something that someone really should have found before. Like it's something that maybe several people have found before, and never bothered to publish because it was so simple it must have been discovered, published, and lost to the obscurity warehouse where all grade-school theorems go to die.
--Blair
"Insert something here about watery bints distributing swords."
I remember ten years ago reading about a crystal a cm or so on a side that was being used to hold enormous amounts of data holographically. Probably the LiNb they were talking about.
The problem of read-erase is easy to solve: use twice the amount of crystal and write one half with the bits you read from the other. It's still two orders of magnitude more bit-density than anything else. And it's not like there aren't a dozen other examples of dynamic RAM devices that needed some sort of refresh or constant cycling during access (bubble memory, bloch-line memory, mercury SAW memory, that thing the Canucks are doing storing data in the laser beams on their token ring...)
The demurrer about how to read materials with a laser? Please. CD, DVD, etc., etc. Throw in a micromirror array and a spindle, and you can do anything and watch TV on your wall.
Shrink, Schmink. If the reader system can't handle minor variations in process parameters, it was designed by monkeys. Or Ballmer. Same thing.
Nature kills me...they post a story about using multiple lasers to twiddle the orbitals in a supermaterial, and help you understand by reminding you (really, telling most of you for the first time) that varnish turns brown! Ya gotta love those mooks.
--Blair
"Has anyone ever actually seen a molecule of dihydrogen monoxide?"
Clay seems to think it's not.
Peer-to-peer as used for data sharing is still client-server, with an extra layer of directory serverness to permit discovery of the data server. Distributing the directory and data make the protocol and pattern richer, it doesn't change them into something they're not.
True P2P is something like AIM, which still involves a C-S directory layer, or its grand old ancestor, talk(1), which does not, but relies on the well-known-service paradigm to handshake the connection to life. You see here how hard it is to get the C-S out of any computational commo.
But that's all technical, and should make a difference only to someone interested in the internals. Perceptionally, his point holds. Computerized Client-Server P2P looks and feels like real P2P, and it changes the way people interact with the net and with each other on the net, to make it more like the way we interact with and in the real world.
--Blair
"Hay you kids! Get offa my lawn!"
Your CS professor was wrong:
radioactive decay random-number generator
atmospheric noise random-number generator
--Blair
"Nineteen billion bits can't be wrong!"
SVs at all altitudes are required to remain within control boxes a few km on a side.
The thing that decays orbits faster at LEO is that there is actually a little bit of atmosphere out there, constantly braking the orbit. But that's still pretty small.
What makes all the control really necessary is the difficulty of computing trajectories more than a couple of days out from feedback data that is only good to 3-6 significant figures. Today's corrective bump is next week's broken crosslink. And as long as you're going to have to do all that control, and make and break links semi-randomly, you might as well justify it by putting the birds right on the deck where you can get good signals and short propagation times.
Now if only they can find a real market.
--Blair
"Damn. I was gonna bid $26 million, but my browser hanged..."
Granted, people who run retail stores aren't supposed to be computer savvy, that's why they're supposed to hire people like us.
But instead they hire people like Joe Java who doesn't know a form from a transaction processing system.
Any retailer who uses the pricing info in the form instead of the SKU and an offering database is a luser of the highest water.
That's not an indication of a "bug" or a "glitch", it's malfeasant system design perpetrated by button-pushers pretending to be software engineers.
--Blair
"I gotta go see a website about a Lexus."
The story implies that the "codes" were stolen, but the code that was stolen was source, not encryption keys.
It implies that a lone hacker in a foreign land got through a high-security installation to steal sensitive data. A team of hackers broken into what was probably a semi-secured system and got something that's probably been superseded by code changes already.
It states that the source code stolen is Top Secret. OS/Comet is not Top Secret. It's not Secret. It's not even Confidential/NOFORN. It might be used by some installations for Top Secret stuff, but I doubt it, and if they did it would be like saying "swedish teen-aged janitor steals Top Secret floor buffer!" When did Reuters become the Weekly World News?
It implies that the script kiddies can use it to control satellites. Well, yes, but only if they happened to steal the OTP, too. And if they did it's really easy to confound them by replacing the OTP. They can't control anything.
Someone else here posted that Exigent had "just deployed" OS/Comet. Huh. Heh. I've seen the insides of Comet, years ago, and baby, there's stuff in there that's older than most people here.
Now, that's not to say that Exigent should blow them off. It's proprietary software, and they make millions per year off of it. Mostly by selling consulting support to wedge the elephant into whatever hatbox it's being bought to drive, but still.
--Blair
Cripes, I'm old.
It must be 20 years ago now that Carver Mead was talking about having a machine on your desk that would fabricate silicon integrated circuits for you.
Anyone who's seen a fab line knows it's not that simple. The closest anyone came was e-beam lithography, but those machines are still the size of your bathroom, and still only do some of the processes.
It's pretty interesting to think about printing chip layers like a multi-pass color laser printer.
But can you imagine the toner-cartridge spam you'll get when there are ten kinds of toner material needed, and some run ten bucks a pass?
--Blair
"Dammit! I left my TiVo folded up in my pocket and it went through the wash again..."
Try this:
Next time they try to get you to sign a non-compete clause, whip out one of your own for them to sign that says they will not hire anyone who does what you do for 12 months after you leave...
--Blair
(pardon the OT; he didn't post an email addr):
I'm looking for a good Gyro place in the South Bay area. If you know of one, please let me know.
There's a place called Ylassoo (sp?) in what looks like an old, tiny Taco Bell on Saratoga-Sunnyvale (not Saratoga) down near where it hits 85, in the south lobe of Cupertino, iirc.
I got an above-average souvlaki there. I don't know how their gyros are. But you're right. There's not enough Greek deli around here.
--Blair
"This is not a hate-crime for souvlaki transaction."
>> And we're not just talking about ordinary
>> crime. We're talking about hate crimes.
>
> I fail to see how you're any more dead if
> the man who kills you hates all people of
> your skin tone, not just you.
And his punishment can't make you any less dead, so why should we bother to punish him?
As any cop will tell you, the law is not meant to protect you as a person, but us as a society.
The purpose of designating some crimes as hate crimes is to dissuade terrorists; to demonize their beliefs; and to popularize the notion that hate is not ennobling or bonding, it's just plain bad.
Punishing someone only for murder when their real goal was to injure a community isn't enough. You have to punish all the crimes related to a criminal act or closure doesn't occur in that community. If closure doesn't occur, hate rebounds, society is disrupted, and the terrorists win.
--Blair
"Same deal with script kiddies..."
Another thing to keep in mind is that DARPA is a government agency, and as such has a mandate to diseminate their findings as far as possible within the federal government. I actually worked on a liason project with FEMA, where we were trying to help kick-start FEMA's web-based emergency-mitigation effort.
Did they do anything about it? Because today, when the quake hit Olympia, the net up there went blooey. Probably just overload, but even so, that's the kind of fault that fault-tolerance should have handled.
...or maybe I was emergency-managed way down in their QoS...
--Blair
"Will spend grant money for food."
Someone asked the Q in the subj, and Oztun repeats: "Hiura suggests...and the silicon cage would protect it from corruption."
Well, that's what he suggests. He doesn't give the mechanism. Protect it from what sort of corruption? Onanism?
Seriously, this is the point of basic research. Who knew that twisted ribbons of bubble walls in magnetic media could be used to create memories until someone poked around at it?
Was it Einstein or Pauli who said "the only real science is physics, the rest are stamp collecting"? In chemistry it seems you need a new theory for every five or six materials. The pharmaceutical industry fleshes this out, trying every combination of molecule and malady until they find an effect they can sell, and not really caring about why unless there's a patent they need to circumvent.
Likewise in materials for data storage. They found a toy that might be able to maintain a state. They need to find out if they can control the datum, if it is BIBO-stable to various kinds of perturbation, and if the entire memory apparatus can be built for a few bucks per gigabit. (Only geeks care what's under the hood, so the new technology has to compete on price/performance with the old one in some market, niche or broad).
--Blair
The article begins: "Ever since Mosaic, the computer industry has been obsessed with cryptography.".
Uh-huh. That long. Wow.
Does someone want to tell these guys about World War II?
Ah, heck.
--Blair
"Next week: How to Patent Chisambop."
1. Read Slashdot.com a lot.
2. Wait for safeWeb.Com banner ad at top of Slashdot.com.
3. Click safeWeb.Com banner ad at Slashdot.com.
4. Browse around, or enter "slashdot.com" in safeWeb.com Go box.
5. Click on Configure button.
6. Check "Block pop-up windows" under Miscellaneous, and click on "set these options permanently".
7. Bookmark slashdot in safeweb window.
8. From now on, use bookmark to get to slashdot. (You may have to log in again. Poor baby.)
9. Bliss out.
--Blair
This is the sort of story that should be turned into a mass mailing to your local and national news outlets.
Here's a few addresses:
letters@nytimes.com
letters@sjmercury.com
dmnweb.dallasnews.com/letters
AP Bureaus by State
(I get a kick out of their triple-bank rolodex logo. Someone needs to add one of those to Aqua.)
--Blair
I think the distinction you seek is "those humans who are really damn tired of breathing in smoke they can't control" versus "inconsiderate smokers". This latter group does not appear to include you, which is wonderful. How nice it would be if other smokers were as thoughtful as you are.
Unfortunately, this can backfire. In places such as poker rooms, smokers often go to great lengths to keep their neighbors from getting smoke in their faces. They generally hold the cigarette down and behind them when they aren't actively dragging on it. That helps the people to their left and right. And almost always puts it right next to the three people sitting at the table behind them, with nowhere to go but up and into their seats.
There's nothing more noxious than the smoke coming directly from a cigarette three feet away. Most smokers I've discussed it with refuse to remain in that situation. Almost none would hold the cigarette so that it goes directly into their eyes and nose. And if you're on the end of a table with a smoker next to you and two at the table behind you, just get out the cell phone and schedule a chest x-ray.
A poker room is an extreme situation, but you would be amazed how many people notice and enjoy when a whole table and the tables surrounding it are free of smokers.
And then there's the guy who goes to his car to smoke and comes back into the office with a lungful and smelling like he'd bathed in half-charred cats. The diffusion constant of the stink of smoke must be some sort of p-chem record. Even in a stiff wind it seems to be able to propagate omnidirectionally.
And add "downstairs" to the "across the hall and two doors down" effect. Many buildings are designed to expand and contract, which means air gaps in the floors that allow smoke to go up. One man's ceiling is another man's seive.
So basically, it's nice that someone tries to be considerate, but the physics of smoke don't allow you ever to be considerate enough in the vicinity of other people. Which is why laws are being changed to take proximity completely out of the equation.
--Blair
Couldn't you just "support it" buy asking the company to charge you more for it, so the rest of us don't need to get sucked into buying something we don't want?
I assure you they won't mind taking more dollars per unit instead of selling more units.
--Blair
Eric Raymond stopped being relevant for me when he stole the Jargon File and published it for his own profit without compensating either those who contributed or redirecting a nickel to any open-source organizations.
After that, anything he has to say about communal efforts is the height of hypocrisy.
--Blair
It's already begun.
Window kits and light kits are being sold by one of this confab's few advertisers.
You can always put a hot, silicone-overclocked babe on your screen with far too few mouse clicks. (If I need to post a URL for that...)
How you accessorize your hog is up to you.
--Blair
"Any color you want, as long as it's paisley."
Very Interesting. I'd never seen the resolution of this.
If you go to the interview and search on "Hyatt" you come to the point where Hoff belittles Hyatt's patent, gives some lame implied demurrer about the design not being the implementation, blames the PTO for doing its job, and then admits that "royalties are being paid" to Hyatt, presumably by Intel and everyone else who constructs microcomputers.
It's pretty easy to believe that if Hyatt's patent had no merit, or limited scope, or even if it had a disqualifying claim, then Intel, Compaq, IBM, Dell, Apple, and all those other 8,000-ton gorillas would have fought it in court, successfully, and they would not be paying Hyatt anything nor citing his numbers on their plastic.
--Blair
"In your patent application for The Universe, it is not necessary to provide a working model."
If you're a musician, don't sign with a record label, sign with Napster . Now that they're going to be a pay service, they can pay you instead of the fat, oily jerk with the cigar. And since he's not taking his industrial size cut, they can offer you more money while selling your songs for a fraction of their Label price. You win, Napster wins, the fans win.
You say Napster doesn't develop and promote? Well, shoot. They'll just have to open an A&R office.
--Blair
"Business is the art of doing everything you can get away with. For money."