RE: Sterotypes of what Hollywood Screenwriters are like (cocaine-snorting yes-men cranking out mindless drivel)."
Oh, I'm sorry, you're so right. They're all English majors, attempting the next version of Citizen Kane. WRONG. They're looking for proven formula of this month, and then to patch a few relatively original ideas
onto it.
Then there is the "Mark Twain factor".
Once you learn how to be one of the few people who is successful in your chosen field,
you may find that it stops being your dream job,
and has become just as boring and stultifying
as all those mundane jobs you couldn't dream of
ever doing.
In his autobiography, Sam Clemens described his
childhood dream of becoming a Mississipi River
Boat pilot. Young Clemens grew up next to the
dark, powerful, mysterious river. Being a River
Boat Pilot in those days was a very high prestige occupation. The navigable channel, and navigational dangers, were constantly changing in
those days. Pilots were hired for one passage
only. They were paid as much or more than the
boat's regular captains.
When they were on, they had tremendous responsibility -- but in short bursts.
Clemens wanted to become a River Boat pilot.
Clemens did learn how to become a River Boat
pilot.
And what did he find? He found that once he
learned how to read the surface of the river, once
he learned the meaning of the smooth "boils",
eddies and "snags", the river totally lost all
of its mystery and romance for him.
So he quit, and did something else.
His pen-name, "Mark Twain", is a remnant of his
love for the occupation of river boat piloting.
When the depth was uncertain a sailor would sit on
the bow, measuring the depth. "Mark Twain" is
a particular depth measurement.
This is a cautionary tale I tell to any young
person I meet who wants to become an artist or
musician.
I wondered about this. I figured that there was
always a strong element of comic relief in the
portrayal of the three original Lone Gunmen on
the X-files. They needed a "straight-man" -- someone who would ask questions, so the clever
parts could be explained. On the X-files Mulder and or Sculley filled this role. Hence Jimmy's role.
Yves Harlow is a more benevolent cancer man.
Personally, I didn't mind her character at all.
I thought the series had some very clever writing.
I particularly enjoyed clever bits, like the
episode with the super-genius chimps taking place
at the "Boulle Primate Research Center". French
author Pierre Boulle wrote a novel "Monkey Planet"
which was later the basis of the movie "Planet of the Apes". (Another book of his was the basis
for "Bridge over the River Kwai".)
I was looking forward to the rebroadcast of the
X-files episode that episode where the Lone
Gunmen first come
together.
I'm surprised NOBODY here has thought of this solution: use... to slow the asteroid and nudge it into the L1 zone of equal gravitational pull between the Earth and the Moon.
Diverting an asteroid or comet from a direct hit into a near miss would
require much less energy than matching its orbit
to our own.
Much, much less energy.
...anonymously contact some of the individuals whose information is being exposed. Sure, technically your breaking the law getting the information, but I imagine that a couple employees getting seriously pissed
about their personal information being wide open might solve the real problem pretty quickly.
Tempting, no doubt, but how would you keep
it anonymous? You are going to be on the
top of the list of suspects.
What if you contact a couple of employees
anonymously, and then you hear nothing?
There is no way you can seek followup without
tipping your hand.
The potential exists that those employees
had low enough ethical standards that they
didn't bring it to management's attention,
but instead exploited the security flaw to
fuck-up other employees. If they did this
I suspect you would be an accomplice.
OK, you decide to only give the info to
employees you know well enough to trust
not to do anything unethical with the knowledge
that the system is insecure? But if you know
them that well, presumably they know you well
enough to ruin your idea of keeping it anonymous.
But lets forget about the anonymous aspect.
If you have done work on-site, if they have
trusted you to work on-site, your possession
of personnel data does not prove their web-site
is insecure. If you
had physical access to their machines you could
have gained that information some other way.
You could, for instance, have purloined a backup
tape, copied it off-site, returned it the next
day, and perused your copy at your leisure.
Many a time my clients have come up with some Great Idea[tm]. My initial response is to agree with it, no matter how bad I know it is.
There is one big advantage to the humble
approach that coolgeek didn't mention.
Later I ask questions and present information,
each of these really being another slice with
the X-acto knife, until their Great Idea dies
the death of a thousand cuts.
Not only is the humble approach, where you
merely ask questions potentially more tactful
for the other party, it really pays off when it
turns out that you are the one who is mistaken.
If your questions
help them discover flaws in the "great idea"
you can both think of yourselves as smart
members of a team.
If it turns out that the confidence you felt
that their idea is all wrong is misplaced
and your response was tactful questioning you
don't look like an idiot. They may appreciate
the opportunity to show off how smart they were
to have thought it all through. They may think
of you as a brain, almost as smart as them,
to have found the same question to which they
figured out an answer.
And hey, you ended up learning something useful.
Being mistaken when you have shot off yout big
mouth, and acted like a know-it-all (been there,
done that) is a lot more embarrassing than
merely asking questions.
I can see that in a suburban area a shallow
trenching machine would be cheaper. But won't
older neighbourhoods have
more crowded shallow subsurface real
estate? Ideally you want your fibre buried
deeply enough it won't be dug up accidentally
by a crew digging for some other purpose.
And won't that shallow trench of yours require
repairing side-walks, roads, landscaping?
You need to take care to avoid existing tunnels, ductwork, cables, etc.
Precisely. Which is one reason it seems to me
a minature tunnel boring machine might make a
lot of sense -- namely, the subsurface real
estate of inner urban cores can contain surprises.
Ducts, cables that have lost reason for existing,
and have been forgotten.
You may not know where these older fixtures are,
but I suspect you know how deep you have to go
to avoid them.
I saw a documentary about the contstruction of
London's "Jubilee Line" -- a new addition to the
London England subway system. One of the things
that I particularly remember about its
construction is that to avoid bumping into
things they had to go very, very deep.
Finally, I wonder if present day technology
could provide
sensors you could mount in the business end of
the uTBM so that it isn't drilling blind?
The channel tunnel, some subways, some mines,
are dug with tunnel boring machines. Like in
"Total Recall" 8-). They come in various
sizes. So, if these old pneumatic tubes aren't
useable, or don't go where the fiber is needed,
what prevents some smart outfit from making a
tunnel boring machine that digs a tunnel just
big enough to run optical fibre?
Years ago, when I was a kid, I remember reading
about a linear accelerator somewhere, where they
kept a ferret on staff, which was trained to
run through the long tube, dragging a string, which was then used to tow cleaning gizmos,
to keep the tube dust-free.
Ferrets can run through really tiny holes.
They have been used to hunt pesky rodents,
and I suspect they could handle even NYC rats.
After a while the staff at the accelerator
doubled the size of the ferret staff, so the
ferret could have a mate.
Re:.com, vc, and S&L's -- the Bush connection
on
Hi-Tech Repo Man
·
· Score: 1
Forget Keating...
OK. I am a foreigner. Who is Keating?
he got the press and trial but the biggest of the s&l failures was Silverado... with Mr. Neil
Bush on the Board. That's the son of GHWBush and bro to Dubya for y'all a little slow on the draw.
Darn. I thought it was Dubya himself who was
caught. Still pretty shameful.
Actually, from what I gathered about the article, you'd have to probing about in their mDNA and their mother's mDNA to figure out that they weren't the same before you'd have a clue that anything was different. Their mDNA should be perfectly normal, it's just from a third "parent."
From what I gather, they had extra mitochondria
injected into their unfertilized egg. So the
resulting individual would have mitochondria with
differing mitochondrial DNA.
So, if an individual has mitochondria with
identical DNA, they are not from this experiment?
And if their mitochondria with differing chains
of DNA, would that imply they were the subject
of an experiment? If that is so, you wouldn't
have to check their mother.
There are a number of
known mitochondrial diseases, and there's no real
difference between transplanting a mitochondrion
to fix that and transplanting a kidney to fix kidney failure.
Would you care to describe a couple of them
for us? I am not asking you to challenge
you and start a fight. I'd really like to know.
fhwang (User #90412 Info) wrote:
I don't really know what I think about the ethics
of this kind of modification, but in the long
term I'd be concerned about diversity of the
species.
This was not cloning.
If I read this article properly, the
researchers took ova from women whose
infertility they suspected was caused by damaged
mitochondria, and injected working mitochondria
from healthy subjects.
So, the children born from this experiment
will inherit mitochondria from both their original
mother, and from the other host. Does that mean
they will have
twice the diversity, not half?
As another respondent pointed out, these defective
mitochondria couldn't cause complete infertility,
or the host mothers would never have been born.
The experimenters won't know whether the experiment restored normal fertility until the
children start raising their own families.
This seems sloppy to me.
I remember reading, at the time that Sneakers
came out, that the two films shared some of
the same creative people.
Sure enough, checking the internet movie database reveals two writers worked on both films.
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Lasker,+Lawrence
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Parkes,+Walter+F
These guys also collaborated on "True Believer",
which is a darn good film IMO, "Awakenings", another Mathew Broderick film, "Project X", and a TV
series, called "Ernie Dodd".
Parkes seems to have had a pretty strong career
as a producer, both before and since, and these
two films are the only two he has a writing
credit for. Note that he is one of the producers
of the upcoming movie "A.I.".
...I hope they remember the
basic principles the internet and computers were founded on.
Freedom......so that reminds me that
we wouldn't have all those posts if people weren't free.
Basically, freedom is the key to everythig. As someone famous
(Henry somebody?) said something like, "I may not like what
you have to say, but I guess you have to say it anyway even if
it kills me"
Um, that would be Voltaire, usually translated as "I may disagree
with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to
say it."
But my favourite paraphrase was uttered in a long-running thread, where one guy kept flogging
a herd of dead horses.
Somebody said, "Buddy, I may agree with
everything you've just said, but I will kill you if you say it again."
I'd say an informed populace who gives a darn is
one of the central requirements for a real
democracy.
If we in the first world live in such bastions of
democracy why are voter turnouts so low?
I have genuine sympathy for the original poster. I also have some skepticism about the number of hours to completion. Surely, with a real project being fifty hours from completion would put one in the bug-hunting, keep running it with the test suite dataset you developed phase of the project. If the original poster is really that close they could demonstrate a semi-working product.
I have genuine sympathy for the original poster.
Maybe I am a stupid, code-monkey, but I think they would have been best off to have owned up to have already put in a substantial amount of work on a similar project after hours as soon as the companies plans in this area where shared with him or her.
Some correspondents here write as if it is obvious that the original poster signed some kind of contract with a clause granting the employer all their code -- even after hours code -- since these clauses are so ubiquitous. Other respondents write as if it is unlikely he or she signed one, since they are so uncommon. It would be a big help here if the original poster could tell us whether they did or didn't.
There has been a paradigm shift in much of North America over the social acceptability of smoking.
The Steve Martin skit reflected something true. Smokers used to make, perhaps still make, token efforts to show concern. And non-smokers used to let them get away with. They would preserve the social fiction that smoking was just a minor annoyance. Steve Martin is a genius. He put his finger on something important. The smoker in his skit is not truly sincere.
The social fiction is that indulging the smoker is a mild inconvenience. Like indulging the musical taste of someone who likes a kind of music you don't like, who says, "oh, this is my favourite song, do you mind if I turn up the radio?"
In the case of the music, when the song is over there is no permanent harm done. In the case of the non-smoker, their hair smells, maybe it triggered their asthma. Some other asshole may come over, and start smoking without asking, on the premise, that the first guy is goind it.
Smoking is an ADDICTION. People who smoke are ADDICTS. It is very difficult for them to objectively see how deeply disturbing their ADDICTION is to those around them.
Twenty-five years ago most non-smokers did not challenge that fiction. If you broke the rules, if you gave an honest answer to the question, "do you mind if I smoke", you could expect shock and consternation. Sometimes even from other non-smokers.
Well, the balance has shifted. And about time too I would say. Except, for historical reasons, some places, like bars, remain hold-outs.
In some jurisdictions the reason why smoking is banned in bars is not to preserve the health of patrons like myself, who could try to seek out a deserted bar. In some jurisdictions smoking bans are intended to preserve the health of the bar-tenders and waiting staff. Nowadays it is seen as unacceptable that anyone should be forced to work under unsafe working conditions. Bars can be really smoky -- filled with more toxic smoke than all but the worst old-fashioned factory.
Let me address the tolerance question first. Why the HECK should I be tolerant? My favourite bar has a well ventilated non-smoking section, so I can go there, and not return home with my clothes and hair reeking of smoke -- except if it is busy, and I have to make a pit stop. On busy nights wading into the fog of smoke to make my pit stop is like a physical assault.
Yes, I don't like it. I _really_ don't like it. Why the heck should I be tolerant of it? Why the heck shouldn't I spell out in detail how disgusting and repugnant smoking is?
Yes, governments around the world are hooked on the taxes on Tobacco products. I believe that most of the retail price of smokes in the UK is some form of tax.
But you seem to be saying that since the government takes a cut you have somehow paid in advance for the right to make a big fat mess.
You will have to try a lot harder if you are going to convince me that you paid enough.
Smoking is very costly. You say that smokers pay for a third of the National Health System? Do you think that that means it is OK for British smokers to put the health of non-smokers at risk? Do you think that those taxes cover the full, real, social cost of smoking? Over and above the extra inroads smokers make on the NHS please add the extra inroads made to the health system from the effects of second hand smoke. Please add the social cost of orphaned children, whose parents died from smoking related diseases. Please add the social cost of the lost productivity when smokers poor health makes them call in sick. Please add the social cost of the lost productivity when smokers have to rush out to sneak a smoke. Then there are fires. Careless smoking causes fires. And it might seem trivial, but smoking is a dirty habit. It is costly to clean up cigarette butts, empty ashtrays, replace scorched floor tiles, windows and walls get a yellow stain.
Then there is the social cost of the unpleasantness factor. Who the heck gave you the right to set the cost of the revulsion being exposed to smoke engenders in me?
So if a K7 capable of 1000Mhz uses 49 watts at 1000Mhz, and a K7 only capable of 750Mhz uses
35 watts, don't you think the 1000Mhz part
would use 35 watts if it were underclocked
to 750Mhz?
Mr Katz, do you remember that it was only with
windows95 revision 2 that it would
go to the trouble of repairing the file system
after a crash. Ordinary consumers didn't know
this. Microsoft didn't warn them. In those days
when naive users asked me to do work on their
computers I routinely invoked scandisk (the closest thing windows has to fsck) -- and I would
routinely find dozens or even hundreds of unrepaired file-system errors.
This harmed consumers. This really harmed consumers. You have an O.S. that is as fragile
as a house of cards -- one that crashes all the
time, on practically a daily basis. And it fails
to repair its filesystem when it reboots. This
is a recipe for disaster. These disasters were
routine. Lost files. Lost directories. Consumers blamed themselves. They thought they
had been hit by viruses. But all they had been
hit by was microsoft's shameful quality.
Then there are the Microsoft Word email viruses,
like "I love you". These would not have been
possible except for some shamefully negligent -- or worse -- design decisions on microsoft's part.
Mr Katz's article addresses Microsoft's predatory pricing and trade practices. But I didn't
see it address the accusation that Microsoft includes undocumented features in its operating
system code in order to give microsoft applications unfair short-cuts not available to
third party developers.
Neither did Mr Katz article address the accusation
that Microsoft included booby-traps in its operating system code -- booby-traps that would
make competitors programs fail. It is well-known
that windows 3.1 was booby-trapped to fail if it
detected it was being invoked form DR DOS, not
MS DOS. Microsoft did settle their case with
the owners of DR DOS out of court -- for nine
figures. That is a pretty damning admission of
guilt I'd say. Bill did pass the reins to Ballmer
a couple of days later. Some have suggested that
this was one of the clauses of the secret
settlement.
Is this programming practice a typical one for
Microsoft? Yes, I am ready to believe it is.
When I heard that the source code for Windows 98
was fifty percent longer than that for Windows 95
I thought to myself, "what is that extra fifty
percent code bloat doing? W98 is not 50% better
than W95!" I suspected that much of that 50%
code bloat was due to booby-traps.
In particular it is important to be humble enough to be methodical, and check the simplest things first. I believe this is true for technicians,
motorcycle mechanics,
engineers, medical doctors, detectives and computer programmers. Maybe it is true for
Zen buddhists too.
My understanding is that almost all consumer grade surge protectors
is only good for one good surge. And then it will no longer provide
any surge protection, but it will provide power. When they no longer
provide surge protection, they should no longer provide power too.
I took apart the surge protector that had protected my mother's VCR
when a lightning strike had knocked out the VCRs of practically
everyone else on her rural road. Rather, I took it apart after
a second lightning strike left all the new replacement VCRs her
neighbours had bought alone, because they had learned there lessons,
and bought surge protectors to go along with them.
My mother's valiant $5 surge protector was one of those boxes that
you plug over top of a standard pair of wall outlets and provide
six receptacles instead of two. Except this one had a single MOV
and an LED inside. The surge had made the MOV explode, and it had
sprayed all over the inside of the box. And, of course, the LED
went out.
Really bad design, in my opinion. Since in the typical use of
something like this is it is behind whatever it had plugged into
it, the LED that shows it is still working isn't visible to
casual observation.
Slashdot Mirror
Then there is the "Mark Twain factor". Once you learn how to be one of the few people who is successful in your chosen field, you may find that it stops being your dream job, and has become just as boring and stultifying as all those mundane jobs you couldn't dream of ever doing.
In his autobiography, Sam Clemens described his childhood dream of becoming a Mississipi River Boat pilot. Young Clemens grew up next to the dark, powerful, mysterious river. Being a River Boat Pilot in those days was a very high prestige occupation. The navigable channel, and navigational dangers, were constantly changing in those days. Pilots were hired for one passage only. They were paid as much or more than the boat's regular captains.
When they were on, they had tremendous responsibility -- but in short bursts.
Clemens wanted to become a River Boat pilot. Clemens did learn how to become a River Boat pilot.
And what did he find? He found that once he learned how to read the surface of the river, once he learned the meaning of the smooth "boils", eddies and "snags", the river totally lost all of its mystery and romance for him.
So he quit, and did something else. His pen-name, "Mark Twain", is a remnant of his love for the occupation of river boat piloting. When the depth was uncertain a sailor would sit on the bow, measuring the depth. "Mark Twain" is a particular depth measurement.
This is a cautionary tale I tell to any young person I meet who wants to become an artist or musician.
Yves Harlow is a more benevolent cancer man. Personally, I didn't mind her character at all.
I thought the series had some very clever writing. I particularly enjoyed clever bits, like the episode with the super-genius chimps taking place at the "Boulle Primate Research Center". French author Pierre Boulle wrote a novel "Monkey Planet" which was later the basis of the movie "Planet of the Apes". (Another book of his was the basis for "Bridge over the River Kwai".)
I was looking forward to the rebroadcast of the X-files episode that episode where the Lone Gunmen first come together.
Diverting an asteroid or comet from a direct hit into a near miss would require much less energy than matching its orbit to our own. Much, much less energy.
I
Tempting, no doubt, but how would you keep it anonymous? You are going to be on the top of the list of suspects.
What if you contact a couple of employees anonymously, and then you hear nothing? There is no way you can seek followup without tipping your hand.
The potential exists that those employees had low enough ethical standards that they didn't bring it to management's attention, but instead exploited the security flaw to fuck-up other employees. If they did this I suspect you would be an accomplice.
OK, you decide to only give the info to employees you know well enough to trust not to do anything unethical with the knowledge that the system is insecure? But if you know them that well, presumably they know you well enough to ruin your idea of keeping it anonymous.
But lets forget about the anonymous aspect. If you have done work on-site, if they have trusted you to work on-site, your possession of personnel data does not prove their web-site is insecure. If you had physical access to their machines you could have gained that information some other way. You could, for instance, have purloined a backup tape, copied it off-site, returned it the next day, and perused your copy at your leisure.
There is one big advantage to the humble approach that coolgeek didn't mention.
Not only is the humble approach, where you merely ask questions potentially more tactful for the other party, it really pays off when it turns out that you are the one who is mistaken.If your questions help them discover flaws in the "great idea" you can both think of yourselves as smart members of a team. If it turns out that the confidence you felt that their idea is all wrong is misplaced and your response was tactful questioning you don't look like an idiot. They may appreciate the opportunity to show off how smart they were to have thought it all through. They may think of you as a brain, almost as smart as them, to have found the same question to which they figured out an answer.
And hey, you ended up learning something useful.
Being mistaken when you have shot off yout big mouth, and acted like a know-it-all (been there, done that) is a lot more embarrassing than merely asking questions.
I can see that in a suburban area a shallow trenching machine would be cheaper. But won't older neighbourhoods have more crowded shallow subsurface real estate? Ideally you want your fibre buried deeply enough it won't be dug up accidentally by a crew digging for some other purpose.
And won't that shallow trench of yours require repairing side-walks, roads, landscaping?
You need to take care to avoid existing tunnels, ductwork, cables, etc.
Precisely. Which is one reason it seems to me a minature tunnel boring machine might make a lot of sense -- namely, the subsurface real estate of inner urban cores can contain surprises. Ducts, cables that have lost reason for existing, and have been forgotten. You may not know where these older fixtures are, but I suspect you know how deep you have to go to avoid them.
I saw a documentary about the contstruction of London's "Jubilee Line" -- a new addition to the London England subway system. One of the things that I particularly remember about its construction is that to avoid bumping into things they had to go very, very deep.
Finally, I wonder if present day technology could provide sensors you could mount in the business end of the uTBM so that it isn't drilling blind?
The channel tunnel, some subways, some mines, are dug with tunnel boring machines. Like in "Total Recall" 8-). They come in various sizes. So, if these old pneumatic tubes aren't useable, or don't go where the fiber is needed, what prevents some smart outfit from making a tunnel boring machine that digs a tunnel just big enough to run optical fibre?
Ferrets can run through really tiny holes. They have been used to hunt pesky rodents, and I suspect they could handle even NYC rats.
After a while the staff at the accelerator doubled the size of the ferret staff, so the ferret could have a mate.
OK. I am a foreigner. Who is Keating?
Darn. I thought it was Dubya himself who was caught. Still pretty shameful.
From what I gather, they had extra mitochondria injected into their unfertilized egg. So the resulting individual would have mitochondria with differing mitochondrial DNA.
So, if an individual has mitochondria with identical DNA, they are not from this experiment? And if their mitochondria with differing chains of DNA, would that imply they were the subject of an experiment? If that is so, you wouldn't have to check their mother.
Would you care to describe a couple of them for us? I am not asking you to challenge you and start a fight. I'd really like to know.
This was not cloning. If I read this article properly, the researchers took ova from women whose infertility they suspected was caused by damaged mitochondria, and injected working mitochondria from healthy subjects.
So, the children born from this experiment will inherit mitochondria from both their original mother, and from the other host. Does that mean they will have twice the diversity, not half?
As another respondent pointed out, these defective mitochondria couldn't cause complete infertility, or the host mothers would never have been born. The experimenters won't know whether the experiment restored normal fertility until the children start raising their own families. This seems sloppy to me.
It is a porn site. It has nothing to do with computers.
Yes, NASA published pictures of Aurora on Jupiter in Dec 2000. NASA published earlier photos of Jovian aurora on Jan 1998, Jun 1997 and Oct 1996.
Sure enough, checking the internet movie database reveals two writers worked on both films. http://us.imdb.com/Name?Lasker,+Lawrence http://us.imdb.com/Name?Parkes,+Walter+F These guys also collaborated on "True Believer", which is a darn good film IMO, "Awakenings", another Mathew Broderick film, "Project X", and a TV series, called "Ernie Dodd".
Parkes seems to have had a pretty strong career as a producer, both before and since, and these two films are the only two he has a writing credit for. Note that he is one of the producers of the upcoming movie "A.I.".
Um, that would be Voltaire, usually translated as "I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
But my favourite paraphrase was uttered in a long-running thread, where one guy kept flogging a herd of dead horses. Somebody said, "Buddy, I may agree with everything you've just said, but I will kill you if you say it again."
I'd say an informed populace who gives a darn is one of the central requirements for a real democracy. If we in the first world live in such bastions of democracy why are voter turnouts so low?
Maybe you meant to say they should negotiate an immediate bonus?
I have genuine sympathy for the original poster. Maybe I am a stupid, code-monkey, but I think they would have been best off to have owned up to have already put in a substantial amount of work on a similar project after hours as soon as the companies plans in this area where shared with him or her.
Some correspondents here write as if it is obvious that the original poster signed some kind of contract with a clause granting the employer all their code -- even after hours code -- since these clauses are so ubiquitous. Other respondents write as if it is unlikely he or she signed one, since they are so uncommon. It would be a big help here if the original poster could tell us whether they did or didn't.
Good luck.
The Steve Martin skit reflected something true. Smokers used to make, perhaps still make, token efforts to show concern. And non-smokers used to let them get away with. They would preserve the social fiction that smoking was just a minor annoyance. Steve Martin is a genius. He put his finger on something important. The smoker in his skit is not truly sincere.
The social fiction is that indulging the smoker is a mild inconvenience. Like indulging the musical taste of someone who likes a kind of music you don't like, who says, "oh, this is my favourite song, do you mind if I turn up the radio?"
In the case of the music, when the song is over there is no permanent harm done. In the case of the non-smoker, their hair smells, maybe it triggered their asthma. Some other asshole may come over, and start smoking without asking, on the premise, that the first guy is goind it.
Smoking is an ADDICTION. People who smoke are ADDICTS. It is very difficult for them to objectively see how deeply disturbing their ADDICTION is to those around them.
Twenty-five years ago most non-smokers did not challenge that fiction. If you broke the rules, if you gave an honest answer to the question, "do you mind if I smoke", you could expect shock and consternation. Sometimes even from other non-smokers.
Well, the balance has shifted. And about time too I would say. Except, for historical reasons, some places, like bars, remain hold-outs.
In some jurisdictions the reason why smoking is banned in bars is not to preserve the health of patrons like myself, who could try to seek out a deserted bar. In some jurisdictions smoking bans are intended to preserve the health of the bar-tenders and waiting staff. Nowadays it is seen as unacceptable that anyone should be forced to work under unsafe working conditions. Bars can be really smoky -- filled with more toxic smoke than all but the worst old-fashioned factory.
Yes, I don't like it. I _really_ don't like it. Why the heck should I be tolerant of it? Why the heck shouldn't I spell out in detail how disgusting and repugnant smoking is?
Yes, governments around the world are hooked on the taxes on Tobacco products. I believe that most of the retail price of smokes in the UK is some form of tax.
But you seem to be saying that since the government takes a cut you have somehow paid in advance for the right to make a big fat mess.
You will have to try a lot harder if you are going to convince me that you paid enough.
Smoking is very costly. You say that smokers pay for a third of the National Health System? Do you think that that means it is OK for British smokers to put the health of non-smokers at risk? Do you think that those taxes cover the full, real, social cost of smoking? Over and above the extra inroads smokers make on the NHS please add the extra inroads made to the health system from the effects of second hand smoke. Please add the social cost of orphaned children, whose parents died from smoking related diseases. Please add the social cost of the lost productivity when smokers poor health makes them call in sick. Please add the social cost of the lost productivity when smokers have to rush out to sneak a smoke. Then there are fires. Careless smoking causes fires. And it might seem trivial, but smoking is a dirty habit. It is costly to clean up cigarette butts, empty ashtrays, replace scorched floor tiles, windows and walls get a yellow stain.
Then there is the social cost of the unpleasantness factor. Who the heck gave you the right to set the cost of the revulsion being exposed to smoke engenders in me?
So if a K7 capable of 1000Mhz uses 49 watts at 1000Mhz, and a K7 only capable of 750Mhz uses 35 watts, don't you think the 1000Mhz part would use 35 watts if it were underclocked to 750Mhz?
Mr Katz, do you remember that it was only with windows95 revision 2 that it would go to the trouble of repairing the file system after a crash. Ordinary consumers didn't know this. Microsoft didn't warn them. In those days when naive users asked me to do work on their computers I routinely invoked scandisk (the closest thing windows has to fsck) -- and I would routinely find dozens or even hundreds of unrepaired file-system errors.
This harmed consumers. This really harmed consumers. You have an O.S. that is as fragile as a house of cards -- one that crashes all the time, on practically a daily basis. And it fails to repair its filesystem when it reboots. This is a recipe for disaster. These disasters were routine. Lost files. Lost directories. Consumers blamed themselves. They thought they had been hit by viruses. But all they had been hit by was microsoft's shameful quality.
Then there are the Microsoft Word email viruses, like "I love you". These would not have been possible except for some shamefully negligent -- or worse -- design decisions on microsoft's part.
Neither did Mr Katz article address the accusation that Microsoft included booby-traps in its operating system code -- booby-traps that would make competitors programs fail. It is well-known that windows 3.1 was booby-trapped to fail if it detected it was being invoked form DR DOS, not MS DOS. Microsoft did settle their case with the owners of DR DOS out of court -- for nine figures. That is a pretty damning admission of guilt I'd say. Bill did pass the reins to Ballmer a couple of days later. Some have suggested that this was one of the clauses of the secret settlement.
Is this programming practice a typical one for Microsoft? Yes, I am ready to believe it is. When I heard that the source code for Windows 98 was fifty percent longer than that for Windows 95 I thought to myself, "what is that extra fifty percent code bloat doing? W98 is not 50% better than W95!" I suspected that much of that 50% code bloat was due to booby-traps.
In particular it is important to be humble enough to be methodical, and check the simplest things first. I believe this is true for technicians, motorcycle mechanics, engineers, medical doctors, detectives and computer programmers. Maybe it is true for Zen buddhists too.
My understanding is that almost all consumer grade surge protectors is only good for one good surge. And then it will no longer provide any surge protection, but it will provide power. When they no longer provide surge protection, they should no longer provide power too.
I took apart the surge protector that had protected my mother's VCR when a lightning strike had knocked out the VCRs of practically everyone else on her rural road. Rather, I took it apart after a second lightning strike left all the new replacement VCRs her neighbours had bought alone, because they had learned there lessons, and bought surge protectors to go along with them.
My mother's valiant $5 surge protector was one of those boxes that you plug over top of a standard pair of wall outlets and provide six receptacles instead of two. Except this one had a single MOV and an LED inside. The surge had made the MOV explode, and it had sprayed all over the inside of the box. And, of course, the LED went out.
Really bad design, in my opinion. Since in the typical use of something like this is it is behind whatever it had plugged into it, the LED that shows it is still working isn't visible to casual observation.