There's a picture of the second (1982) edition at amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Instant-BASIC-Freeze-dried-Computer-Programming/dp/0918398576/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268240739&sr=1-9
The original goes back to 1977. I've actually got a copy of it around somewhere. I should put up a tribute page.
Anyone else remember learning to program with the book "Instant Basic"? It was formatted like a Trader Joe's advertisement, with lots of Victorian clip art, and it let a lot of us learn the basics of programming -- conditional branching, loops, variables -- without actually having access to a computer.
That copyright notice sounds like a good legal defense for JibJab. I hope that "This Land is Your Land" was included in that songbook. Of course, the current owners of the copyright will probably claim that Guthrie's notice was a parody of a copyright notice. Or is that a satire?
Here's a question that I have been wondering about:
A lot of American companies have written policies about diversity, which they promote through their recruiting and hiring practices. How do these companies fulfill their policies when they create jobs offshore? Do they implement their policies in a way that addresses the social and racial inequalities of the offshore country, or do they simply ignore their own policies and follow local practices?
John McPhee wrote an incredible book called "The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed" about the Aeron company, which designed an aircraft that would combine airship technology with a lifting-body style airplane, where the entire body of the plane provides lift. This was a serious design, with no pseudo-science factor. However, the original design (the Aeron 3) was exactly the one described in this post. It was a two-hulled, helium-filled aircraft that would use wings to turn buoyant lift into forward motion. The whole idea was the dream of a christian missionary and pilot who wanted a craft that could deliver bibles and tractors to the third world at minimal cost. The Aeron 3 was destroyed on the ground by high winds before its first test flight. The company didn't bother to rebuild it after they hired some real engineers and hit on the lifting body idea.
The Zauruses (Zauri?) are very big compared to other PDAs. I have a 5600, and it makes my old Handspring Visor Deluxe look svelt. The 5500 is a bit thinner (because it uses a smaller battery), but it is just as tall.
I think the main advantage of the Zaurus is that you get some more choices about the software you run. I also have a Dell Axim Pocket PC, but I'm annoyed that most of the additional software made for it, even by hobbyists, is not free. I'm not against people making money from their work, but you never really know if a piece of shareware is going to work the way you hope.
Right now, I'm considering getting rid of my Zaurus and going back to the Axim. This is because it will sync to the CorporateTime scheduling system my company uses, and because Microsoft Pocket Streets, a road map application, is the most mind-bogglingly useful thing to have on a PDA. I'm not a Microsoft fan, but Pocket Streets rocks.
Lycoris Pocket PC (or whatever they end up calling it after the dust settles) could be a good alternative to the standard Zaurus ROM from Sharp.
If Lycoris can put together a system that looks good, runs on all of the different Zaurus models (OpenZaurus is not yet usable on the Zaurus 5600), and has a decent Personal Information Manager that syncs seamlessly with a decent PIM on the Linux desktop machine, that would be a good thing.
I picked up a Zaurus 5600 from Amazon a couple weeks ago, hoping that the wide variety of open source and free software projects for it would allow me to put together exactly the kind of PDA I wanted. However, it turns out that a lot of these projects are in, at best, beta phase. Or they don't really run on the 5600. Or they don't work with each other. You usually don't find out about any of these problems until you spend a few hours trying to get something to work. It doesn't make sense to complain about free software created by a community of volunteers, but it's been a frustrating experience.
I have a Handspring Visor (the "deluxe" one that you could probably buy on EBay for about $50 by now). The schedule is fairly useful, as is the address book. However, I find that the killer app is my outliner, a product called ThoughtMill. It is absolutely the best way for me to organize ideas, lists, etc. I've used it for everything from shopping lists to outlines of technical documents. I also keep notes on obscure Unix commands and Perl debugging info in it. The Palm OS's search feature lets me find anything in ThoughMill (or anywhere else) quickly.
I'm not a big fan of the Palm method of syncing. Instead, I have a plug-in backup module (for Handsprings only) that creates a full image of the everything in memory. I've had to use it to restore the backup twice already (both times my fault).
Maybe she says "like" a lot, but she says a number of pretty insightful things.
I thought if I went on Letterman, it would be like I go on Letterman, and then I go on "Regis and Kelly," and then I go on Channel 5 News, and then it would kind of fizzle out pathetically.
That's the smartest thing ever said by a temporary celebrity about temporary celebrity.
One day after work I played Tetris for about an hour. During my drive home on an L.A. freeway, I had to fight off the urge to constantly switch lanes and floor it every time I saw a space open up in one of the lanes ahead of me. There must be a word for this phenomenon, where the imperitives of a game get temporarily transposed onto some other activity.
None of the examples you mention even come close to describing the kind of landscape change suggested by this "discovery." Volcanic processes that create new land are simply irrelevant. Volcanos that explode can turn large chunks of land in to rubble, but they don't pick up entire cities and throw them, in one piece, into the ocean. Hurricanes and floods don't rate, either.
I don't think anyone's ever seen evidence of subsidence on this scale, in this short a time.
This whole thing looks pretty fishy. No images have been released, as far as I can tell. None of the news articles indicate that the journalists have been shown images, video, or the earlier sonar images. An interview with someone at National Geographic (with which ADC's president claims to be arranging a joint project) suggests that noone there has seen anything either.
The president of ADC is referred to as an "ocean engineer." My guess is that she is a mechanical engineer specializing in marine salvage operations. She doesn't sound like an archaeologist or a geologist. My guess is that ADC has discovered some unique natural formations. These could prove to be very, very interesting to geologists, but totally irrelevant to human history.
I don't read much science fiction anymore, but Lathe of Heaven is one of my favorite books. I re-read it about once a year.
The Lathe of Heaven movie that was made for public TV back in the 70s is now, finally, available on video and DVD. I actually saw the movie when it was first shown (and only discovered the book later). The movie then disappeared for years, apparently over some kind of dispute over the rights.
Even though I looked for the movie for years, I'm now afraid to rent it. One of the employees in Seattle's Scarecrow Video store warned me that it's pretty dated and a bit disappointing.
There are a couple other notable science fiction works that address gender and society. Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time takes an oppressed underclass woman from mid-1970s America and projects her into a future utopia in which differences in gender and sexuality have been erased. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale imagines an America dominated by Reagan-era patriarchy.
In both these novels, gender difference is seen as the central problem in society. In The Handmaid's Tale, rigidly-defined gender roles form the basis of everyone's oppression. The utopia of Woman on the Edge of Time depends on the complete eradication of gender roles, even using technology to allow men to breast-feed.
In LeGuin's fictional world, however, genderless societies prove to be just as oppressive and intolerant as the real world. Militarism dominates one society, political repression the other, and in both, deviating from sexual and gender norms makes you a pervert.
The Left Hand of Darkness is more of a thought experiment on the subject of gender than it is a political argument. It achieves a sophistication lacking in the other two novels. Both The Handmaid's Tale and Woman on the Edge of Time based their fictional societies on contemporary feminist political theory. Piercy gives us an unintentionally insufferable utopia dominated by feminized (not necessarily feminist) forms of social interaction and 1970s commune culture. Atwood creates a cartoonish distopia dominated by masculine militarism and 1980s conservative ideology. LeGuin's fictional world is equally rooted in the political context of its times; its cold war themes make it read, in parts, like a John LeCarre spy novel. However, The Left Hand of Darkness seems more plausible and less dated than the other two novels because it draws on a broad view of society rather than one focused on gender as a single issue.
A few years ago, Microsoft got into trouble because the Spanish version of the Office thesaurus, which was made up of content bought from another company, offered a number of words like "lazy" and "savage" when the user entered "indeo," the Spanish word for indian. A lot of people who hated Microsoft blasted the company for not censoring the thesaurus.
Another issue that came up around the same time was Microsoft's addition of a "parental control" feature to thier Bookshelf reference CD. The company wanted to expand the market for the CD, which included a dictionary, encyclopedia, book of quotations, and thesaurus, to schools and families. However, the content of each book included some words that parents might consider objectionable. The parental control feature allowed a user to "hide" all words and entries that might be objectionable. Bookshelf's dictionary, like any dictionary, tagged some definitions with labels like "offensive," "obscene," and "vulgar." The parental control feature simply turned off any entry that contained a word for which the dictionary included an offensive definition. This seemed like a good solution. However, this meant that a kid writing a report on beavers, for instance, wasn't going to get any help from Microsoft Bookshelf. He also wouldn't find the word "mother," believe it or not.
The latest flap over the Office thesaurus sounds like more of the same. Microsoft wants to avoid offending people who don't understand what a thesaurus is really for. They also don't really want to get into the messy business of censoring content word-by-word. There's probably a setting hidden somewhere that allows you to turn the full thesaurus back on.
I use USB Macs, ADB Macs, PS/2 PCs, and USB PCs on a variety of switchboxes, and have a few suggestions of what to consider for a mixed environment.
Mac issues The Headless Mac Problem When a Macintosh is booted without a monitor attached, it turns off its video circuitry. There is no way, as far as I know, to get it to start sending a video signal once it has turned it off. This means that if you boot a Mac attached to a KVM switch, you have to make sure that you don't switch to another machine until the Mac has gotten past the part of the startup where it looks for a monitor. The real solution is to buy a gHead adapter from Dr. Bott (about US$20). It's a small pass-through adapter that fits onto the Mac's video port and spoofs it into thinking it has an attached monitor. It works with any resolution.
USB vs. MacsBug My machines are used for development and testing, which means that they regularly drop into the Mac debugger, MacsBug. If a USB Mac is not the active machine on the KVM switch, it decides that there is no keyboard attached and it unloads the keyboard driver. Normally, the Mac just reloads the driver when you switch back to the Mac. However, if the Mac has dropped into MacsBug, it won't reload the driver and you have no input at all. There is, as yet, no good solution to this problem. I wish someone would write a keyboard driver that would never unload.
Using ADB Macs with PS/2 Switchboxes There are ADB to PS/2 adapters. The ADB2PS/2 adapters are pricey, about US$100. I've used them with the Belkin OmniView switchboxes with no complaints.
Using USB Macs with PS/2 Switchboxes I've used a Y-mouse USB2PS/2 adapter, which costs less than US$50, with an Avocent (formerly Cybex/Apex) switchbox. It seems to work very well. It may even solve the MacsBug problem mentioned above, but I haven't tested it thouroughly.
USB KVM Switchboxes I've used two USB KVM switches. One was from Belkin. I don't remember the model, as I never was able to get it to work and sent it back. The other is the Dr. Bott MoniswitchPro8USB. This is an 8-port USB KVM switchbox marketed by Dr. Bott, but made by the same company that makes the Jargy switch reviewed in the article. It costs US$400, but it comes with all the necessary cables. The only hidden cost are the gHead adapters mentioned above, which make it easier to deal with reboots without causing the headless mac problem. I have a mix of Mac and PCs on this switchbox and it seems to work acceptibly well. My only complaint is that there is often a bit of a lab when you switch to a machine that has not been active for a while. The lag occurs because the USB keyboard driver has to reload.
Once, while working on MS Bookshelf, I had to explain to a conservative (christian, I assume) program manager that the word "homosexuality" was not actually obscene, and would not be blocked by the product's parental filtering feature.
What kind of policy will govern the board that chooses sites to filter based on member nominations? The web contains a lot of perfectly inoffensive material that conservative Christian parents find objectionable.
What if a health information site contains a small amount of information on sexuality or medicinal herbs? It wouldn't exactly qualify as sex & drugs, and I can't imagine AOL filtering that. However, what about a Wiccan or Pagan site that contains the same information? I could see 10,000 well-organized Christian AOL members sending in their votes.
Re:Repo story sounds about 1/2 urban legend
on
Hi-Tech Repo Man
·
· Score: 1
I stand by my original comment. There's a lot of stuff in the article, and most of the action takes place in the car-owners' neighborhoods and driveways, but the reporter keeps bringing in the repo man's claims about getting large numbers of cars from Apple's, Cisco's, and Intel parking lots. Maybe he was telling the truth, but the article doesn't give much of an explanation of why this would be true.
The reporter offers only minimal analysis of why people are defaulting on their loans. Are large numbers of people keeping their jobs but taking pay cuts? Not that I've heard of. Were folks using stock options to make monthly car payments? That sounds unlikely. The concrete examples the article contains all involve techs who lost their jobs due to lay offs or company failures. Mentioning these in the same breath as company-lot repossessions suggests that they are the same phenomena. The/. blurb was a pretty accurate depiction of what most people will take away from this article and it's the reporter's fault.
Repo story sounds about 1/2 urban legend
on
Hi-Tech Repo Man
·
· Score: 1
I'm not so sure the reporter should have taken as fact everything the repo guy told him. What's wrong with this story: Techie gets laid off. Techie can't make his car payments. Techies car is repossessed in the company lot.
Maybe this is really a story about power of habit. People get so used to commuting that, even after getting laid off, they continue to drive to work and park in the company lot.
According to a Salon review of the new book about Timothy McVeigh, he used the original Star Wars movie as part of his inspiration for the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.
"As a kid, McVeigh had noticed that the 'Star Wars' movies showed people sitting at consoles -- Space-Age clerical workers -- inside the Death Star. Those people weren't storm troopers. They weren't killing anyone. But they were vital to the operations of the Evil Empire, McVeigh deduced, and when Luke blew up the Death Star those people became inevitable casualties. When the Death Star exploded, the movie audiences cheered. The bad guys were beaten: that was all that really mattered. As an adult, McVeigh found himself able to dismiss the killings of secretaries, receptionists, and other personnel in the Murrah building with equally cold-blooded calculation. They were all part of the Evil Empire."
http://www.salon.com/books/2001/04/07/mcveigh/inde x2.html
Slashdot Mirror
There's a picture of the second (1982) edition at amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Instant-BASIC-Freeze-dried-Computer-Programming/dp/0918398576/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268240739&sr=1-9
The original goes back to 1977. I've actually got a copy of it around somewhere. I should put up a tribute page.
Anyone else remember learning to program with the book "Instant Basic"? It was formatted like a Trader Joe's advertisement, with lots of Victorian clip art, and it let a lot of us learn the basics of programming -- conditional branching, loops, variables -- without actually having access to a computer.
That copyright notice sounds like a good legal defense for JibJab. I hope that "This Land is Your Land" was included in that songbook. Of course, the current owners of the copyright will probably claim that Guthrie's notice was a parody of a copyright notice. Or is that a satire?
Here's a question that I have been wondering about:
A lot of American companies have written policies about diversity, which they promote through their recruiting and hiring practices. How do these companies fulfill their policies when they create jobs offshore? Do they implement their policies in a way that addresses the social and racial inequalities of the offshore country, or do they simply ignore their own policies and follow local practices?
John McPhee wrote an incredible book called "The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed" about the Aeron company, which designed an aircraft that would combine airship technology with a lifting-body style airplane, where the entire body of the plane provides lift. This was a serious design, with no pseudo-science factor. However, the original design (the Aeron 3) was exactly the one described in this post. It was a two-hulled, helium-filled aircraft that would use wings to turn buoyant lift into forward motion. The whole idea was the dream of a christian missionary and pilot who wanted a craft that could deliver bibles and tractors to the third world at minimal cost. The Aeron 3 was destroyed on the ground by high winds before its first test flight. The company didn't bother to rebuild it after they hired some real engineers and hit on the lifting body idea.
The Zauruses (Zauri?) are very big compared to other PDAs. I have a 5600, and it makes my old Handspring Visor Deluxe look svelt. The 5500 is a bit thinner (because it uses a smaller battery), but it is just as tall.
I think the main advantage of the Zaurus is that you get some more choices about the software you run. I also have a Dell Axim Pocket PC, but I'm annoyed that most of the additional software made for it, even by hobbyists, is not free. I'm not against people making money from their work, but you never really know if a piece of shareware is going to work the way you hope.
Right now, I'm considering getting rid of my Zaurus and going back to the Axim. This is because it will sync to the CorporateTime scheduling system my company uses, and because Microsoft Pocket Streets, a road map application, is the most mind-bogglingly useful thing to have on a PDA. I'm not a Microsoft fan, but Pocket Streets rocks.
Lycoris Pocket PC (or whatever they end up calling it after the dust settles) could be a good alternative to the standard Zaurus ROM from Sharp.
If Lycoris can put together a system that looks good, runs on all of the different Zaurus models (OpenZaurus is not yet usable on the Zaurus 5600), and has a decent Personal Information Manager that syncs seamlessly with a decent PIM on the Linux desktop machine, that would be a good thing.
I picked up a Zaurus 5600 from Amazon a couple weeks ago, hoping that the wide variety of open source and free software projects for it would allow me to put together exactly the kind of PDA I wanted. However, it turns out that a lot of these projects are in, at best, beta phase. Or they don't really run on the 5600. Or they don't work with each other. You usually don't find out about any of these problems until you spend a few hours trying to get something to work. It doesn't make sense to complain about free software created by a community of volunteers, but it's been a frustrating experience.
I have a Handspring Visor (the "deluxe" one that you could probably buy on EBay for about $50 by now). The schedule is fairly useful, as is the address book. However, I find that the killer app is my outliner, a product called ThoughtMill. It is absolutely the best way for me to organize ideas, lists, etc. I've used it for everything from shopping lists to outlines of technical documents. I also keep notes on obscure Unix commands and Perl debugging info in it. The Palm OS's search feature lets me find anything in ThoughMill (or anywhere else) quickly.
I'm not a big fan of the Palm method of syncing. Instead, I have a plug-in backup module (for Handsprings only) that creates a full image of the everything in memory. I've had to use it to restore the backup twice already (both times my fault).
Oh, I also play Minehunter obsessively.
That's the smartest thing ever said by a temporary celebrity about temporary celebrity.
One day after work I played Tetris for about an hour. During my drive home on an L.A. freeway, I had to fight off the urge to constantly switch lanes and floor it every time I saw a space open up in one of the lanes ahead of me. There must be a word for this phenomenon, where the imperitives of a game get temporarily transposed onto some other activity.
Maybe now this phrase can make a comeback.
Maybe this is a little dig at those football-loving Berkeley alumni who call it just "Cal."
None of the examples you mention even come close to describing the kind of landscape change suggested by this "discovery." Volcanic processes that create new land are simply irrelevant. Volcanos that explode can turn large chunks of land in to rubble, but they don't pick up entire cities and throw them, in one piece, into the ocean. Hurricanes and floods don't rate, either.
I don't think anyone's ever seen evidence of subsidence on this scale, in this short a time.
This whole thing looks pretty fishy. No images have been released, as far as I can tell. None of the news articles indicate that the journalists have been shown images, video, or the earlier sonar images. An interview with someone at National Geographic (with which ADC's president claims to be arranging a joint project) suggests that noone there has seen anything either.
The president of ADC is referred to as an "ocean engineer." My guess is that she is a mechanical engineer specializing in marine salvage operations. She doesn't sound like an archaeologist or a geologist. My guess is that ADC has discovered some unique natural formations. These could prove to be very, very interesting to geologists, but totally irrelevant to human history.
I don't read much science fiction anymore, but Lathe of Heaven is one of my favorite books. I re-read it about once a year.
The Lathe of Heaven movie that was made for public TV back in the 70s is now, finally, available on video and DVD. I actually saw the movie when it was first shown (and only discovered the book later). The movie then disappeared for years, apparently over some kind of dispute over the rights.
Even though I looked for the movie for years, I'm now afraid to rent it. One of the employees in Seattle's Scarecrow Video store warned me that it's pretty dated and a bit disappointing.
There are a couple other notable science fiction works that address gender and society. Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time takes an oppressed underclass woman from mid-1970s America and projects her into a future utopia in which differences in gender and sexuality have been erased. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale imagines an America dominated by Reagan-era patriarchy.
In both these novels, gender difference is seen as the central problem in society. In The Handmaid's Tale, rigidly-defined gender roles form the basis of everyone's oppression. The utopia of Woman on the Edge of Time depends on the complete eradication of gender roles, even using technology to allow men to breast-feed.
In LeGuin's fictional world, however, genderless societies prove to be just as oppressive and intolerant as the real world. Militarism dominates one society, political repression the other, and in both, deviating from sexual and gender norms makes you a pervert.
The Left Hand of Darkness is more of a thought experiment on the subject of gender than it is a political argument. It achieves a sophistication lacking in the other two novels. Both The Handmaid's Tale and Woman on the Edge of Time based their fictional societies on contemporary feminist political theory. Piercy gives us an unintentionally insufferable utopia dominated by feminized (not necessarily feminist) forms of social interaction and 1970s commune culture. Atwood creates a cartoonish distopia dominated by masculine militarism and 1980s conservative ideology. LeGuin's fictional world is equally rooted in the political context of its times; its cold war themes make it read, in parts, like a John LeCarre spy novel. However, The Left Hand of Darkness seems more plausible and less dated than the other two novels because it draws on a broad view of society rather than one focused on gender as a single issue.
A few years ago, Microsoft got into trouble because the Spanish version of the Office thesaurus, which was made up of content bought from another company, offered a number of words like "lazy" and "savage" when the user entered "indeo," the Spanish word for indian. A lot of people who hated Microsoft blasted the company for not censoring the thesaurus.
Another issue that came up around the same time was Microsoft's addition of a "parental control" feature to thier Bookshelf reference CD. The company wanted to expand the market for the CD, which included a dictionary, encyclopedia, book of quotations, and thesaurus, to schools and families. However, the content of each book included some words that parents might consider objectionable. The parental control feature allowed a user to "hide" all words and entries that might be objectionable. Bookshelf's dictionary, like any dictionary, tagged some definitions with labels like "offensive," "obscene," and "vulgar." The parental control feature simply turned off any entry that contained a word for which the dictionary included an offensive definition. This seemed like a good solution. However, this meant that a kid writing a report on beavers, for instance, wasn't going to get any help from Microsoft Bookshelf. He also wouldn't find the word "mother," believe it or not.
The latest flap over the Office thesaurus sounds like more of the same. Microsoft wants to avoid offending people who don't understand what a thesaurus is really for. They also don't really want to get into the messy business of censoring content word-by-word. There's probably a setting hidden somewhere that allows you to turn the full thesaurus back on.
I use USB Macs, ADB Macs, PS/2 PCs, and USB PCs on a variety of switchboxes, and have a few suggestions of what to consider for a mixed environment.
Mac issues
The Headless Mac Problem When a Macintosh is booted without a monitor attached, it turns off its video circuitry. There is no way, as far as I know, to get it to start sending a video signal once it has turned it off. This means that if you boot a Mac attached to a KVM switch, you have to make sure that you don't switch to another machine until the Mac has gotten past the part of the startup where it looks for a monitor. The real solution is to buy a gHead adapter from Dr. Bott (about US$20). It's a small pass-through adapter that fits onto the Mac's video port and spoofs it into thinking it has an attached monitor. It works with any resolution.
USB vs. MacsBug
My machines are used for development and testing, which means that they regularly drop into the Mac debugger, MacsBug. If a USB Mac is not the active machine on the KVM switch, it decides that there is no keyboard attached and it unloads the keyboard driver. Normally, the Mac just reloads the driver when you switch back to the Mac. However, if the Mac has dropped into MacsBug, it won't reload the driver and you have no input at all. There is, as yet, no good solution to this problem. I wish someone would write a keyboard driver that would never unload.
Using ADB Macs with PS/2 Switchboxes There are ADB to PS/2 adapters. The ADB2PS/2 adapters are pricey, about US$100. I've used them with the Belkin OmniView switchboxes with no complaints.
Using USB Macs with PS/2 Switchboxes I've used a Y-mouse USB2PS/2 adapter, which costs less than US$50, with an Avocent (formerly Cybex/Apex) switchbox. It seems to work very well. It may even solve the MacsBug problem mentioned above, but I haven't tested it thouroughly.
USB KVM Switchboxes
I've used two USB KVM switches. One was from Belkin. I don't remember the model, as I never was able to get it to work and sent it back. The other is the Dr. Bott MoniswitchPro8USB. This is an 8-port USB KVM switchbox marketed by Dr. Bott, but made by the same company that makes the Jargy switch reviewed in the article. It costs US$400, but it comes with all the necessary cables. The only hidden cost are the gHead adapters mentioned above, which make it easier to deal with reboots without causing the headless mac problem. I have a mix of Mac and PCs on this switchbox and it seems to work acceptibly well. My only complaint is that there is often a bit of a lab when you switch to a machine that has not been active for a while. The lag occurs because the USB keyboard driver has to reload.
What kind of policy will govern the board that chooses sites to filter based on member nominations? The web contains a lot of perfectly inoffensive material that conservative Christian parents find objectionable.
What if a health information site contains a small amount of information on sexuality or medicinal herbs? It wouldn't exactly qualify as sex & drugs, and I can't imagine AOL filtering that. However, what about a Wiccan or Pagan site that contains the same information? I could see 10,000 well-organized Christian AOL members sending in their votes.
The reporter offers only minimal analysis of why people are defaulting on their loans. Are large numbers of people keeping their jobs but taking pay cuts? Not that I've heard of. Were folks using stock options to make monthly car payments? That sounds unlikely. The concrete examples the article contains all involve techs who lost their jobs due to lay offs or company failures. Mentioning these in the same breath as company-lot repossessions suggests that they are the same phenomena. The /. blurb was a pretty accurate depiction of what most people will take away from this article and it's the reporter's fault.
Maybe this is really a story about power of habit. People get so used to commuting that, even after getting laid off, they continue to drive to work and park in the company lot.
According to a Salon review of the new book about Timothy McVeigh, he used the original Star Wars movie as part of his inspiration for the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building. "As a kid, McVeigh had noticed that the 'Star Wars' movies showed people sitting at consoles -- Space-Age clerical workers -- inside the Death Star. Those people weren't storm troopers. They weren't killing anyone. But they were vital to the operations of the Evil Empire, McVeigh deduced, and when Luke blew up the Death Star those people became inevitable casualties. When the Death Star exploded, the movie audiences cheered. The bad guys were beaten: that was all that really mattered. As an adult, McVeigh found himself able to dismiss the killings of secretaries, receptionists, and other personnel in the Murrah building with equally cold-blooded calculation. They were all part of the Evil Empire." http://www.salon.com/books/2001/04/07/mcveigh/inde x2.html