Methanol, Propanol, Pentanol = kill you fast.
Ethanol, Butanol, Hexanol = not quite so deadly.
WARNING: I AM NOT A CHEMIST, BUT I REMEMBER BEING WARNED THAT ALL OF THESE ARE POTENTIALLY LETHAL. Depressing how many frat boys slab themselves because they still haven't learned the toxicity level of even standard Ethyl Alcohol.
I didn't really believe that was the website for a real company. I called the number (so please *DON'T* unless you need a cleanup, they've already been bothered). The nice (but busy dispatch lady) said that she'd to refer the person over to a specialist (currently out on a job), but they might be able to help. The website does list "Contaminated property cleanup including persistent or reoccurring odor abatement" in the services.
I didn't ask if they make sure the police know about the body/evidence before removing... tempting for a gag, but not something I want to try from a phone that's either tracable or in a public place these days. Of course, since they do specialize in cleanups for crime scenes such as for murders, you probably want to make sure that the server room geeks have showered before asking for "persistant odor abatement." =)
Again... yes, those folks are real, please don't bother them unless you have a job. They also sell T-Shirts with the "Crime Scene Cleaners" logo on them-- looks like a great gift for your favorite black hat.
Wait, so they wrote a law that defined two seperate concepts to be equal? Didn't we decide that this concept was illegal 50 years ago?
Not quite. Creating two separate-and-equal institutions is legal, but denying someone admission to such an instituion based on race (or other civil rights-type grounds -- IANAL, ask someone who actually IS a lawyer to detail them) is what is illegal. Seperate-Equal-and-Open-To-All is merely redundant and stupid, not illegal. There is, for example, no reason why (as a random example) the school district of Rome, New York couldn't build Romus High School and Remus High School across the street from each other, and have them with separate-but-equal facilities, and even separate football teams that played each other in a bitter rivalry. All perfectly legal. However, saying to someone "no, you can't go to this school because you're _______, you have to go to the other one"... definitely is illegal.
As I understand it, domestic partner status in California is available to any couple, regardless of the gender mix thereof. If so, it's legal. Stupid, perhaps redundant with marriage for heterosexuals, but legal.
The question of whether marriage is legal as it is presently described remains up for grabs. And, if I'm wrong about DP being open to both straights and gays, you're probably completely right. However, the DP law might provide enough of a safety valve and dissipation of political focus to delay the final resolution of this issue for a decade or two, since it provides the majority of what the majority of gay couples want-- the substance, if not the name, from the state, and nothing precluding them from using the name with their church, themselves, or their unbigoted neighbors. The current trend is that the younger someone is, the more likely they are to be tollerant to the idea of gay marriage. A two-decade delaying half measure might allow the political tide in this country to turn, and get rid of the half-measure by simplifying to one institution, open to all.
Myself, I think the state doesn't belong in the marriage business, merely in the "civil union"/"domestic partnership" business, but I'm a little strange, even for a Catholic; I believe that cases involving whether something is a marriage, or merely a domestic partnership, is something that may be decided by no mortal court. Religious authorities merely express advisory opinions as to what the ruling of that Final Court is thought likely to be.
Anyway, the current strange demographic trend (more conservative in personal behavior, but more liberal in tolerance of others) in the younger crowd may be one reason why the Republicans are using such desperate measures to pack the federal bench, and are drooling so hard over the prospects of putting up to three justices on the Supreme Court next term. I believe (as I have stated elsewhere in this discussion) that the Republicans have lost their sense of history. Though it might take a tremendous expendature of political capital, an extremist Supreme Court can be bludgeoned to a more moderate position if both President and Congress are united and sufficiently motivated. (Whether this is a good thing is questionable.)
I'd disagree with that assessment; Ringworld Throne was worse. However, it definitely requires reading all three of the earlier Ringworld books first, and if you haven't read all of Niven's other Known Space material (including Kzin Wars stuff from him and his guests), there will be lesser references (EG, "Sheathclaws") you won't get. The infodumps are no dryer than needed for protectors conversing in a hurry, and while some of the minor players lack depth, most of the characters are as well developed as Niven ever manages.
Snuggle up to your local librarian to borrow the hardcover, perhaps buy the paperback when it comes out, or the hardcover when copies start hitting clearance prices in B&N and the like (which is the only reason I bought Ringworld Throne-- I decided it was worth four bucks in hardcover to fill in the hole in my Niven collection). It's Niven, so it's not bad, but he's not on my short list of hardcover purchases these days. (Bujold, Brust, Laurell Hamilton, George RR Martin, and Modesitt-- the last of whom I don't recommend usually, but his work suits some of my tastes.)
It felt a trifle skeletal, but he's got a universe of details to juggle consistently, so I can sympathize with his restraint in not making a larger book.
How about a modified form of cloture? Only 51 votes... but then any senator who want to speak can do so once. You keep the floor as long as you hold the floor. So, you can try to ram through the confirmation of a right wing nut job with a bare majority of 51... but you risk a possibly month long delay in business, depending on how frantic the emnity is.
The Republicans have lost their sense of history. They've used the filibuster against even higher court appointments before. It was the right thing to do then. It is the right thing to do now. The filibuster remains the last desperate refuge of the minority against the tyranny of the majority.
A more paranoid theory is that they intend to take such measures to insure they need never be the minority again. However, I feel (especially given the President) that it is more appropriate to attribute their behavior to stupidity rather than malice.
You REALLY need to get your facts straight...or maybe NPR does... now THERE is a surprise. In CA same sex mariages are illegal.
Correct, so far as you go, but you also might also desire to get your facts straight, or perhaps read more carefully. The laws under discussion (apparently AB 205 and AB 25 according to this GoogleNews listed source) would make gay partnerships legally recognized with all the same rights as a marriage, but a different name -- a rose by any other name and a nicely Solomonic decision, pissing off the Radical Gays who demand both name and substance, and Christian Zealots who would deny them both. A nice compromise, therefore. =)
When macrealist refered to the law, he refered to it as "same sex unions", which seems a semantically accurate description of gay partnerships. The later reference was "What ever you think of same sex marriages"... which, macrealist's bad grammar aside, indicates only that this is part of the same spectrum of debate; and most people, whatever their position on the benefit or harm of it, would agree that gay marriage, domestic partnership rights, and "civil unions" are all part of the same debate, while disagreeing where the line should be drawn.
I don't see anything here that setting up a whitelist only mail server doesn't do
If you're one of the people still foolhardy enough to post messages without spam-gaurding your address to Usenet or some other public discussion space where address harvesters graze, and you regularly e-mail back and forth to some of those people privately as well as posting back and forth in the forum, then it is possible that you will get e-mails with apparent from lines from people you know, where the real email content is "|3UY V!AgrA n0W"; several of the spam-softwares appear to be (somewhat) biased to keep emails addresses together from common sources-- or at least, that's why I assume I regularly get spam from my old acquaintance Ed Ming's long defunct cyhpn.radnet address.
Of course, I'm old fashioned. I think "Hey Joe: Bob has his head up his arse again" is something better sent via email than in a post to a Usenet group. On the other hand, I seem to be very much in the minority, these days.
Restrictions on size of emails, number of emails allowed in a given time, and total email volume in MB sent in a given time on the email server-- all fairly standard. Port blocking outside mail servers is also needed for substantial effectiveness; sniffing for and jamming SMTP traffic on non-standard ports would also be needed for completeness. SSH port forwarding might get around that, but I doubt you'll manage that from a locked-down Windoze box.
Anyone who puts a BIOS password on without putting a case lock on is kidding themselves.
I had to help take control of a XP deskstop recently; the admin password was lost, and the damn thing was unpatched and virus infested; it may still need a wipe. Of course, the BIOS password didn't help matters.
Open case, disconnect from current boot drive, use a 40 *megabyte* hard drive I keep in my toolkit for this-- useless for anything but this, but the damn thing is comparatively indestructable, and has been bounced for years with one dead sector. Boot to the new drive, which contains only PC-DOS and a Clear CMOS program. (You can't always remove the soldered-in CMOS Battery or find the Clear CMOS jumper on older motherboards.) Run the program. Power down, reconnect drive, reboot. Add one NTPW&RE floppy to the drive, set the BIOS to boot to that, and remove the admin password. Reboot, and reset all passwords off the network. It's not the users machine any more
Of course, even a case lock yields to boltcutters-- but security tends to ask questions of people wandering around with those. A thermos of liquid Helium is slightly more concealable, and potentailly more effective against Kryptonite locks... but not real easy to get your hands on. (Places that sell it usually aren't in the "Cash, up front, no questions" crowd.)
So presumably these companies aren't connected to the Internet, don't have floppy drives, CD/DVD writers, printers, or pens and paper either? And they don't employ people with good memories?
Have you ever tried to carry a gigabyte of text data on paper? How about a gigabyte's worth of floppies? CD/DVD burners are a threat-- but I bet those can be restricted even easier.
And unaided memory is a skill that is being lost-- possibly as a result of current school system practices, but that's a separate rant.
They simply patented "calculating a hash of some data".
No. It looks like that may have been patented in 1972. They seem to have patented the using of data hashes to identify data (files) and see if it's the data people are looking for. But I am not a patent attorney, nor do I have time to read the whole patent nor the 30-odd patents it references.
From what you quote, it sounds like that they want to exempt things like photos of Area 51 from FOIA-- but that's probably not what they're actually doing. Interestingly, in 15 USC 82 I see no prohibitions of sale of any data to anyone, but I may have missed it. Or that part of the law may be classified, and exempt from FOIA requests. =)
She deals more with the "sex and reproduction" aspects of it. Much of it has to do with the technological implications of one idea: the "Uterine Replicator". From it you get: at the end of a war an irritated government returning the foetuses of rape victims to the perpetrators (Shards of Honor); the kidnapping of an unborn child (Barrayar); the job of an ObGyn specialist on a planet entirely populated by men (Ethan of Athos); a society which keeps its sex and reproduction seperate as part of it's experimentalist eugenics program (Cetaganda); many references to the peculiar "Beta Colony", which has a genetically engineered hermaphrodite minority seamlessly integrated, and apparent freedom in sexual practices at the price of absolute responsibility for the consequences; a noble who decides to start increasing his taxpayer base in a fairly direct manner (A Civil Campaign). There are others.
Bujold's emphasis is more on the reproductive aspects of sex-- possibly because she is herself a mother. She brushes up against a number of odd answers to the social questions sex (and families) pose-- generally as in incidental to spinning her entertaining space opera.
Point. He had some interesting things to say in Ophihuchi Hotline back in '84, and he's elaborated a bit with Steel Beach in '94. (No, I don't think his "Titan" trilogy had much of interest to say on sex; sorry.) There may have been a very few others, too...
IANAL, but writing stuff all over the sidewalk (over an extended area) - even in chalk - has to be against some local laws
The law in question appears to be the NYC administrative code Section 19-138, prohibiting defacing of streets-- although NYC (unhelpfully) does not have said administrative code up on the web for a canonical citation. The fact that there are first amendment issues is indicated by my having found that reference on a website referring to a lawsuit that seems to be about that.
Re:Star Trek is dead, has been for awhile
on
Should Star Trek Die?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Um, kinda hard to do, given that Bones is the one who's dead. And unfortunately Scotty currently suffers from Alzheimers amoung other problems-- which means... he'll... sound... like... Kirk... since neither... can now... remember their... lines!
Mind you, I'll take your money anyway (and give you nothing for it). A fool and his money are some party.
As opposed to what
T'Pol has?
Not that I mind having something to appeal to my baser instincts, as long as you can do it while actually telling a thoughtful SF story. And frankly, Bujold's the only author in SF who's had anything new and thoughtful to say about sex since about 1975. Yes, the repetitive calisthenics are fun, but so what?
But this is really more an issue of a new game not supporting older cards as well as it should
Actually, I'm not even bothered by it being unsupported. I'm merely objecting to the imprecise definintion of a "modern" video card when claiming "any modern card will run any modern game". For the emphasis you wish, a better phrasing might be "any modern game is playable with cards using chipsets from any current video chipset manufacturer."
Please... Any modern game will work fine on any modern card using DX or Open GL.
The key being how you define "modern". As a not-at-random example, City of Heroes will not work with a ATI 7500 -- a card less than three years old. I'll grant the 7500s are far from state-of-the-art. But if you're defining "modern" as "less than 18 months on the market", I believe you've been hanging out with Humpty Dumpty too long.
Earlier in the thread, it was said that Walmart's gift cards are not issued by an outside vendor - they're issued by Walmart itself. I really don't think that they'd fall under the regulations that control normal debit cards.
Right. In that case, the cards would still legally fall under 18 USC 47 s. 1029 (as an access device that can be used to obtain goods/services) with regards to the crime being fraud, but probably not with regard to to consumers getting refunds. But I'm not a lawyer, and WallyWorld has plenty of 'em. =)
Only that particular book at the time was "too much"; the rest of the series is fine (aside from a very brief scene in "Shards of Honor" that is cut short before getting too nasty). There are some psychologically nasty torture scenes in "Mirror Dance"; nothing overly gory, but the brain games were too much for me at the time. I've since picked up another copy; I blame my ex-GF for having left me now jaded to psychological torture. I would recommend keeping that one away from the more sensitive adolescents. Otherwise, her stuff is fairly serviceable as juvies.
You forgot her Hugo and Nebula for the Mountains of Mourning.
"I remember everything." -- Adept Havelock, from "The Mirror of Her Dreams", by Donaldson.
"Mountains of Mourning" was a novella, not a novel, and the Nebulas are a separate honor from the Hugos. (Hugos are given by amateurs; Nebulas are given by other SF professionals.) It was not forgotten, it was ignored.
Walmart is not (yet) a bank, and as such they don't fall under the same regulation that controls debit cards.
Perhaps. I was told by an employee of Barnes and Noble, however, that B&N cards are actually issued and run by AMEX. (Anyone able to give details?) If WalMart has a similar arrangement with one AMEX/VISA/MC/DISC (probably Discover, since that's the only card Sam's Club takes last I checked), they might still fall under the regulations by another route.
They would probably be well within their rights to tell the consumers to beat it - not that it would be a good business practice to do so.
For one thing, antsy consumers might then call their congresscritters to agitate for that correcting that lack of similar regulation.
Slashdot Mirror
Ethanol, Butanol, Hexanol = not quite so deadly.
WARNING: I AM NOT A CHEMIST, BUT I REMEMBER BEING WARNED THAT ALL OF THESE ARE POTENTIALLY LETHAL. Depressing how many frat boys slab themselves because they still haven't learned the toxicity level of even standard Ethyl Alcohol.
I didn't ask if they make sure the police know about the body/evidence before removing... tempting for a gag, but not something I want to try from a phone that's either tracable or in a public place these days. Of course, since they do specialize in cleanups for crime scenes such as for murders, you probably want to make sure that the server room geeks have showered before asking for "persistant odor abatement." =)
Again... yes, those folks are real, please don't bother them unless you have a job. They also sell T-Shirts with the "Crime Scene Cleaners" logo on them-- looks like a great gift for your favorite black hat.
As I understand it, domestic partner status in California is available to any couple, regardless of the gender mix thereof. If so, it's legal. Stupid, perhaps redundant with marriage for heterosexuals, but legal.
The question of whether marriage is legal as it is presently described remains up for grabs. And, if I'm wrong about DP being open to both straights and gays, you're probably completely right. However, the DP law might provide enough of a safety valve and dissipation of political focus to delay the final resolution of this issue for a decade or two, since it provides the majority of what the majority of gay couples want-- the substance, if not the name, from the state, and nothing precluding them from using the name with their church, themselves, or their unbigoted neighbors. The current trend is that the younger someone is, the more likely they are to be tollerant to the idea of gay marriage. A two-decade delaying half measure might allow the political tide in this country to turn, and get rid of the half-measure by simplifying to one institution, open to all.
Myself, I think the state doesn't belong in the marriage business, merely in the "civil union"/"domestic partnership" business, but I'm a little strange, even for a Catholic; I believe that cases involving whether something is a marriage, or merely a domestic partnership, is something that may be decided by no mortal court. Religious authorities merely express advisory opinions as to what the ruling of that Final Court is thought likely to be.
Anyway, the current strange demographic trend (more conservative in personal behavior, but more liberal in tolerance of others) in the younger crowd may be one reason why the Republicans are using such desperate measures to pack the federal bench, and are drooling so hard over the prospects of putting up to three justices on the Supreme Court next term. I believe (as I have stated elsewhere in this discussion) that the Republicans have lost their sense of history. Though it might take a tremendous expendature of political capital, an extremist Supreme Court can be bludgeoned to a more moderate position if both President and Congress are united and sufficiently motivated. (Whether this is a good thing is questionable.)
Snuggle up to your local librarian to borrow the hardcover, perhaps buy the paperback when it comes out, or the hardcover when copies start hitting clearance prices in B&N and the like (which is the only reason I bought Ringworld Throne-- I decided it was worth four bucks in hardcover to fill in the hole in my Niven collection). It's Niven, so it's not bad, but he's not on my short list of hardcover purchases these days. (Bujold, Brust, Laurell Hamilton, George RR Martin, and Modesitt-- the last of whom I don't recommend usually, but his work suits some of my tastes.)
It felt a trifle skeletal, but he's got a universe of details to juggle consistently, so I can sympathize with his restraint in not making a larger book.
The Republicans have lost their sense of history. They've used the filibuster against even higher court appointments before. It was the right thing to do then. It is the right thing to do now. The filibuster remains the last desperate refuge of the minority against the tyranny of the majority.
A more paranoid theory is that they intend to take such measures to insure they need never be the minority again. However, I feel (especially given the President) that it is more appropriate to attribute their behavior to stupidity rather than malice.
Correct, so far as you go, but you also might also desire to get your facts straight, or perhaps read more carefully. The laws under discussion (apparently AB 205 and AB 25 according to this GoogleNews listed source) would make gay partnerships legally recognized with all the same rights as a marriage, but a different name -- a rose by any other name and a nicely Solomonic decision, pissing off the Radical Gays who demand both name and substance, and Christian Zealots who would deny them both. A nice compromise, therefore. =)
When macrealist refered to the law, he refered to it as "same sex unions", which seems a semantically accurate description of gay partnerships. The later reference was "What ever you think of same sex marriages"... which, macrealist's bad grammar aside, indicates only that this is part of the same spectrum of debate; and most people, whatever their position on the benefit or harm of it, would agree that gay marriage, domestic partnership rights, and "civil unions" are all part of the same debate, while disagreeing where the line should be drawn.
If you're one of the people still foolhardy enough to post messages without spam-gaurding your address to Usenet or some other public discussion space where address harvesters graze, and you regularly e-mail back and forth to some of those people privately as well as posting back and forth in the forum, then it is possible that you will get e-mails with apparent from lines from people you know, where the real email content is "|3UY V!AgrA n0W"; several of the spam-softwares appear to be (somewhat) biased to keep emails addresses together from common sources-- or at least, that's why I assume I regularly get spam from my old acquaintance Ed Ming's long defunct cyhpn.radnet address.
Of course, I'm old fashioned. I think "Hey Joe: Bob has his head up his arse again" is something better sent via email than in a post to a Usenet group. On the other hand, I seem to be very much in the minority, these days.
Restrictions on size of emails, number of emails allowed in a given time, and total email volume in MB sent in a given time on the email server-- all fairly standard. Port blocking outside mail servers is also needed for substantial effectiveness; sniffing for and jamming SMTP traffic on non-standard ports would also be needed for completeness. SSH port forwarding might get around that, but I doubt you'll manage that from a locked-down Windoze box.
I had to help take control of a XP deskstop recently; the admin password was lost, and the damn thing was unpatched and virus infested; it may still need a wipe. Of course, the BIOS password didn't help matters.
Open case, disconnect from current boot drive, use a 40 *megabyte* hard drive I keep in my toolkit for this-- useless for anything but this, but the damn thing is comparatively indestructable, and has been bounced for years with one dead sector. Boot to the new drive, which contains only PC-DOS and a Clear CMOS program. (You can't always remove the soldered-in CMOS Battery or find the Clear CMOS jumper on older motherboards.) Run the program. Power down, reconnect drive, reboot. Add one NTPW&RE floppy to the drive, set the BIOS to boot to that, and remove the admin password. Reboot, and reset all passwords off the network. It's not the users machine any more
Of course, even a case lock yields to boltcutters-- but security tends to ask questions of people wandering around with those. A thermos of liquid Helium is slightly more concealable, and potentailly more effective against Kryptonite locks... but not real easy to get your hands on. (Places that sell it usually aren't in the "Cash, up front, no questions" crowd.)
Have you ever tried to carry a gigabyte of text data on paper? How about a gigabyte's worth of floppies? CD/DVD burners are a threat-- but I bet those can be restricted even easier.
And unaided memory is a skill that is being lost-- possibly as a result of current school system practices, but that's a separate rant.
No. It looks like that may have been patented in 1972. They seem to have patented the using of data hashes to identify data (files) and see if it's the data people are looking for. But I am not a patent attorney, nor do I have time to read the whole patent nor the 30-odd patents it references.
From what you quote, it sounds like that they want to exempt things like photos of Area 51 from FOIA-- but that's probably not what they're actually doing. Interestingly, in 15 USC 82 I see no prohibitions of sale of any data to anyone, but I may have missed it. Or that part of the law may be classified, and exempt from FOIA requests. =)
She deals more with the "sex and reproduction" aspects of it. Much of it has to do with the technological implications of one idea: the "Uterine Replicator". From it you get: at the end of a war an irritated government returning the foetuses of rape victims to the perpetrators (Shards of Honor); the kidnapping of an unborn child (Barrayar); the job of an ObGyn specialist on a planet entirely populated by men (Ethan of Athos); a society which keeps its sex and reproduction seperate as part of it's experimentalist eugenics program (Cetaganda); many references to the peculiar "Beta Colony", which has a genetically engineered hermaphrodite minority seamlessly integrated, and apparent freedom in sexual practices at the price of absolute responsibility for the consequences; a noble who decides to start increasing his taxpayer base in a fairly direct manner (A Civil Campaign). There are others.
Bujold's emphasis is more on the reproductive aspects of sex-- possibly because she is herself a mother. She brushes up against a number of odd answers to the social questions sex (and families) pose-- generally as in incidental to spinning her entertaining space opera.
Point. He had some interesting things to say in Ophihuchi Hotline back in '84, and he's elaborated a bit with Steel Beach in '94. (No, I don't think his "Titan" trilogy had much of interest to say on sex; sorry.) There may have been a very few others, too...
The law in question appears to be the NYC administrative code Section 19-138, prohibiting defacing of streets-- although NYC (unhelpfully) does not have said administrative code up on the web for a canonical citation. The fact that there are first amendment issues is indicated by my having found that reference on a website referring to a lawsuit that seems to be about that.
Mind you, I'll take your money anyway (and give you nothing for it). A fool and his money are some party.
As opposed to what T'Pol has?
Not that I mind having something to appeal to my baser instincts, as long as you can do it while actually telling a thoughtful SF story. And frankly, Bujold's the only author in SF who's had anything new and thoughtful to say about sex since about 1975. Yes, the repetitive calisthenics are fun, but so what?
Actually, I'm not even bothered by it being unsupported. I'm merely objecting to the imprecise definintion of a "modern" video card when claiming "any modern card will run any modern game". For the emphasis you wish, a better phrasing might be "any modern game is playable with cards using chipsets from any current video chipset manufacturer."
The key being how you define "modern". As a not-at-random example, City of Heroes will not work with a ATI 7500 -- a card less than three years old. I'll grant the 7500s are far from state-of-the-art. But if you're defining "modern" as "less than 18 months on the market", I believe you've been hanging out with Humpty Dumpty too long.
Right. In that case, the cards would still legally fall under 18 USC 47 s. 1029 (as an access device that can be used to obtain goods/services) with regards to the crime being fraud, but probably not with regard to to consumers getting refunds. But I'm not a lawyer, and WallyWorld has plenty of 'em. =)
"I remember everything." -- Adept Havelock, from "The Mirror of Her Dreams", by Donaldson.
"Mountains of Mourning" was a novella, not a novel, and the Nebulas are a separate honor from the Hugos. (Hugos are given by amateurs; Nebulas are given by other SF professionals.) It was not forgotten, it was ignored.
Perhaps. I was told by an employee of Barnes and Noble, however, that B&N cards are actually issued and run by AMEX. (Anyone able to give details?) If WalMart has a similar arrangement with one AMEX/VISA/MC/DISC (probably Discover, since that's the only card Sam's Club takes last I checked), they might still fall under the regulations by another route.
They would probably be well within their rights to tell the consumers to beat it - not that it would be a good business practice to do so.
For one thing, antsy consumers might then call their congresscritters to agitate for that correcting that lack of similar regulation.