New Rose Hotel is a B-grade Skinemax movie. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. It is one of the worst movies I have seen in a loooooong time. 65 minutes of plot and the 30 minutes of random flashbacks to footage we've already seen? Augh.
I've watch a lot of Christopher Walken films; he does a lot of sub-par movies. His presence is usually enough to make the movies entertaining, but this one... just doesn't cut it.
A real shame, too. I'm a big Gibson fan and they turned into mediocre meaningless crap.
Actually, I believe the suit is for trademark damages. Which is a whole 'nothercan of worms. It is allegedly the first trademark lawsuit involving a sound rather than an image, making it something of a landmark...
i agree with you on this, more or less, but it should also be noted that there are plenty of startups (more, perhaps, than your example) which are started on the basis of a cool technical idea that has no reasonable revenue model. you've not only got to have a product to sell, but also people to sell it to.
i don't like sales guys any more than the next engineer, but sales and marketing are a crucial part of the long term success of a company.
Fugazi has had a similar deal going for a long time. Walk into any major music chain, find a $16 Fugazi cd, and look on the back for the inevitable "This CD is $10 pp from Dischord at (address)".
I'm not accusing anyone of bandwagon jumping, just noting a nice bit of independant-mindedness that has amused me for a long time.
there are several kinds of stock options that are issued to employees at tech companies. the kind that most smaller companies issue are called "incentive stock options" and they have the properties you mention. excercising the option has no tax impact on you. you just pay the strike price and then you own the stock. when you sell, you pay taxes on the difference. if you've owned the stock for at least a year you can recognize the income as capitol gains, which is a lot cheaper.
microsoft employees, on the other hand, get "non-qualified stock options". these are options where, when you excercise them, you immediately owe income tax on the difference between the strike price and the current market price. i don't know for certain but i suspect further increases in the price when you sell are treated by the 1-year capitol gains rule. at any rate, most MSFT people just turn their stock around immediately.
my understanding of MSFT options are based on a friend of mine who's been a programmer there for a couple years. he gets tax advice from his father, who is a tax lawyer.
the ramones did not invent punk...
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... and even if one were to suppose that they were the first punk band (which they unequivocably weren't), punk music isn't as simple as any punk band you care to name. there were plenty of punk bands that new how to play their instruments.
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Um, he said $50 PLUS the rack case. I don't know how much that is, but it's probably $100-150, for a total cost of $150-200 (maybe more). Which is, of course, still cheaper than $349, but it's a lot more than $50.
For those readers who haven't checked out the link yet, several people below have posted large chunks of the interview. It's not complete yet but I asshume it will be soon.
So it took me all of 20 seconds to find this at www.be.com. here's an excerpt:
"No, the BeOS is not compatible with Apple's "G3" systems. We have requested from Apple the detailed technical specifications we would need to provide support for these systems, and Apple has declined our requests. This information, concerning the design of the logicboard (including information about address spaces, custom logic chips, etc.), is available only from Apple. It is available only under non-disclosure, and only to "Mac OS licensees.""
ok, in defense of the media (who i have been critical of as well...) the city councilman was "almost handcuffed" -- he was pulled from his car, and had his arms pulled behind him, and that was as far as it went. and every major news source has at least alluded to this incident, and most have had moderately detailed coverage. likewise for the bus story -- not as detailed as i would like, but it's no secret that the arrested were denied access to food, bathrooms, or lawyers. on the other hand, some of that is accounted for by their refusal to leave the bus, which is of course justified as their demand was simply access to laywers. the warehouse story also got a moderate amount of coverage.
((deep breath))
the stories i have not heard, as a local resident, and protester, and someone who has put a LOT of effort this week into staying informed about all the things tht were going on through every media outlet i could find, were the handgun story, and the human chain. and as i wrote above, i was terribly disturbed on wednesday when the capitol hill story made only two or three sentences TOTAL in all the major media reports i read -- doubly so when i found myself on capitol hill breathing tear gas that night.
the reporting is flawed, and sensationalistic, and biased, but i must give credit where credit is due.
btw, the best source that i found (okay, no source was satisfactory on its own, or anywhere close) was northwestcablenews.com, which was also the only live internet feed, other than one station just on tuesaday night. the coverage was not deep, but it was updated frequently, and pulled less punches in telling stories that cast the police in an unfavorable light. point in case: richard mciver, the black councilmember, said that the incident with police made him feel like "just another goddamn nigger". nw cable news was the only source that i saw this mornign that ran that quote, though they've since pulled it.
the lefty news sites were good but not thorough. znet was especially good, and i kept checking in to indymedia, whose tale of being barricaded IN their building by riot cops is horrifying, if true, and the sound clips they posted lend it good credibility.
i'm tired of writing and spending so much of my time on this all. i went to a labor rally today, and a very nice candlelight march this evening in protest of police violence. i didn't intend at the start of the week to participate in any of this, and it's ended up consuming virtually all of my time all week. i hope that some eyes have been opened. but having the city back to normal will be wonderful. i am still a little shell shocked. i woke up the other morning to the sound of someone kicking a ball against the wall, and i thought it was the sound of concussion grenades. my first thought on waking up was that the police had arrived to gas and arrest me.
while my life and personal safety (beyond temporary discomfort) were never in a lot of danger this week, i think i am in a much better position to understand other people whose are threatened (obviously only in a limited way). i will never lose the image of a line of riot cops emerging in step out of a dense cloud of tear gas. it scared the hell out of me. it still does.
It's good to see that this topic hasn't just been allowed to scroll off the Current Items page. Here is an account of what I saw on Wednesday, followed by more of an analysis.
Note that while the police have (wisely) backed way off in the last 24 hours, they still have a lot of questions to answer. A black Seattle City Councilmember was pulled from his car last night and nearly arrested for attempting to go to a WTO reception. Fortunately there were other politicians there to witness it, so his complaints won't be ignored.
There is another rally tonight for protesting police aggression. Volunteer Park at 8. Hope to see some of you there.
Warning: the following is long and includes occassional profanity. Thank you for listening.
So I went to an impromptu demonstration tonight, the message of which was "get the fuck out of our neighborhood". While not as wild as Kevin's experiences yesterday (don't expect to see *me* on the cover of USA Today), I thought I'd let you all know about it.
Though the media has more or less ignored it, the police kicked ass on Capitol Hill, away from the convention center, both nights of the conference so far. Tonight I heard that they were beating up a gathering of people (one would almost hesitate to use the word "protesters"; they weren't doing much more than being a bit of a crowd) at Olive and Broadway. There was no mention of crowd violence, but people were being removed in ambulances, and I got angry. My reason for going was fear that the media might try to ignore it again. I felt that the more of us there were, the more likely it was to make headlines.
I drove to Seattle and parked at the north end of Broadway. I didn't see much at first. People were talking about it some but there were no concussions or cheers that I could hear at first. As I walked south, I ran into an aquaintance. I asked if he knew what was going on and he said he'd been doing his best to avoid riot police (understandable...), so he didn't have any specific details. I got to the intersection where the initial altercation took place, and there were no cops or protesters visible. I kept walking south.
The crowd was at Pine and Broadway. At first it was hard to tell what was going on, but eventually the situation became clear. Riot police were stationed two blocks east at 10th and Pine. Behind them was the armored vehicle poice have been using to fire the concussion grenades and the tear gas cannisters. At Broadway, there was a large mass of people watching from what they percieved to be a safe distance. Then the next block and a half towards the police was filled sparsely with people, then about 10 yards from the police there was another smaller mass of people. A lot of people didn't really seem to know what was going on. I learned that the police had forced the crowd down Broadway (good thinking, police) and then had established their position here. I found a spot about halfway between Broadway and 10th where I could stand on a large stone and see things pretty well. at this point I estimate that there were about 5-600 protesters.
Shortly after I stationed myself, the Blackhawk helicopter arrived, with the brightest goddamn spotlight i've ever seen on a moving vehicle. It was clearly sweeping nearby buildingtpos for snipers or whatever, as well as the crowd. About 10 minutes later, the first round of gassing started. I should note for the out-of-towners that it is at this moment illegal to buy, sell, or posess a gas mask in public in Seattle. The police weren't moving, just dumping a lot of gas canisters in front of the front group of protesters. There were some people kicking canisters away. The police appeared to be using a lot more gas than they had been at other protest sites. It became impossible to see the police through the gas. There were also concussion grenades being used. More people were showing up to watch, though. Some idiots broke a car window on the other side of the street and were immediately surrounded by angry protesters. Some kids near me threw a rock into a window and then looked really sheepish (and dumb). Mostly we watched. A dumpster was rolled out into the street at the front of the crowd.
For a while, there would be a flurry of gas, then a pause; some of the gas would clear, and they would start again. It was very loud. The protesters were fairly quiet, which suprised me. It was pretty intense to watch, with the line of cops just standing there and a handful of protesters hanging out right in the gas cloud. It sounded like war, too; huge booming percussive blasts.
Another pause and then the police advanced. They volleyed gas and grenades farther out in front of them than before and the line of rito cops started moving. There was some initial panic. People were running. A number of people, including me, yelled for people to walk and people calmed down a lot. The police were paving their approace with a ton of gas. I walked north down a small street between 10th and Broadway, and got hit with a hefty dose of tear gas. I was breathing through my scarf, so it wasn't too bad in my lungs, but it was difficult to keep my eyes open. I cut through a parking lot over to Broadway, where it didn't appear the police had reached yet. I walked north on Broadway along Seattle Central Community College. There was tear gas here, too. I shared my scarf with someone next to me as we walked. The breeze was blowing in the direction I was walking.
I circled around the main building of the school and headed back to Broadway. By the time I got there, the police had fallen back somewhat and the crowd appeared to be substantially smaller. I found Joey and we talked about what had happened. It became apparent that the crowd had grown to several thousand, maybe more. The police were back to their original positions. We headed up to the front and I lost track of Joey. Shortly, the street between 10th and Broadway was filled with people, though not densely packed. I talked to several people around me who were angry at not being able to get home. The crowd started engaging in a fair amount of chanting. There were a lot of attempts by some protesters to get everyone to stand on the sidewalk. A lot of time passed. Rumors started circling that the national guard was coming.
Eventually the police made statements through a loud speaker. They told us we were all guilty of unlawful assembly and we must leave immediately. Everyone tensed up, as this has consistently been followed within seconds by teargas, rubber bullets, and police advances. But they didn't come. After a long while the hellicopter returned and circled. People were still anticipating action. I went and made sure the streets leading away weren't blocked. I was afraid they would trap everyone and make a mass arrest. The crowd had thinned quite a bit by now, maybe to less than a thousand. I hung for a while and then walked away to a vantage point about a block away. I watched as the crowd chanted loudly, then after a while I decided that it would end when all the cold, tired protesters realized that nothing was going to happen and left. About 5 minutes later I was at the Lillian visiting Kevin and Lanie when we head the loud concussive sounds that the teargas and grenade deployments make. One cable news station had the story about how it ended... They broke up the demonstration. I don't know if they arrested anybody. That's the end of the blow-by-blow.
Also, I posted the following to discussion groups at the New York Times and NPR web sites. It's not the most coherent thing I've ever written, but it's late and I had a long day.
I just returned from Capitol Hill, a dense residential area where, for the second night in a row, police used tear gas and rubber bullets (I got souveniers!) in an attempt to disperse a crowd that was peaceful and frustrated. I estimate that at it's peak there were at least 3,000 protesters, mostly neighborhood residents who were angry that they were being treated like criminals.
The police hospitalized a number of protesters, tear gassed virtually everyone, and repeatedly asserted that everyone there was guilty of "unlawful assembly", because some protesters were standing in the street (most of the standoff was spent on a quiet side street, though the early beatings occurred on the main street in the neighborhood). The protesters made it very clear that all they wanted was for the police to go home so that they could go home. They chanted "you go home, we go home" and "whose streets? our streets". A King County Council Member attempted to negotiate with the cops but was told that they had no interest in any resolution other than everyone dispersing immediately.
Whatever feelings I have about curfews and no-protest zones, I think this is intolerable. The word that best describes the scene in my mind was 'invasion'. To enter a residential neighborhood where a small crowd is peacefully gathered and create a sitution where hundreds of passers-by are tear-gassed and many people are prevented from going home (due to the arbitrary nature of where the police took up their position), and then to blame it on the protesters, is criminal. And the worst part is, I am afraid the media is going to ignore the story.
These are the things the police did wrong: 1. Sending riot cops 2. Initiating violence against protesters 3. Failing to realize that their withdrawl would put an immediate end to the situation 4. Tear-gassing eveything that moved
It was wonderful to see that there were many hundreds of people who came out to protest when they realized what was going on. I spoke to a number of locals who told me they didn't care about WTO protests, but they weren't going to stand for police telling them that the streets and sidewalks in front of their homes were off limits. This is two nights in a row that police have attacked peaceful protesters in this neighborhood, and I suspect that if it happens again the protesters may attempt to take direct action against the cops.
anyone wearing a gas mask now is in danger of a $500 fine and confiscation of the mask. mayor schell announced today that under the civil emergency gas masks on civilians are illegal.
using 120mm discs means that you can reuse lots of cd/dvd production/reproduction/packagin equipment, which given the scale of the cd/dvd industry means big savings in initial media and player cost. cheaper introduction means faster acceptance, etc, etc.
The environmentalists, in effect, see the power and sway the WTO has and want to hijack it for their own causes. So they really are protesting for the WTO to have even more power (and a different focus).
What the environmentalists want is to see the WTO deprived of the power to overturn laws that abridge trade based on environmental concerns. This is essentially a souverignty issue. eg, the US says "killing endangered sea turtles is bad. people who catch shrimp in nets that don't have turtle-escapes shouldn't bother sending them here", to which the WTO says "go to hell and buy their shrimp". And the US, under pressure from the corporations who really suffer from trade- and WTO-sanctions, looks sheepish and complies.
This, btw, is why all those people today were wearing turtle outfits.
To claim that Higgs boson will be discovered is a joke. It may be discovered, but given how many times its mass has been revised upward because they didn't find anything at lower masses, it'd sure be a surprise if Higgs existed. Similarly, there has been a ridiculous number of revisions of proton decay times and they just keep revising it up. They may have a point, but their case looks rather bleak right now.
a good portion of the high-rest mass particles discovered in the last half century have been predicted by theory well before their discovery in colliders. the top quark is the most well known example and it fits the exact pattern you describe. estimates for it's rest mass kept getting pushed up as it failed to show up. eventually, of course, it was discovered.
the Z messenger particle is another good example. and some of the neutrinos (though they aren't heavy, just slippery). so there's plenty of grounding for faith in the ability of particle physics.
what's more, the standard model is just a theory. recall that quarks, with their 1/3 and 2/3 charges, were postulated as imaginary placeholder particles to fit some data. very few people took them seriously until a few early believers showed just how well the idea fit the data. so it's not inconceivable that someone will come up with a more elegant explanation of mass and electroweak-strong unification than scalar fields and the higgs particle.
... tried spinning any of your LPs at 10,000 rpm lately? there are a number of reasons storage platters have been getting smaller. it's difficult to find things that will attain that kind of angular momentum without warping or just plain falling apart.
"Back in highschool I got so annoyed with my poor memory that I began to research the subject. I studied and trained my memory for several months and found amazing improvements."
"I was homeschooled until highschool and one of the focuses of my education was memory training."
I'm a little confused here. Did you do memory trining in highschool, or before highschool? Do you remember?
there are slated to be socket 370 Coppermine P3s. I imagine they would prabably work in a BP6 system, but keep in mind that there is no 1/2 divider in BX chipset motherboards to run the AGP bus at 66MHz when the bus speed is 133 MHz, so a lot of graphics cards poop out.
consider: 256K of coppermine on-die cache adds almost 20 million transistors to the thing -- the core is roughly 9 million transistors and the whole package with cache is 28 million.
Athlon is 22 million transistors WITHOUT L2 cache on board, which means that even at a.18 micron process, they don't have a lot of room to throw extra stuff on without the die size getting excessively big.
even if they could magically do onboard L2 with only a single transistor for each bit and no overhead, 8 MB of L2 cache would add 64 million transistors to the package, for a total of nearly 90 million transistors, which would mean a huge die size. that would make each chip more expensive because the number of chips per wafer would go way down and the yield would go way way down.
i believe that only HP is making chips with transistor counts that high. they're huge, hot, and terribly, terribly expensive.
so i find the notion of 8 MB onboard L2 cache unlikely.
this is a good thing. sockets are cheaper. one of the chief advantages of the slot system was that it allowed them to easily package the L2 cache with the chip rather than having it be on the motherboard. that is, of course, no longer an issue.
PLUS switching to a socket means that in another 18 months when they want to make everyone buy new chips they can switch back to a slot, with the excuse of adding an L3 cache for feature parity with Athlons.
the trend for the last couple years has been a return to large, gas guzzing SUVs. The air in Los Angeles was the cleanest in 50 years, but thanks in large part to massive sales of SUVs over the last couple years, this year will have worse air.
the ford expedition weights over 3 tons and get TWELVE miles per gallon.
Belle and Sebastian are from Glasgow. And their win was cleared by the contest promoters, who, as representatives of the highly commercial British music industry, have little invested in seeing a brilliant-but-somewhat-obscure indie band win over a Ricky-Martin-style-crap Top of the Pops band like Steps.
Okay, I may have been wrong about Kasparov winning, but... Any of you who have ever followed grandmaster chess know that the most common outcome is a draw. The world team has done better than I believed it would, but the reason for this is that a) they followed the analysts more closely than I thought they would, and b) the analysts communicated more closely than I thought I would.
There have been a number of comments suggesting a Deep Blue-vs-the-World match. I believe that Deep Blue has been dismantled, and according to IBM, will never play again. Which is strange, and in my opinion, leads some credibility to some of Kasparov's claims about the thing. For those of you who don't know, Kasparov suggested a man-inside-the-box approach was being taken by the IBM team after their last match. He's a poor loser, and had obviously been demoralized by the time the match was over, so I initially dismissed his claims. But in light of IBM's refusal to release any documentation of Deep Blue's move analysis, and then taking it apart (they needed those RS/6000 chess daughterboards somewhere else?)... the questions seem more reasonable now.
Anyway, I certainly wouldn't want to play against the world, except maybe in a 5 minute blitz game. But the "rebuttal" of the World naysayers like myself seems a little premature. Nobody gets crushed, no wild antics, Kasparov has the initiative the whole game. Essentially what I predicted.
Slashdot Mirror
look for c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\lmhosts.*
New Rose Hotel is a B-grade Skinemax movie. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. It is one of the worst movies I have seen in a loooooong time. 65 minutes of plot and the 30 minutes of random flashbacks to footage we've already seen? Augh.
I've watch a lot of Christopher Walken films; he does a lot of sub-par movies. His presence is usually enough to make the movies entertaining, but this one... just doesn't cut it.
A real shame, too. I'm a big Gibson fan and they turned into mediocre meaningless crap.
Actually, I believe the suit is for trademark damages. Which is a whole 'nothercan of worms. It is allegedly the first trademark lawsuit involving a sound rather than an image, making it something of a landmark...
i agree with you on this, more or less, but it should also be noted that there are plenty of startups (more, perhaps, than your example) which are started on the basis of a cool technical idea that has no reasonable revenue model. you've not only got to have a product to sell, but also people to sell it to.
i don't like sales guys any more than the next engineer, but sales and marketing are a crucial part of the long term success of a company.
Fugazi has had a similar deal going for a long time. Walk into any major music chain, find a $16 Fugazi cd, and look on the back for the inevitable "This CD is $10 pp from Dischord at (address)".
I'm not accusing anyone of bandwagon jumping, just noting a nice bit of independant-mindedness that has amused me for a long time.
there are several kinds of stock options that are issued to employees at tech companies. the kind that most smaller companies issue are called "incentive stock options" and they have the properties you mention. excercising the option has no tax impact on you. you just pay the strike price and then you own the stock. when you sell, you pay taxes on the difference. if you've owned the stock for at least a year you can recognize the income as capitol gains, which is a lot cheaper.
microsoft employees, on the other hand, get "non-qualified stock options". these are options where, when you excercise them, you immediately owe income tax on the difference between the strike price and the current market price. i don't know for certain but i suspect further increases in the price when you sell are treated by the 1-year capitol gains rule. at any rate, most MSFT people just turn their stock around immediately.
my understanding of MSFT options are based on a friend of mine who's been a programmer there for a couple years. he gets tax advice from his father, who is a tax lawyer.
... and even if one were to suppose that they were the first punk band (which they unequivocably weren't), punk music isn't as simple as any punk band you care to name. there were plenty of punk bands that new how to play their instruments.
Um, he said $50 PLUS the rack case. I don't know how much that is, but it's probably $100-150, for a total cost of $150-200 (maybe more). Which is, of course, still cheaper than $349, but it's a lot more than $50.
For those readers who haven't checked out the link yet, several people below have posted large chunks of the interview. It's not complete yet but I asshume it will be soon.
So it took me all of 20 seconds to find this at www.be.com. here's an excerpt:
"No, the BeOS is not compatible with Apple's "G3" systems. We have requested from Apple the detailed technical specifications we would need to provide support for these systems, and Apple has declined our requests.
This information, concerning the design of the logicboard (including information about address spaces, custom logic chips, etc.), is available only from Apple. It is available only under non-disclosure, and only to "Mac OS licensees.""
may i recommend denise richard's part as the world's least convincing nuclear physicist in the last james bond movie, then?
ok, in defense of the media (who i have been critical of as well...) the city councilman was "almost handcuffed" -- he was pulled from his car, and had his arms pulled behind him, and that was as far as it went. and every major news source has at least alluded to this incident, and most have had moderately detailed coverage. likewise for the bus story -- not as detailed as i would like, but it's no secret that the arrested were denied access to food, bathrooms, or lawyers. on the other hand, some of that is accounted for by their refusal to leave the bus, which is of course justified as their demand was simply access to laywers. the warehouse story also got a moderate amount of coverage.
((deep breath))
the stories i have not heard, as a local resident, and protester, and someone who has put a LOT of effort this week into staying informed about all the things tht were going on through every media outlet i could find, were the handgun story, and the human chain. and as i wrote above, i was terribly disturbed on wednesday when the capitol hill story made only two or three sentences TOTAL in all the major media reports i read -- doubly so when i found myself on capitol hill breathing tear gas that night.
the reporting is flawed, and sensationalistic, and biased, but i must give credit where credit is due.
btw, the best source that i found (okay, no source was satisfactory on its own, or anywhere close) was northwestcablenews.com, which was also the only live internet feed, other than one station just on tuesaday night. the coverage was not deep, but it was updated frequently, and pulled less punches in telling stories that cast the police in an unfavorable light. point in case: richard mciver, the black councilmember, said that the incident with police made him feel like "just another goddamn nigger". nw cable news was the only source that i saw this mornign that ran that quote, though they've since pulled it.
the lefty news sites were good but not thorough. znet was especially good, and i kept checking in to indymedia, whose tale of being barricaded IN their building by riot cops is horrifying, if true, and the sound clips they posted lend it good credibility.
i'm tired of writing and spending so much of my time on this all. i went to a labor rally today, and a very nice candlelight march this evening in protest of police violence. i didn't intend at the start of the week to participate in any of this, and it's ended up consuming virtually all of my time all week. i hope that some eyes have been opened. but having the city back to normal will be wonderful. i am still a little shell shocked. i woke up the other morning to the sound of someone kicking a ball against the wall, and i thought it was the sound of concussion grenades. my first thought on waking up was that the police had arrived to gas and arrest me.
while my life and personal safety (beyond temporary discomfort) were never in a lot of danger this week, i think i am in a much better position to understand other people whose are threatened (obviously only in a limited way). i will never lose the image of a line of riot cops emerging in step out of a dense cloud of tear gas. it scared the hell out of me. it still does.
enough rambling.
It's good to see that this topic hasn't just been allowed to scroll off the Current Items page. Here is an account of what I saw on Wednesday, followed by more of an analysis.
Note that while the police have (wisely) backed way off in the last 24 hours, they still have a lot of questions to answer. A black Seattle City Councilmember was pulled from his car last night and nearly arrested for attempting to go to a WTO reception. Fortunately there were other politicians there to witness it, so his complaints won't be ignored.
There is another rally tonight for protesting police aggression. Volunteer Park at 8. Hope to see some of you there.
Warning: the following is long and includes occassional profanity. Thank you for listening.
So I went to an impromptu demonstration tonight, the message of which was "get the fuck out of our neighborhood". While not as wild as Kevin's experiences yesterday (don't expect to see *me* on the cover of USA Today), I thought I'd let you all know about it.
Though the media has more or less ignored it, the police kicked ass on Capitol Hill, away from the convention center, both nights of the conference so far. Tonight I heard that they were beating up a gathering of people (one would almost hesitate to use the word "protesters"; they weren't doing much more than being a bit of a crowd) at Olive and Broadway. There was no mention of crowd violence, but people were being removed in ambulances, and I got angry. My reason for going was fear that the media might try to ignore it again. I felt that the more of us there were, the more likely it was to make headlines.
I drove to Seattle and parked at the north end of Broadway. I didn't see much at first. People were talking about it some but there were no concussions or cheers that I could hear at first. As I walked south, I ran into an aquaintance. I asked if he knew what was going on and he said he'd been doing his best to avoid riot police (understandable...), so he didn't have any specific details. I got to the intersection where the initial altercation took place, and there were no cops or protesters visible. I kept walking south.
The crowd was at Pine and Broadway. At first it was hard to tell what was going on, but eventually the situation became clear. Riot police were stationed two blocks east at 10th and Pine. Behind them was the armored vehicle poice have been using to fire the concussion grenades and the tear gas cannisters. At Broadway, there was a large mass of people watching from what they percieved to be a safe distance. Then the next block and a half towards the police was filled sparsely with people, then about 10 yards from the police there was another smaller mass of people. A lot of people didn't really seem to know what was going on. I learned that the police had forced the crowd down Broadway (good thinking, police) and then had established their position here. I found a spot about halfway between Broadway and 10th where I could stand on a large stone and see things pretty well. at this point I estimate that there were about 5-600 protesters.
Shortly after I stationed myself, the Blackhawk helicopter arrived, with the brightest goddamn spotlight i've ever seen on a moving vehicle. It was clearly sweeping nearby buildingtpos for snipers or whatever, as well as the crowd. About 10 minutes later, the first round of gassing started. I should note for the out-of-towners that it is at this moment illegal to buy, sell, or posess a gas mask in public in Seattle. The police weren't moving, just dumping a lot of gas canisters in front of the front group of protesters. There were some people kicking canisters away. The police appeared to be using a lot more gas than they had been at other protest sites. It became impossible to see the police through the gas. There were also concussion grenades being used. More people were showing up to watch, though. Some idiots broke a car window on the other side of the street and were immediately surrounded by angry protesters. Some kids near me threw a rock into a window and then looked really sheepish (and dumb). Mostly we watched. A dumpster was rolled out into the street at the front of the crowd.
For a while, there would be a flurry of gas, then a pause; some of the gas would clear, and they would start again. It was very loud. The protesters were fairly quiet, which suprised me. It was pretty intense to watch, with the line of cops just standing there and a handful of protesters hanging out right in the gas cloud. It sounded like war, too; huge booming percussive blasts.
Another pause and then the police advanced. They volleyed gas and grenades farther out in front of them than before and the line of rito cops started moving. There was some initial panic. People were running. A number of people, including me, yelled for people to walk and people calmed down a lot. The police were paving their approace with a ton of gas. I walked north down a small street between 10th and Broadway, and got hit with a hefty dose of tear gas. I was breathing through my scarf, so it wasn't too bad in my lungs, but it was difficult to keep my eyes open. I cut through a parking lot over to Broadway, where it didn't appear the police had reached yet. I walked north on Broadway along Seattle Central Community College. There was tear gas here, too. I shared my scarf with someone next to me as we walked. The breeze was blowing in the direction I was walking.
I circled around the main building of the school and headed back to Broadway. By the time I got there, the police had fallen back somewhat and the crowd appeared to be substantially smaller. I found Joey and we talked about what had happened. It became apparent that the crowd had grown to several thousand, maybe more. The police were back to their original positions. We headed up to the front and I lost track of Joey. Shortly, the street between 10th and Broadway was filled with people, though not densely packed. I talked to several people around me who were angry at not being able to get home. The crowd started engaging in a fair amount of chanting. There were a lot of attempts by some protesters to get everyone to stand on the sidewalk. A lot of time passed. Rumors started circling that the national guard was coming.
Eventually the police made statements through a loud speaker. They told us we were all guilty of unlawful assembly and we must leave immediately. Everyone tensed up, as this has consistently been followed within seconds by teargas, rubber bullets, and police advances. But they didn't come. After a long while the hellicopter returned and circled. People were still anticipating action. I went and made sure the streets leading away weren't blocked. I was afraid they would trap everyone and make a mass arrest. The crowd had thinned quite a bit by now, maybe to less than a thousand. I hung for a while and then walked away to a vantage point about a block away. I watched as the crowd chanted loudly, then after a while I decided that it would end when all the cold, tired protesters realized that nothing was going to happen and left. About 5 minutes later I was at the Lillian visiting Kevin and Lanie when we head the loud concussive sounds that the teargas and grenade deployments make. One cable news station had the story about how it ended... They broke up the demonstration. I don't know if they arrested anybody. That's the end of the blow-by-blow.
Also, I posted the following to discussion groups at the New York Times and NPR web sites. It's not the most coherent thing I've ever written, but it's late and I had a long day.
I just returned from Capitol Hill, a dense residential area where, for the second night in a row, police used tear gas and rubber bullets (I got souveniers!) in an attempt to disperse a crowd that was peaceful and frustrated. I estimate that at it's peak there were at least 3,000 protesters, mostly neighborhood residents who were angry that they were being treated like criminals.
The police hospitalized a number of protesters, tear gassed virtually everyone, and repeatedly asserted that everyone there was guilty of "unlawful assembly", because some protesters were standing in the street (most of the standoff was spent on a quiet side street, though the early beatings occurred on the main street in the neighborhood). The protesters made it very clear that all they wanted was for the police to go home so that they could go home. They chanted "you go home, we go home" and "whose streets? our streets". A King County Council Member attempted to negotiate with the cops but was told that they had no interest in any resolution other than everyone dispersing immediately.
Whatever feelings I have about curfews and no-protest zones, I think this is intolerable. The word that best describes the scene in my mind was 'invasion'. To enter a residential neighborhood where a small crowd is peacefully gathered and create a sitution where hundreds of passers-by are tear-gassed and many people are prevented from going home (due to the arbitrary nature of where the police took up their position), and then to blame it on the protesters, is criminal. And the worst part is, I am afraid the media is going to ignore the story.
These are the things the police did wrong:
1. Sending riot cops
2. Initiating violence against protesters
3. Failing to realize that their withdrawl would put an immediate end to the situation
4. Tear-gassing eveything that moved
It was wonderful to see that there were many hundreds of people who came out to protest when they realized what was going on. I spoke to a number of locals who told me they didn't care about WTO protests, but they weren't going to stand for police telling them that the streets and sidewalks in front of their homes were off limits. This is two nights in a row that police have attacked peaceful protesters in this neighborhood, and I suspect that if it happens again the protesters may attempt to take direct action against the cops.
anyone wearing a gas mask now is in danger of a $500 fine and confiscation of the mask. mayor schell announced today that under the civil emergency gas masks on civilians are illegal.
that creeps me out.
using 120mm discs means that you can reuse lots of cd/dvd production/reproduction/packagin equipment, which given the scale of the cd/dvd industry means big savings in initial media and player cost. cheaper introduction means faster acceptance, etc, etc.
This is just plain inaccurate.
The environmentalists, in effect, see the power and sway the WTO has and want to hijack it for their own causes. So they really are protesting for the WTO to have even more power (and a different focus).
What the environmentalists want is to see the WTO deprived of the power to overturn laws that abridge trade based on environmental concerns. This is essentially a souverignty issue. eg, the US says "killing endangered sea turtles is bad. people who catch shrimp in nets that don't have turtle-escapes shouldn't bother sending them here", to which the WTO says "go to hell and buy their shrimp". And the US, under pressure from the corporations who really suffer from trade- and WTO-sanctions, looks sheepish and complies.
This, btw, is why all those people today were wearing turtle outfits.
To claim that Higgs boson will be discovered is a joke. It may be discovered, but given how many times its mass has been revised upward because they didn't find anything at lower masses, it'd sure be a surprise if Higgs existed. Similarly, there has been a ridiculous number of revisions of proton decay times and they just keep revising it up. They may have a point, but their case looks rather bleak right now.
a good portion of the high-rest mass particles discovered in the last half century have been predicted by theory well before their discovery in colliders. the top quark is the most well known example and it fits the exact pattern you describe. estimates for it's rest mass kept getting pushed up as it failed to show up. eventually, of course, it was discovered.
the Z messenger particle is another good example. and some of the neutrinos (though they aren't heavy, just slippery). so there's plenty of grounding for faith in the ability of particle physics.
what's more, the standard model is just a theory. recall that quarks, with their 1/3 and 2/3 charges, were postulated as imaginary placeholder particles to fit some data. very few people took them seriously until a few early believers showed just how well the idea fit the data. so it's not inconceivable that someone will come up with a more elegant explanation of mass and electroweak-strong unification than scalar fields and the higgs particle.
"Back in highschool I got so annoyed with my poor memory that I began to research the subject. I studied and trained my memory for several months and found amazing improvements."
"I was homeschooled until highschool and one of the focuses of my education was memory training."
I'm a little confused here. Did you do memory trining in highschool, or before highschool? Do you remember?
there are slated to be socket 370 Coppermine P3s. I imagine they would prabably work in a BP6 system, but keep in mind that there is no 1/2 divider in BX chipset motherboards to run the AGP bus at 66MHz when the bus speed is 133 MHz, so a lot of graphics cards poop out.
consider: 256K of coppermine on-die cache adds almost 20 million transistors to the thing -- the core is roughly 9 million transistors and the whole package with cache is 28 million.
.18 micron process, they don't have a lot of room to throw extra stuff on without the die size getting excessively big.
Athlon is 22 million transistors WITHOUT L2 cache on board, which means that even at a
even if they could magically do onboard L2 with only a single transistor for each bit and no overhead, 8 MB of L2 cache would add 64 million transistors to the package, for a total of nearly 90 million transistors, which would mean a huge die size. that would make each chip more expensive because the number of chips per wafer would go way down and the yield would go way way down.
i believe that only HP is making chips with transistor counts that high. they're huge, hot, and terribly, terribly expensive.
so i find the notion of 8 MB onboard L2 cache unlikely.
conform
FCPGA is a socket 370-seated packaging.
socket 370 is what socket Celerons use.
this is a good thing. sockets are cheaper. one of the chief advantages of the slot system was that it allowed them to easily package the L2 cache with the chip rather than having it be on the motherboard. that is, of course, no longer an issue.
PLUS switching to a socket means that in another 18 months when they want to make everyone buy new chips they can switch back to a slot, with the excuse of adding an L3 cache for feature parity with Athlons.
conform
the trend for the last couple years has been a return to large, gas guzzing SUVs. The air in Los Angeles was the cleanest in 50 years, but thanks in large part to massive sales of SUVs over the last couple years, this year will have worse air.
the ford expedition weights over 3 tons and get TWELVE miles per gallon.
blech.
Belle and Sebastian are from Glasgow. And their win was cleared by the contest promoters, who, as representatives of the highly commercial British music industry, have little invested in seeing a brilliant-but-somewhat-obscure indie band win over a Ricky-Martin-style-crap Top of the Pops band like Steps.
my original post on the matter is here.
Okay, I may have been wrong about Kasparov winning, but... Any of you who have ever followed grandmaster chess know that the most common outcome is a draw. The world team has done better than I believed it would, but the reason for this is that a) they followed the analysts more closely than I thought they would, and b) the analysts communicated more closely than I thought I would.
There have been a number of comments suggesting a Deep Blue-vs-the-World match. I believe that Deep Blue has been dismantled, and according to IBM, will never play again. Which is strange, and in my opinion, leads some credibility to some of Kasparov's claims about the thing. For those of you who don't know, Kasparov suggested a man-inside-the-box approach was being taken by the IBM team after their last match. He's a poor loser, and had obviously been demoralized by the time the match was over, so I initially dismissed his claims. But in light of IBM's refusal to release any documentation of Deep Blue's move analysis, and then taking it apart (they needed those RS/6000 chess daughterboards somewhere else?)... the questions seem more reasonable now.
Anyway, I certainly wouldn't want to play against the world, except maybe in a 5 minute blitz game. But the "rebuttal" of the World naysayers like myself seems a little premature. Nobody gets crushed, no wild antics, Kasparov has the initiative the whole game. Essentially what I predicted.