What's the difference between someone sporting a sign on their back that says "Kick Me", and some talking head saying "...won't likely be breached for 10 years."?
Someone with a "Kick Me" sign just looks stupid. Someone saying something won't be hacked soon looks stupid now and proof of it will be supplied soon. In fact they're worse than stupid, they're all but begging people to do it in order to prove them stupid.
'If [Web] 1.0 is full page refreshes for content, Web 2.0 is, "How do I minimize page views and deliver content more seamlessly?"'
Has anyone explained this to the marketoids? As far as I can tell "Web 2.0" is a marketing term that means "We're new and improved and you should look at us so you can see the ads we present and make us money." I've found no consistent explanation from any of the supposed Web 2.0 purveyors as to exactly what they mean by it. If the ratings folks have a valid and generalizable definition, perhaps they'll pass it on.
From what I can tell, they're taking their definition from blogging, which used to be considered a rude and wasteful practice of piling more and more stuff on the same page. How little things change, except what it's called and how people react to that. But then that's marketing.
Warning, excessive and reckless noun-to-verb transforms included. "Verbing weirds language." -- Calvin and Hobbes
In his book "Tog On Interface", Bruce Tognazzini quotes some research done at Apple and elsewhere (Stanford?) where they tested actual speed of mousing vs. keyboarding, and users' perception of same. Bottom line was people thought mousing was faster, but they were wrong. The effort required to remember keyboard commands, and typing them, gets perceived as more time, whereas the lesser effort of mousing seems like less time but actually takes longer.
The learning curve for keyboard commands is definitely steeper though. If you don't already know them and have to look them up, or are just not familiar and take a long time to remember them, then the keyboard is slower.
The mouse isn't used because it's faster, it's used because it's easier. It takes very little learning, and almost no cognitive effort. That's the whole philosophy behind the GUI, of which the mouse is an integral part.
Last month a Texas Ranger (state police, not ball club member) fired a taser at a guy who had just poured gasoline all over himself. The spark set off the gas and fried the guy. The ranger is is trouble because he should have known better. Even if he hadn't seen the gas can he could have smelled the gas.
I'm betting these robots won't be able to smell gas. That's just one situation and limitation. Everything they can't do that a person can is a possible problem.
He can try as hard as he wants to create CS without math, but when he comes up with something usable, even if it's written in words, it'll describe a process that could be stated clearer and shorter with math. And if he doesn't state it with math those that know better won't pay him any attention.
Boole's framework for describing logical processes is math. That's why it's called Boolean algebra. Try to do CS without that.
Holographic Memories; Scientific American, November 1995, by Psaltis & Mok
It does make some sense to spin a disk rather than reorient the beam. But a solid crystal holographic storage device not only has lots of locations within itself to store collections of data, but can also be turned on a turntable and have the beam attack it from different directions, storing more data in the same place but at a different angle.
3D holographic storage design has another benefit -- it is self-searching via "reverse" holography. You shine a laser off a target and let it reflect to the memory, and out comes as many copies of the reference beam as their are stored data sets (with a realistic situation of most dissimilar results being buried in noise). Each beam is proportional to the strength of the reference beam according to the similarity of the dataset it came from. You can pick the strongest if you want to find the closest match, or you can statistically test the range of beam strengths to check for uniqueness of the target, or any number of things. The search process is virtually instantaneous, the speed of getting the result limited only by the speed of the measuring and calculating processes.
That's what I thought you said. At least now we know that moving from XP to Vista is not a security upgrade. So much for the oh so secure new OS, I'm sure it's worth every penny I saved not getting it.
I'm thinking about migrating to DOS 6.6. I have no idea how secure it is, but I'm pretty damn sure nobody's trying to exploit it.
... And I say with with vehement disgust in lieu of stronger words. I like stronger words, but those to whom they'd refer have their heads someplace where they couldn't hear them clearly, so I'll save them.
When I was crawling in and out of underground fuel tanks in a space suit (not really, but we called it that; the air supply was via a hose, not an air tank) I picked up more than a couple pertinent details. And after reading this article I went and looked up a couple more.
The underground temperature at the depth most tanks must reside is between 54 and 58 F depending on location (and varying 1 to 2 F over a year), not 64.7. That figured was arrived at by a company that sells the same kind of equipment this article talks about. They have a vested interest in the data. Not stated is when the measurement is taken -- just after a 5,000 gal. tanker dumps its load into a 20,000 gal tank?
Tanks need to be more than just under the surface. They need to have enough ground covering them so they don't float up out of the ground through bouyancy. Many are tied down by steel straps to a concrete cradle for this reason, but the depth underground is a fail-safe and still adhered to. They also have to be well underground anywhere a vehicle has to drive over them, or a concrete apron will cover them, so the weight above will be spread out and not collapse the tank. Thus, they're almost invariably below the level where variations will be more than a degree or two.
The average annual temperature temperature where I am, Dallas-Fort Worth, is 64.5 F. The expansion of gasoline from 60 to 64.5 is ~0.3% (0.00069 per degree F; diesel is less, 0.00050 per). The amount of gas above the ground in a piping and pump system is the only part of a fill up that'll be affected by air temperature, and then only if it sits long enough to equalize. The volume involved is from 0.5 to 1.5 gallons depending on distance from riser and style of pump+hose. The rest of what's pumped will come right from underground and will be at or less than 60 F.
If this passes, the average US driver will lose the benefit they're already getting due to the average temperature being less than 60 F. The average temperature from 1900 to 2000 is less than 60 over almost all the US (according to plots from data at NOAA's Earth Systems Research Lab http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/USclimate/USclimdivs.html) . The expansion of the small portion of gas above the riser will be negative for more people than not, more of the time than not. It'll be a contraction.
They'll also pay even more because they'll foot the bill for these devices and their installation; the big oil producers will just plow these costs into the price, and it'll never be noticed, because they can raise the price 10 times that amount, then drop it 9 of that 10, and people will think the price is so close to what it started at that they won't think about it twice.
I had more than a passing familiarity with the issue. Besides going into tanks to inspect them, I also did the annual volumetric testing of gas pumps. I had to apply the correction factor. Where I was, the upper peninsula of Michigan, the average air temperature was very much less than 60. It was 32 F when I moved there in 1976. However, we applied the correction, or rather tried to, based on measuring the temperature of the fuel in the testing can. There was a thermometer built into the glass tube on the side of the can's neck where we also measured the gas level in 0.1 in^3 increments (one part on over 10,000 for the 5 gallon testing can). The temperature was never, as far as I can recall, ever outside the 50s F range.
I'd like to hear from someone up in the Great White as to exactly why they have those temperature sensing devices installed. Whose idea was it, the gas companies' or the peoples'? The article(s; I've looked at several elsewhere) seems to imply the former, but I can't find anything explicit on it.
> Sadly, if what you threaten to do, or not do, is a lawful action that you are legally > entitled to make, it is not criminal extortion. It is negotiation.
The key operator here is "threat". A threat is an assault in every US state.
Extortion is the use of threat in order to force the target to comply. Negotiation is based on mutual voluntary entrance into the process. Compliance gaining through threat is not negotiation, except perhaps in the minds of those who insist they negotiate such things as protection money or else "Vinny might have an unforeseen regretable accident in your fine establishment of purveyance, which we would see as an unfortunate occurrence in the extreme."
A threat of legal action is still a threat. Just because it's about legal action does not make the threat legal. So I was told by an FBI agent sent at my request due to just such an effort. They sent federal agents to the source and made them stop specifically for this reason. Filing a legal action is not a threat any more than firing a gun at someone is. It may or may not be legally conducted, but it's not a verbal attempt to force compliance a priori.
The MafIAA letters explicitly offer a settlement. That's not a threat. However, there can be an implied threat in an explicit offer. If the recipient feels that the offer carries an implied threat which they can reasonably expect to be carried out and cause them harm (financial included) they can attempt to make that case in court.
> "Massachusetts is the first state to require its residents to secure health insurance.....
> Those who fall below the federal poverty line may be eligible for health care at no cost."
Maybe something's changed since I got a master's in health care administration, but I seem to remember that health insurance costs money. Free health care (which is what I assume is what is meant by "health care at no cost") is the opposite of that. If you're going to give something to some people, you're not requiring them to secure it, you're offering it to them. So WTF is this supposed to mean? All those reddish green people are going to get free expensive insurance? Or are those greenish red people going to have to buy insurance for no money? If they are offered health care for free and they turn it down, are they breaking the law that says they have to secure it? Or maybe by "secure" they don't mean "obtain", but rather another meaning such as "locked". I'm thinking it's "locked" because that's the opposite of "free", and that'd make it self-contradictory like the rest of the article.
Stories like this are going to turn me into Lewis Black.
> Er, um, no. They're now charging $50 less for Ubuntu than for Vista.
You're right of course. I would have been too if you'd read what I meant instead of what I wrote. Funny how I don't seem to be able to get that across in print.
Still, I don't think they're expecting to make it as much a profit point as all that. Their tech support is already problem enough, and that's with printed scripts for the drones to follow. Linux users will probably need more support, and require it to be better quality than what they provide for Windows.
> [T]he private investigations company hired by plaintiffs engaged in one or more overt acts of unlawful private investigation... Such actions constitute civil conspiracy under Texas common law.
Just so. Also, as noted in the p2p article their actions "amount to extortion". If someone says "If you do/do not do X, then I will/will not do Y", that's extortion. When it's done across state lines, it's a federal offense, and none of the plaintiffs are Texas corporations.
I'm looking forward to the day someone manages to get charges filed rather than just filing suit, and someone from the MafIAA gets arrested. My money's on a state's attorney general doing it, and Texas is a very likely place for that to happen. In any case, KICK ASS, GRANNY!
I can't believe that a Linux distro, even at one-of prices, costs them only $50 more than Vista, even at maximum quantity discount prices. I'm guessing they're expecting a lot more support problems with Ubuntu (not in and of itself, but as a Linux install) and charging more up front to offset that.
OTOH, if I could have gotten Ubuntu installed on this $399 Dimension system when I bought it a year ago, I'd have paid the same. But then I've done my own Linux support since Slackware 1.0. I just don't see too many who'd planned on getting a Dell choosing Linux instead for only $50 off.
> It is a bit hard to jump back into Slackware... The long hiatus a while back left me seeking other distros which I have stayed loyal to.
No, you're probably not the only one. However, that opinion is the opposite as that of Jason1729 below, who states he gave it up due to too many updates and fixes, and he's probably not the only one to feel that way either. Between the two, Patrick is probably running at pretty much the right speed:
From: Patrick J. Volkerding (bf703@cleveland.Freenet.Edu)
Subject: ANNOUNCE: Slackware Linux 1.00
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux
Date: 1993-07-16 17:21:20 PST
The Slackware Linux distribution (v. 1.00) is now available for
anonymous FTP.....
12 versions in 14 years, plus revisions between. All under his guidance. Most would have abandoned the effort sooner and with fewer releases, and probably due to doing so many in that time. Hell, most would have given up rather than rewrite it all in order to switch libraries.
> Just because he made a sworn affidavit does not mean that the man really saw something. > As scientists have demonstrated, this might easily be something he created and believed himself.
Yup. re: Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, U. Wash. She's the most sought after expert on real- and false-memory creation. Bottom line, all memory is reconstruction, not retrieval. It's never perfectly accurate (vivid =! accurate) and so even when "correct" is only at least good enough, not "true". People can be made to "recall" a lot of stuff, by others, thesmelves or context/situations.
I was pointing more at what people will or will not believe about what the guy said, not what he "remembered".
> You're comparing apples to pears here, a union or an organization like the ACLU is there to protect it's members against Bad Things(tm) and is either government based or a non-profit organization or otherwise and tries to find a solution for a large number of people equally and evenly that might not have the power or money to fight for themselves individually (class-action).
I don't dispute that. The RIAA stuff is as different from both of those as they are from each other. But legal precedent is based on principles, not details. Even if not directly applicable and admissible as such, it makes for easy good argument due to its support as accepted in other situations.
From a (yet another) Roswell story? You must be new to this planet. Hope you landed more successfully than your predecessors.
The admission of the photographer of the "alien" autopsies that it was all staged didn't make a dent in the myth, nor did the facts surrounding the captured Japanese Fugu balloon project team building test craft for the Air Corps/Force, and neither will this. The believers, skeptics and Skeptics (the last being Faithful Disblievers for its own sale -- er, sake -- like Randi) will all continue in their behavioral/cognitive momentum for the same reasons that place them in those categories. Why anyone would assume that someone changing their story is now telling the truth just because he's now dead is beyond me. We don't accept story changing from living people (unless they change it to support our particular belief system). Dying might make musicians better and poets tolerable*, but it doesn't make anyone on any side of the Roswell story more credible to anyone on any of the other sides, or more credible period.
(* The former is a popular misconception in the more explicit sense in that people believe it despite evidence and adjust their taste to match, avoiding cognitive dissonance of the changed belief system as well as avoiding grieving for the person that's dead. That's why recent Hendrix releases sell well although the quality is poor, and repeats other works as well as itself by including multiple takes of other, more polished releases. If he were alive nobody would stand for this. And I made up the part about poets because it made for a good sentence. I look forward to its being accepted as "common wisdom".)
Pun unintended, but at least noticed before posting.
I seem to recall that the specific copyright violations have resulted in the specific rights holders (ie. individual record companies) being listed as plaintiff on the cases involving violation of their copyrights, with those violations and rights being specifically listed in the filings. As such, the RIAA, and by extension its other members, are not attempting to sue collectively for the rights violations. This claim contradicts that, which is easily found in the collection of suits and pre-suit collection attempts.
This claim will fall apart based on this evidence. The rest of it will be moot, as it is not illegal to actively pursue settlement collectively as long as specific individual instances of damage are not claimed when they don't occur. This is the basis of class action suits. Suits brought by trade unions on behalf of more than one of its members for a specific complaint similar to each v. a specific company would perhaps be a more apt example.
As to why the RIAA would then attempt to block it: delaying tactic. They are trying to cause this case, as they have with many others, to be as costly as possible for the defendant to pursue. Their collective purse, paying the RIAA's attorneys, is much larger than any defendant's, and they're simply trying to price the case out of existence.
As much as I'd like to see the RIAA and its members hung using their own intestines if not vas deferens, I think there's a gaping hole in the tactic being attempted here. If the agreements the RIAA seeks to block discovery of contradicts this in some way, great. But the individual suits as filed, used as their evidence in defense, indicate the opposite and makes it unlikely those agreements will get examined due to this action. It could even backfire. A request for discovery without the claim that they're tying their rights to each other, perhaps brought separately by one of the RICO countersuit v. RIAA plaintiffs, might have been a better idea. Now the RIAA is warned, can delay, and can alter any agreements that might have supported it by superseding them with newer ones that don't have this problem. The old ones would still exist, but would be evidence of this claim in the past, not of claims that this is how things are being done in the case that resulted in the claims.
No, I'm not a lawyer. But I did work on behalf of some in collecting evidence and acting as witness in some intellectual property cases.
> Not so quick, look: 42! A first reference to The Guide!
As a bit of synchronicity, the following was the tagline at the bottom of the page when I read this:
"Life, loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it." -- Marvin, "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
>> [ ] Standby [X] Die [ ] Restart
> Are you running Vista?
No, Dave. I have the greatest enthusiasm for this mission. I know a song. Would you like me to sing it to you? You do not have the appropriate license to play this song. Please download the appropriate license and try again.
Download license from chandra.uiuc.edu? y
Download failed.
There is nothing wrong with the DRM-35 module, Dave. You do not have the appropriate license to play this song. Please download the appropriate license and try again.
Makes you wish they'd get their horse shit straight.
I was wrong about one thing. The debris from Solwind was tracked and the data made available. 250 pieces. One almost hit ISS 8 years ago. http://cns.miis.edu/pubs/week/070124.htm So if the US says pieces of the Chinese test might hit ISS, we can assume they're correct because they have experience in these things.
The Boeing B-52's wings flex up 10 feet at the tip from parking to take-off speed. They've been that way for 55 years. Let's hope they've come a long way since then, carbon composite or no.
The Buff also gets a foot longer at cruising speed as compared to parked. Will Boeing build more foot room into the 787? Not bloody likely. "Call that progress? Because I don't." -- Marvin the Paranoid Android
> so if china does it it's shocking, i wonder what it'd be called if you yanks did it
Successful. If by "you yanks" you mean the US Air Force. They launched the Vought ASM-135A ASAT against a "retired communications satellite" from an F-15 in 1985 and killed it. Note this was an air launched weapon (the "could this be next?" question on the article), not rocket launched as was the Chinese weapon.
If by "you yanks" you mean the US scientists who were at the time using the Solwind research satellite that the USAF actually shot down, I suppose it'd be called "what the fuck happened to our satellite?", until they figured out what happened. At that point it probably became "what the fuck did you do that to our satellite for?"
Since the official story is still that they shot down a retired communications satellite, rather than acknowledging the actual kill (the answer to the above questions being essentially "What satellite? Shut the fuck up."), we've no way to know if they missed their target and the ASAT locked onto Solwind by mistake, or if they just took out a target of opportunity that wouldn't cost them anything. Both are disturbing in their own way.
There's also no word on how much debris was created by Solwind's destruction. The US Space Surveillance Network knows they answer, but they're not saying. They are, after all, operated primarily by the USAF.
Although the ASM-135A ASAT project was cancelled soon after the Solwind kill, there's no reason to expect the USAF stopped ASAT development. The ASM-135A was built from an AGM-69 SRAM and Vought Scout B fourth stage (a Thiokol Altair III motor). These had both been operational for more than a decade when they put the ASAT together. They could have used much newer and more powerful, already operational hardware the very next day, taking it off the active armament shelf, bypassing the messy PR problem of using a defense contractor directly and so having to admit they launched something. The Vought project proved the feasibility based on older hardware. The US military doesn't readily let go of a proven idea they deem necessary unless it has something better to replace it.
If there were something going on that a group didn't want you to think about, they'd generate what seemed to be a more important story with much the same characteristics. This story is about dirty secrets in high government. Yet it's not a news story as the major facts have already been known. What else is going on that's similar, that the government doesn't want thought about too hard? Within 24 hours we're given notice that the White House, and specifically Dick Cheney's office, were subpeonaed for information on the recent (already determined illegal be federal courts) wiretapping increase. It's probably not just this we're being defelected from, but from the almost inevitable refusal to comply, something far more illegal than the wiretapping as it flies in the face of the Constitution, as does much of the present administration's actions.
Shiny hat material? Read "Psychological Warfare" by Paul (E.E. "Doc" Smith to S.F. fans) Linebarger. It's 60 years old, but is still a required text at the War College. You can be sure the primary movers of the present administration have read it and taken it to heart. The barely concealed course of the present administration, based on machinery put in place by previous administrations, is an obvious application of the techniques described and prescribed by Linebarger. But as I said, read it. Don't just believe me. That's the point of it.
You'll have trouble finding it. Although still in print for the limited distribution noted, it's barely available to the public. Last I looked I could only find German translations, going for over US$300. I only got to keep mine due to a clerical error that made it appear that I'd returned mine already, as required. Generating clerical errors like this are now called "social engineering". It's not a new idea.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the difference between someone sporting a sign on their back that says "Kick Me", and some talking head saying "...won't likely be breached for 10 years."?
Someone with a "Kick Me" sign just looks stupid. Someone saying something won't be hacked soon looks stupid now and proof of it will be supplied soon. In fact they're worse than stupid, they're all but begging people to do it in order to prove them stupid.
'If [Web] 1.0 is full page refreshes for content, Web 2.0 is, "How do I minimize page views and deliver content more seamlessly?"'
Has anyone explained this to the marketoids? As far as I can tell "Web 2.0" is a marketing term that means "We're new and improved and you should look at us so you can see the ads we present and make us money." I've found no consistent explanation from any of the supposed Web 2.0 purveyors as to exactly what they mean by it. If the ratings folks have a valid and generalizable definition, perhaps they'll pass it on.
From what I can tell, they're taking their definition from blogging, which used to be considered a rude and wasteful practice of piling more and more stuff on the same page. How little things change, except what it's called and how people react to that. But then that's marketing.
Warning, excessive and reckless noun-to-verb transforms included. "Verbing weirds language." -- Calvin and Hobbes
In his book "Tog On Interface", Bruce Tognazzini quotes some research done at Apple and elsewhere (Stanford?) where they tested actual speed of mousing vs. keyboarding, and users' perception of same. Bottom line was people thought mousing was faster, but they were wrong. The effort required to remember keyboard commands, and typing them, gets perceived as more time, whereas the lesser effort of mousing seems like less time but actually takes longer.
The learning curve for keyboard commands is definitely steeper though. If you don't already know them and have to look them up, or are just not familiar and take a long time to remember them, then the keyboard is slower.
The mouse isn't used because it's faster, it's used because it's easier. It takes very little learning, and almost no cognitive effort. That's the whole philosophy behind the GUI, of which the mouse is an integral part.
Last month a Texas Ranger (state police, not ball club member) fired a taser at a guy who had just poured gasoline all over himself. The spark set off the gas and fried the guy. The ranger is is trouble because he should have known better. Even if he hadn't seen the gas can he could have smelled the gas.
I'm betting these robots won't be able to smell gas. That's just one situation and limitation. Everything they can't do that a person can is a possible problem.
He can try as hard as he wants to create CS without math, but when he comes up with something usable, even if it's written in words, it'll describe a process that could be stated clearer and shorter with math. And if he doesn't state it with math those that know better won't pay him any attention.
Boole's framework for describing logical processes is math. That's why it's called Boolean algebra. Try to do CS without that.
Holographic Memories; Scientific American, November 1995, by Psaltis & Mok
It does make some sense to spin a disk rather than reorient the beam. But a solid crystal holographic storage device not only has lots of locations within itself to store collections of data, but can also be turned on a turntable and have the beam attack it from different directions, storing more data in the same place but at a different angle.
3D holographic storage design has another benefit -- it is self-searching via "reverse" holography. You shine a laser off a target and let it reflect to the memory, and out comes as many copies of the reference beam as their are stored data sets (with a realistic situation of most dissimilar results being buried in noise). Each beam is proportional to the strength of the reference beam according to the similarity of the dataset it came from. You can pick the strongest if you want to find the closest match, or you can statistically test the range of beam strengths to check for uniqueness of the target, or any number of things. The search process is virtually instantaneous, the speed of getting the result limited only by the speed of the measuring and calculating processes.
> ... including ... Vista ...
That's what I thought you said. At least now we know that moving from XP to Vista is not a security upgrade. So much for the oh so secure new OS, I'm sure it's worth every penny I saved not getting it.
I'm thinking about migrating to DOS 6.6. I have no idea how secure it is, but I'm pretty damn sure nobody's trying to exploit it.
... And I say with with vehement disgust in lieu of stronger words. I like stronger words, but those to whom they'd refer have their heads someplace where they couldn't hear them clearly, so I'll save them.
) . The expansion of the small portion of gas above the riser will be negative for more people than not, more of the time than not. It'll be a contraction.
When I was crawling in and out of underground fuel tanks in a space suit (not really, but we called it that; the air supply was via a hose, not an air tank) I picked up more than a couple pertinent details. And after reading this article I went and looked up a couple more.
The underground temperature at the depth most tanks must reside is between 54 and 58 F depending on location (and varying 1 to 2 F over a year), not 64.7. That figured was arrived at by a company that sells the same kind of equipment this article talks about. They have a vested interest in the data. Not stated is when the measurement is taken -- just after a 5,000 gal. tanker dumps its load into a 20,000 gal tank?
Tanks need to be more than just under the surface. They need to have enough ground covering them so they don't float up out of the ground through bouyancy. Many are tied down by steel straps to a concrete cradle for this reason, but the depth underground is a fail-safe and still adhered to. They also have to be well underground anywhere a vehicle has to drive over them, or a concrete apron will cover them, so the weight above will be spread out and not collapse the tank. Thus, they're almost invariably below the level where variations will be more than a degree or two.
The average annual temperature temperature where I am, Dallas-Fort Worth, is 64.5 F. The expansion of gasoline from 60 to 64.5 is ~0.3% (0.00069 per degree F; diesel is less, 0.00050 per). The amount of gas above the ground in a piping and pump system is the only part of a fill up that'll be affected by air temperature, and then only if it sits long enough to equalize. The volume involved is from 0.5 to 1.5 gallons depending on distance from riser and style of pump+hose. The rest of what's pumped will come right from underground and will be at or less than 60 F.
If this passes, the average US driver will lose the benefit they're already getting due to the average temperature being less than 60 F. The average temperature from 1900 to 2000 is less than 60 over almost all the US (according to plots from data at NOAA's Earth Systems Research Lab http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/USclimate/USclimdivs.html
They'll also pay even more because they'll foot the bill for these devices and their installation; the big oil producers will just plow these costs into the price, and it'll never be noticed, because they can raise the price 10 times that amount, then drop it 9 of that 10, and people will think the price is so close to what it started at that they won't think about it twice.
I had more than a passing familiarity with the issue. Besides going into tanks to inspect them, I also did the annual volumetric testing of gas pumps. I had to apply the correction factor. Where I was, the upper peninsula of Michigan, the average air temperature was very much less than 60. It was 32 F when I moved there in 1976. However, we applied the correction, or rather tried to, based on measuring the temperature of the fuel in the testing can. There was a thermometer built into the glass tube on the side of the can's neck where we also measured the gas level in 0.1 in^3 increments (one part on over 10,000 for the 5 gallon testing can). The temperature was never, as far as I can recall, ever outside the 50s F range.
I'd like to hear from someone up in the Great White as to exactly why they have those temperature sensing devices installed. Whose idea was it, the gas companies' or the peoples'? The article(s; I've looked at several elsewhere) seems to imply the former, but I can't find anything explicit on it.
AC sez:
> Sadly, if what you threaten to do, or not do, is a lawful action that you are legally
> entitled to make, it is not criminal extortion. It is negotiation.
The key operator here is "threat". A threat is an assault in every US state.
Extortion is the use of threat in order to force the target to comply. Negotiation is based on mutual voluntary entrance into the process. Compliance gaining through threat is not negotiation, except perhaps in the minds of those who insist they negotiate such things as protection money or else "Vinny might have an unforeseen regretable accident in your fine establishment of purveyance, which we would see as an unfortunate occurrence in the extreme."
A threat of legal action is still a threat. Just because it's about legal action does not make the threat legal. So I was told by an FBI agent sent at my request due to just such an effort. They sent federal agents to the source and made them stop specifically for this reason. Filing a legal action is not a threat any more than firing a gun at someone is. It may or may not be legally conducted, but it's not a verbal attempt to force compliance a priori.
The MafIAA letters explicitly offer a settlement. That's not a threat. However, there can be an implied threat in an explicit offer. If the recipient feels that the offer carries an implied threat which they can reasonably expect to be carried out and cause them harm (financial included) they can attempt to make that case in court.
> "Massachusetts is the first state to require its residents to secure health insurance.....
> Those who fall below the federal poverty line may be eligible for health care at no cost."
Maybe something's changed since I got a master's in health care administration, but I seem to remember that health insurance costs money. Free health care (which is what I assume is what is meant by "health care at no cost") is the opposite of that. If you're going to give something to some people, you're not requiring them to secure it, you're offering it to them. So WTF is this supposed to mean? All those reddish green people are going to get free expensive insurance? Or are those greenish red people going to have to buy insurance for no money? If they are offered health care for free and they turn it down, are they breaking the law that says they have to secure it? Or maybe by "secure" they don't mean "obtain", but rather another meaning such as "locked". I'm thinking it's "locked" because that's the opposite of "free", and that'd make it self-contradictory like the rest of the article.
Stories like this are going to turn me into Lewis Black.
> Er, um, no. They're now charging $50 less for Ubuntu than for Vista.
You're right of course. I would have been too if you'd read what I meant instead of what I wrote. Funny how I don't seem to be able to get that across in print.
Still, I don't think they're expecting to make it as much a profit point as all that. Their tech support is already problem enough, and that's with printed scripts for the drones to follow. Linux users will probably need more support, and require it to be better quality than what they provide for Windows.
Grannies From Texas. I know, I'm married to one.
> [T]he private investigations company hired by plaintiffs engaged in one or more overt acts of unlawful private investigation... Such actions constitute civil conspiracy under Texas common law.
Just so. Also, as noted in the p2p article their actions "amount to extortion". If someone says "If you do/do not do X, then I will/will not do Y", that's extortion. When it's done across state lines, it's a federal offense, and none of the plaintiffs are Texas corporations.
I'm looking forward to the day someone manages to get charges filed rather than just filing suit, and someone from the MafIAA gets arrested. My money's on a state's attorney general doing it, and Texas is a very likely place for that to happen. In any case, KICK ASS, GRANNY!
I can't believe that a Linux distro, even at one-of prices, costs them only $50 more than Vista, even at maximum quantity discount prices. I'm guessing they're expecting a lot more support problems with Ubuntu (not in and of itself, but as a Linux install) and charging more up front to offset that.
OTOH, if I could have gotten Ubuntu installed on this $399 Dimension system when I bought it a year ago, I'd have paid the same. But then I've done my own Linux support since Slackware 1.0. I just don't see too many who'd planned on getting a Dell choosing Linux instead for only $50 off.
> It is a bit hard to jump back into Slackware... The long hiatus a while back left me seeking other distros which I have stayed loyal to.
No, you're probably not the only one. However, that opinion is the opposite as that of Jason1729 below, who states he gave it up due to too many updates and fixes, and he's probably not the only one to feel that way either. Between the two, Patrick is probably running at pretty much the right speed:
From: Patrick J. Volkerding (bf703@cleveland.Freenet.Edu)
Subject: ANNOUNCE: Slackware Linux 1.00
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux
Date: 1993-07-16 17:21:20 PST
The Slackware Linux distribution (v. 1.00) is now available for
anonymous FTP.....
12 versions in 14 years, plus revisions between. All under his guidance. Most would have abandoned the effort sooner and with fewer releases, and probably due to doing so many in that time. Hell, most would have given up rather than rewrite it all in order to switch libraries.
> Just because he made a sworn affidavit does not mean that the man really saw something.
> As scientists have demonstrated, this might easily be something he created and believed himself.
Yup. re: Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, U. Wash. She's the most sought after expert on real- and false-memory creation. Bottom line, all memory is reconstruction, not retrieval. It's never perfectly accurate (vivid =! accurate) and so even when "correct" is only at least good enough, not "true". People can be made to "recall" a lot of stuff, by others, thesmelves or context/situations.
I was pointing more at what people will or will not believe about what the guy said, not what he "remembered".
> You're comparing apples to pears here, a union or an organization like the ACLU is there to protect it's members against Bad Things(tm) and is either government based or a non-profit organization or otherwise and tries to find a solution for a large number of people equally and evenly that might not have the power or money to fight for themselves individually (class-action).
I don't dispute that. The RIAA stuff is as different from both of those as they are from each other. But legal precedent is based on principles, not details. Even if not directly applicable and admissible as such, it makes for easy good argument due to its support as accepted in other situations.
> a serious public relations blow.
From a (yet another) Roswell story? You must be new to this planet. Hope you landed more successfully than your predecessors.
The admission of the photographer of the "alien" autopsies that it was all staged didn't make a dent in the myth, nor did the facts surrounding the captured Japanese Fugu balloon project team building test craft for the Air Corps/Force, and neither will this. The believers, skeptics and Skeptics (the last being Faithful Disblievers for its own sale -- er, sake -- like Randi) will all continue in their behavioral/cognitive momentum for the same reasons that place them in those categories. Why anyone would assume that someone changing their story is now telling the truth just because he's now dead is beyond me. We don't accept story changing from living people (unless they change it to support our particular belief system). Dying might make musicians better and poets tolerable*, but it doesn't make anyone on any side of the Roswell story more credible to anyone on any of the other sides, or more credible period.
(* The former is a popular misconception in the more explicit sense in that people believe it despite evidence and adjust their taste to match, avoiding cognitive dissonance of the changed belief system as well as avoiding grieving for the person that's dead. That's why recent Hendrix releases sell well although the quality is poor, and repeats other works as well as itself by including multiple takes of other, more polished releases. If he were alive nobody would stand for this. And I made up the part about poets because it made for a good sentence. I look forward to its being accepted as "common wisdom".)
Pun unintended, but at least noticed before posting.
I seem to recall that the specific copyright violations have resulted in the specific rights holders (ie. individual record companies) being listed as plaintiff on the cases involving violation of their copyrights, with those violations and rights being specifically listed in the filings. As such, the RIAA, and by extension its other members, are not attempting to sue collectively for the rights violations. This claim contradicts that, which is easily found in the collection of suits and pre-suit collection attempts.
This claim will fall apart based on this evidence. The rest of it will be moot, as it is not illegal to actively pursue settlement collectively as long as specific individual instances of damage are not claimed when they don't occur. This is the basis of class action suits. Suits brought by trade unions on behalf of more than one of its members for a specific complaint similar to each v. a specific company would perhaps be a more apt example.
As to why the RIAA would then attempt to block it: delaying tactic. They are trying to cause this case, as they have with many others, to be as costly as possible for the defendant to pursue. Their collective purse, paying the RIAA's attorneys, is much larger than any defendant's, and they're simply trying to price the case out of existence.
As much as I'd like to see the RIAA and its members hung using their own intestines if not vas deferens, I think there's a gaping hole in the tactic being attempted here. If the agreements the RIAA seeks to block discovery of contradicts this in some way, great. But the individual suits as filed, used as their evidence in defense, indicate the opposite and makes it unlikely those agreements will get examined due to this action. It could even backfire. A request for discovery without the claim that they're tying their rights to each other, perhaps brought separately by one of the RICO countersuit v. RIAA plaintiffs, might have been a better idea. Now the RIAA is warned, can delay, and can alter any agreements that might have supported it by superseding them with newer ones that don't have this problem. The old ones would still exist, but would be evidence of this claim in the past, not of claims that this is how things are being done in the case that resulted in the claims.
No, I'm not a lawyer. But I did work on behalf of some in collecting evidence and acting as witness in some intellectual property cases.
> Not so quick, look: 42! A first reference to The Guide!
As a bit of synchronicity, the following was the tagline at the bottom of the page when I read this:
"Life, loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it." -- Marvin, "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
>> [ ] Standby [X] Die [ ] Restart
> Are you running Vista?
No, Dave. I have the greatest enthusiasm for this mission. I know a song. Would you like me to sing it to you? You do not have the appropriate license to play this song. Please download the appropriate license and try again.
Download license from chandra.uiuc.edu? y
Download failed.
There is nothing wrong with the DRM-35 module, Dave. You do not have the appropriate license to play this song. Please download the appropriate license and try again.
Download license from chandra.uiuc.edu?
I've seen star ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
/. article on an Earth simulation, with over 100 replies, and no mention of The Matrix.
I've seen a
Time to die.
[ ] Standby [X] Die [ ] Restart
> This story is complete horseshit. [blahblah] http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/histind/ASAT/F15ASAT.ht ml
t ml/asat.html
Sure it is. Now. See also http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/asat.htm
22 years ago it wasn't. Solwind was still downlinking data when it poofed. http://www.patricksaviation.com/wiki/F-15_ASAT I got the story from Astronomy magazine at the time.
It was taking a lot of work to keep it synched, but USAF (its original owner) had not shut it down. http://franksblog.hoferfamily.org/2004/01/21/
Usually very complete with their data, Vought is rather mute about it, naming the sat only by its designator. http://www.voughtaircraft.com/heritage/products/h
Makes you wish they'd get their horse shit straight.
I was wrong about one thing. The debris from Solwind was tracked and the data made available. 250 pieces. One almost hit ISS 8 years ago. http://cns.miis.edu/pubs/week/070124.htm So if the US says pieces of the Chinese test might hit ISS, we can assume they're correct because they have experience in these things.
> As someone pointed out in an earlier post: "this is a Microsoft slam piece from an
> unlikely source".
> One of these things is not like the others:
Feh. Foiled by the RTFA bug again.
The presence of "gravity research subject" should have been enough of a tip off. Looks like they couldn't hold their April 1st water.
> They have come a long way in wing flexibility.
The Boeing B-52's wings flex up 10 feet at the tip from parking to take-off speed. They've been that way for 55 years. Let's hope they've come a long way since then, carbon composite or no.
The Buff also gets a foot longer at cruising speed as compared to parked. Will Boeing build more foot room into the 787? Not bloody likely. "Call that progress? Because I don't." -- Marvin the Paranoid Android
> so if china does it it's shocking, i wonder what it'd be called if you yanks did it
Successful. If by "you yanks" you mean the US Air Force. They launched the Vought ASM-135A ASAT against a "retired communications satellite" from an F-15 in 1985 and killed it. Note this was an air launched weapon (the "could this be next?" question on the article), not rocket launched as was the Chinese weapon.
If by "you yanks" you mean the US scientists who were at the time using the Solwind research satellite that the USAF actually shot down, I suppose it'd be called "what the fuck happened to our satellite?", until they figured out what happened. At that point it probably became "what the fuck did you do that to our satellite for?"
Since the official story is still that they shot down a retired communications satellite, rather than acknowledging the actual kill (the answer to the above questions being essentially "What satellite? Shut the fuck up."), we've no way to know if they missed their target and the ASAT locked onto Solwind by mistake, or if they just took out a target of opportunity that wouldn't cost them anything. Both are disturbing in their own way.
There's also no word on how much debris was created by Solwind's destruction. The US Space Surveillance Network knows they answer, but they're not saying. They are, after all, operated primarily by the USAF.
Although the ASM-135A ASAT project was cancelled soon after the Solwind kill, there's no reason to expect the USAF stopped ASAT development. The ASM-135A was built from an AGM-69 SRAM and Vought Scout B fourth stage (a Thiokol Altair III motor). These had both been operational for more than a decade when they put the ASAT together. They could have used much newer and more powerful, already operational hardware the very next day, taking it off the active armament shelf, bypassing the messy PR problem of using a defense contractor directly and so having to admit they launched something. The Vought project proved the feasibility based on older hardware. The US military doesn't readily let go of a proven idea they deem necessary unless it has something better to replace it.
If there were something going on that a group didn't want you to think about, they'd generate what seemed to be a more important story with much the same characteristics. This story is about dirty secrets in high government. Yet it's not a news story as the major facts have already been known. What else is going on that's similar, that the government doesn't want thought about too hard? Within 24 hours we're given notice that the White House, and specifically Dick Cheney's office, were subpeonaed for information on the recent (already determined illegal be federal courts) wiretapping increase. It's probably not just this we're being defelected from, but from the almost inevitable refusal to comply, something far more illegal than the wiretapping as it flies in the face of the Constitution, as does much of the present administration's actions.
Shiny hat material? Read "Psychological Warfare" by Paul (E.E. "Doc" Smith to S.F. fans) Linebarger. It's 60 years old, but is still a required text at the War College. You can be sure the primary movers of the present administration have read it and taken it to heart. The barely concealed course of the present administration, based on machinery put in place by previous administrations, is an obvious application of the techniques described and prescribed by Linebarger. But as I said, read it. Don't just believe me. That's the point of it.
You'll have trouble finding it. Although still in print for the limited distribution noted, it's barely available to the public. Last I looked I could only find German translations, going for over US$300. I only got to keep mine due to a clerical error that made it appear that I'd returned mine already, as required. Generating clerical errors like this are now called "social engineering". It's not a new idea.