...drink an 80 oz coke everyday and see how long it takes before you are shooting up insulin twice a day...
Excuse me? I thought only type 1, juvenile onset diabetes sufferers, took insulin injections? I thought type 2, adult onset diabetes sufferers were supposed to control their blood sugar through diet and exercise.
I understood that many native communities were struck by epidemics of obesity and adult onset diabetes when they shifted to the same diet of junk food as the rest of us, but that when the sufferers lost weight, through a healthy diet and exercise, their diabetes disappeared.
Repeating my main point -- a bad diet can help you acquire diabetes as an adult, but you won't "shoot up" insulin.
If the speed of light was close to infinity, immediately after the Big Bang...
If the very early Universe, when all the matter and energy could be contained in a microdot, was such an exotic place that the speed of light approached infinity -- then what happened to the speed of sound?
Okay, maybe it is a dumb sounding question. But it is one I have been curious about.
Or the choice to release a movie in a foreign market dubbed...
Let me add a somewhat related anecdote about dubbing to the mix. If you speak the language a film or TV show is being dubbed into, it is really important that you do your best to do the dubbing yourself.
Candace Bergin, probably best known for playing the title character on the TV show Murphy Brown, was, for several years, the spokesperson for the Sprint long distance service. Bergin was married, for many years, to the late Louis Malle, a well-known French film director. She spent much of that time in France, and is perfectly comfortable speaking French. So, when it came time to make the Sprint commercials, she was to do some extra takes, in French, to be shown in the Province of Quebec.
Those ads, where Bergin spoke French, had to be yanked.
Murphy Brown had been dubbed into French for broadcast into Quebec for years. And, for all that time, the same actress had been dubbing "Murphy's" voice. Francophone listeners in Quebec found Bergin's real voice jarring. I believe the actress who dubbed her Murphy character had to be called in to dub the Sprint commercials, because the Francophone listeners knew what Bergin really sounded like.
Could O'Reilly sue you if you didn't read the.NET section of their new regular expression book, simply because you own't use it? Can the movie studio sue you for fast forwarding during a movie? Or pausing it?
A related question was discussed a few months ago. The CEO of Turner Broadcasting gave an interview where he argued that skipping over commercials was theft. Even his acceptance of using the commercial break to go to the washroom was very grudging. Here is a quote from the 2600 commentary:
When asked if he considers people who go to the bathroom during a commercial to be thieves, he responded: "I guess there's a certain amount of tolerance for going to the bathroom. But if you formalize it and you create a device [like Tivo] that skips certain second increments, you've got that only for one reason, unless you go to the bathroom for 30 seconds. They've done that just to make it easy for someone to skip a commercial."
Note, this clown seems to have been completely serious. You have to pay to read the original interview from Cableworld now, but my recollection was that even letting your attention lapse during the commercials raised his ire.
... then why don't movie makers... themselves... re-release the movies in the way that the audience wants to see them?"
You mean the way Stanley Kubrick did with Eyes Wide Shut? There is a long orgy scene in EWS, that American censors said would have to go, because it was too explicit. In the version shown in American obstructions were digitally drawn in to hide the, um, "action".
But as to the deeper question, "why don't artists just give people what they want?" I am going to translate that to "why don't artists just give people what they are comfortable with, what won't challenge them?"
Well, many film-makers, writers, musicians, entertainers do exactly that. But there are great artists, like Kubrick, who feel they have a point of view that it is important to express. They think that they have an idea that it is important to present to the public even if it isn't completely comfortable at first.
Is this a good thing? It depends how you feel about cultural and social change. American writer Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a book called Uncle Tom's Cabin. I believe the term "Uncle Tom" has a cultural meaning nowadays that it acquired in the last couple of generations. I believe that scholars such as those whose article you can read in the link I have pointed to, contend that UTC was an uncomfortable read for many, when it was published, because it put a human face on the effects of slavery for white American readers. So, yeah, I believe being open to letting artist's challenge our accepted views of things is worthwhile.
This link describes how a plaster cast of Michelangelo's famous statue of an unclothed adolescent David, given to Queen Victoria, promptly had plaster fig leaves commissioned to cover David's privates.
So this kind of thing was done in the days before digital technology.
The basic point I was making was that some people have a way of overanalyzing the shit out of any movie until they don't like it anymore.
Set the way back machine
to 1983. Superman 3 was in the movie theatres. And there was considerable discussion of it failings on USENET. Devoted fans were criticizing this movie left, right and centre. "C'mon, there is no way Richard Pryor's character could learn enough about computers in a prison rehabilitation program to take over the entire world." Mercifully, I have forgotten the other criticisms.
I liked it too. But I have some beefs with it. In Space Seed Khan was merely the smartest or strongest of the genetically enhanced refugees. His compatriots should also have been supermen. But in the film they were all non-entities.
The brain eating worms were a low point too.
Kirk jr was irritating.
And while I am at it the McGuffin, the "genesis machine" was pretty bogus.
I liked that Spock died. I saw the film at a Saturday Matinee, in a theatre filled with teenage boys. I heard a moan of distress as the kids figured out Spock was really going to die. I heard a murmur sweep through the theatre. "Spock can't die! Spock can't die!"
I chortled. "Grow up kids. Live with it. It is like real life." I honoured the film for flouting the convention that a major character couldn't die.
Well, it turns out the kids were right, and I was wrong. It turned out Spock couldn't die.
The first Star Trek movie: "Star Trek: the Motionless Picture" cost $35,000,000. This was expensive for films back then. My understanding was that it was a financial disaster. So Star Trek 2 was made on the cheap. My recollection was that, at the time ST:TMP was said to have cost $48,000,000, and that ST:TWOK cost just $6,000,000. But the imdb says $11,000,000.
I am going to put a spoiler in a followup article...
Re:Check out Ivan Illich's "Silence as a Commons"
on
Reclaiming the Commons
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· Score: 2
In this 1983 essay Illich suggested a property of the commons. We are unaware of our traditional rights, they are so omnipresent, that we are unaware of them until after they are removed from us. This essay was originally delivered as a Speech at a conference in Japan. It makes the first half dozen paragraphs hard slogging. But skim over them to the last half of the essay, which, I suspect, you will find profoundly interesting.
The title of this essay comes from a story Illich tells of his arrival on a small, quiet island off the Dalmation coast as a your child.
On the same boat on which I arrived in 1926, the first loudspeaker was landed on the island. Few people there had ever heard of such a thing. Up to that day, all men and women had spoken with more or less equally powerful voices. Henceforth this would change. Henceforth the access to the microphone would determine whose voice shall be magnified. Silence now ceased to be in the commons; it became a resource for which loudspeakers compete.
Bogs, piles of manure, improperly aerated compost piles generate methane. It is a byproduct of anaerobic bacteria. Since it is a more potent greenhouse gas it would be in our interests to aerate bogs, manure piles, and compost piles. Global warming will speed up the biological activity in said bogs, etc.
CBC Radio had a reporter whose job was to search for funny or
interesting Y2K stories. One story he reported on was how the Y2K bug had ruined the hottest date of the Millenium.
Apparently this popular young singer named Britney Spears was interviewed online on AOL. One of her young fans asked her what plans she had for New Years Eve. Ms Spears replied she had to stay home, because her mom was worried about how Planes would crash from the sky, and how elevators would stop working...
Not that related but here is a funny April fools y2k spoof that I am afraid I fell for hook line and sinker when it was reprinted in Risks on April 15th.
My favourite Y2K story was published in Risks 17.79. Unfortunately, the version that made the archives seems to have been edited for space, and it took all the juice out of it.
In the original, our hero worked for some big outfit.
He was hearing of some big rumble on the executive floor.
He gets called in, there are slumping figures, and the big brains on the executive floor are stumped! They have tried everything! They have had all their staff scouring the files looking for missing account files, or mis-filed orders.
Finally, in the interests of completeness, someone decides to call in an IT guy to look at the program that produces the summary of expected income.
Well, he looks at it. It reaches its summary of projected income by adding up all the expected payments scheduled over the next 1000 working days, and dividing by 1000. In early 1996 1000 working days reached into the year 2000.
His solution? He changed the program so it summed the expected income over the next 500 working days, and divided by 500, on the theory that in 500 working days it would be someone else's problem.
Dumb question. How does a 12-gauge shotgun compare with other
shotguns? I used google to look up some web-sites. I gather
that 16 gauge and other gauges, have smaller diameter barrels.
I also read that there are various kinds or ammunition. "00",
"buckshot", and according to this gun enthusiast's web-site, odd specialty ammunition, that fires bean-bags or incendiary charges. But I would welcome slashdot readers who know about
this stuff to explain more fully what ammunition loads a shotgun
weilding robot should use.
I saw a show on TV about bomb-defusing robots, like the packbot,
but a bit bigger. The show explained that they used to mount
a shotgun, intended to blow apart the fuse mechanism of bombs.
But these are replaced by these high powered squirt guns.
They disrupt the fuse mechanism with a high-pressure, supersonic
slug of water. This is less likely to set off the fuse than
a shotgun blast. The squirt gun fired with a single boom,
like a shotgun. It would be hard for a casual observer to
distinguish it from a shotgun.
Probably only lethal at extremely close range.
I'm sorry, but I really can't let you do that Dave
on
Robots Go Spelunking
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· Score: 2
Local supernovae and other threats?
on
A Rock Moves In Space
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· Score: 3, Interesting
A lot of evidence points to asteroid impact likely being the biggest actual threat to mankind
Oh come on, what for evidence? Compared to other threats?
Lots of civilization ending threats face us. Race ending threats face us. Life on Earth ending threats face us. For most of them the odds are basically impossible to calculate. Will we end civilization? Render the human race extinct? Render the Earth unfit for anything but the most primitve life through poisoning the Earth with our waste? It is incalculable, because it depends on making a subjective judgement of whether we can learn to be wise, instead of clever. We are clever enough to build things that could kill us as a side-effect. Are we wise enough not to? That is incalculable.
Astronomical disasters are ones about which we can make reasonable, defensible judgements, and start to enter into actuarial calculations.
...I say there are dozens dangers far more likely... and additionally asteroids is not the only astronomical accident that may happen, there are far more, just not spectaluar enough to make movies from. How about a supernova in our quater of the galaxy? We will be ripped away.
Yes, a close enough Supernova burst could destroy civilization. Slashdot has discussed this recently, and again here. 160 to 200 light years was suggested to be the distance beyond which civilization would be safe from a supernova. NASA's picture of the day site has half a dozen articles about eta carinae, a large variable star that they state is a good candidate for the next supernova in our neck of the woods. It is well beyond that 200 ly limit.
Space rubble less dangerous than one big rock?
on
A Rock Moves In Space
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· Score: 2
Most asteroids that they say will crumble in the atmosphere are about 200 meters in diameter, this one is 10x wider.
I have read that the Tunguska hit is imagined to have been 50-60 metres in diameter, air-burst at a height of 8 km, releasing energy equivalent to a 10 megaton H-bomb. I read that it blew down and ignited 1000 square kilometres of Siberian forest. So clearly blowing apart in the atmosphere doesn't keep a strike from being devastating.
Kinetic energy is one half mass times velocity squared. So a rock or an iceberg 200 metres in diameter will release 64 times as much energy as one 50 metres in diameter.
I have a couple of questions.
A big rock that strikes an ocean can produce a wave that will devastate coastal cities an ocean away. How much smaller is the wave if it blows apart before striking the ocean?
It now seems that a lot of asteroids, and maybe comets, are not solid rocks, with a measure of structural integrity. It now seems that many asteroids more closely resemble very loosely bound piles of gravel. Tidal forces ripped apart Shoemaker-Levy 9.
So, if an asteroid that is a big pile of rubble is speeding towards Earth, at what point does tidal forces overpower its very loose gravity so it fails to hold together? If none of the fragments strike solid ground it will throw up relatively little dust -- which could otherwise cloak the earth in a cloud that brings us years of endless winter. How many deaths would even a year of total crop failures cause? Hundreds of millions? Billions?
Those of us old enough to watch broadcast TV over the air will remember how lightning disrupted the broadcast. Nuclear weapons also generate an electro-magnetic pulse (aka EMP). It is a stronger one, strong enough that our electrical power grid into a huge antennae, receiving enough energy to turn all our electronic devices into junk.
Am I wrong to believe a rock that air-burst that releases the equivalent of kilotons bombs would generate an electro-magnetic pulse, just like a bomb? 8 kilometres, that is about the height an airliner flies at. What is the distance of your horizon at 8 kilometres? A hundred kilometres? Hundreds of kilometres?
Some frequencies of radio can be heard at long distance. The radio waves are reflected off layers in the upper atmosphere. Can light at those frequencies carry enough energy to ruin electronics over the horizon?
Would the EMP from a 1200 metre rock generate enough EMP to ruin electronics around the Earth?
Re:where do they get these numbers??
on
WarTalking Arrest
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· Score: 2
Hey, dumbass, he did it in front of a court official
No, he did not perform the demonstration for Charles Bacarisse, who, is the closest thing to a Court official in this story. He performed the demonstration for Jennings the head of the County's Technology department.
Did Jennings have the authority to order Bacarisse to close down or secure his network, because it was putting the rest of the County's systems at risk? I suspect he did not. Or why wouldn't he have done so? Is it possible Jennings agreed to Puffer's demonstration in order to win a turf war with Bacarisse?
At first I thought they were being a bit harsh until I took a closer look at the dates. He's accused of breaking into the network on the 8th, but not reporting it until the 18th.
I read the July 24th Houston Chronicle article and the March 21st article too. The Cheif County Clerk seems to be saying that one (1) pornographic picture found on one (1) of his department's poorly secured computers was the sole damage found. He claims it cost $5,000 to fix the damage he accuses Puffer (the whistleblower) of causing.
With a network as poorly secured as his practically anyone with a wifi card could have uploaded that picture.
If any repercussions should come anyone's way over this incident I don't understand why the first candidate isn't Charles Bacarisse, the County's District Clerk. Bacarisse claims that none of the computers under his administration could have been seriously damaged by the penetration of war-drivers. Okay, but am I mis-reading the Chronicles quotes from him? Doesn't he seem to have been completely oblivious to the vulnerability his insecure testing was opening to the rest of the computers on the County's system?
The lesson seems to be that no matter how well intentioned you are, the only safe way to report a security vulnerability is if you can find a way to do so anonymously.
Slashdot Mirror
Excuse me? I thought only type 1, juvenile onset diabetes sufferers, took insulin injections? I thought type 2, adult onset diabetes sufferers were supposed to control their blood sugar through diet and exercise.
I understood that many native communities were struck by epidemics of obesity and adult onset diabetes when they shifted to the same diet of junk food as the rest of us, but that when the sufferers lost weight, through a healthy diet and exercise, their diabetes disappeared.
Repeating my main point -- a bad diet can help you acquire diabetes as an adult, but you won't "shoot up" insulin.
If the very early Universe, when all the matter and energy could be contained in a microdot, was such an exotic place that the speed of light approached infinity -- then what happened to the speed of sound?
Okay, maybe it is a dumb sounding question. But it is one I have been curious about.
Let me add a somewhat related anecdote about dubbing to the mix. If you speak the language a film or TV show is being dubbed into, it is really important that you do your best to do the dubbing yourself.
Candace Bergin, probably best known for playing the title character on the TV show Murphy Brown, was, for several years, the spokesperson for the Sprint long distance service. Bergin was married, for many years, to the late Louis Malle, a well-known French film director. She spent much of that time in France, and is perfectly comfortable speaking French. So, when it came time to make the Sprint commercials, she was to do some extra takes, in French, to be shown in the Province of Quebec.
Those ads, where Bergin spoke French, had to be yanked.
Murphy Brown had been dubbed into French for broadcast into Quebec for years. And, for all that time, the same actress had been dubbing "Murphy's" voice. Francophone listeners in Quebec found Bergin's real voice jarring. I believe the actress who dubbed her Murphy character had to be called in to dub the Sprint commercials, because the Francophone listeners knew what Bergin really sounded like.
A related question was discussed a few months ago. The CEO of Turner Broadcasting gave an interview where he argued that skipping over commercials was theft. Even his acceptance of using the commercial break to go to the washroom was very grudging. Here is a quote from the 2600 commentary:
Note, this clown seems to have been completely serious. You have to pay to read the original interview from Cableworld now, but my recollection was that even letting your attention lapse during the commercials raised his ire.
Do you really want to know? The imdb.com is your friend. Movies have a page listing their alternate version. Lord of the Rings, Close Encounters of the 3rd kind, Star Wars, ET: The extraterrestrial. And finally, how about a good movie, like Bladerunner?
You mean the way Stanley Kubrick did with Eyes Wide Shut? There is a long orgy scene in EWS, that American censors said would have to go, because it was too explicit. In the version shown in American obstructions were digitally drawn in to hide the, um, "action".
But as to the deeper question, "why don't artists just give people what they want?" I am going to translate that to "why don't artists just give people what they are comfortable with, what won't challenge them?"
Well, many film-makers, writers, musicians, entertainers do exactly that. But there are great artists, like Kubrick, who feel they have a point of view that it is important to express. They think that they have an idea that it is important to present to the public even if it isn't completely comfortable at first.
Is this a good thing? It depends how you feel about cultural and social change. American writer Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a book called Uncle Tom's Cabin. I believe the term "Uncle Tom" has a cultural meaning nowadays that it acquired in the last couple of generations. I believe that scholars such as those whose article you can read in the link I have pointed to, contend that UTC was an uncomfortable read for many, when it was published, because it put a human face on the effects of slavery for white American readers. So, yeah, I believe being open to letting artist's challenge our accepted views of things is worthwhile.
So this kind of thing was done in the days before digital technology.
Precisely. 800x600 is more than 6 times as many pixels as the 320 x 240 found on similarly sized PDAs.
Set the way back machine to 1983. Superman 3 was in the movie theatres. And there was considerable discussion of it failings on USENET. Devoted fans were criticizing this movie left, right and centre. "C'mon, there is no way Richard Pryor's character could learn enough about computers in a prison rehabilitation program to take over the entire world." Mercifully, I have forgotten the other criticisms.
One wise guy wrote:
The brain eating worms were a low point too.
Kirk jr was irritating.
And while I am at it the McGuffin, the "genesis machine" was pretty bogus.
Wait a second, did I say I liked this film :-)?
I liked that Spock died. I saw the film at a Saturday Matinee, in a theatre filled with teenage boys. I heard a moan of distress as the kids figured out Spock was really going to die. I heard a murmur sweep through the theatre. "Spock can't die! Spock can't die!"
I chortled. "Grow up kids. Live with it. It is like real life." I honoured the film for flouting the convention that a major character couldn't die.
Well, it turns out the kids were right, and I was wrong. It turned out Spock couldn't die.
I am going to put a spoiler in a followup article...
The title of this essay comes from a story Illich tells of his arrival on a small, quiet island off the Dalmation coast as a your child.
I got a SPAM from snapstream, about half an hour ago, announcing a 24 hour sale, aimed at slashdot readers. Grrr.
Bogs, piles of manure, improperly aerated compost piles generate methane. It is a byproduct of anaerobic bacteria. Since it is a more potent greenhouse gas it would be in our interests to aerate bogs, manure piles, and compost piles. Global warming will speed up the biological activity in said bogs, etc.
Apparently this popular young singer named Britney Spears was interviewed online on AOL. One of her young fans asked her what plans she had for New Years Eve. Ms Spears replied she had to stay home, because her mom was worried about how Planes would crash from the sky, and how elevators would stop working...
Not that related but here is a funny April fools y2k spoof that I am afraid I fell for hook line and sinker when it was reprinted in Risks on April 15th.
In the original, our hero worked for some big outfit.
He was hearing of some big rumble on the executive floor.
He gets called in, there are slumping figures, and the big brains on the executive floor are stumped! They have tried everything! They have had all their staff scouring the files looking for missing account files, or mis-filed orders.
Finally, in the interests of completeness, someone decides to call in an IT guy to look at the program that produces the summary of expected income.
Well, he looks at it. It reaches its summary of projected income by adding up all the expected payments scheduled over the next 1000 working days, and dividing by 1000. In early 1996 1000 working days reached into the year 2000.
His solution? He changed the program so it summed the expected income over the next 500 working days, and divided by 500, on the theory that in 500 working days it would be someone else's problem.
I saw a show on TV about bomb-defusing robots, like the packbot, but a bit bigger. The show explained that they used to mount a shotgun, intended to blow apart the fuse mechanism of bombs. But these are replaced by these high powered squirt guns. They disrupt the fuse mechanism with a high-pressure, supersonic slug of water. This is less likely to set off the fuse than a shotgun blast. The squirt gun fired with a single boom, like a shotgun. It would be hard for a casual observer to distinguish it from a shotgun.
Probably only lethal at extremely close range.
What happens when it is time to turn it off
Lots of civilization ending threats face us. Race ending threats face us. Life on Earth ending threats face us. For most of them the odds are basically impossible to calculate. Will we end civilization? Render the human race extinct? Render the Earth unfit for anything but the most primitve life through poisoning the Earth with our waste? It is incalculable, because it depends on making a subjective judgement of whether we can learn to be wise, instead of clever. We are clever enough to build things that could kill us as a side-effect. Are we wise enough not to? That is incalculable.
Astronomical disasters are ones about which we can make reasonable, defensible judgements, and start to enter into actuarial calculations.
Yes, a close enough Supernova burst could destroy civilization. Slashdot has discussed this recently, and again here. 160 to 200 light years was suggested to be the distance beyond which civilization would be safe from a supernova. NASA's picture of the day site has half a dozen articles about eta carinae, a large variable star that they state is a good candidate for the next supernova in our neck of the woods. It is well beyond that 200 ly limit.
I have read that the Tunguska hit is imagined to have been 50-60 metres in diameter, air-burst at a height of 8 km, releasing energy equivalent to a 10 megaton H-bomb. I read that it blew down and ignited 1000 square kilometres of Siberian forest. So clearly blowing apart in the atmosphere doesn't keep a strike from being devastating.
Kinetic energy is one half mass times velocity squared. So a rock or an iceberg 200 metres in diameter will release 64 times as much energy as one 50 metres in diameter.
I have a couple of questions.
A big rock that strikes an ocean can produce a wave that will devastate coastal cities an ocean away. How much smaller is the wave if it blows apart before striking the ocean?
It now seems that a lot of asteroids, and maybe comets, are not solid rocks, with a measure of structural integrity. It now seems that many asteroids more closely resemble very loosely bound piles of gravel. Tidal forces ripped apart Shoemaker-Levy 9.
So, if an asteroid that is a big pile of rubble is speeding towards Earth, at what point does tidal forces overpower its very loose gravity so it fails to hold together? If none of the fragments strike solid ground it will throw up relatively little dust -- which could otherwise cloak the earth in a cloud that brings us years of endless winter. How many deaths would even a year of total crop failures cause? Hundreds of millions? Billions?
Those of us old enough to watch broadcast TV over the air will remember how lightning disrupted the broadcast. Nuclear weapons also generate an electro-magnetic pulse (aka EMP). It is a stronger one, strong enough that our electrical power grid into a huge antennae, receiving enough energy to turn all our electronic devices into junk.
Am I wrong to believe a rock that air-burst that releases the equivalent of kilotons bombs would generate an electro-magnetic pulse, just like a bomb? 8 kilometres, that is about the height an airliner flies at. What is the distance of your horizon at 8 kilometres? A hundred kilometres? Hundreds of kilometres?
Some frequencies of radio can be heard at long distance. The radio waves are reflected off layers in the upper atmosphere. Can light at those frequencies carry enough energy to ruin electronics over the horizon?
Would the EMP from a 1200 metre rock generate enough EMP to ruin electronics around the Earth?
No, he did not perform the demonstration for Charles Bacarisse, who, is the closest thing to a Court official in this story. He performed the demonstration for Jennings the head of the County's Technology department.
Did Jennings have the authority to order Bacarisse to close down or secure his network, because it was putting the rest of the County's systems at risk? I suspect he did not. Or why wouldn't he have done so? Is it possible Jennings agreed to Puffer's demonstration in order to win a turf war with Bacarisse?
I read the July 24th Houston Chronicle article and the March 21st article too. The Cheif County Clerk seems to be saying that one (1) pornographic picture found on one (1) of his department's poorly secured computers was the sole damage found. He claims it cost $5,000 to fix the damage he accuses Puffer (the whistleblower) of causing.
With a network as poorly secured as his practically anyone with a wifi card could have uploaded that picture.
If any repercussions should come anyone's way over this incident I don't understand why the first candidate isn't Charles Bacarisse, the County's District Clerk. Bacarisse claims that none of the computers under his administration could have been seriously damaged by the penetration of war-drivers. Okay, but am I mis-reading the Chronicles quotes from him? Doesn't he seem to have been completely oblivious to the vulnerability his insecure testing was opening to the rest of the computers on the County's system?
We have seen this before, with Randal Schwartz's ordeal at Intel. This comp.security article contains a contemporary account of his "crimes".
The lesson seems to be that no matter how well intentioned you are, the only safe way to report a security vulnerability is if you can find a way to do so anonymously.
This article explains, in detail, the difference between shell fragments and shrapnel.
I think it is worthwhile at this point to refer to the original history of the word "shrapnel".
The short version is that a Henry Shrapnel invented the style of antipersonnel projectile, filled with extra metal bits, that now bears his name.