I was a small time firefighter for awhile, and we trained to deal with this stuff all the time.
First off, you can put a fire out by using water to cover all the surfaces and deprive it of oxygen. One one fire the gire started in a basement room that was closed on all sides. We didn't get there fast enough to snuff it out at the point of origin. But the fire damned sure went out when we pumped the basement full. That's not the goal, but it works, guaranteed.
The ideal way of dealing with ordinary house fires is to get there fast enough so it's confined to one room. You advance a hoste team a bit into the room, set the nozzle to a 30 degree fog pattern and move thestream in a clockwise pattern thru the seat of the fire, up to the ceiling and back down. A few sweeps like that and a small fire will be out and you can get to work. At no time is the fire actually "drowned."
If the room is already mostly engulfed, you just crack the door, pump a bunch of fog in, and let your old friend vapor phase cooling suck the heat out of the fire. The only downer is that anybody in there is gonna cook for sure.
In our training burns we would start a fire in the tower, let it build up, and then run the hose team in. The boundary between smoke and clear air is actually quite distinct, i'd say no more than a foot high. When you cut loose with the water everything gets dak fast, the layer drops down, and life starts to suck. It does give ou confidence in your gear though. You have to experience it if you get the chance.
Theoretically you can put out a room fire without causing any water damage by putting in just the right amount of a fog stream into the room and letting all the water be vaporized. But fire fighting isn't ballet, and I've never seen it happen. Usually water damage is pretty bad.
One effect that can't be ignored is the mechanical force of a stream of water coming out of a hose. It can and will tear stuff up. If you spread out the stuff that is burning, stuff gets cooler and is easier to deal with. A nice straight bore nozzle hooked up to a good size pump can and will tear thru roofs without a problem. You absolutely have to get a hold of one of these things at least once in your life:)
This is so not my area, but Metal fires, Class D in the U.S., are only fought with powder extinguishers. Any extinguisher that isn't marked as a Class D is useless and a health hazard. One of the main reason you don't spray water onto a Class D fire is that you tend to get violent and explosive spalling. Life will start to suck in a big way if a moron tries that. It's a specialty area and any shop that workes with these metals, zirconium, and a bunch of others should put bucks into their training and safety gear. It's not to be messed with by amateurs.
A very interesting concept, but I just can help but think that it wouldn't work at all.
Food co-ops may have an advantage because people buy food often, are flexible, and failure isn't a big problem. Food getting is a repetitive batch process, car getting is not.
I can't afford to have my next car not be exactly right, but it's not a problem if my next sack of potatoes is one potatoe shy and has an onionthrown in. I won't be happy if my next car has only three wheels and it has just one tail fin.
for example... Two warriors that had different religions, were sworn enemies, but they did sit down and have a nice meal with eachother. The story goes that they were comparing weapons and Saladin threw a silk scarf up into the air, held out his scimitar and the silk scarf cut itself in two, by it's own weight. Richard put an iron bar on a block and chopped it in half with one swing of his sword. That sword bit may be grossly distorted,or a total fabrication, but people believed it for a long time.
In Euope, on the rare occasions that monarchs were captured, they were often allowed to take whole wagon trains of stuff with them and whole bunches of servants. They most certainly did not rot in a hole, and they often ate with their captors. Leaving aside the fact that the royal families of europe were a bunch of inbred freaks and that the vanquished was probably your cousin, it makes a point. But woe to the commoner that got uppity. They would be put down hard with no courtesy.
Yeah, warrior-kings tend to take care of their own, when they aren't busy chopping eachother up. Yesterday it was a joust and a feast, today 18 holes & lunch at the Yacht club. No difference.
Step 1: Short this stock Step 2: Coerce/Beg/Convince MSFT and others to license AdAware & include it in a free "update" Step 3: ??? Step 4: Profit and maybe hang out with Martha Stewart for awhile.
Damn... didn't think this thru. She'd make me giver her my shirt to make a "Nice Ghetto Chic" throw rug.
Final Cut Pro has a filter that supposes to do this, but I'll be damned if I've ever seen it work. I've used it to change footage from totally unusable to unusuable and very annoying. Maybe some FCP guru can set me straight.
I believe some consumer cameras do this for small, high frequency vibrations in software and using tiny little servos to move something in the lense/sensor assembly. I've never seen that in a professional type camera.
It's best to just get your footage right the first time. "Fixing it in post" is for lazy and stupid directors. Good idea though, if you have all year. Sorry!
I can't really disagree with the fundamental ideas in you post, and that's scary, speaking as an U.S'ian.
Violence is just as natural as sex. It is a human constant. I think that is true because toddlers will always fight over a toy until their parents train them no to, and there's always a war going on somewhere.
Some twisted freaks argue that sex and violence are just different facets of the same psychological drive. That's more than a little fucked up, but maybe it is partly true.
The point is, that which is natural is not necessarily good. Equating the two is an anti-hippie peeve of mine, sorry. Humans are sexual beings and denying it makes no sense. Kids will learn about their sexuality, and it's up to their parents to help them see sex as positive and to be responsible about it.
Well, by definition, software can only do what it was designed to do, right? If those functions are different from the stated intent of the developer, then tough beans.
Computers are wonderfully deterministic beasts. We shouldn't pretend that they aren't and blame our glitches on computers. If Ralph Nader is "accidentally" elected, it's not a machine/software problem. Somebody, a person or a group of people, screwed up.
I'm not saying that a law court would agree, but if a voting machine can be made to sing "Turkey in the Straw" every time you hit the Libertarian button, then that's exactly what the it was "designed" to do.
(Wow, a two bit thought in three paragraphs, time for more bran.)
Well, as long as they remember to bring some bagels, all is good, as long as the tank doesn't leak, or the space suits, or if somebody REMEMBERED TO BRING A LIGHTER & A FLASHLIGHT, OH OHHHHHH!
but they fixed it. For awhile I was getting 5+ spam messages per day, sometimes more. The latest version of their client put a "report spam" button, front and center. Since that version came out, my ICQ spam has nearly disappeared.
I can still pick up new contacts, new contacts can search and find me, and it's easy. If I don't want to deal with someone they go on my deny list and the issue is settled. ICQ, or others like it, really are quite useful.
It's simple, quick and it has solved the problem, for now at least. If only the email beast was that easy.
A customized magazine. One article from Home & Garden (approximately never, for me anyway,) an article from Wired, the occasional Jolene Blalock pictorial (often please,) maybe some stuff from Scientic American about oceanography and you have a fine magazine.
There just aren't many big name magazines out htere that are independent. As in all mass media these days, a few players hold most of the marbles. It stands to reason that each large company could cherry pick from tehir different lines to make a super-mag. Basically you'd have an instantly customizable source of reading material with just in time delivery. Or just use the web.
Still, high res alien babe goodness on dead tree format... That may be worth it.
Well, if you are what you eat then all is good. I've always been a fan of jelly donuts, and the guy was in a cafe. So the two major food groups are already present.
I say let him eat the pen drive, then have our Guardai friends load him up with a couple of pounds or kilos of that good Irish farm cheese. Then we'll see how much he likes being a spammer.
Revenge fantasies really are a waste of time, aren't they?
I used to work for emachines as a tech support flunkie. For a quite awhile I was ashamed of it and ranted regularly because of the poor service I was forced to give customers. For example I had a hotel owner beg me to send him a hard drive because his had failed. He said that he would pay for overnight shipping without hesitating and that we should name our price for doing so. Policy prohibited anything but offering him the normal slow warranty fufillment process and mule based delivery. The policies also prohibited me from telling him to walk down to the local store, grab the appropriate drive and run the restore procedures.
Ok, so I still like to rant, but eMachines has seen the light. Maybe. When I worked for them he would have gotten his battery via regular parcel post or UPS ground, and God only know how long that takes.
Bulletproof hardware will likely always cost large piles of money. Great, heaping, has their own ZIP code piles of cash. That's fine and dandy if you're NASA and are putting machines on some other planet with exactly one semi-redundant backup. Most of the rest of us must make trade offs. If reliability is slighted for cost's sake, then some kind of replacement system is necessary.
If it is necessary, why not do it right? How much extra does good customer support need to cost? In my example case, replacing the guy's drive overnight could have been as easy as setting a single flag on the ticket and having a pile of "ship this out on the next plane" stickers at the fufillment center.
Legendary customer support will always cost big money. If you want multi-lingual engineers that have taken sacred vows and can offer prayer, holy communion, teach yoga or sacrifice chickens for your machine, then it's coing to cost you.
I accept the fact that stuff will fail. Crappy customer support doesn't have to be, and good customer support doesn't have to be expensive.
It sounds like e-Machines is getting it. Now we can top calling buyers "eWhores." Perhaps "eMildlySluttyAfterTwoBeers." Really, I'm happy about the change.
The have two problems with intercity train travel in the U.S. When I have traveled by train, I''ve most often had to have somebody pick me up in a car from the terminal. It isn't always easy to get to your actual destination. My second objection is that in some parts of the U.S. there are maybe two ways into many large cities. Rails can and do break, tunnels get torched, and stuff breaks down. There simply isn't enough redundency to handle impatient people type traffic.
And yeah, it's quite a site to see a couple of miles worthof cars rolling along. It's an awesome sight.
"an internation collaborative plant conservation initiative. This worldwide effort aims to safeguard 24,000 plant species from around the globe against extinction."
They have multiple redundant backups, regular testing of the backups, and a massively distributed supplementary backup system for the earth's plants. It doesn't get everything of course, but throw in my efforts to back up my genetic code and you have everything you need to save the world or take over another planet.
With some big database fun, remote sensing and GIS goodness you have a good project for he conservation minded geek.
Also, try some bread made with quinoa flour if you get the chance.. It's an interesting change from Wonder Bread.
First of all, a CEO is an officer of the company. That officer may or may not be the owner in any degree. It's true that there is some personal responsibility, but it's really the shareholder's money and it is their duty, thru the governing board, to hold on to it. The only person he has to apologize to for blowing millions is his stockholders and the board. In this case I think the distinction is academic since he's pretty much his own man.
The corporate shield is a mixed blessing, but it means that everything isn't personal. Sure, CEOs need to learn from their mistakes, but if they had to pay for their mistakes personally would anyone but a power mad lunatic administer agree to run anything bigger than a lemonade stand? I think not. We really can't have it both ways.
And buy the way, you going broke is largely an artifact of your parent's discipline. You may earn a check, but in many cases you don't have the legal ability to contract and the tax man can go after your money to pay your parent's taxes. Yep, it's happened but usually it doesn't fly because of the extremely nasty publicity states get when they try this. I just don't think you and a large publicly traded company making a mistake and going broke are even qualitatively the same.
Making business this personal is a big mistake. Now fraud is another matter. I hope the Enron flunkies and others like them get the very most friendly cell mates.
I'm a microscopically small share holder in a few companies and I have to accept stupidity and mistakes. That's unavoidably human. Dishonesty and theft is too but I guess I still want to feed such people to my dog. Slow. (the feeding, not the dog's name, but it would be apt) It's hard to have a non-hypocritical attitude, you're right.
In some cases stamping lettering into a stressed rotating part can lead to sudden failure. Stamping can put odd stresses into the part, and makes a slightly weaker space in the part.
I believe that the NTSB found a stamping on a rail car wheel caused a failure and derailment, but i'll be danged if I can find the incident. Maybe tonight...
Moisture could collect in the little crevices of the letters leading to corrosion. i suspect that this is not really a concern.
Silk screening or some creative powdercoating could totally avoid these issues. But what do I know. I managed to smoke my e-machine 500 last night. Nobody would hire me to be a shuttle engineer!
that's why I said to buy flowers. I mean as long as the security people insist on being that friendly.
It does seem reasonable to allow extra time for a lot of anoying questions and a detailed search of luggage and person. But, so far as I know, bringing in a dead laptop isn't a crime, just good conversation starter.
I wonder if the whole issue could be avoided by putting it in checked baggage? Hopefully the U.K. people are still thorough, but a little bit more reasonable than our guys over here. Allow them plenty of time to poke thru and x-ray your stuff and maybe they won't hassle you. I'm guessing here, but it sounds likely.
Get a laptop corpse, carry it on you flight to the U.S., pitch it into the garbage, let the customs weenies think that your new laptop is the old one. Simple.
Aside from the need to buy an empty shell and flowers your new airport security friend, it's cheap and easy.
I really have no idea if this would work, and I certainly wouldn't advocate cheating the taxman. Never never never...
I've never had the fortune of meeting Mr. Stallman, but I'm asuming he has some sense of humor. I'm a still very new to the GNU/Linux scene, but I can appreciate the guy's work.
I say we find out what his official title is and print him up some business cards with the building name in extra bold print. It'll either give him a chuckle every time he hands one out or make his head explode.
This is an all around good deal I think. Mr. Gates gets to do good as he sees it and get some PR and RMS gets a nice place to do his work in. One of them will eventually eat the other's lunch anyway.
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I was a small time firefighter for awhile, and we trained to deal with this stuff all the time.
:)
First off, you can put a fire out by using water to cover all the surfaces and deprive it of oxygen. One one fire the gire started in a basement room that was closed on all sides. We didn't get there fast enough to snuff it out at the point of origin. But the fire damned sure went out when we pumped the basement full. That's not the goal, but it works, guaranteed.
The ideal way of dealing with ordinary house fires is to get there fast enough so it's confined to one room. You advance a hoste team a bit into the room, set the nozzle to a 30 degree fog pattern and move thestream in a clockwise pattern thru the seat of the fire, up to the ceiling and back down. A few sweeps like that and a small fire will be out and you can get to work. At no time is the fire actually "drowned."
If the room is already mostly engulfed, you just crack the door, pump a bunch of fog in, and let your old friend vapor phase cooling suck the heat out of the fire. The only downer is that anybody in there is gonna cook for sure.
In our training burns we would start a fire in the tower, let it build up, and then run the hose team in. The boundary between smoke and clear air is actually quite distinct, i'd say no more than a foot high. When you cut loose with the water everything gets dak fast, the layer drops down, and life starts to suck. It does give ou confidence in your gear though. You have to experience it if you get the chance.
Theoretically you can put out a room fire without causing any water damage by putting in just the right amount of a fog stream into the room and letting all the water be vaporized. But fire fighting isn't ballet, and I've never seen it happen. Usually water damage is pretty bad.
One effect that can't be ignored is the mechanical force of a stream of water coming out of a hose. It can and will tear stuff up. If you spread out the stuff that is burning, stuff gets cooler and is easier to deal with. A nice straight bore nozzle hooked up to a good size pump can and will tear thru roofs without a problem. You absolutely have to get a hold of one of these things at least once in your life
This is so not my area, but Metal fires, Class D in the U.S., are only fought with powder extinguishers. Any extinguisher that isn't marked as a Class D is useless and a health hazard. One of the main reason you don't spray water onto a Class D fire is that you tend to get violent and explosive spalling. Life will start to suck in a big way if a moron tries that. It's a specialty area and any shop that workes with these metals, zirconium, and a bunch of others should put bucks into their training and safety gear. It's not to be messed with by amateurs.
A very interesting concept, but I just can help but think that it wouldn't work at all.
Food co-ops may have an advantage because people buy food often, are flexible, and failure isn't a big problem. Food getting is a repetitive batch process, car getting is not.
I can't afford to have my next car not be exactly right, but it's not a problem if my next sack of potatoes is one potatoe shy and has an onionthrown in. I won't be happy if my next car has only three wheels and it has just one tail fin.
Just a few thoughts from a pessimist.
when you need her? Other than getting rich with her business...
for example... Two warriors that had different religions, were sworn enemies, but they did sit down and have a nice meal with eachother. The story goes that they were comparing weapons and Saladin threw a silk scarf up into the air, held out his scimitar and the silk scarf cut itself in two, by it's own weight. Richard put an iron bar on a block and chopped it in half with one swing of his sword. That sword bit may be grossly distorted,or a total fabrication, but people believed it for a long time.
In Euope, on the rare occasions that monarchs were captured, they were often allowed to take whole wagon trains of stuff with them and whole bunches of servants. They most certainly did not rot in a hole, and they often ate with their captors. Leaving aside the fact that the royal families of europe were a bunch of inbred freaks and that the vanquished was probably your cousin, it makes a point. But woe to the commoner that got uppity. They would be put down hard with no courtesy.
Yeah, warrior-kings tend to take care of their own, when they aren't busy chopping eachother up. Yesterday it was a joust and a feast, today 18 holes & lunch at the Yacht club. No difference.
Step 1: Short this stock
Step 2: Coerce/Beg/Convince MSFT and others to license AdAware & include it in a free "update"
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit and maybe hang out with Martha Stewart for awhile.
Damn... didn't think this thru. She'd make me giver her my shirt to make a "Nice Ghetto Chic" throw rug.
But really, how do we screw this up for them?
Final Cut Pro has a filter that supposes to do this, but I'll be damned if I've ever seen it work. I've used it to change footage from totally unusable to unusuable and very annoying. Maybe some FCP guru can set me straight.
I believe some consumer cameras do this for small, high frequency vibrations in software and using tiny little servos to move something in the lense/sensor assembly. I've never seen that in a professional type camera.
It's best to just get your footage right the first time. "Fixing it in post" is for lazy and stupid directors. Good idea though, if you have all year. Sorry!
I can't really disagree with the fundamental ideas in you post, and that's scary, speaking as an U.S'ian.
Violence is just as natural as sex. It is a human constant. I think that is true because toddlers will always fight over a toy until their parents train them no to, and there's always a war going on somewhere.
Some twisted freaks argue that sex and violence are just different facets of the same psychological drive. That's more than a little fucked up, but maybe it is partly true.
The point is, that which is natural is not necessarily good. Equating the two is an anti-hippie peeve of mine, sorry. Humans are sexual beings and denying it makes no sense. Kids will learn about their sexuality, and it's up to their parents to help them see sex as positive and to be responsible about it.
No, but I found a guy that can print images on long thin strips of soft paper.
I'd be interested in still pics or short video clips of Richter and his buddies. Did anybody snap any?
So, joggers stretch, weight lifters do a few light reps, and the Almighty scares the piss out of a few Sicilians?
I guess Armageddon would be a lot of work and a sprain in the hellfire/brimstone casting finger would be inconvenient.
Well, by definition, software can only do what it was designed to do, right? If those functions are different from the stated intent of the developer, then tough beans.
Computers are wonderfully deterministic beasts. We shouldn't pretend that they aren't and blame our glitches on computers. If Ralph Nader is "accidentally" elected, it's not a machine/software problem. Somebody, a person or a group of people, screwed up.
I'm not saying that a law court would agree, but if a voting machine can be made to sing "Turkey in the Straw" every time you hit the Libertarian button, then that's exactly what the it was "designed" to do.
(Wow, a two bit thought in three paragraphs, time for more bran.)
Well, as long as they remember to bring some bagels, all is good, as long as the tank doesn't leak, or the space suits, or if somebody REMEMBERED TO BRING A LIGHTER & A FLASHLIGHT, OH OHHHHHH!
Sorry.
but they fixed it. For awhile I was getting 5+ spam messages per day, sometimes more. The latest version of their client put a "report spam" button, front and center. Since that version came out, my ICQ spam has nearly disappeared.
I can still pick up new contacts, new contacts can search and find me, and it's easy. If I don't want to deal with someone they go on my deny list and the issue is settled. ICQ, or others like it, really are quite useful.
It's simple, quick and it has solved the problem, for now at least. If only the email beast was that easy.
A customized magazine. One article from Home & Garden (approximately never, for me anyway,) an article from Wired, the occasional Jolene Blalock pictorial (often please,) maybe some stuff from Scientic American about oceanography and you have a fine magazine.
There just aren't many big name magazines out htere that are independent. As in all mass media these days, a few players hold most of the marbles. It stands to reason that each large company could cherry pick from tehir different lines to make a super-mag. Basically you'd have an instantly customizable source of reading material with just in time delivery. Or just use the web.
Still, high res alien babe goodness on dead tree format... That may be worth it.
Well, if you are what you eat then all is good. I've always been a fan of jelly donuts, and the guy was in a cafe. So the two major food groups are already present.
I say let him eat the pen drive, then have our Guardai friends load him up with a couple of pounds or kilos of that good Irish farm cheese. Then we'll see how much he likes being a spammer.
Revenge fantasies really are a waste of time, aren't they?
I used to work for emachines as a tech support flunkie. For a quite awhile I was ashamed of it and ranted regularly because of the poor service I was forced to give customers. For example I had a hotel owner beg me to send him a hard drive because his had failed. He said that he would pay for overnight shipping without hesitating and that we should name our price for doing so. Policy prohibited anything but offering him the normal slow warranty fufillment process and mule based delivery. The policies also prohibited me from telling him to walk down to the local store, grab the appropriate drive and run the restore procedures.
Ok, so I still like to rant, but eMachines has seen the light. Maybe. When I worked for them he would have gotten his battery via regular parcel post or UPS ground, and God only know how long that takes.
Bulletproof hardware will likely always cost large piles of money. Great, heaping, has their own ZIP code piles of cash. That's fine and dandy if you're NASA and are putting machines on some other planet with exactly one semi-redundant backup. Most of the rest of us must make trade offs. If reliability is slighted for cost's sake, then some kind of replacement system is necessary.
If it is necessary, why not do it right? How much extra does good customer support need to cost? In my example case, replacing the guy's drive overnight could have been as easy as setting a single flag on the ticket and having a pile of "ship this out on the next plane" stickers at the fufillment center.
Legendary customer support will always cost big money. If you want multi-lingual engineers that have taken sacred vows and can offer prayer, holy communion, teach yoga or sacrifice chickens for your machine, then it's coing to cost you.
I accept the fact that stuff will fail. Crappy customer support doesn't have to be, and good customer support doesn't have to be expensive.
It sounds like e-Machines is getting it. Now we can top calling buyers "eWhores." Perhaps "eMildlySluttyAfterTwoBeers." Really, I'm happy about the change.
The have two problems with intercity train travel in the U.S. When I have traveled by train, I''ve most often had to have somebody pick me up in a car from the terminal. It isn't always easy to get to your actual destination. My second objection is that in some parts of the U.S. there are maybe two ways into many large cities. Rails can and do break, tunnels get torched, and stuff breaks down. There simply isn't enough redundency to handle impatient people type traffic.
And yeah, it's quite a site to see a couple of miles worthof cars rolling along. It's an awesome sight.
They have multiple redundant backups, regular testing of the backups, and a massively distributed supplementary backup system for the earth's plants. It doesn't get everything of course, but throw in my efforts to back up my genetic code and you have everything you need to save the world or take over another planet.
With some big database fun, remote sensing and GIS goodness you have a good project for he conservation minded geek.
Also, try some bread made with quinoa flour if you get the chance.. It's an interesting change from Wonder Bread.
Or "visible" light maser. Not that it really matters.
First of all, a CEO is an officer of the company. That officer may or may not be the owner in any degree. It's true that there is some personal responsibility, but it's really the shareholder's money and it is their duty, thru the governing board, to hold on to it. The only person he has to apologize to for blowing millions is his stockholders and the board. In this case I think the distinction is academic since he's pretty much his own man.
The corporate shield is a mixed blessing, but it means that everything isn't personal. Sure, CEOs need to learn from their mistakes, but if they had to pay for their mistakes personally would anyone but a power mad lunatic administer agree to run anything bigger than a lemonade stand? I think not. We really can't have it both ways.
And buy the way, you going broke is largely an artifact of your parent's discipline. You may earn a check, but in many cases you don't have the legal ability to contract and the tax man can go after your money to pay your parent's taxes. Yep, it's happened but usually it doesn't fly because of the extremely nasty publicity states get when they try this. I just don't think you and a large publicly traded company making a mistake and going broke are even qualitatively the same.
Making business this personal is a big mistake. Now fraud is another matter. I hope the Enron flunkies and others like them get the very most friendly cell mates.
I'm a microscopically small share holder in a few companies and I have to accept stupidity and mistakes. That's unavoidably human. Dishonesty and theft is too but I guess I still want to feed such people to my dog. Slow. (the feeding, not the dog's name, but it would be apt) It's hard to have a non-hypocritical attitude, you're right.
In some cases stamping lettering into a stressed rotating part can lead to sudden failure. Stamping can put odd stresses into the part, and makes a slightly weaker space in the part.
I believe that the NTSB found a stamping on a rail car wheel caused a failure and derailment, but i'll be danged if I can find the incident. Maybe tonight...
Moisture could collect in the little crevices of the letters leading to corrosion. i suspect that this is not really a concern.
Silk screening or some creative powdercoating could totally avoid these issues. But what do I know. I managed to smoke my e-machine 500 last night. Nobody would hire me to be a shuttle engineer!
that's why I said to buy flowers. I mean as long as the security people insist on being that friendly.
It does seem reasonable to allow extra time for a lot of anoying questions and a detailed search of luggage and person. But, so far as I know, bringing in a dead laptop isn't a crime, just good conversation starter.
I wonder if the whole issue could be avoided by putting it in checked baggage? Hopefully the U.K. people are still thorough, but a little bit more reasonable than our guys over here. Allow them plenty of time to poke thru and x-ray your stuff and maybe they won't hassle you. I'm guessing here, but it sounds likely.
Get a laptop corpse, carry it on you flight to the U.S., pitch it into the garbage, let the customs weenies think that your new laptop is the old one. Simple.
Aside from the need to buy an empty shell and flowers your new airport security friend, it's cheap and easy.
I really have no idea if this would work, and I certainly wouldn't advocate cheating the taxman. Never never never...
I've never had the fortune of meeting Mr. Stallman, but I'm asuming he has some sense of humor. I'm a still very new to the GNU/Linux scene, but I can appreciate the guy's work.
I say we find out what his official title is and print him up some business cards with the building name in extra bold print. It'll either give him a chuckle every time he hands one out or make his head explode.
This is an all around good deal I think. Mr. Gates gets to do good as he sees it and get some PR and RMS gets a nice place to do his work in. One of them will eventually eat the other's lunch anyway.