Not to mention that it's the only nation ever to actually USE nuclear weapons against another nation.
Yes, there is no argueing that is true. And, however true it is is up for debate, but its since been read that Harry had a couple of think tanks work on the results of using it, or finishing it with boots on the ground.
The balance sheet came back overwhelmingly in favor of using it because it would actually cut the casualties on both sides by 75%, or more.
It also leaves a very permanent mark on history, at least until the goody two shoe types succeed in re-writing it, to remind those who would use them to make what to them is nothing more than a means to an end, about the real destructive power then unleashed against themselves.
Understand that today, the first one to use them, us included, will make the user a percieved legal target for the rest of the world to unload theirs on.
There is one other unknown in the equation, and thats how much maintainance has been done on the stockpiles of these things to keep them assuredly functional. How many of them would be having working half-life problems and might just go pfffft if they were pulled out of the bunkers and means to fit them to modern delivery methods worked out?
Personally I have no idea, and haven't even tried to study up on the effects of this deterioration, but I know it does exist.
You will have the opportunity to get rid of that G.W. in less than 1.5 years. Strangely, your people didn't take the opportunity to get rid of the Republican-majority government during your recent opportunity. Maybe you just don't like democracy.
Oh, I'd say we like democracy alright, its just the democrats we don't like. Unforch, the republicans are turning out to be just as crooked, so we're damned if we do, and damned if we don't.
I think the difference is that the democrats seem to think that the rich are an endless resource to be exploited, and the republicans seem to think that only the rich should get any richer.
Neither in the long run will achieve a working balance.
Laws passed by primarily democratic congresses have reduced the incentive for companies to put any of their profits back into R&D since all the tax incentives that existed in the 1930-40's that got us out of the "great depression" have been nibbled away to nothing today, the republicrats thinking they are just a tax escapement haven.
Similarly, laws passed by republican congresses have been the worst at protecting the have's interests (Sen. Disney being a prime example) and the quarterly bottom line.
We are in bad need of a political party that can look 10 to 50 years down the log and take corrective action to revive, not stifle in endless litigation, that which has the ability to improve this nations productivity and maintain or improve the balance of trade situation. Innovation is what got us where we are, and now we've apparently allowed the patent office to patent the word so no one else can use it. Thats a bit smelly, usually steaming if fresh enough, and found on the ground behind well fed males of the bovine specie. Be carefull where you walk if you're not an old Iowa farm boy (I am).
As it is, we're exporting america, one huge money transfer at a time, to china everytime we buy clothing from the likes of Walmart et all. It wouldn't be so bad if, when I went after another pair of blue jeans, I could actually find a quality, american made product even if it did carry a slightly premium pricetag. Sadly we've already admitted we have lost the war because there aren't any that can carry both the claim of quality, and american made.
As for the canadian readers, how many of you that live more than an hour west of Ottowa, have actually turned in your guns? I think thats a good question for a poll.
The human condition, and its want for personal freedom, tells me that compliance with that edict, out in the real farm & back country, where you might have to shoot a wolf attacking you cattle, or more probably a badger in the henhouse, not to mention a little meat for the larder from time to time is probably not more than 1%.
IMNSHO, you canadians, the ones I've talked to on the cb radio when skip was king 25 years ago, are most certainly not so stupid as to allow yourselves to be self destructed by some goody two shoes a thousand miles away.
Are there any readers out there with a phone line who'd care to admit they are free men instead of slaves to the eastern wannabe dictators? Let us do that poll, right here and now folks!
Stand up anon, and testify, naming only the province you live in to protect the (chuckle) 'guilty':-)
As to our american problems, I have faith we will figure them out in due time. It will happen when enough people are hungry and willing to restore balance with votes, and if need be, blood. The second amendment was the founding fathers insurance that the ultimate power of the people would remain in the hands of the people. I just hope we are still 'governing' ourselves when we do, and that it is not hindsight because we've been totally enslaved by the apathy of the average voter in the meantime.
At my age, its probably a surer bet that I won't live to see it, but I can hope for my great-grandchildren, and I can, and do, vote.
Recently its sure seems like it has been a choice of the lessor of two evils though...
Nice, but the legal beagles have already been there, and made the gent who wrote tarpit take it down. That doesn't mean it cannot be found as I did just that with about 5 minutes worth of searching. This is, IMNSHO, a program that like the DeCSS code, should, even if not being used, be archived on half the hard drives of the planet if for no other reason than its the internet equ of the USA's second amendment, giving the people the ability to shoot back if push comes to shove.
2. Make sure the content looks "illegal" but, in fact, is not
(i.e., MP3 files named for popular songs but containing only commentary on them).
Or is the home written output of a local who would like some publicity. But then could he be sued for plagerizing the titles? I Dunno.
3. Get hit.
This depends on how ineffective your configuration of both your firewall, and the tarpit. I ran portsentry for years, and my hosts.deny file looked like the LA phone book, but iptables seems to be less of a hit on the cpu, so I compromised. Now I have portsentry writing automatic rules for iptables should somebody get in far enough to get portsentry's attention. So far, the only one to do that was a dns server of verizon.net which hit me pretty hard on a port well above the 30,000 mark. Apparently a false alarm as I had to delete that rule to get a dns back, and its not repeated.
So I think you'd have to make it look like a pretty insecure winderz box. I don't think they have what it takes to walk thru a decent firewall and do as they please.
4. Sue for damages.
Now I like this one, especially for lots of 'punitive':-)
Neither do I. And while I'm a bit abivalent about this war from the standpoint of the weapons used, such as the depleted uranium cannon shells, thats not germain to this particular subject.
What is germain is that DARPA issued a grant to fund a major effort at improving this particular OS, one that already has a decent reputation for being secure, airplane tickets were bought and paid for out of the expectation of receiving the grant in a timely manner, plus accomodations arranged for. All of this costs money.
To then have the grant canceled just because the head honcho made his views known on the war is being petty beyond belief!
I have no idea who is responsible for this, but if this person can be identified, we, the tax-payers of the US would most assuredly like to interview him for the public record, and so that appropriate changes in the funding of DARPA can be arranged in congress.
Its not out of the realm of possibilities to arrange to have this persons salary removed from the DARPA budget by congress.
Its been done at least once before when a Richard Davis at the BATF, who was espousing a national gun registration scheme, had his salary removed from the BATF budget by a nearly unanimous vote of both houses of congress, now about 25 or so years back up the log.
Who else feels as I do on this, and could afford to offer a bit of help, it sure sounds like Theo needs it right now!
That, and let us see if we can find out who made that decision. IMO this person needs to see how _real politics_ is played.
The apparently superluminal speed of expansion is an optical illusion caused by the fact that what we see is approaching us at relativistic speeds. The original energy we first saw, which travels at C speed, and a week later we see that which is 3 weeks later in the objects time frame because the ejection of the material creating the image is itself traveling toward us at near C speeds. I saw some math several years ago, but cannot recall the details well enough to quote it here.
Someone who is familiar with how this works should attempt to explain it better for us inquisitive bystanders to interesting events such as this.
Good comment, and to be fair, I had forgotten the connection between the OKC bombing and the SS when I was writing that. The "Federal Building" doesn't automaticly translate to the Social Security offices in my central processor unit I guess. Maybe I need a new one, this ones 68 years old & getting rusty.:)
As that cost them quite a few people, maybe I can understand the source of the paranoia. IMNSHO, this doesn't excuse its treatment of the general "Joe Sixpack" populace however since I had nothing to do with it other than watching in horror the carnage of that mornings tv coverage in OKC. The same horror that I watched the first shuttle blow up with, and then these 2 hits, and the last shuttles destruction. Its very hard to describe that feeling and do it justice.
That OKC bombing, and 9/11/01 have pretty much convinced me to keep things well cleaned and loaded and quickly accessable. Who knows for sure but what the 2nd amendments "well regulated militia" just might be needed on 30 seconds notice to actually "crack a cap" or 500. I'm out in the sticks & mountains of WV, but we picked up 4 arabs in a late model car, taking pictures of the understructure of one of the areas larger dams just last week. Being 3 miles downstream of that dam doesn't make me sleep better at night, not after that. I never did learn to swim all that well.
"I agree with some of the anti-terrorist security measures - Jersey barriers at Federal buildings to prevent parking too close, metal detectors at government buildings/airports, etc. Those are non-intrusive security measures. The ones that say that the government can monitor my emails and phone conversations at will, on the other hand, ARE intrusive... particularly when I can then be jailed and prosecuted without lawyer consultation, public knowledge, etc.
Don't look at this from a "I have nothing to hide, so therefore feel free to monitor my actions all the time" point of view. Look at it from a "I have nothing to hide, and have done nothing wrong, so therefore there's no need to monitor my actions all the time and it's intrusive to do so" view."
Pardon the screwed up quotations above, but the usual > didn't seem to stay formatted.
The second paragraph in particular says it like it should be.
For instance, not too long *before* 9/11/01, I had occasion to visit the Social Security admin building in a nearby town, and was treated in what I termed a very humiliating way. On entry to the building all sorts of alarms went off, and I was forced to empty my pockets of anything metalic such as my coin purse, car keys, a small barlow style pocket knife, an engraved money clip (I could keep its contents not that there was that much in the clip, 17 dollars I think), then all my shirt pocket contents such as a ball point pen, a small 'greenie' screwdriver, 2 pair of 5" curved nose suture clamps and a small 2 AAA cell flashlight. I'm a Certified Electronics Technician and those are the things that go on with my shirt in the morning, and get hung on the doorknob with it at night. Hell, they even made noises about taking my belt off because it had a metal buckle!
I did it because I had business there, but that doesn't make me the least bit happy and I made no flimsey excuses about how I felt about it. I was told to shut up or they would call the local law enforcement to have me forcibly removed and charged with verbal assault.
Security is one thing, but pure fscking paranoia is something else, and that was 100% pure paranoia, and should be treated like the male bovine excrement that it is. To be shoveled up and spread on any nearby field that needs it.
As far as privacy matters, there is entirely too much loss of that taken as matter of fact by the sheep^H^H^H^H^H population in general. My house is MY house, bought AND 100% paid for, and somebody who doesn't belong there may well find about 3 lbs of a 44 calibre barrel stuck up his nose.
These so-called think tankers seem to forget that the sorts of things they are advocating were foretold by our founding fathers, and having been forewarned, they then proceeded to formulate and pass the first 10 amendments to our Constitution, otherwise known as "The Bill of Rights"
We should take any attempted encroachment on those rights very seriously indeed. One such instance, back in '76 IIRC, resulted in the congress as a whole, passing legislation that enjoined the BATF from implementing Mr. Richard Davis's gun registration scheme, removed the 4.7 million dollars it was estimated to take to do it from the BATF budget, and enjoined them from moving any other monies into the project, and as the final insult, removed Mr. Richard Davis's salary from the budget.
Now, who did you say was writing this persons paycheck? It sure seems like we need to repeat a bit of recent history here, sending the message one more time to such personally ambitious individuals. If thats my tax dollars supporting her and that think tank, I object, stenuously.
This makes me feel that the average Michigander is pretty dumb, if they think we are going to open up our systems just to please some fscker from the phone industry whose afraid he might lose a nickle because pa's computer, and 3 of the kid's machines all come in on the same ip adddress.
Tell ya what Michigan, in this country the majority rules, and the majority is going to run something that protects his investment, even if he's a windows weenie. You can go fly a kite, prefereably with a wire string, its not your machinery, its mine.
Methinks its time I shut down my home dns though. That gave me away the last time I had a check site check me.
-- Cheers, Gene (who doesn't live in Michigan, thanks)
Unforch, one of the reasons mac's OS9 was rather quickly passed over and on into OSX, was that OS9 is a registered trademark then owned by the MicroWare Corporation in Des Moines IA, USA, and now owned by Radisys for a multiuser/multitasking operating system that originally ran on specialized hardware for use with the moto 6809 cpu, made by GIMIX at the time, and on the TRS-80 Color Computer (even the 64k memory versions could run it) and was subsequently developed into OSK for the m68k cpu's, and OS9000 for intel cpu's.
I'd imagine that when the mac OS9 was released, there was an exchange of letters between MicroWare and Apple indicating MicroWares general displeasure with such a revolting turn of events, and which had the effect of hastening OSX out the door a year early.
Its truely major useage was as the optional OS for the Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer, all 3 versions over the years, where it showed up the offerings from M$ so bad that some shack people were told to not demo what it could do for fear of trashing an intel based box sale which had more 'spiff' attached to it anyway.
It would, we users think, have made a much larger impression on the computing scene had the intel versions not been priced at 5 to 20x what the 'other guys' were selling their crappy OS for. But MicroWare wasn't terribly interested in mass sales because that also equaled massive support costs, so they chose the massive price route with support as part of the sales contract. Such automaticly limited sales to those who could afford a seat at the table.
It was a stable system, achieving uptimes in some cases that would make even the oldtimer unix admin a bit jealous, one instance of almost 7 years is on record, and many, many "coco's" ran from power failure to power failure. When was the last time you saw a traffic signal controller that was crashed? It runs at least half of them.
I still have one of them in the basement, sporting a 1 gig scsi hard drive, 2 monitors (independent, not the current wide screen thing) and all the other goodies to make it a usefull machine.
As an educational tool for someone wanting to study how a computer actually works, that "Trash 80 color computer" has, not even today, 20 years after it was first offered for sale, no equal in the teaching field because that os is the single, most documented os ever written. It came with an assembler, and several other languages were also available including a fairly K&R C, a Basic modeled after TrueBasic, and a pascal, and aftermarket folks even had a decent forth for it.
But my soapbox is getting old and creaky just like me, so I'll give it a rest. Your basic trivia lesson for the day:-)
" That is asinine, if the parents don't want little Jimmy to have an accident with the gun, they should teach little Jimmy how it works, let him shoot it (at a watermelon or something else with a soft inside) and see the distructive potential. Then lock the gun up and out of reach."
Yup, sure, go right ahead and put it behind a locked door or whatever. Scuse me?
When my kids were in the just barely walking stage, and again when they were about 4, each of them got to witness a 5 gallon can of water and a 150grain hollowpoint bullet meet at about 3100fps. Thats quite impressive to a child when he is also advised that he/she is about 98% water.
The gun then went back in the unlocked, open cabinet behind the front door till I got it out again a few days later for some more target practice, loaded and ready for action. It was even used for point making a time or 3 back in those years. My deceased ex once opened the can of bud in a guys hand who was intent of having a party in our front yard with it. The party went elsewhere as requested.
The point being that those guns, all of them were loaded and ready for action, and to this day my kids, some of them now 40 years old, handle guns responsibly. None of them ever shot his brother playing with guns. That was the whole point.
And to the poster who said the NRA isn't you and me? Tell that to the losers of the last presidential elections here, who were avowedly anti-gun. We voted almost as a block, 5 million of us, to protect and defend the constitution and the bill of rights. By now I think some of us are having second thoughts for other reasons, but there is another election coming up so we can fix it. Thats what a democracy is all about.
Of course, which is why I questioned how to actually get Canopy out of the picture. Since our laws and mores generally prevent someone from walking in with the appropriate weapons to enforce the point that they are out of the TrollTech business, the whole post was a "what if" that we'll never see unless TrollTech goes down the tubes far enough to make them something Canopy would want to get rid of to control what they perceive as the bleeding.
And I most certainly don't wish that on TrollTech.
The only way as I see it would be to take TrollTech back to private, and that, just from the amount of cash that would take, is in all probability well out of reach for all concerned parties here.
The next best thing would be to mobilize the users to each buy a share, and at some point the available shares, since there are only X shares in circulation, would be used up, preventing Canopy from further increasing their share of TrollTech unless they really did want to run the price up way beyond its normal worth, at which point somebody will unload theirs at a handsome profit.
Unforch, I haven't the foggiest how many outstandng shares there are, or what they're currently moving at.
So I guess the future will tell the tale, and I hope its a palatable story.
The suggestion that we buy out that 5.8% of Trolltech which is currently owned by the Canopy Group does on the face of it seem like a decent idea.
I have no idea if Trolltech is publicly traded or not, but if it were possible for me to buy one share of Trolltech with the provisio that the share I was buying was formerly a Canopy Group share, and that my buying it would be just a nibble by one duck, then I'd imagine that I'd have to stand in quite a long line of similarly minded folks. With enough ducks, well...
I'd just consider it a down payment for all the kde/qt code we're had the pleasure of useing for all these years now.
As a retired person, I don't have the wherewithall to go after this in wholesale share numbers, but I'd be very intereseted in finding out how many like minded folks there are that could be counted on to defend trolltech from the potential meddling that a 5.8% stake held by an adversary might allow.
So how many of us are there who would buy a share just to get it out of the Canopy Groups safe?
As to how to go about that bit of certifying its a formerly Canopy Group share, I'd not have a clue, none, nada, zip, point double ought nothin.
Yeah, sure, great idea man. Just one problem with it.
You would have to start with the esteemed govenor, probably one Mr. Grey Davis, who got, and spent his political kharma on promoting the NIBY attitude every time a power entity wanted to build any more capacity within the borders of the great state of California. You couldn't buy a construction permit there for many years for any amount of money. From the reports I've read, PG&E alone wasted well over a billion on applications that were turned down. Then when the state was buying OP power, and the price went up due to simple supply and demand economics brought on by the lack of new construction, so what did they do?
They passed a state law regulating what they could sell power for, but not what the utilities had to pay for it. When it became a loss to move it, obviously they quit, hence the blackouts. Simple business economics, you cannot buy at 1.00 and sell for.50 and make money.
Even the much maligned govenor moonbeam was smarter than that.
I agree, go after the perps, but make very sure you have all the responsible names on the perp list before you issue the warrants. In this case, it certainly appears to start from the highest office in the state. But remember, he ran, and won with that as a plank in his platform. You gonna arrest the voters that put him there too?
I thought not. In the meantime I think there may even be some new construction going on now after receiveing that particular nastygram in the form of the blackouts at the statehouse, I can't say that for sure though, It's been 20 years since I lived there, and 8 since I last visited. Good place to visit, not as great to work in though.
"We're going to have a lot of cease and desist orders then. Search google for 539-60-5125."
Which was a trigger for me to do just that. But using my SS number. Now, I've been around 68 years folks and I have managed to walk into (and out of in one piece) several places I'd druther not regale you with, but the google search came back empty.
Seems to me that the elapsed time from the court ruling to google decideing that cleaning out all SS numbers in the google database would be a good idea leaves me coming to the conclusion that an in-sufficient amount of time to have searched and purged has passed, so I'd suggest that its apparently NOT a common practice, at least for google.
FWIW, I didn't try your number, if its none of my business, why should I. My number IS my business.
How come it took so long? Plate tectonics has only come into wide favor as an accepted and now quite well proved theory the last 20 some years, but I had that figured out at about age 8, 60 years ago. My mother even had to agree with me on that at the time as she couldn't come up with a competing idea.
I should have copyrighted it then. But it would have long expired by the time the geologists figured it out. No Sonny Bono law then you see.
They did in fact fit together rather well, several hundred million years ago. It was, and is now called Pangea in the publications discussing it.
Maybe, and then again maybe not. Your idea makes no provision to enforce the word "fair".
IMO, if we were to give them that, they in turn must give us back the classic definitions of Fair Use, including the right to make backup copies that are exact images, and therefore just as copy protected as the originals, quote a sentence from to establish the context in other references AND maintain an escrow that will in 28 years, automaticly release into the public domain, with no copy protection scheme whatsoever, the currently under copyright (and no doubt copy protected) work.
I do not see any other way to make it even remotely close to fair all around without this provision, backed up by fairly heavy, intentionally punitive even (a percentage of the gross sales comes to mind, to be left in escrow in the event they default), fines, maybe even some jail time for those who steal silently way into the night after 27 years and 11 months, leaving the work legally available, but still copy protected, and the circumvention of it for any reason still subject to prosecution under the DMCA. If they go away without a full release, then whomever comes out of the woodwork to insist you be prosecuted for cracking the protection gets to pay the fines & maybe do the time.
Yeah, well you didn't look too hard on the kde site. There have been special rh8.0 packages of kde available, all 106 files, for at least 2 weeks just for the 3.0.5a release. Before that there was a set of 3.0.4's, then 3.0.5's.
I think that actually started out to be 3.0.2 but I won't say so on the good book.
I too tried to make rh8.0 and evolution work, but evo apparently has no way to switch it to use a pop server, only imap, and thats about as worthless as the proverbial tits on a boarhog to me when my isp only has a pop server. That was redhat mistake #1, assuming everyine has access to an imap server. (whatever the heck that is, maybe it is the latest and greatest, but its not *here* *now* for me)
So, all of the redhat supplied kde got ripped out, and the rh8.0 versions from the kde site were installed. It mostly worked then and is all working now. Heck, I couldn't even find a method to add my favs to the toolbar in gnome! 45 seconds of clicking in kde, what can I say.
Likewise, trying to use the bluecurve in prefs-->look and feel-->window decorations is a 100% guaranteed kwin crasher. I liked the looks of the BlueCurve decorated window, but when it crashes kwin 100% of the time just winning a game or closing gedit out, then its not worth the hassle because thats exactly what it is. Switching that back to the "KDE2 default" and everything is stable. This bug has been reported, but its apparently non-issue to redhat.
It the little gotcha's like that that have driven the longtime linux users away from the redhat8.0 look because it doesn't mean squat to me how it looks as long as it works, and bluecurve didn't work for me in any way but visually.
And thats one redhat users attitude about bluecurve. Apply salt if your experience is different.
There is in fact an E language, written by Wooter Van Oortmanson although that spelling is probaby highly fubar. More or less typeless, like arexx, I found my arexx experience getting in the way of getting anything done.
It ran on the amiga, and I don't know if it was ever ported to a *nix environment or not. I've a copy of the docs laying around here someplace and they pretty well fill a 3.5" "D" ring binder.
-- Cheers, Gene 99.22% setiathome ranking, what are you doing with your spare cpu cycles?
"And until I can pay my bills over the Internet, it wouldn't be a substitute for me either".
I have no idea whats holding you back, I've been paying my bills by logging into my account at my bank for 7 or 8 years, first starting to do that from a big box amiga and one of its browsers that could spoof as IE. Then switching to a linux box about 5 years back to do that. The biggest problem I ever had was in convincing them to remove the fscking line terminator in their matching patterns for the password. I finally solved that by making sure I tabbed out of the box before I hit the send button as I was changing it.
When I first started to do this, I had to convince them that they shouldn't care what kind of a gawdamned box I had as long as it sent the proper responses. They were very windows-centric & the phone help refused to talk to me in technical terms, insisting that the only thing they supported was windows & IE.
That suddenly stopped about 3 years ago, when I threatened to go find a bank that actually wanted my business, taking my 15 year old 5.5 digit account out in one swell foop. I was standing there ready to write the check while the local manager got on the phone to the main to find out what the hell was going on. I don't know what was said as she closed the door about 15 seconds into the call, but I could see the conversation was very animated, and the problem was solved by the time she came back out of the office.
I've had several occasions to talk to the phone support folks since and not one of them has ever again asked me what version of windows IE I was running.
First, you have to get their attention. Once you've done that, its amazing how they can find the time and people to keep a customer happy.
-- Cheers, Gene 99.21% ranking in setiathome. What are you doing with your spare cpu cycles?
I'm now 68 years old, and almost retired. Why not completely you ask?
Well, for those that "walk on water" its a bit hard to quit cold turkey, particularly when that might have pretty bad consequences for the company who thought enough of me to throw me a small party, and present the Rolex I'll let you figure out the price of when I did retire to a part-time status after 18 years in their top technical chair. I got that chair, with an 8th grade education and a natural ability to see in my mind how almost anything with a line cord or batteries worked, and to fix it if it didn't work, often better than new because I could see the weak point, the design flaw, or the schematic that somehow got fubar'd between the designers mind and the production shop. Old knowledge also comes in handy, which is why I'm not fully retired, I still keep their 40 some year old tv transmitter on the air. Not too many old engineers who understand such things left, and its not a particularly appealing profession for the younger set who have been known to ask "Whats a tube?". So I have job security I'd rather not have at times, I've got too many other things to do, and historically, too little time to do them in.
I had a hand, as a tech, in building the tv cameras that were on the Trieste when it was taken down into the mohole, nearly 7 miles down in the pacific. I may have tested the fuel and oxidizer uullage(sp) pressure regulators that put John Glenn up.
There are other things I could bore this audience with. Suffice to say I'm not rich, but I've had a pretty satisfying life and wouldn't bypass too much of it if I could play it back again. Losing my first wife to a stroke at the age of 34, and finding myself with 3 sub-teen children to raise would be the one item I'd leave out. Losing one of those to cancer about 4 years back would be another.
I got my start in electronics at a quite early age, having an alcoholic uncle that fixed radios for beer money. He had a menu on the wall that if it did this, you replaced that which in fact just about covered what could happen to an "all american 5 tube" radio of the 1940's. But as he was changing a part one day when I was about 8 or 9 years old, I asked him what was wrong with the part he was taking out. And he couldn't tell me!
At that point I became "hooked" on finding out exactly what each part was supposed to do, and as they say, the rest is now history. Such knowledge has stood me in good stead right thru the transistor revolution, thru the digital revolution and up to todays modern computers. No "windows" in my house, I built all of them and they run linux. So I think I'm doing pretty good for an old fart with 8th grade (and a University of Hard Knocks) diploma's on the wall.
I went and took the GED test cold turkey about a decade back, and 2 weeks later I was bugging the test admin about the results. His reply was "why do you care, you were just doing it for the exercise weren't you?"
Someday I'll explain the walking on water reference above, its rather funny I think.
The point is, if you can do it, do it. And don't look back, they'll never catch you anyway if you are doing it right. Your technical reputation will preceed you as you move from job to job. For me, it really has been easy. Maybe I had a head start in the IQ dept at 147, or my mother, who was the only girl in the 1929 class in aviation technology at Des Moines Tech, or the fact that the Iowa schools actually taught me how to read, whatever, there has been just enough of Isacc Asimov's "Magic" to keep me going for nearly 55 years of lassoing and branding electrons for a living. Its been a fun ride:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention that it's the only nation ever to actually USE nuclear weapons against another nation.
Yes, there is no argueing that is true. And, however true it is is up for debate, but its since been read that Harry had a couple of think tanks work on the results of using it, or finishing it with boots on the ground.
The balance sheet came back overwhelmingly in favor of using it because it would actually cut the casualties on both sides by 75%, or more.
It also leaves a very permanent mark on history, at least until the goody two shoe types succeed in re-writing it, to remind those who would use them to make what to them is nothing more than a means to an end, about the real destructive power then unleashed against themselves.
Understand that today, the first one to use them, us included, will make the user a percieved legal target for the rest of the world to unload theirs on.
There is one other unknown in the equation, and thats how much maintainance has been done on the stockpiles of these things to keep them assuredly functional. How many of them would be having working half-life problems and might just go pfffft if they were pulled out of the bunkers and means to fit them to modern delivery methods worked out?
Personally I have no idea, and haven't even tried to study up on the effects of this deterioration, but I know it does exist.
--
Cheers, Gene
You will have the opportunity to get rid of that G.W. in less than 1.5 years. Strangely, your people didn't take the opportunity to get rid of the Republican-majority government during your recent opportunity. Maybe you just don't like democracy.
:-)
Oh, I'd say we like democracy alright, its just the democrats we don't like. Unforch, the republicans are turning out to be just as crooked, so we're damned if we do, and damned if we don't.
I think the difference is that the democrats seem to think that the rich are an endless resource to be exploited, and the republicans seem to think that only the rich should get any richer.
Neither in the long run will achieve a working balance.
Laws passed by primarily democratic congresses have reduced the incentive for companies to put any of their profits back into R&D since all the tax incentives that existed in the 1930-40's that got us out of the "great depression" have been nibbled away to nothing today, the republicrats thinking they are just a tax escapement haven.
Similarly, laws passed by republican congresses have been the worst at protecting the have's interests (Sen. Disney being a prime example) and the quarterly bottom line.
We are in bad need of a political party that can look 10 to 50 years down the log and take corrective action to revive, not stifle in endless litigation, that which has the ability to improve this nations productivity and maintain or improve the balance of trade situation. Innovation is what got us where we are, and now we've apparently allowed the patent office to patent the word so no one else can use it. Thats a bit smelly, usually steaming if fresh enough, and found on the ground behind well fed males of the bovine specie. Be carefull where you walk if you're not an old Iowa farm boy (I am).
As it is, we're exporting america, one huge money transfer at a time, to china everytime we buy clothing from the likes of Walmart et all. It wouldn't be so bad if, when I went after another pair of blue jeans, I could actually find a quality, american made product even if it did carry a slightly premium pricetag. Sadly we've already admitted we have lost the war because there aren't any that can carry both the claim of quality, and american made.
As for the canadian readers, how many of you that live more than an hour west of Ottowa, have actually turned in your guns? I think thats a good question for a poll.
The human condition, and its want for personal freedom, tells me that compliance with that edict, out in the real farm & back country, where you might have to shoot a wolf attacking you cattle, or more probably a badger in the henhouse, not to mention a little meat for the larder from time to time is probably not more than 1%.
IMNSHO, you canadians, the ones I've talked to on the cb radio when skip was king 25 years ago, are most certainly not so stupid as to allow yourselves to be self destructed by some goody two shoes a thousand miles away.
Are there any readers out there with a phone line who'd care to admit they are free men instead of slaves to the eastern wannabe dictators? Let us do that poll, right here and now folks!
Stand up anon, and testify, naming only the province you live in to protect the (chuckle) 'guilty'
As to our american problems, I have faith we will figure them out in due time. It will happen when enough people are hungry and willing to restore balance with votes, and if need be, blood. The second amendment was the founding fathers insurance that the ultimate power of the people would remain in the hands of the people. I just hope we are still 'governing' ourselves when we do, and that it is not hindsight because we've been totally enslaved by the apathy of the average voter in the meantime.
At my age, its probably a surer bet that I won't live to see it, but I can hope for my great-grandchildren, and I can, and do, vote.
Recently its sure seems like it has been a choice of the lessor of two evils though...
--
Cheers, Gene
1. Set up a honeypot.
:-)
Nice, but the legal beagles have already been there, and made the gent who wrote tarpit take it down. That doesn't mean it cannot be found as I did just that with about 5 minutes worth of searching. This is, IMNSHO, a program that like the DeCSS code, should, even if not being used, be archived on half the hard drives of the planet if for no other reason than its the internet equ of the USA's second amendment, giving the people the ability to shoot back if push comes to shove.
2. Make sure the content looks "illegal" but, in fact, is not
(i.e., MP3 files named for popular songs but containing only commentary on them).
Or is the home written output of a local who would like some publicity. But then could he be sued for plagerizing the titles? I Dunno.
3. Get hit.
This depends on how ineffective your configuration of both your firewall, and the tarpit. I ran portsentry for years, and my hosts.deny file looked like the LA phone book, but iptables seems to be less of a hit on the cpu, so I compromised. Now I have portsentry writing automatic rules for iptables should somebody get in far enough to get portsentry's attention. So far, the only one to do that was a dns server of verizon.net which hit me pretty hard on a port well above the 30,000 mark. Apparently a false alarm as I had to delete that rule to get a dns back, and its not repeated.
So I think you'd have to make it look like a pretty insecure winderz box. I don't think they have what it takes to walk thru a decent firewall and do as they please.
4. Sue for damages.
Now I like this one, especially for lots of 'punitive'
5. Profit!
I'm retired, I can use all the $$ help I can get.
--
Cheers, Gene
Neither do I. And while I'm a bit abivalent about this war from the standpoint of the weapons used, such as the depleted uranium cannon shells, thats not germain to this particular subject.
What is germain is that DARPA issued a grant to fund a major effort at improving this particular OS, one that already has a decent reputation for being secure, airplane tickets were bought and paid for out of the expectation of receiving the grant in a timely manner, plus accomodations arranged for. All of this costs money.
To then have the grant canceled just because the head honcho made his views known on the war is being petty beyond belief!
I have no idea who is responsible for this, but if this person can be identified, we, the tax-payers of the US would most assuredly like to interview him for the public record, and so that appropriate changes in the funding of DARPA can be arranged in congress.
Its not out of the realm of possibilities to arrange to have this persons salary removed from the DARPA budget by congress.
Its been done at least once before when a Richard Davis at the BATF, who was espousing a national gun registration scheme, had his salary removed from the BATF budget by a nearly unanimous vote of both houses of congress, now about 25 or so years back up the log.
Who else feels as I do on this, and could afford to offer a bit of help, it sure sounds like Theo needs it right now!
That, and let us see if we can find out who made that decision. IMO this person needs to see how _real politics_ is played.
--
Cheers, Gene
The apparently superluminal speed of expansion is an optical illusion caused by the fact that what we see is approaching us at relativistic speeds. The original energy we first saw, which travels at C speed, and a week later we see that which is 3 weeks later in the objects time frame because the ejection of the material creating the image is itself traveling toward us at near C speeds. I saw some math several years ago, but cannot recall the details well enough to quote it here.
Someone who is familiar with how this works should attempt to explain it better for us inquisitive bystanders to interesting events such as this.
--
Cheers, Gene
Good comment, and to be fair, I had forgotten the connection between the OKC bombing and the SS when I was writing that. The "Federal Building" doesn't automaticly translate to the Social Security offices in my central processor unit I guess. Maybe I need a new one, this ones 68 years old & getting rusty. :)
As that cost them quite a few people, maybe I can understand the source of the paranoia. IMNSHO, this doesn't excuse its treatment of the general "Joe Sixpack" populace however since I had nothing to do with it other than watching in horror the carnage of that mornings tv coverage in OKC. The same horror that I watched the first shuttle blow up with, and then these 2 hits, and the last shuttles destruction. Its very hard to describe that feeling and do it justice.
That OKC bombing, and 9/11/01 have pretty much convinced me to keep things well cleaned and loaded and quickly accessable. Who knows for sure but what the 2nd amendments "well regulated militia" just might be needed on 30 seconds notice to actually "crack a cap" or 500. I'm out in the sticks & mountains of WV, but we picked up 4 arabs in a late model car, taking pictures of the understructure of one of the areas larger dams just last week. Being 3 miles downstream of that dam doesn't make me sleep better at night, not after that. I never did learn to swim all that well.
--
Cheers, Gene
And thgis portion gives me the willies, big time.
"I agree with some of the anti-terrorist security measures - Jersey barriers at Federal buildings to prevent parking too close, metal detectors at government buildings/airports, etc. Those are non-intrusive security measures. The ones that say that the government can monitor my emails and phone conversations at will, on the other hand, ARE intrusive... particularly when I can then be jailed and prosecuted without lawyer consultation, public knowledge, etc.
Don't look at this from a "I have nothing to hide, so therefore feel free to monitor my actions all the time" point of view. Look at it from a "I have nothing to hide, and have done nothing wrong, so therefore there's no need to monitor my actions all the time and it's intrusive to do so" view."
Pardon the screwed up quotations above, but the usual > didn't seem to stay formatted.
The second paragraph in particular says it like it should be.
For instance, not too long *before* 9/11/01, I had occasion to visit the Social Security admin building in a nearby town, and was treated in what I termed a very humiliating way. On entry to the building all sorts of alarms went off, and I was forced to empty my pockets of anything metalic such as my coin purse, car keys, a small barlow style pocket knife, an engraved money clip (I could keep its contents not that there was that much in the clip, 17 dollars I think), then all my shirt pocket contents such as a ball point pen, a small 'greenie' screwdriver, 2 pair of 5" curved nose suture clamps and a small 2 AAA cell flashlight. I'm a Certified Electronics Technician and those are the things that go on with my shirt in the morning, and get hung on the doorknob with it at night. Hell, they even made noises about taking my belt off because it had a metal buckle!
I did it because I had business there, but that doesn't make me the least bit happy and I made no flimsey excuses about how I felt about it. I was told to shut up or they would call the local law enforcement to have me forcibly removed and charged with verbal assault.
Security is one thing, but pure fscking paranoia is something else, and that was 100% pure paranoia, and should be treated like the male bovine excrement that it is. To be shoveled up and spread on any nearby field that needs it.
As far as privacy matters, there is entirely too much loss of that taken as matter of fact by the sheep^H^H^H^H^H population in general. My house is MY house, bought AND 100% paid for, and somebody who doesn't belong there may well find about 3 lbs of a 44 calibre barrel stuck up his nose.
These so-called think tankers seem to forget that the sorts of things they are advocating were foretold by our founding fathers, and having been forewarned, they then proceeded to formulate and pass the first 10 amendments to our Constitution, otherwise known as "The Bill of Rights"
We should take any attempted encroachment on those rights very seriously indeed. One such instance, back in '76 IIRC, resulted in the congress as a whole, passing legislation that enjoined the BATF from implementing Mr. Richard Davis's gun registration scheme, removed the 4.7 million dollars it was estimated to take to do it from the BATF budget, and enjoined them from moving any other monies into the project, and as the final insult, removed Mr. Richard Davis's salary from the budget.
Now, who did you say was writing this persons paycheck? It sure seems like we need to repeat a bit of recent history here, sending the message one more time to such personally ambitious individuals. If thats my tax dollars supporting her and that think tank, I object, stenuously.
--
Cheers, Gene
This makes me feel that the average Michigander is pretty dumb, if they think we are going to open up our systems just to please some fscker from the phone industry whose afraid he might lose a nickle because pa's computer, and 3 of the kid's machines all come in on the same ip adddress.
Tell ya what Michigan, in this country the majority rules, and the majority is going to run something that protects his investment, even if he's a windows weenie. You can go fly a kite, prefereably with a wire string, its not your machinery, its mine.
Methinks its time I shut down my home dns though.
That gave me away the last time I had a check site check me.
--
Cheers, Gene (who doesn't live in Michigan, thanks)
Unforch, one of the reasons mac's OS9 was rather quickly passed over and on into OSX, was that OS9 is a registered trademark then owned by the MicroWare Corporation in Des Moines IA, USA, and now owned by Radisys for a multiuser/multitasking operating system that originally ran on specialized hardware for use with the moto 6809 cpu, made by GIMIX at the time, and on the TRS-80 Color Computer (even the 64k memory versions could run it) and was subsequently developed into OSK for the m68k cpu's, and OS9000 for intel cpu's.
:-)
I'd imagine that when the mac OS9 was released, there was an exchange of letters between MicroWare and Apple indicating MicroWares general displeasure with such a revolting turn of events, and which had the effect of hastening OSX out the door a year early.
Its truely major useage was as the optional OS for the Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer, all 3 versions over the years, where it showed up the offerings from M$ so bad that some shack people were told to not demo what it could do for fear of trashing an intel based box sale which had more 'spiff' attached to it anyway.
It would, we users think, have made a much larger impression on the computing scene had the intel versions not been priced at 5 to 20x what the 'other guys' were selling their crappy OS for. But MicroWare wasn't terribly interested in mass sales because that also equaled massive support costs, so they chose the massive price route with support as part of the sales contract. Such automaticly limited sales to those who could afford a seat at the table.
It was a stable system, achieving uptimes in some cases that would make even the oldtimer unix admin a bit jealous, one instance of almost 7 years is on record, and many, many "coco's" ran from power failure to power failure. When was the last time you saw a traffic signal controller that was crashed? It runs at least half of them.
I still have one of them in the basement, sporting a 1 gig scsi hard drive, 2 monitors (independent, not the current wide screen thing) and all the other goodies to make it a usefull machine.
As an educational tool for someone wanting to study how a computer actually works, that "Trash 80 color computer" has, not even today, 20 years after it was first offered for sale, no equal in the teaching field because that os is the single, most documented os ever written. It came with an assembler, and several other languages were also available including a fairly K&R C, a Basic modeled after TrueBasic, and a pascal, and aftermarket folks even had a decent forth for it.
But my soapbox is getting old and creaky just like me, so I'll give it a rest. Your basic trivia lesson for the day
--
Cheers, Gene
" That is asinine, if the parents don't want little Jimmy to have an accident with the gun, they should teach little Jimmy how it works, let him shoot it (at a watermelon or something else with a soft inside) and see the distructive potential. Then lock the gun up and out of reach."
Yup, sure, go right ahead and put it behind a locked door or whatever. Scuse me?
When my kids were in the just barely walking stage, and again when they were about 4, each of them got to witness a 5 gallon can of water and a 150grain hollowpoint bullet meet at about 3100fps. Thats quite impressive to a child when he is also advised that he/she is about 98% water.
The gun then went back in the unlocked, open cabinet behind the front door till I got it out again a few days later for some more target practice, loaded and ready for action. It was even used for point making a time or 3 back in those years. My deceased ex once opened the can of bud in a guys hand who was intent of having a party in our front yard with it. The party went elsewhere as requested.
The point being that those guns, all of them were loaded and ready for action, and to this day my kids, some of them now 40 years old, handle guns responsibly. None of them ever shot his brother playing with guns. That was the whole point.
And to the poster who said the NRA isn't you and me? Tell that to the losers of the last presidential elections here, who were avowedly anti-gun. We voted almost as a block, 5 million of us, to protect and defend the constitution and the bill of rights. By now I think some of us are having second thoughts for other reasons, but there is another election coming up so we can fix it. Thats what a democracy is all about.
Of course, which is why I questioned how to actually get Canopy out of the picture. Since our laws and mores generally prevent someone from walking in with the appropriate weapons to enforce the point that they are out of the TrollTech business, the whole post was a "what if" that we'll never see unless TrollTech goes down the tubes far enough to make them something Canopy would want to get rid of to control what they perceive as the bleeding.
And I most certainly don't wish that on TrollTech.
The only way as I see it would be to take TrollTech back to private, and that, just from the amount of cash that would take, is in all probability well out of reach for all concerned parties here.
The next best thing would be to mobilize the users to each buy a share, and at some point the available shares, since there are only X shares in circulation, would be used up, preventing Canopy from further increasing their share of TrollTech unless they really did want to run the price up way beyond its normal worth, at which point somebody will unload theirs at a handsome profit.
Unforch, I haven't the foggiest how many outstandng shares there are, or what they're currently moving at.
So I guess the future will tell the tale, and I hope its a palatable story.
--
Cheers, Gene
TANSTAAFL!
The suggestion that we buy out that 5.8% of Trolltech which is currently owned by the Canopy Group does on the face of it seem like a decent idea.
I have no idea if Trolltech is publicly traded or not, but if it were possible for me to buy one share of Trolltech with the provisio that the share I was buying was formerly a Canopy Group share, and that my buying it would be just a nibble by one duck, then I'd imagine that I'd have to stand in quite a long line of similarly minded folks. With enough ducks, well...
I'd just consider it a down payment for all the kde/qt code we're had the pleasure of useing for all these years now.
As a retired person, I don't have the wherewithall to go after this in wholesale share numbers, but I'd be very intereseted in finding out how many like minded folks there are that could be counted on to defend trolltech from the potential meddling that a 5.8% stake held by an adversary might allow.
So how many of us are there who would buy a share just to get it out of the Canopy Groups safe?
As to how to go about that bit of certifying its a formerly Canopy Group share, I'd not have a clue, none, nada, zip, point double ought nothin.
But I'm listening.
Yeah, sure, great idea man. Just one problem with it.
.50 and make money.
You would have to start with the esteemed govenor, probably one Mr. Grey Davis, who got, and spent his political kharma on promoting the NIBY attitude every time a power entity wanted to build any more capacity within the borders of the great state of California. You couldn't buy a construction permit there for many years for any amount of money. From the reports I've read, PG&E alone wasted well over a billion on applications that were turned down. Then when the state was buying OP power, and the price went up due to simple supply and demand economics brought on by the lack of new construction, so what did they do?
They passed a state law regulating what they could sell power for, but not what the utilities had to pay for it. When it became a loss to move it, obviously they quit, hence the blackouts. Simple business economics, you cannot buy at 1.00 and sell for
Even the much maligned govenor moonbeam was smarter than that.
I agree, go after the perps, but make very sure you have all the responsible names on the perp list before you issue the warrants. In this case, it certainly appears to start from the highest office in the state. But remember, he ran, and won with that as a plank in his platform. You gonna arrest the voters that put him there too?
I thought not. In the meantime I think there may even be some new construction going on now after receiveing that particular nastygram in the form of the blackouts at the statehouse, I can't say that for sure though, It's been 20 years since I lived there, and 8 since I last visited. Good place to visit, not as great to work in though.
"We're going to have a lot of cease and desist orders then. Search google for 539-60-5125."
Which was a trigger for me to do just that. But using my SS number. Now, I've been around 68 years folks and I have managed to walk into (and out of in one piece) several places I'd druther not regale you with, but the google search came back empty.
Seems to me that the elapsed time from the court ruling to google decideing that cleaning out all SS numbers in the google database would be a good idea leaves me coming to the conclusion that an in-sufficient amount of time to have searched and purged has passed, so I'd suggest that its apparently NOT a common practice, at least for google.
FWIW, I didn't try your number, if its none of my business, why should I. My number IS my business.
Cheers, Gene
How come it took so long? Plate tectonics has only come into wide favor as an accepted and now quite well proved theory the last 20 some years, but I had that figured out at about age 8, 60 years ago. My mother even had to agree with me on that at the time as she couldn't come up with a competing idea.
I should have copyrighted it then. But it would have long expired by the time the geologists figured it out. No Sonny Bono law then you see.
They did in fact fit together rather well, several hundred million years ago. It was, and is now called Pangea in the publications discussing it.
Cheers, Gene
Maybe, and then again maybe not. Your idea makes no provision to enforce the word "fair".
IMO, if we were to give them that, they in turn must give us back the classic definitions of Fair Use, including the right to make backup copies that are exact images, and therefore just as copy protected as the originals, quote a sentence from to establish the context in other references AND maintain an escrow that will in 28 years, automaticly release into the public domain, with no copy protection scheme whatsoever, the currently under copyright (and no doubt copy protected) work.
I do not see any other way to make it even remotely close to fair all around without this provision, backed up by fairly heavy, intentionally punitive even (a percentage of the gross sales comes to mind, to be left in escrow in the event they default), fines, maybe even some jail time for those who steal silently way into the night after 27 years and 11 months, leaving the work legally available, but still copy protected, and the circumvention of it for any reason still subject to prosecution under the DMCA. If they go away without a full release, then whomever comes out of the woodwork to insist you be prosecuted for cracking the protection gets to pay the fines & maybe do the time.
IMO that will stop a lot of the BS right there.
--
Cheers, Gene
2. Find a mirror and download that kernel
3. Calculate MD5 and compare
Whats this poster smoking or using for crap hardware? It should compare, or I'd go back and get them over again, simple eh? whats the problem?
Yeah, well you didn't look too hard on the kde site. There have been special rh8.0 packages of kde available, all 106 files, for at least 2 weeks just for the 3.0.5a release. Before that there was a set of 3.0.4's, then 3.0.5's.
I think that actually started out to be 3.0.2 but I won't say so on the good book.
I too tried to make rh8.0 and evolution work, but evo apparently has no way to switch it to use a pop server, only imap, and thats about as worthless as the proverbial tits on a boarhog to me when my isp only has a pop server. That was redhat mistake #1, assuming everyine has access to an imap server. (whatever the heck that is, maybe it is the latest and greatest, but its not *here* *now* for me)
So, all of the redhat supplied kde got ripped out, and the rh8.0 versions from the kde site were installed. It mostly worked then and is all working now. Heck, I couldn't even find a method to add my favs to the toolbar in gnome! 45 seconds of clicking in kde, what can I say.
Likewise, trying to use the bluecurve in prefs-->look and feel-->window decorations is a 100% guaranteed kwin crasher. I liked the looks of the BlueCurve decorated window, but when it crashes kwin 100% of the time just winning a game or closing gedit out, then its not worth the hassle because thats exactly what it is. Switching that back to the "KDE2 default" and everything is stable. This bug has been reported, but its apparently non-issue to redhat.
It the little gotcha's like that that have driven the longtime linux users away from the redhat8.0 look because it doesn't mean squat to me how it looks as long as it works, and bluecurve didn't work for me in any way but visually.
And thats one redhat users attitude about bluecurve. Apply salt if your experience is different.
--
Cheers, Gene
There is in fact an E language, written by Wooter Van Oortmanson although that spelling is probaby highly fubar. More or less typeless, like arexx, I found my arexx experience getting in the way of getting anything done.
It ran on the amiga, and I don't know if it was ever ported to a *nix environment or not. I've a copy of the docs laying around here someplace and they pretty well fill a 3.5" "D" ring binder.
--
Cheers, Gene
99.22% setiathome ranking, what are you doing with your spare cpu cycles?
"And until I can pay my bills over the Internet, it wouldn't be a substitute for me either".
I have no idea whats holding you back, I've been paying my bills by logging into my account at my bank for 7 or 8 years, first starting to do that from a big box amiga and one of its browsers that could spoof as IE. Then switching to a linux box about 5 years back to do that. The biggest problem I ever had was in convincing them to remove the fscking line terminator in their matching patterns for the password. I finally solved that by making sure I tabbed out of the box before I hit the send button as I was changing it.
When I first started to do this, I had to convince them that they shouldn't care what kind of a gawdamned box I had as long as it sent the proper responses. They were very windows-centric & the phone help refused to talk to me in technical terms, insisting that the only thing they supported was windows & IE.
That suddenly stopped about 3 years ago, when I threatened to go find a bank that actually wanted my business, taking my 15 year old 5.5 digit account out in one swell foop. I was standing there ready to write the check while the local manager got on the phone to the main to find out what the hell was going on. I don't know what was said as she closed the door about 15 seconds into the call, but I could see the conversation was very animated, and the problem was solved by the time she came back out of the office.
I've had several occasions to talk to the phone support folks since and not one of them has ever again asked me what version of windows IE I was running.
First, you have to get their attention. Once you've done that, its amazing how they can find the time and people to keep a customer happy.
--
Cheers, Gene
99.21% ranking in setiathome. What are you doing with your spare cpu cycles?
Let me put in another vote for this view.
:-)
I'm now 68 years old, and almost retired. Why not completely you ask?
Well, for those that "walk on water" its a bit hard to quit cold turkey, particularly when that might have pretty bad consequences for the company who thought enough of me to throw me a small party, and present the Rolex I'll let you figure out the price of when I did retire to a part-time status after 18 years in their top technical chair. I got that chair, with an 8th grade education and a natural ability to see in my mind how almost anything with a line cord or batteries worked, and to fix it if it didn't work, often better than new because I could see the weak point, the design flaw, or the schematic that somehow got fubar'd between the designers mind and the production shop. Old knowledge also comes in handy, which is why I'm not fully retired, I still keep their 40 some year old tv transmitter on the air. Not too many old engineers who understand such things left, and its not a particularly appealing profession for the younger set who have been known to ask "Whats a tube?". So I have job security I'd rather not have at times, I've got too many other things to do, and historically, too little time to do them in.
I had a hand, as a tech, in building the tv cameras that were on the Trieste when it was taken down into the mohole, nearly 7 miles down in the pacific. I may have tested the fuel and oxidizer uullage(sp) pressure regulators that put John Glenn up.
There are other things I could bore this audience with. Suffice to say I'm not rich, but I've had a pretty satisfying life and wouldn't bypass too much of it if I could play it back again. Losing my first wife to a stroke at the age of 34, and finding myself with 3 sub-teen children to raise would be the one item I'd leave out. Losing one of those to cancer about 4 years back would be another.
I got my start in electronics at a quite early age, having an alcoholic uncle that fixed radios for beer money. He had a menu on the wall that if it did this, you replaced that which in fact just about covered what could happen to an "all american 5 tube" radio of the 1940's. But as he was changing a part one day when I was about 8 or 9 years old, I asked him what was wrong with the part he was taking out. And he couldn't tell me!
At that point I became "hooked" on finding out exactly what each part was supposed to do, and as they say, the rest is now history. Such knowledge has stood me in good stead right thru the transistor revolution, thru the digital revolution and up to todays modern computers. No "windows" in my house, I built all of them and they run linux. So I think I'm doing pretty good for an old fart with 8th grade (and a University of Hard Knocks) diploma's on the wall.
I went and took the GED test cold turkey about a decade back, and 2 weeks later I was bugging the test admin about the results. His reply was "why do you care, you were just doing it for the exercise weren't you?"
Someday I'll explain the walking on water reference above, its rather funny I think.
The point is, if you can do it, do it. And don't look back, they'll never catch you anyway if you are doing it right. Your technical reputation will preceed you as you move from job to job. For me, it really has been easy. Maybe I had a head start in the IQ dept at 147, or my mother, who was the only girl in the 1929 class in aviation technology at Des Moines Tech, or the fact that the Iowa schools actually taught me how to read, whatever, there has been just enough of Isacc Asimov's "Magic" to keep me going for nearly 55 years of lassoing and branding electrons for a living. Its been a fun ride