The city sold it to apartment builder every house on the block lost value and everyone except one house is now a rental. All crime can be traced to said Apt now. So good for tearing down low income apartments. I aint sheading any f ing tears.
Tearing down Public Housing –without replacing that housing stock with the 'dispersed, single-level dwelling' units at the same rate is what led to what is now referred to as "Chi-raq". That is, Chicago, with its re-attainment of the murder capital of the US.
I know people who saw this coming 15 years ago. They worked hard to balance the demolition rate with the rebuilding rate. Their please were not heeded. Now many people die in the street as a result.
I won't shed a tear for you if I hear of any violent act committed against you or your loved ones, you callous asshole.
He'll build a new yacht, and instead of being automated, it will be manned by the crop of newly created galley slaves that are the inevitable result of his business practice.
A bunch of poor people won't add anything to his bottom line, so they might as die serving to maintain his luxury lifestyle. It's not like they're citizens with "inalienable rights" to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" or any such commie nonsense.
Isn't his main yacht named "The Octopus?"
I believe that his private investment company is similarly named: "Octopus Holdings Corp."
Honestly Oracle really does not care about them, nor the fact that the property management company is being scum.
All oracle cares about is next quarter profits. if people have to suffer for those profits, then so be it.
Not true.
ORACLE also cares about Larry Ellison keeping his fake Japanese-style palace in Malibu (Southern California), while still being able to commute to work in Northern California, in a giant, noisy, Corporate jet that flies out of my Municipal Airport every goddamned morning. Then back again in the evening. And often, for 'practice', the jets bank at super-low altitudes over the one Municipal Airport in the Nation with (1) the highest density of Jet traffic, (2) the highest density of residential population around any Municipal Airport in the US, and (3) the busiest Municipal Airport in the Nation.
And don't tell me that I knew what I was getting into when buying here. I moved away from the flight-path of my Municipal Airport, specifically to get out of the FAA-mandated flight-path. Now the jets have come to me. One crashed a decade or so ago about a block from my place. The pilots prefer to fly at low altitude to show the neighborhood residents "Who's Boss", in violation of FAA Rules, but the FAA is the poster-child for regulatory capture.
20,000% increase in business-jet traffic over the past 20 years. There is no body to report violations to, nor any body to actually enforce regulations.
I guess when Harrison Ford crashes one of his WW-II planes into my living room, his craft will no longer be under FAA control (being crashed and in my living room). Then the heavy lawsuits will really begin...
Boards of Directors can, indeed, be held personally liable for the acts of a Corporation that they oversee. The bar to personal prosecution is very high, though.
See the US Supreme Court decision way back in the mid-1800's regarding a railroad company calling itself a 'person' under the law. A Corporation is a person, at least under the law.
This stupid error could have been fixed at any time in the intervening ~150 years by Congress passing a law stating otherwise. It hasn't.
The day that I see a law-breaking Corporation either jailed or put-to-death for their crimes, I might then consider viewing them as people. Until then, they are not—Corporations (profit or non-profit) are legal structures that represent and act for a particular group of people—Corporations are not people.
isn't an agreement to continue offering housing at a stated rate exactly what a signed lease is?
It is quite common for a lease to include a clause detailing how many days notice the landlord must provide the tenant in the event of an eviction involving the sale of the home. ..
A contract that any party can terminate at any time at his sole discretion is not a contract.
Precisely. A Contract is either a Contract –or it is not. No grey area there.
Austin may seem like a liberal bastion compared to the rest of Texas, but it's actually still enormously conservative compared to say California.
R'Amen to that. I will never live south of the Mason-Dixon line. Ever.
I would rather starve and survive off the bits of cheese from the inside of discarded pizza boxes than to educate (college Prof. here) a population that still says things like, "The South will rise again."
Yes, I have indeed heard Southern acquaintances say this. And also one to brag that his father received US Govt subsidies to not grow food crops on his land in certain years—he grew tobacco instead, which actually paid more per acre. He was proud of milking and defrauding the US Government. His father was not only committing deliberate fraud, but happily giving people cancer to boot.
Cauterize Texas from the US. Give it back to Mexico. Let it be its own country. I don't care—just get rid of the South.
Just because a bank is holding onto property does not mean its empty, and nor does it mean it would be affordable to rent for these people needing to find cheap accommodation. Unoccupied properties degrade quickly, so banks will gladly rent them out.. . .
No. Banks are not landlords, nor do they want to be. They will let squatters reside in a place for over a year, collecting no rent from them, just to keep the place occupied.
Banks are (assumedly) good at being banks – not landlords.
It was ORACLE who chose to do business with a (nother) scumbag. . . perhaps as a condition of closing the sale, although that its only a guess.
Why should MY tax dollars go to support these people that were displaced through bad-faith business practices? That is like saying it is A-OK for big corps. to externalize their costs onto the taxpayers.
Make the guilty party pay. Let ORACLE get lots of bad PR, which they deserve, for this. The seller could have simply bought-out the leases of the renters (leases run with the land), but chose to be assholes, and make it way more expensive for everyone.
I 'opted out' of the cancer-scanner at LAX in December. It took 15 minutes for a "male pat-down" to appear, and the pat-down took about 10 minutes, plus five of waiting around while they gathered up my things.
Next time, I will simply strip off, and hold my ass open goat.se-style, asking if they want to check for any "bombs" that I might drop during the flight. (I've dropped trou before for the TSA, and they are going to see me naked, so why not opt to let them actually see me naked?) I also do not want to be blasted with x-rays.
The day I am turned away from the airport for opting out of a rape-scanner is the day I retain counsel.
It's good to hear that my suspicion was right all along.
I've a number of hand-made or specialized scientific hand-tools confiscated by the TSA. In every case, I have rendered the object non-functional. For example, bending my expensive tweezers completely out of shape before handing them over. (Tweezers are not knives, BTW.)
A TSA Rep insisted that the laptop of an acquaintance be put in the checked luggage, and was not allowed to be carried on (this was several years ago). Guess what? It disappeared magically between departure and destination – with no "TSA opened your bag" note inside, either.
The Patent application (publication) is three pages in total. That is incredibly short.
It also has (for now) only one claim, not a list of claims of various scope.
It also lacks a list Examples or Embodiments, which are the structure that support a Patent when contested or claimed in Court.
Last, the Figure shown on the front page looks very, very Mac-like. As if they are trying to get Patent coverage for a Design which already exist(ed) on the drawing boards of a competing firm.
Note that this was filed in 2006 or 2007 (I won't waste the seconds to check). Mac OS X Finder does indeed feature this exact type of magnification slider in the bottom-right of any Finder window, although I forget when the element was introduced. Knowing Apple, it was conceived at least five years prior to its implementation. (Note that the AIA did not go into effect until January 2014, making this stupid patent application part of the 'first-to-invent' era.)
Yep, I can confirm this. . . In retrospect, I wish I would have stuck with Win 7 as long as possible.
I still run XP.
In VM-Ware, under Mac OS X, only in the rare instances where a technical application is only available under Windoze (usually an application that a friend wrote, amounting to little more than a script).
Bruce, thank you for saying some of what needs to be said.
But please drop the Apple hate—Music downloaded via iTunes can be saved in DRM-free MP3 format, and it has been this way for about 8 years.
And please do not be afraid of bashing the IoT. It is one of the stupidest ideas tht humanity has ever come up with.
No, really, the stupidest. Stupider than eugenics. Stupider than. . . OK, that is about the crown of them all, but please somebody prove me wrong and argue that there was ever a stupider idea than the IoT.
* Have randomly sized text * Are impractical to carry in enough quantity for 1-2 weeks away from home *... * Annotation is messy and often frowned upon * You lose your place if you fall asleep while reading them
What? really?
Page-layout in physical print is a highly refined art. In web pages and 'Kindle-versions' of books, the great effort of the typesetter for readability is thrown out of the window.
If you read only 'fluff' books, then your second point does appy. I suggest that you read something pithy that requires you to think every few paragraphs. Thus, you will have less paper to carry, and as a reward, much more to ponder.
Annotation is frowned upon? By whom? Your first-grade teacher? Write in the goddamned margins. All the greats did. If you think annotation destroys the value of your book, then you have argued explicitly against you last point of 'destroying value' of a book by annotating. Look up the word 'palimpsest', and also google the term 'famous margin writings'.
RE: Your last point. If re-reading a paragraph, or even gasp, a whole page of a book or magazine that you have been reading flummoxes you, then you are either (a) reading page-turner garbage, (b) choosing authors who have nothing worth repeating, or (probably) (c) too dumb to get that re-reading anything worthwhile is a worthwhile investment of your time.
I not only love used books, but this last five years has been an absolute bonanza on IRL rare books that have a low consumer demand. That is, for me, technical books on conference proceedings where an idea was first germinated, or even figured out over beers.
Yes, I do use a rig w/an iPhone and GeniusScan+ to quickly PDF and OCR them, under Fair Use Rights. That is only to make them term-searchable, which is better than any index. I keep the physical copies.
Some seminal scientific breakthroughs were first reported in conferences forty years ago, when transcriptionists recorded every question-and-answer sessions of colloquia. Libraries are throwing these things out left and right, to the detriment of human knowledge. It's like a slow-burn in Alexandria.
Detergents are more than plenty powerful enough - they're capable of etching glass if they're too strong (my mother's glasses are all an etched milky-white because for years she's filled the detergent box to capacity.)
correlation isn't causation. Etched glasses is more likely from the water. If it is from the detergent, it's likely a thermostat issue. The temp should be high enough to dissolve all the detergent, preventing it from etching anything. Or, she always bought the cheapest detergent, and it's half sand and filler.
Or she might just own really cheap glassware – the kind that use too much alkali fluxes. They leach out of the glass, and charge equality means that something with 2+ or more charge is going to replace the two alkali lost. Ca2+, and so on. That is, calcium oxide --> calcium hydroxide, which is not (appreciably) water-soluble.
Go buy some "muriatic acid" (hydrochloric acid) at the hardware store. Mix it 1:3 for the first try, and soak. If that doesn't work, try 1:1. It won't dissolve the glass, but it will etch most metals, so use a big Corningware bowl or baking dish.
And for gosh-sakes,
(1) do it outside or in the garage with the door open,
(2) wear goggles and gloves,
(3) dilute the hell out of it when it comes time to dispose of the mixture, and
(4) Run lots or water, like 100x, behind it. Otherwise, you will cause major plumbing problems, no matter where you dispose of it.
As has been done with hundreds of middle school science projects, this can be done for $200. Sheet of plywood, plastic sheeting, and a couple of leaf blowers.
Right.
It's a hovercraft, not a Hoverboard.
And a crappy one at that. It's inefficient – in too many ways to bother listing any of them.
Update: according to an anonymous but credible source, this policy was started on 12/20. Will find out more once TSA files its official response to my motion on Tuesday.
I opted out both directions of my trip home for the holidays –both after 12/20.
The pat-downs were excessively long, and they insisted on going through their little script regardless of my repeatedly saying, "I know the drill—get on with it."
The cost is in the rocket motor, the nozzle that holds the combustion products in plasma state, its cooling mechanism, pumps and controls. I am not sure how much of it can be inspected and re validated without extensive disassembly.
I keep waiting for them to replace the nozzle with an experimental version that uses a linear aerospike. The April 10, 2001 patent will be expiring in just about 5 1/2 years now...
Aerospike? What about the Marlinspike? I hear it's got real Moxie.
The space shuttle program ended up being extremely expensive compared to rocket launches.
The Shuttle was the poster child for how NOT to do reusable. Government spec with 10 mission requirements orthogonal to each other, half of which are not technically possible at time of design while development is spread out over ever ZIP code in the country.
Elon can't be dumber than Congress. Unpossible.
My family has had the same broom for five generations. We use it daily.
Sure, we occasionally replace the bristles. And yes, other times, we replace the handle. But it is the same broom that my ancestors used!
Slashdot Mirror
The city sold it to apartment builder every house on the block lost value and everyone except one house is now a rental. All crime can be traced to said Apt now.
So good for tearing down low income apartments. I aint sheading any f ing tears.
Tearing down Public Housing –without replacing that housing stock with the 'dispersed, single-level dwelling' units at the same rate is what led to what is now referred to as "Chi-raq". That is, Chicago, with its re-attainment of the murder capital of the US.
I know people who saw this coming 15 years ago. They worked hard to balance the demolition rate with the rebuilding rate. Their please were not heeded. Now many people die in the street as a result.
I won't shed a tear for you if I hear of any violent act committed against you or your loved ones, you callous asshole.
He'll build a new yacht, and instead of being automated, it will be manned by the crop of newly created galley slaves that are the inevitable result of his business practice.
A bunch of poor people won't add anything to his bottom line, so they might as die serving to maintain his luxury lifestyle. It's not like they're citizens with "inalienable rights" to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" or any such commie nonsense.
Isn't his main yacht named "The Octopus?"
I believe that his private investment company is similarly named: "Octopus Holdings Corp."
Is that a hint to anyone?
Honestly Oracle really does not care about them, nor the fact that the property management company is being scum.
All oracle cares about is next quarter profits. if people have to suffer for those profits, then so be it.
Not true.
ORACLE also cares about Larry Ellison keeping his fake Japanese-style palace in Malibu (Southern California), while still being able to commute to work in Northern California, in a giant, noisy, Corporate jet that flies out of my Municipal Airport every goddamned morning. Then back again in the evening. And often, for 'practice', the jets bank at super-low altitudes over the one Municipal Airport in the Nation with (1) the highest density of Jet traffic, (2) the highest density of residential population around any Municipal Airport in the US, and (3) the busiest Municipal Airport in the Nation.
And don't tell me that I knew what I was getting into when buying here. I moved away from the flight-path of my Municipal Airport, specifically to get out of the FAA-mandated flight-path. Now the jets have come to me. One crashed a decade or so ago about a block from my place. The pilots prefer to fly at low altitude to show the neighborhood residents "Who's Boss", in violation of FAA Rules, but the FAA is the poster-child for regulatory capture.
20,000% increase in business-jet traffic over the past 20 years. There is no body to report violations to, nor any body to actually enforce regulations.
I guess when Harrison Ford crashes one of his WW-II planes into my living room, his craft will no longer be under FAA control (being crashed and in my living room). Then the heavy lawsuits will really begin...
Boards of Directors can, indeed, be held personally liable for the acts of a Corporation that they oversee. The bar to personal prosecution is very high, though.
See the US Supreme Court decision way back in the mid-1800's regarding a railroad company calling itself a 'person' under the law. A Corporation is a person, at least under the law.
This stupid error could have been fixed at any time in the intervening ~150 years by Congress passing a law stating otherwise. It hasn't.
The day that I see a law-breaking Corporation either jailed or put-to-death for their crimes, I might then consider viewing them as people. Until then, they are not—Corporations (profit or non-profit) are legal structures that represent and act for a particular group of people—Corporations are not people.
isn't an agreement to continue offering housing at a stated rate exactly what a signed lease is?
It is quite common for a lease to include a clause detailing how many days notice the landlord must provide the tenant in the event of an eviction involving the sale of the home. . .
A contract that any party can terminate at any time at his sole discretion is not a contract.
Precisely. A Contract is either a Contract –or it is not. No grey area there.
Austin may seem like a liberal bastion compared to the rest of Texas, but it's actually still enormously conservative compared to say California.
R'Amen to that. I will never live south of the Mason-Dixon line. Ever.
I would rather starve and survive off the bits of cheese from the inside of discarded pizza boxes than to educate (college Prof. here) a population that still says things like, "The South will rise again."
Yes, I have indeed heard Southern acquaintances say this. And also one to brag that his father received US Govt subsidies to not grow food crops on his land in certain years—he grew tobacco instead, which actually paid more per acre. He was proud of milking and defrauding the US Government. His father was not only committing deliberate fraud, but happily giving people cancer to boot.
Cauterize Texas from the US. Give it back to Mexico. Let it be its own country. I don't care—just get rid of the South.
Just because a bank is holding onto property does not mean its empty, and nor does it mean it would be affordable to rent for these people needing to find cheap accommodation. Unoccupied properties degrade quickly, so banks will gladly rent them out.. . .
No. Banks are not landlords, nor do they want to be. They will let squatters reside in a place for over a year, collecting no rent from them, just to keep the place occupied.
Banks are (assumedly) good at being banks – not landlords.
WTF?!?
It was ORACLE who chose to do business with a (nother) scumbag. . . perhaps as a condition of closing the sale, although that its only a guess.
Why should MY tax dollars go to support these people that were displaced through bad-faith business practices? That is like saying it is A-OK for big corps. to externalize their costs onto the taxpayers.
Make the guilty party pay. Let ORACLE get lots of bad PR, which they deserve, for this. The seller could have simply bought-out the leases of the renters (leases run with the land), but chose to be assholes, and make it way more expensive for everyone.
Just a comment.
I 'opted out' of the cancer-scanner at LAX in December. It took 15 minutes for a "male pat-down" to appear, and the pat-down took about 10 minutes, plus five of waiting around while they gathered up my things.
Next time, I will simply strip off, and hold my ass open goat.se-style, asking if they want to check for any "bombs" that I might drop during the flight. (I've dropped trou before for the TSA, and they are going to see me naked, so why not opt to let them actually see me naked?) I also do not want to be blasted with x-rays.
The day I am turned away from the airport for opting out of a rape-scanner is the day I retain counsel.
It's good to hear that my suspicion was right all along.
I've a number of hand-made or specialized scientific hand-tools confiscated by the TSA. In every case, I have rendered the object non-functional. For example, bending my expensive tweezers completely out of shape before handing them over. (Tweezers are not knives, BTW.)
A TSA Rep insisted that the laptop of an acquaintance be put in the checked luggage, and was not allowed to be carried on (this was several years ago). Guess what? It disappeared magically between departure and destination – with no "TSA opened your bag" note inside, either.
The Patent application (publication) is three pages in total. That is incredibly short.
It also has (for now) only one claim, not a list of claims of various scope.
It also lacks a list Examples or Embodiments, which are the structure that support a Patent when contested or claimed in Court.
Last, the Figure shown on the front page looks very, very Mac-like. As if they are trying to get Patent coverage for a Design which already exist(ed) on the drawing boards of a competing firm.
Note that this was filed in 2006 or 2007 (I won't waste the seconds to check). Mac OS X Finder does indeed feature this exact type of magnification slider in the bottom-right of any Finder window, although I forget when the element was introduced. Knowing Apple, it was conceived at least five years prior to its implementation. (Note that the AIA did not go into effect until January 2014, making this stupid patent application part of the 'first-to-invent' era.)
Bringing back some Mars rocks would be nice in my lifetime. Even in unmanned missions.
An unmanned mission to bring back Mars rocks is probably doable. I'm dubious that we will send humans there in my remaining lifespan.
Aha! My friend, approximately 7% of all humans that have ever lived are alive today.
Thus, if statistics doesn't lie –and we know that it can't –you and I have a 7% chance of being immortal.
Prove me wrong!
Yep, I can confirm this. . . In retrospect, I wish I would have stuck with Win 7 as long as possible.
I still run XP.
In VM-Ware, under Mac OS X, only in the rare instances where a technical application is only available under Windoze (usually an application that a friend wrote, amounting to little more than a script).
Bruce, thank you for saying some of what needs to be said.
But please drop the Apple hate—Music downloaded via iTunes can be saved in DRM-free MP3 format, and it has been this way for about 8 years.
And please do not be afraid of bashing the IoT. It is one of the stupidest ideas tht humanity has ever come up with.
No, really, the stupidest. Stupider than eugenics. Stupider than. . . OK, that is about the crown of them all, but please somebody prove me wrong and argue that there was ever a stupider idea than the IoT.
* Have randomly sized text ...
* Are impractical to carry in enough quantity for 1-2 weeks away from home
*
* Annotation is messy and often frowned upon
* You lose your place if you fall asleep while reading them
What? really?
Page-layout in physical print is a highly refined art. In web pages and 'Kindle-versions' of books, the great effort of the typesetter for readability is thrown out of the window.
If you read only 'fluff' books, then your second point does appy. I suggest that you read something pithy that requires you to think every few paragraphs. Thus, you will have less paper to carry, and as a reward, much more to ponder.
Annotation is frowned upon? By whom? Your first-grade teacher? Write in the goddamned margins. All the greats did. If you think annotation destroys the value of your book, then you have argued explicitly against you last point of 'destroying value' of a book by annotating. Look up the word 'palimpsest', and also google the term 'famous margin writings'.
RE: Your last point. If re-reading a paragraph, or even gasp, a whole page of a book or magazine that you have been reading flummoxes you, then you are either (a) reading page-turner garbage, (b) choosing authors who have nothing worth repeating, or (probably) (c) too dumb to get that re-reading anything worthwhile is a worthwhile investment of your time.
This is 2015. Why are books still being printed on paper?
Because a lot of people like them that way.
But here's a puzzler: This is 2015. Why are people still asking stupid questions?
Precisely. I am not going to read Harper's on a Kindle (or iPad, etc.) in the bathtub or hot tub.
Likewise, I am not going to leave my iPad on the beach while I go for a swim. A paper copy of something... Ha. No one will take it.
I not only love used books, but this last five years has been an absolute bonanza on IRL rare books that have a low consumer demand. That is, for me, technical books on conference proceedings where an idea was first germinated, or even figured out over beers.
Yes, I do use a rig w/an iPhone and GeniusScan+ to quickly PDF and OCR them, under Fair Use Rights. That is only to make them term-searchable, which is better than any index. I keep the physical copies.
Some seminal scientific breakthroughs were first reported in conferences forty years ago, when transcriptionists recorded every question-and-answer sessions of colloquia. Libraries are throwing these things out left and right, to the detriment of human knowledge. It's like a slow-burn in Alexandria.
What does a law passed by the Chinese Parliament have to do with Apple, particularly?
Detergents are more than plenty powerful enough - they're capable of etching glass if they're too strong (my mother's glasses are all an etched milky-white because for years she's filled the detergent box to capacity.)
correlation isn't causation. Etched glasses is more likely from the water. If it is from the detergent, it's likely a thermostat issue. The temp should be high enough to dissolve all the detergent, preventing it from etching anything. Or, she always bought the cheapest detergent, and it's half sand and filler.
Or she might just own really cheap glassware – the kind that use too much alkali fluxes. They leach out of the glass, and charge equality means that something with 2+ or more charge is going to replace the two alkali lost. Ca2+, and so on. That is, calcium oxide --> calcium hydroxide, which is not (appreciably) water-soluble.
Go buy some "muriatic acid" (hydrochloric acid) at the hardware store. Mix it 1:3 for the first try, and soak. If that doesn't work, try 1:1. It won't dissolve the glass, but it will etch most metals, so use a big Corningware bowl or baking dish.
And for gosh-sakes,
(1) do it outside or in the garage with the door open,
(2) wear goggles and gloves,
(3) dilute the hell out of it when it comes time to dispose of the mixture, and
(4) Run lots or water, like 100x, behind it. Otherwise, you will cause major plumbing problems, no matter where you dispose of it.
Oh, hackers, not tweakers. I mis-read the headline.
As has been done with hundreds of middle school science projects, this can be done for $200.
Sheet of plywood, plastic sheeting, and a couple of leaf blowers.
Right.
It's a hovercraft, not a Hoverboard.
And a crappy one at that. It's inefficient – in too many ways to bother listing any of them.
Update: according to an anonymous but credible source, this policy was started on 12/20. Will find out more once TSA files its official response to my motion on Tuesday.
I opted out both directions of my trip home for the holidays –both after 12/20.
The pat-downs were excessively long, and they insisted on going through their little script regardless of my repeatedly saying, "I know the drill—get on with it."
The cost is in the rocket motor, the nozzle that holds the combustion products in plasma state, its cooling mechanism, pumps and controls. I am not sure how much of it can be inspected and re validated without extensive disassembly.
I keep waiting for them to replace the nozzle with an experimental version that uses a linear aerospike. The April 10, 2001 patent will be expiring in just about 5 1/2 years now...
Aerospike? What about the Marlinspike? I hear it's got real Moxie.
The space shuttle program ended up being extremely expensive compared to rocket launches.
The Shuttle was the poster child for how NOT to do reusable. Government spec with 10 mission requirements orthogonal to each other, half of which are not technically possible at time of design while development is spread out over ever ZIP code in the country.
Elon can't be dumber than Congress. Unpossible.
My family has had the same broom for five generations. We use it daily.
Sure, we occasionally replace the bristles. And yes, other times, we replace the handle. But it is the same broom that my ancestors used!