but he said that if we win the X-Prize, demonstrating cheaper launch for even suborbital lobs, Boeing would "just buy us".
Unless you are a publicly-traded company, I don't see how Boeing could do that without your cooperation. (That's one reason of many why I don't think I'd ever do an IPO for a company of mine). I suppose dirty tricks that make your position untenable are possible, and a "head of acquisitions" should know more about what's possible than me.
However, I used to work at a big gummit contractor myself (who shall go nameless, but whose initials are LMCO). Its pretty common for them to hire ex-military or ex-NASA guys just for the PR value, and put them in positions where they deal with other companies, particularly former friends and collegues, or anyone who's liable to be awed by who they are. Generally the person's skill for the job is not an issue, so often they are the most inept employees in the org. So it could Easily (with a capital 'E') be that the guy's a bumbling idiot.
However, this is clearly a huge generalization. For all I know Buzz Jr. could be a diabolicly clever takeover genius. (trying hard not to laugh here...)
If I were you I'd trust my impression of him when we met in person. If he seemed really knowledgable and sharp, perhaps you should worry. If he seems about as clued-in as a bunny on a dingo ranch, he probably is.
I wonder if Kevin would be able to go after that NY Times writer for the false statements.
Well, you can always sue someone. Winning is the tricky part. Reporters are actually held to a much looser standard for libel and defamation than anyone else. Not only would Kevin have to show that the reporter knew the info was wrong, but he'd also have to prove that the writer spread it malicously. If he's got any documentation for some of the earlier events he said happened, that might be possible with a really good (=expensive) lawyer. However, I get the sense from reading the interview that Kevin really isn't up to another round of legal battles.
What exactly did the prosecution bring up in court to convince the judge that he was a danger?
From what I remember of the case, Kevin was being cast as some kind of pernatural uber-hacker, who could completly hose anyone's credit rating with nothing more that a rotary-dial phone. The prosecutor played to this, and tried to scare the Judge by claiming he would be in danger if Kevin was allowed access to anything more than a cup on a string. Apparently the Judge bought it. Probably he was a regular MacGuyver viewer, and thought that 2 minute gum-wrapper laser beam stuff on TV was actually possible.:-)
Wouldn't this mean that nothing illegal happened to Kevin?
Pretty much. As near as I can tell there were several parties in this matter that took things right to the line where legalities are concerned. And pretty much everyone overreacted (and that's being charitable to them). Perhaps with a really good legal team, a place or two could be found where something that was done slipped a wee bit over the line, or where something was unconstitutional. But Kevin is hardly the first person ever hosed by an unfair and innacurate media campaign, held without a hearing, or put in solitary for a long time.
Oh yeah, I forgot one more biggie: All those Americans of Japaneese descent who were rounded up in prison camps for the duration of WWII. This, I believe, included one current US senator.
Re:Not the only person in US history ....
on
Kevin Mitnick Answers
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Ahem, the key word here is "citizen". Please give links to articles talking about those two citizens. I'm not saying they're non-existent, I just want something to reference instead of "JoeBuck said so on/."
Well, President Lincoln suspended Habeus Corpus (your right to a speedy trial) for the duration of the Civil War. He then proceeded to have all sorts of war protesters and suspected confederate sympathizers locked up without either hearing or trail.
That's essentially what is done to people put in preventative detention too. If you read the link, at least 4 people were so held in the 70's and early 80's before Mitnik. There were probably more, and this is eactly what the Feds asked be done with Kevin. They felt he couldn't be given bail, not because of any flight risk, but rather because of the risk of him commiting crimes while on bail (specificly against the Judge or prosecuting attorneys or witnesses).
Not that I'm defending such practices. But its very, very wrong to suggest they are somehow new or unique to Kevin.
What? I'll grant most of what you are saying here, but I can't figure out what you are saying about political correctness here, except it applies to anything you don't like.
If anything, the original Star Trek was quite politically correct. The two basic political themes I see were (1) inclusion, equality, diversity, and (2) exploring without conquering, winning the hearts and minds of everybody we find by virtue of our virtue and our lofty principles. This isn't a bad description of the way America wanted to view itself then.
You are right about the themes, but dead wrong about society at that time. Perhaps today we want to view ourselves that way. Back in the 60's those were radical ideas. People were killed fighting for these ideas. There were many places in this country where you would (not could, would) get killed for promoting the first. Martin Luther King Jr. at one point called up the actress playing Lt. Uhura and insisted that she had to stay with the show (she was thinking of leaving), as it was the only place anywhere you could find images of a black person working alongside of white people as an equal. Not long afterwards he was shot and killed for promoting the very ideals you mention.
Like you, I don't much like the term "political correctness". That's just whineing about having to face the consequences that always come along with having an opinion. But the point is well taken that Trek no longer has an opinion.
To the extent the open source model gains increasing market acceptance, sales of the company's products may decline, the company may have to reduce the prices it charges for its products, and revenues and operating margins may consequently decline
Here, then, we see the beginnings of a process of reparation and of the chastisement of wrong-doing which reminds us that though the mills of the gods grind slowly they grind exceedingly small.
What folks seem to be missing here is that SimDesk is proprietary software, just like Office. What it has over office apparently is that:
Its cheaper (to Houston anyway)
Its (apparently) client-server based, with the servers being run by SimDesk.
This is the "Hailstorm" issue all over again. But it does have certian advantanges for poor folk who don't own their own systems, which was one of the reasons Houston starting looking at it. An out of work homeless person can put his resume on it, and then access his resume later from any other system he manages to get access too. He doesn't have to haul a floppy around with him out in the elements where he lives. If you read the article, it was tried out in public libraries as a way to "bridge the digital divide", and apparently was wildly successful.
Due to the fact that SimDesk holds your data hostage, they can probably offer a very different pricing structure than traditional software vendors. They can charge peanuts for the clients, and then keep charging you access fees for the server. Think of it as the first MMOS (Massively-Multiplayer Office Suite):-)
I think Hoover was a verb in the Great Depression.
His name did become a prefix. As in "Hooverville" to describe a shanty town.
I believe his name also became an adjective. I'm pretty sure I remember there being a term "Hoover Recovery" to describe a continuing economic malaise. This bit of sacrasm would doubtless have been inspired by his continual insistence that recovery was right around the corner. Needless to say, that attitude didn't exactly endear the man to the 1/3rd of the US workforce that was unemployed during the '32 election...
Cal Tech wants to know if you can program an emulator that will play games like a human,
That would be trivial for a MMORPG. Just write a program to make the character stand around at popular spots, like vendors or quest dispensers, casting doubt on the manhood of passerby, and it will be indistinguishable from your typical 13 year old gamer. It could even be done with an existing program like Eliza, if its conversation database were tweaked to generate juvenile insults.
I was thinking about this the other day while pondering a completely immersive VR environment.
Yeah...its called life. Go on out. Do what you want. Have a blast.
Just be careful not to get sent to jail. You'll have to camp for years to get the spawnpoint out of there, and the other campers are a bunch of PK-ing smacktards.
but CS, Engineering and other "technical" fields have some serious issues if you are a single parent or the "homemaker" in home where both parents work.
As someone in this category, I disagree with this strongly. I work developing device drivers, my wife works in Human Resources (a "traditional female job"). When a kid needs to see the doctor or goes home sick (on average at least twice a month with 3 of them in daycare), I'm the one who does it. My job has flexible hours, and I always have the oppertunity to "bank" some overtime hours for use later in a kid-issue situation. The device driver will always be there where I left it when I get back. If I'm 20 minutes late because my daughter didn't want to put her pants on or my son broke the chandelier and I needed to clean up the glass, no biggie. I've got some coworkers who even had their shift slightly adjusted so that they could be at home when the kids get home from school (thus avoiding large after-school-care costs). I'll probably do that myself next year. Every place I've worked since I graduated in '89 was like that (although there's probably some personal choice involved the matter).
My wife has to be at work during normal hours. If someone wants to switch money allocations in their 401K at 8:05 AM and she isn't there to help them, there are problems.
...except for people in Mass. I believe more people than that signed up in the first month for Oklahoma's do-not-call list, and Oklahoma only has a population of about 3.5 million.
Supposedly a bit more than half the states, representing over %75 of the US population, now have do-not-call lists.
A US law can't have much effect, for the simple reason that most of my spam these days comes from outside the US. If you could wave a magic wand and stop all US-based spam, you'd hardly make a dent in it.
In fact, the majority of my spam these days comes in using one of the various eastern pictographic fonts. Not only can't I read it, I can't even make out the symbols. I might as well be getting 50 emails a day of line noise.
A lot of folks here don't seem to be reading the same story I read. Here's what I saw (with a bit of reading between the lines):
Guy is aware of legal and heroic efforts on the part of hobbyist hackers to reverse engineer a piece of DirectTV technology. Guy, though course of his work, comes into possession of DirectTV "secrets" reguarding said equipment. Being sympathetic to the hackers, he publicly releases the "secrets".
Now what the guy did above probably broke a contract with someone somewhere, but its not criminal. Contracts are civil matters. However, a large company is now ticked off, so they want to find a way to make it criminal. There's an "espionage" law, intended to prevent companies from stealing other company's secrets. With some fancy legal work (which they can easily afford) they can twist that law to their purposes, but they have to argue that someone somewhere is going to "profit", even though the guy won't, and the folks he initially gave the info to are hobbyiests. If they can do that, then there basicly is no caviat to this law at all, and the courts have now made release of any "trade secret" criminal. Once they do it for someone, it is a "precedent", and can be used against anyone that way. That's what makes it YRO.
To be more specific, this would be purely a civil matter, if it weren't for the following facts:
Plaintiff is a large company with a lot of money.
Defendant is young, with very little money to fight back.
Defendant is Russian, not American.
Plantiff is engaged in an undeclared war against legal hobbyists
Plaintiff would like trade secret laws dramaticly strenghtened through the backdoor of the courts.
It's good of you to be helpful by explaining that "fry him", in this case, does not mean "kill him". However, note that you have replaced one weird American idiom with another ("send him up the creek").
No, its a mixed metaphor. I think he was going for "send him up the river", which is indeed slang for sending someone to prison. However, he apparently either skipped English class for 4 years straight, or forgot his Prozac this morning, and mixed it with "up the creek without a paddle" (or perhaps "up sh*t creek"). That's a completely different euphamisim for "in trouble".
To anyone still confused: in this case, it's likely that the original poster simply meant that the justice system should show the alleged stealer of secrets no mercy--that they should prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law. It's doubtful that the original poster meant that they should electrocute the alleged thief.
I agree. However, "recieve the death penalty" is what "fry" means in this country. Hopefully, as you say, he was just eggagerating the penalty, because what this guy did was clearly a civil offense (which does not result in either jail or electrocution), barring the missapplication of an "espionage" law like is being attempted here.
However, there is one problem with this view. There's plenty of reason for value-added integrators to use mozilla. What is the reason to contribute back?
The best reason of all - self interest. If an integrator makes a change/bugfix to Mozilla and they don't contribute it, then they will have to take upon themselves the burden of reinstalling their change upon every new version of Mozilla that comes out. Software being what it is, the baseline will randomly drift away from the one their change was designed for, and they will have to make up the difference and manually apply it to every release. Yuck.
That's why in the real world folks fight like hell to get their changes and fixes into the official baseline.
Interesting Dutch perspective
on
Linus Is A Hero
·
· Score: 2
There are a lot of Dutch folk on there I've never heard of. If it were made by Americans, I'm sure there'd be a lot more Americans on it that few outside of this country have heard of. But, given that its a list made by Dutch people, I'm really impressed at the number of Americans on it. Particularly popular culture figures that you'd figure wouldn't translate overseas well, like Michael Jordan and Bill Cosby.
I think they chose some Americans we wouldn't have chosen. Cosby is one example. He's an OK comedian, and I loved Fat Albert back in the day and all, but still not exactly a heroic figure in my book. More interestingly, they picked FDR and did not mention Churchill. If Americans made the list, I suspect the reverse would have been true. (Even back during WWII, it was remarked that the US and Britan could switch leaders, and both would be happier).
...but if it were me, I'd be embarresed to be listed up there with Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandi, Anne Frank, The New York Firefighters, Steve Biko, Nelson Mandela, Albert Einstein, etc. Father of the Free OS or no, I'd feel unworthy to lick their boots.
Then again, there's Bono & David Bowie, so perhaps it isn't as bad as all that.:-)
I'd imagine that around here (Tornado Alley, Oklahoma), that would qualify as a tornado shelter... Having a Hobbit Hole in the backyard would probably increase the property value, too:)
Thanks to the recent passage of State question 696, your first 100 square feet would be exempt from property tax too.:-)
Yup, we are serious about our storm shelters here in Oklahoma. My grandfather's one saved his life back in the 70's. The tornado pulled the whole house down over it. He had spoons stuck inside trees and the whole 9 yards...
My dad has a bit of rual land with a nice hill on it to build into. I'd love to build a hobbit-style house into it. But I doubt 12-foot pipe would be able to provide enough room for a family of 5 (not counting pets).
I'd think you'd want more than 1ft. The lower you make the floor, the less lateral room you will have. I don't have the math skills for an exact number for the width (I suspect you'd need to know both radii at the least). But I suspect you wouldn't have room for two people to pass each other with the floor at only 1 ft (unless one walks up on the wall...). With a family of 5, I don't see how it would be practical. There certianly wouldn't be room for a bigscreen TV and a sofa, like any red-blooded american male requires.
Obviously, the floor height that will maximize floorspace would be halfway up. That would only give you 6ft of headroom. More likely, you'd want to go three feet lower, which would give you a smidge less floor room, but 9 feet of headroom (in the middle), and would make the extra "elbow room" on the sides a good height for shelves, tv's, ovens, and the like.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you are a publicly-traded company, I don't see how Boeing could do that without your cooperation. (That's one reason of many why I don't think I'd ever do an IPO for a company of mine). I suppose dirty tricks that make your position untenable are possible, and a "head of acquisitions" should know more about what's possible than me.
However, I used to work at a big gummit contractor myself (who shall go nameless, but whose initials are LMCO). Its pretty common for them to hire ex-military or ex-NASA guys just for the PR value, and put them in positions where they deal with other companies, particularly former friends and collegues, or anyone who's liable to be awed by who they are. Generally the person's skill for the job is not an issue, so often they are the most inept employees in the org. So it could Easily (with a capital 'E') be that the guy's a bumbling idiot.
However, this is clearly a huge generalization. For all I know Buzz Jr. could be a diabolicly clever takeover genius. (trying hard not to laugh here...)
If I were you I'd trust my impression of him when we met in person. If he seemed really knowledgable and sharp, perhaps you should worry. If he seems about as clued-in as a bunny on a dingo ranch, he probably is.
Well, you can always sue someone. Winning is the tricky part. Reporters are actually held to a much looser standard for libel and defamation than anyone else. Not only would Kevin have to show that the reporter knew the info was wrong, but he'd also have to prove that the writer spread it malicously. If he's got any documentation for some of the earlier events he said happened, that might be possible with a really good (=expensive) lawyer. However, I get the sense from reading the interview that Kevin really isn't up to another round of legal battles.
From what I remember of the case, Kevin was being cast as some kind of pernatural uber-hacker, who could completly hose anyone's credit rating with nothing more that a rotary-dial phone. The prosecutor played to this, and tried to scare the Judge by claiming he would be in danger if Kevin was allowed access to anything more than a cup on a string. Apparently the Judge bought it. Probably he was a regular MacGuyver viewer, and thought that 2 minute gum-wrapper laser beam stuff on TV was actually possible.
Pretty much. As near as I can tell there were several parties in this matter that took things right to the line where legalities are concerned. And pretty much everyone overreacted (and that's being charitable to them). Perhaps with a really good legal team, a place or two could be found where something that was done slipped a wee bit over the line, or where something was unconstitutional. But Kevin is hardly the first person ever hosed by an unfair and innacurate media campaign, held without a hearing, or put in solitary for a long time.
Oh yeah, I forgot one more biggie: All those Americans of Japaneese descent who were rounded up in prison camps for the duration of WWII. This, I believe, included one current US senator.
Well, President Lincoln suspended Habeus Corpus (your right to a speedy trial) for the duration of the Civil War. He then proceeded to have all sorts of war protesters and suspected confederate sympathizers locked up without either hearing or trail.
That's essentially what is done to people put in preventative detention too. If you read the link, at least 4 people were so held in the 70's and early 80's before Mitnik. There were probably more, and this is eactly what the Feds asked be done with Kevin. They felt he couldn't be given bail, not because of any flight risk, but rather because of the risk of him commiting crimes while on bail (specificly against the Judge or prosecuting attorneys or witnesses).
Not that I'm defending such practices. But its very, very wrong to suggest they are somehow new or unique to Kevin.
You are right about the themes, but dead wrong about society at that time. Perhaps today we want to view ourselves that way. Back in the 60's those were radical ideas. People were killed fighting for these ideas. There were many places in this country where you would (not could, would) get killed for promoting the first. Martin Luther King Jr. at one point called up the actress playing Lt. Uhura and insisted that she had to stay with the show (she was thinking of leaving), as it was the only place anywhere you could find images of a black person working alongside of white people as an equal. Not long afterwards he was shot and killed for promoting the very ideals you mention.
Like you, I don't much like the term "political correctness". That's just whineing about having to face the consequences that always come along with having an opinion. But the point is well taken that Trek no longer has an opinion.
No, that would be IOCCC.
However, they don't have one. Using C would produce results too opaque and corrupt even for them.
I thought it was to annually prove right all C detractors.
Speech Broadcast by Prime Minister Winston Churchill February 9, 1941
This is the "Hailstorm" issue all over again. But it does have certian advantanges for poor folk who don't own their own systems, which was one of the reasons Houston starting looking at it. An out of work homeless person can put his resume on it, and then access his resume later from any other system he manages to get access too. He doesn't have to haul a floppy around with him out in the elements where he lives. If you read the article, it was tried out in public libraries as a way to "bridge the digital divide", and apparently was wildly successful.
Due to the fact that SimDesk holds your data hostage, they can probably offer a very different pricing structure than traditional software vendors. They can charge peanuts for the clients, and then keep charging you access fees for the server. Think of it as the first MMOS (Massively-Multiplayer Office Suite)
His name did become a prefix. As in "Hooverville" to describe a shanty town.
I believe his name also became an adjective. I'm pretty sure I remember there being a term "Hoover Recovery" to describe a continuing economic malaise. This bit of sacrasm would doubtless have been inspired by his continual insistence that recovery was right around the corner. Needless to say, that attitude didn't exactly endear the man to the 1/3rd of the US workforce that was unemployed during the '32 election...
That would be trivial for a MMORPG. Just write a program to make the character stand around at popular spots, like vendors or quest dispensers, casting doubt on the manhood of passerby, and it will be indistinguishable from your typical 13 year old gamer. It could even be done with an existing program like Eliza, if its conversation database were tweaked to generate juvenile insults.
Yeah...its called life. Go on out. Do what you want. Have a blast.
Just be careful not to get sent to jail. You'll have to camp for years to get the spawnpoint out of there, and the other campers are a bunch of PK-ing smacktards.
As someone in this category, I disagree with this strongly. I work developing device drivers, my wife works in Human Resources (a "traditional female job"). When a kid needs to see the doctor or goes home sick (on average at least twice a month with 3 of them in daycare), I'm the one who does it. My job has flexible hours, and I always have the oppertunity to "bank" some overtime hours for use later in a kid-issue situation. The device driver will always be there where I left it when I get back. If I'm 20 minutes late because my daughter didn't want to put her pants on or my son broke the chandelier and I needed to clean up the glass, no biggie. I've got some coworkers who even had their shift slightly adjusted so that they could be at home when the kids get home from school (thus avoiding large after-school-care costs). I'll probably do that myself next year.
Every place I've worked since I graduated in '89 was like that (although there's probably some personal choice involved the matter).
My wife has to be at work during normal hours. If someone wants to switch money allocations in their 401K at 8:05 AM and she isn't there to help them, there are problems.
What possible use would elevation have, other than to provide proper coordinates for a ballistic attack against your computer?
...except for people in Mass. I believe more people than that signed up in the first month for Oklahoma's do-not-call list, and Oklahoma only has a population of about 3.5 million.
Supposedly a bit more than half the states, representing over %75 of the US population, now have do-not-call lists.
A US law can't have much effect, for the simple reason that most of my spam these days comes from outside the US. If you could wave a magic wand and stop all US-based spam, you'd hardly make a dent in it.
In fact, the majority of my spam these days comes in using one of the various eastern pictographic fonts. Not only can't I read it, I can't even make out the symbols. I might as well be getting 50 emails a day of line noise.
Guy is aware of legal and heroic efforts on the part of hobbyist hackers to reverse engineer a piece of DirectTV technology. Guy, though course of his work, comes into possession of DirectTV "secrets" reguarding said equipment. Being sympathetic to the hackers, he publicly releases the "secrets".
Now what the guy did above probably broke a contract with someone somewhere, but its not criminal. Contracts are civil matters. However, a large company is now ticked off, so they want to find a way to make it criminal. There's an "espionage" law, intended to prevent companies from stealing other company's secrets. With some fancy legal work (which they can easily afford) they can twist that law to their purposes, but they have to argue that someone somewhere is going to "profit", even though the guy won't, and the folks he initially gave the info to are hobbyiests. If they can do that, then there basicly is no caviat to this law at all, and the courts have now made release of any "trade secret" criminal. Once they do it for someone, it is a "precedent", and can be used against anyone that way. That's what makes it YRO.
To be more specific, this would be purely a civil matter, if it weren't for the following facts:
No, its a mixed metaphor. I think he was going for "send him up the river", which is indeed slang for sending someone to prison. However, he apparently either skipped English class for 4 years straight, or forgot his Prozac this morning, and mixed it with "up the creek without a paddle" (or perhaps "up sh*t creek"). That's a completely different euphamisim for "in trouble".
I agree. However, "recieve the death penalty" is what "fry" means in this country. Hopefully, as you say, he was just eggagerating the penalty, because what this guy did was clearly a civil offense (which does not result in either jail or electrocution), barring the missapplication of an "espionage" law like is being attempted here.
The best reason of all - self interest. If an integrator makes a change/bugfix to Mozilla and they don't contribute it, then they will have to take upon themselves the burden of reinstalling their change upon every new version of Mozilla that comes out. Software being what it is, the baseline will randomly drift away from the one their change was designed for, and they will have to make up the difference and manually apply it to every release. Yuck.
That's why in the real world folks fight like hell to get their changes and fixes into the official baseline.
There are a lot of Dutch folk on there I've never heard of. If it were made by Americans, I'm sure there'd be a lot more Americans on it that few outside of this country have heard of. But, given that its a list made by Dutch people, I'm really impressed at the number of Americans on it. Particularly popular culture figures that you'd figure wouldn't translate overseas well, like Michael Jordan and Bill Cosby.
I think they chose some Americans we wouldn't have chosen. Cosby is one example. He's an OK comedian, and I loved Fat Albert back in the day and all, but still not exactly a heroic figure in my book. More interestingly, they picked FDR and did not mention Churchill. If Americans made the list, I suspect the reverse would have been true. (Even back during WWII, it was remarked that the US and Britan could switch leaders, and both would be happier).
...but if it were me, I'd be embarresed to be listed up there with Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandi, Anne Frank, The New York Firefighters, Steve Biko, Nelson Mandela, Albert Einstein, etc. Father of the Free OS or no, I'd feel unworthy to lick their boots.
:-)
Then again, there's Bono & David Bowie, so perhaps it isn't as bad as all that.
...is that there isn't enough historical data on past internet usage to prove its all baloney yet.
By the time there is, they ought to be able to pump out quite a few subscriptions, books, and speaking tours.
On the bright side, at least now we know where the "Y2K" baloney purveors went. Even better, they are leaving us coders alone this time.
Thanks to the recent passage of State question 696, your first 100 square feet would be exempt from property tax too.
Yup, we are serious about our storm shelters here in Oklahoma. My grandfather's one saved his life back in the 70's. The tornado pulled the whole house down over it. He had spoons stuck inside trees and the whole 9 yards...
My dad has a bit of rual land with a nice hill on it to build into. I'd love to build a hobbit-style house into it. But I doubt 12-foot pipe would be able to provide enough room for a family of 5 (not counting pets).
I'd think you'd want more than 1ft. The lower you make the floor, the less lateral room you will have. I don't have the math skills for an exact number for the width (I suspect you'd need to know both radii at the least). But I suspect you wouldn't have room for two people to pass each other with the floor at only 1 ft (unless one walks up on the wall...). With a family of 5, I don't see how it would be practical. There certianly wouldn't be room for a bigscreen TV and a sofa, like any red-blooded american male requires.
Obviously, the floor height that will maximize floorspace would be halfway up. That would only give you 6ft of headroom. More likely, you'd want to go three feet lower, which would give you a smidge less floor room, but 9 feet of headroom (in the middle), and would make the extra "elbow room" on the sides a good height for shelves, tv's, ovens, and the like.