"Sure! Jonathon Shade, 1060 W Addison St., Chicago, IL 60613."
Which, for anyone who doesn't know is the address for Wrigley Field in Chicago, famously used by Elwood Blues on his driver's license in The Blues Brothers. Subsequently used by thousands of geeks when they just wanted to buy some electronics parts from Radio Shack, et al. for cash without giving their name and address.
I'm not sure what the U.K. equivalent would be. The only address I could find for Wembley Stadium didn't have a numeric address that might throw people off the scent. Using the garage over the road at 11 S Way wouldn't have the same effect.
For the record that music is from the movie Where Eagles Dare, starring Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood. It's a pretty entertaining WWII yarn, especially when the music swells and you hear that iconic drum roll. I didn't know about the movie until late one night when I was in my twenties I caught it on cable and said, "Hey, that's the music from Wolfenstein!" It's one of my favorites now.
A blind man could see in a minute that there's something going on with the atmosphere. We have all kinds of anecdotal evidence that temperatures are warming. We don't need any more suppositions as to the cause of this trend.
What we desperately need are scientific facts, not predictions based on mathematical models. We've seen what using unsound mathematical models can do in the financial sector. We know from historical records that just within the last thousand years it has been both warmer and cooler than it is now. We need a rigorously tested model that can account for what we already know. The model that generated the famous 'hockey stick' need not apply.
One other thing that would be valuable is a worldwide sensor network to get some rigorously defined temperature data. What we have now is a hodgepodge of airport readings surrounded by asphalt, land grant university instruments in rural locations, and various other methods and locations that don't give us an accurate picture.
In short, if politics and activism can be kept out of a nascent climate service, we might actually learn something useful. We, and by we I mean Americans, need to tackle this problem without bankrupting ourselves. We need to know the facts, and to how many decimal places.
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid has already been mentioned, but bears repeating. Godel's Proof by Nagel and Newman makes a good companion to it. Finally, How to Solve It by G. Polya will help make up for the deficiencies in modern mathematics textbooks. I know I wish my mathematics instructor in high school had given me Polya.
Castles and fortresses were completely negated by modern artillery and war machines. A decent fortification would be an immense advantage against a mob armed with pistols and rifles. Just sayin'.
I hate to rain too much on your parade but, if my sleep deprived memory serves me correctly, an EMP would render permanently inoperable any device within the effect area controlled by a semiconductor. This obviously includes computers and routing equipment, but also most cash registers, motor vehicles, kitchen appliances, traffic lights, programmable controllers, etc. Not to mention the approximately 5,000 airliners in the air during peak times.
In addition, communication equipment and other types of receivers, e.g. RADAR, are especially vulnerable to EMP and would also likely be destroyed. Furthermore, any electrical equipment connected even tangentially to a sufficiently long conductor, e.g. network cabling, electrical cabling, piping, fencing, etc., would receive a power surge that could potentially destroy any such equipment.
Long story short, if "they" manage to put a 10 kT air burst 300 miles above Chester, Nebraska, even if all critical Internet junctions were EMP hardened, the Internet would for all intents and purposes be gone until Asia or Europe could send us new equipment.
I can safely predict this would be the least of our worries.
Don't forget the bliss of a both a full-sized backspace and a full-sized enter key. If I had known then that I wouldn't be able to find a match for my mid-nineties Natural keyboard, I'd have bought two.
That being said, I have had my eye on a Belkin F8E208, just in case the old girl gives up the ghost.
Unless somebody else had those domains first, I don't care what you do with them. You're only squatting if there was a legitimate website at that domain before the registration expired and you picked it up solely for the purpose of ransoming it back to the original owner.
For example, take some poor sucker who forgot to update their credit card's expiration date at interland and lost a domain they were using for their business. Now, the punk mofo that snapped it up the instant it went unregistered wants five thousand dollars, Five Thousand Dollars for it and I... I mean they will be damned if they're gonna pay that to some parasite, scum-sucking shitwagon that should be hit with a car!
If they're members of the ACM, they may have acted in contradiction with the Association's Code of Ethics. If such actions rise to the level of "gross misconduct", their membership could be terminated.
It's interesting that this came up, because I've been thinking about this subject quite a bit in the last week or so. Interesting enough, in fact, that I'll undo my mods to reply in the affirmative.
Manners demand that I preface the following by saying that I am not trying to brag, I am trying to provide some bona fides. I'm a smart guy with a strong engineer's mind. I read a newspaper, watch a television news program, and browse dozens of web feeds every day. My library contains more than a thousand volumes. I spend more time than the average person on introspection and self-analysis. Additionally, I'm extremely stubborn. The surest way to get me to not do something is to try to browbeat me into doing it.
Like many of you, I didn't think advertising worked on me. Yet a couple of weeks ago I inexplicably found myself spending half an hour at marines.com looking into enlistment. That the Marines are heavily advertised during adult swim, which I often have on while coding, can't be a coincidence.
World-class advertisers are very good at what they do. They literally have it down to a science. Even if you can use your intellect to protect yourself from the overt message, there's still the more subtle psychological cues and even sheer repetition if nothing else works. It wasn't that long ago the Marines couldn't get enough recruits. The AP reported this week that they've met 142% of their recruiting goal for April. That's not likely to be a coincidence either.
I apologize for replying to your reply to someone's sig, especially while strung out after pulling dawn patrol. I am reminded of the immortal words of Archie Bunker to his daughter when she argued that a large portion of all the murders in New York City were committed with handguns, "Would it make ya feel any better, Little Girl, if they was pushed out of windas?"
Alternative Hairstyle: Guilty. However, I think in my case the real reason has more to do with statements such as, "Greg, you would do well not to turn this into a matter of honor."
Although, "If you knew what you were doing, I wouldn't be here. Why don't you make yourself useful and go get me a cup of coffee. Black," probably runs a close second.
You'd be surprised at how often, "You know who you remind me of? Andrew Jackson," worked back in the day. I suppose it'd have to be "Ulysses S. Grant" or even "Benjamin Franklin" these days.
One solution is to power the satellite with a return beam from the Earth station. If the main beam wanders, it loses power and cuts off. There are other solutions.
I think it depends on where you are in the US. In the more urban northeast I believe VFW members still get out on the streets and sell lapel poppies on Veteran's Day. When I lived there I'd always buy one. In the mostly suburban and rural south, I don't know that I've ever seen one that my grandmother didn't send to me.
Creating a fail-safe design is simple. The satellite should be powered by a return beam from the earth station. Thus if the main power beam wanders off-target, the satellite powers down and the main beam shuts off. This isn't a new idea. Jerry Pournelle has been talking about this for many years.
If anything kills this it'll be that the generated electricity would be too cheap to meter, and thus nobody would make vast fortunes off of it.
Frylock: "Thirty-two grand? That doesn't sound right. Did he even look at the car?"
Meatwad: "Yeah, I mean over the phone. He says that it sounds like the hobbit that turns the crankcase is depressed and needs therapy. We need to get us a new hobbit. They's from the land beyond time. Land beyond time's also gonna hook us up with the unicorn for the radiator. I ain't even gonna tell you about that haunted air conditioner. Plus the air filter, that's made of plutonium. That's gonna involve Superman, so, y'know, plus shipping from Krypton. Then the cow jumped over the moon."
I'll bite. It's really quite simple. Modern police evolved across millennia from ancient officials who were charged with uploading the peace and public order. The ancient symbols of this office were a shield and a baton. The peace officer was expected to use these defend himself and restore order with a minimum of harm to anyone.
One presumes that by and large, most of these men executed their office faithfully and did not abuse their authority, just as our police do today. One further presumes there were no small amount of bullies and sadists among the police, just as there are among police today. Associations of police chiefs will sometimes claim they are in an arms race against the "criminal element". They use said rhetoric to justify their escalation of hostilities with just about everyone, up to and including elderly grandmothers.
I honestly believe it can be traced back to the day that someone decided he was no long a "peace officer" but a "law enforcement officer". The former stares down a disruptive participant in a town hall meeting until he leaves of his own accord, perhaps "mindlessly", but for calculated effect, twirling his baton if the situation warrants. The latter "gives an order" to a person who seemed to be committing no unlawful act, calls for backup and escalates the situation until the crime of resisting arrest has been committed, and then adds fuel to the fire by tazering a more or less helpless subject.
Even if this man is mentally deranged, which given his manner of speech is a strong possibility, unless he is a threat there is no cause to injure him in any way. I suppose that we should be grateful for the tazer, since in former times they might have just shot the poor sap or given him some broken bones at the very least. Equating "potential threat" with "imminent threat" or "immediate threat" is intellectual laziness and should not be tolerated, if only for the reason that obviously almost everybody is a "potential threat".
There's a reason police to this day wear a shield pinned to their chest instead of a sword. Sadly I don't think the ancient and honorable meanings of the symbol and its reason are widely taught in police academies. The "us" versus "them" mentality has to stop, or there will be no peace worth preserving nor any freedom to speak of worth defending.
I imagine that most businesses don't enjoy paying for their all night, every night, floodlit parking lots, etc. They do so because it's cheaper than settling a lawsuit for negligence if a crime or injury occurs in an unlit area. A Google search on "unlit premises negligence" reveals thousands of lawyers eager to take such a case. Lights are cheap insurance against such suits.
Which really annoys those of us who really relish some good, old fashioned darkness.
Slashdot Mirror
You could always use the U.S. standard.
"I'll just need your name and address."
"Sure! Jonathon Shade, 1060 W Addison St., Chicago, IL 60613."
Which, for anyone who doesn't know is the address for Wrigley Field in Chicago, famously used by Elwood Blues on his driver's license in The Blues Brothers. Subsequently used by thousands of geeks when they just wanted to buy some electronics parts from Radio Shack, et al. for cash without giving their name and address.
I'm not sure what the U.K. equivalent would be. The only address I could find for Wembley Stadium didn't have a numeric address that might throw people off the scent. Using the garage over the road at 11 S Way wouldn't have the same effect.
Right on!
For the record that music is from the movie Where Eagles Dare , starring Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood. It's a pretty entertaining WWII yarn, especially when the music swells and you hear that iconic drum roll. I didn't know about the movie until late one night when I was in my twenties I caught it on cable and said, "Hey, that's the music from Wolfenstein!" It's one of my favorites now.
Yes, if they can get some actual science done.
A blind man could see in a minute that there's something going on with the atmosphere. We have all kinds of anecdotal evidence that temperatures are warming. We don't need any more suppositions as to the cause of this trend.
What we desperately need are scientific facts, not predictions based on mathematical models. We've seen what using unsound mathematical models can do in the financial sector. We know from historical records that just within the last thousand years it has been both warmer and cooler than it is now. We need a rigorously tested model that can account for what we already know. The model that generated the famous 'hockey stick' need not apply.
One other thing that would be valuable is a worldwide sensor network to get some rigorously defined temperature data. What we have now is a hodgepodge of airport readings surrounded by asphalt, land grant university instruments in rural locations, and various other methods and locations that don't give us an accurate picture.
In short, if politics and activism can be kept out of a nascent climate service, we might actually learn something useful. We, and by we I mean Americans, need to tackle this problem without bankrupting ourselves. We need to know the facts, and to how many decimal places.
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid has already been mentioned, but bears repeating. Godel's Proof by Nagel and Newman makes a good companion to it. Finally, How to Solve It by G. Polya will help make up for the deficiencies in modern mathematics textbooks. I know I wish my mathematics instructor in high school had given me Polya.
Castles and fortresses were completely negated by modern artillery and war machines. A decent fortification would be an immense advantage against a mob armed with pistols and rifles. Just sayin'.
The Death Knight area is interesting and fun. Then it's over and you find yourself saying, "Thrallmar. I can't believe I'm back in Thrallmar."
I hate to rain too much on your parade but, if my sleep deprived memory serves me correctly, an EMP would render permanently inoperable any device within the effect area controlled by a semiconductor. This obviously includes computers and routing equipment, but also most cash registers, motor vehicles, kitchen appliances, traffic lights, programmable controllers, etc. Not to mention the approximately 5,000 airliners in the air during peak times.
In addition, communication equipment and other types of receivers, e.g. RADAR, are especially vulnerable to EMP and would also likely be destroyed. Furthermore, any electrical equipment connected even tangentially to a sufficiently long conductor, e.g. network cabling, electrical cabling, piping, fencing, etc., would receive a power surge that could potentially destroy any such equipment.
Long story short, if "they" manage to put a 10 kT air burst 300 miles above Chester, Nebraska, even if all critical Internet junctions were EMP hardened, the Internet would for all intents and purposes be gone until Asia or Europe could send us new equipment.
I can safely predict this would be the least of our worries.
My favorite was always Netcomm's web browser that would fail with an "Oops! You're screwed" dialog with just an OK button.
Don't forget the bliss of a both a full-sized backspace and a full-sized enter key. If I had known then that I wouldn't be able to find a match for my mid-nineties Natural keyboard, I'd have bought two.
That being said, I have had my eye on a Belkin F8E208, just in case the old girl gives up the ghost.
Unless somebody else had those domains first, I don't care what you do with them. You're only squatting if there was a legitimate website at that domain before the registration expired and you picked it up solely for the purpose of ransoming it back to the original owner.
For example, take some poor sucker who forgot to update their credit card's expiration date at interland and lost a domain they were using for their business. Now, the punk mofo that snapped it up the instant it went unregistered wants five thousand dollars, Five Thousand Dollars for it and I... I mean they will be damned if they're gonna pay that to some parasite, scum-sucking shitwagon that should be hit with a car!
Ahem. Just sayin'.
If they're snooping, they're not professionals.
If they're members of the ACM, they may have acted in contradiction with the Association's Code of Ethics. If such actions rise to the level of "gross misconduct", their membership could be terminated.
It's interesting that this came up, because I've been thinking about this subject quite a bit in the last week or so. Interesting enough, in fact, that I'll undo my mods to reply in the affirmative.
Manners demand that I preface the following by saying that I am not trying to brag, I am trying to provide some bona fides. I'm a smart guy with a strong engineer's mind. I read a newspaper, watch a television news program, and browse dozens of web feeds every day. My library contains more than a thousand volumes. I spend more time than the average person on introspection and self-analysis. Additionally, I'm extremely stubborn. The surest way to get me to not do something is to try to browbeat me into doing it.
Like many of you, I didn't think advertising worked on me. Yet a couple of weeks ago I inexplicably found myself spending half an hour at marines.com looking into enlistment. That the Marines are heavily advertised during adult swim, which I often have on while coding, can't be a coincidence.
World-class advertisers are very good at what they do. They literally have it down to a science. Even if you can use your intellect to protect yourself from the overt message, there's still the more subtle psychological cues and even sheer repetition if nothing else works. It wasn't that long ago the Marines couldn't get enough recruits. The AP reported this week that they've met 142% of their recruiting goal for April. That's not likely to be a coincidence either.
I apologize for replying to your reply to someone's sig, especially while strung out after pulling dawn patrol. I am reminded of the immortal words of Archie Bunker to his daughter when she argued that a large portion of all the murders in New York City were committed with handguns, "Would it make ya feel any better, Little Girl, if they was pushed out of windas?"
Alternative Hairstyle: Guilty. However, I think in my case the real reason has more to do with statements such as, "Greg, you would do well not to turn this into a matter of honor."
Although, "If you knew what you were doing, I wouldn't be here. Why don't you make yourself useful and go get me a cup of coffee. Black," probably runs a close second.
You'd be surprised at how often, "You know who you remind me of? Andrew Jackson," worked back in the day. I suppose it'd have to be "Ulysses S. Grant" or even "Benjamin Franklin" these days.
One solution is to power the satellite with a return beam from the Earth station. If the main beam wanders, it loses power and cuts off. There are other solutions.
God bless you, officer. I wish more police officers understood this as well as you do.
I think it depends on where you are in the US. In the more urban northeast I believe VFW members still get out on the streets and sell lapel poppies on Veteran's Day. When I lived there I'd always buy one. In the mostly suburban and rural south, I don't know that I've ever seen one that my grandmother didn't send to me.
Creating a fail-safe design is simple. The satellite should be powered by a return beam from the earth station. Thus if the main power beam wanders off-target, the satellite powers down and the main beam shuts off. This isn't a new idea. Jerry Pournelle has been talking about this for many years.
If anything kills this it'll be that the generated electricity would be too cheap to meter, and thus nobody would make vast fortunes off of it.
Frylock: "Thirty-two grand? That doesn't sound right. Did he even look at the car?"
Meatwad: "Yeah, I mean over the phone. He says that it sounds like the hobbit that turns the crankcase is depressed and needs therapy. We need to get us a new hobbit. They's from the land beyond time. Land beyond time's also gonna hook us up with the unicorn for the radiator. I ain't even gonna tell you about that haunted air conditioner. Plus the air filter, that's made of plutonium. That's gonna involve Superman, so, y'know, plus shipping from Krypton. Then the cow jumped over the moon."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidney_Car
http://www.tv.com/aqua-teen-hunger-force/kidney-car/episode/276030/trivia.html
I'll bite. It's really quite simple. Modern police evolved across millennia from ancient officials who were charged with uploading the peace and public order. The ancient symbols of this office were a shield and a baton. The peace officer was expected to use these defend himself and restore order with a minimum of harm to anyone.
One presumes that by and large, most of these men executed their office faithfully and did not abuse their authority, just as our police do today. One further presumes there were no small amount of bullies and sadists among the police, just as there are among police today. Associations of police chiefs will sometimes claim they are in an arms race against the "criminal element". They use said rhetoric to justify their escalation of hostilities with just about everyone, up to and including elderly grandmothers.
I honestly believe it can be traced back to the day that someone decided he was no long a "peace officer" but a "law enforcement officer". The former stares down a disruptive participant in a town hall meeting until he leaves of his own accord, perhaps "mindlessly", but for calculated effect, twirling his baton if the situation warrants. The latter "gives an order" to a person who seemed to be committing no unlawful act, calls for backup and escalates the situation until the crime of resisting arrest has been committed, and then adds fuel to the fire by tazering a more or less helpless subject.
Even if this man is mentally deranged, which given his manner of speech is a strong possibility, unless he is a threat there is no cause to injure him in any way. I suppose that we should be grateful for the tazer, since in former times they might have just shot the poor sap or given him some broken bones at the very least. Equating "potential threat" with "imminent threat" or "immediate threat" is intellectual laziness and should not be tolerated, if only for the reason that obviously almost everybody is a "potential threat".
There's a reason police to this day wear a shield pinned to their chest instead of a sword. Sadly I don't think the ancient and honorable meanings of the symbol and its reason are widely taught in police academies. The "us" versus "them" mentality has to stop, or there will be no peace worth preserving nor any freedom to speak of worth defending.
I imagine that most businesses don't enjoy paying for their all night, every night, floodlit parking lots, etc. They do so because it's cheaper than settling a lawsuit for negligence if a crime or injury occurs in an unlit area. A Google search on "unlit premises negligence" reveals thousands of lawyers eager to take such a case. Lights are cheap insurance against such suits.
Which really annoys those of us who really relish some good, old fashioned darkness.
China went into my Axis of Evil on the 5th of June, 1989. I'll never forgive them sumbitches for that. Never.