Looks like the fix has been made, but so far only on 'internal' builds (whatever that means) & will be added to the next public release. But yeah, this was one of a handful of bugs that annoyed the crap out of me when I switched from SO5.2 to SO6/OO.
As you say, even 'minor' bugs like this mean you still need a copy of Word around to idiotcheck douments you're working on in collaboration with MSOffice users. Let alone if you're required to submit final VeryImportant documents in Word format.. Gah.
"Spellcheck time! Uh, "The spellcheck is complete". I don't think so. Try again."
That's weird - the problem goes the other way with 'standard' open office & SO6 - save a document as W98/00 and Word would refuse to spellcheck it. The workaround is to select all & set language to [anything]. Fixed in the development version of openoffice, but needs the workaround in the stable release.
"An email containing a username and password is sent to the registrant a few hours after submission" [emphasis added]
Unless what you're selling is the one and only tool on the market which does the job it does, in "a few hours" I've found three other products which do what your thing does and I'm busily evaluating them instead. And one of them did the job I need it to. And I've forgotten you even exist.
Unless you really do have a stranglehold on a niche, go have a look around at how your competition deal with evaluation downloads. If some of them are making it even one step eaiser to test their junk, you can bet you're losing sales to them.
Kind of ironic that SciAm is wailing about the demise of the hobbyist magazine - they themselves used to be one of the pre-eminent tinkerer's magazines before a change in ownership in 1948
It's fairly natural to see any particular field go from producing information exchanges (and prior to the 'net, this pretty mich mean magazines) adressing the nuts and bolts of pursuing the field to producing information exchnages which largely address the contemporary problems to which the field is being applied.
Ever since that halfwit in the US patent office said "there's nothing left to be invented" at the turn of the century people have said that there was no longer a role for garage engineering in the advancement of technology. As we've seen repeatedly since, there are always new fields which depend for key bursts of work on people who use too much speed and can't find the key to the garage door. The only thing that's changed in recent years is the switch to the internet as a forum for trading ideas and techniques, hence the apparent dissappearance of the qunitisential tinkerer's magazine.
you must concede that the United States already has by far the most technologically advanced military in the world, and even without devices like this no other country can seriously challenge the United States in a conventional war
.. said [insert a random American pundit, cira 1964]
um, who won the Vietnam war again? who give a shit about "conventional" war - all that counts is whose political aims get furthered by the killing.
" But if worse comes to worse I'll buy up a bunch of microwave ovens, trip the door sensor, point a million pringles cans towards the sky, and show them what real 2.4 ghz interference is like:)."
Worked for the Serbian army : ) - US Navy was wondering why their extremely expensive radar-station detecting missiles kept thumping into empty fields.
Turns out the Serbians were using old microwave ovens on long extension cords (!) with the door open & pointing at the sky, door sensor jammed. Instant $100 missile honeypot.
Re:Missing a bit of history (Re:Corante article)
on
Google Juice
·
· Score: 1
type "dumb motherfucker" now & you get ten stories about the "dumb motherfucker" -> gwb search hit..
..except the fact the US continues to run simulations 'forces' other countries (notably France) to continue to test nuclear weapons to "calibrate" *their* simulations, which they happily admit don't match the sophistication of those conducted by the US.
Every time the US boasts about simulations like this one, they effectively encourage countries like France to crack another one on some poor innocent south pacific atoll.
" First, India's really a second-world nation. The first/second/third world definitions were western/communist/other, but India's definitely not 3rd world (Uganda, Sudan, Afghanistan), and definitely not first world."
Kinda ironic india invented the term 'third world' and applied it to themselves - the idea was the world was polarizing into the russian / american camps, & India saw that small, poor nations that cozied up to one or the other didn't do all that well, so decided to go down the route of 'independent neutrality'. Supposedly the rationale for this was all sorts of world-peace type reasons, but the (presumably hoped for & planned) outcome was the US and USSR outdid each other to see who could throw the most money & toys at the Indian Govt. Dig out an old copy of Janes from the 80s or earlier & have a look at which countries produced major chunks of hardware in the Indian military - a weirder mix of USA/USSR you won't find almost anywhere.
Can't think of too many other countries that did as well out of joining the 'third world' camp though, and it quickly became a catch-all term for places mostly thought of by westerners as stupefyingly poor.
The other problem with online scientific journals is you have to convince *indexing* services to buy into it as well.
When I go to publish, I look at potential journals partially in terms of where they're indexed. "Drug & Alcohol Review", for example, is one of the more consistently relevant journals in my field - but it isn't indexed by PubMed. So as an author, I'm better off submitting to "Addiction" (also good, but for different reasons) because if accepted, my article will turn up as a result in more people's literature searches, which means I'll get cited more often, which helps a lot in the early stages of a research career.
So if a well established, reputable print journal like D&A Review can't get itself indexed by some of the more important indexing services, what chance has some brand new web-based journal got, no matter how big the names on its editorial board? And if it isn't indexed, there's no point in submitting to it unless absolutely no-one else will publish your work. Nasty chicken and egg situation setting itself up immediately there..
Having said all that, Soros has cracked a few interesting nuts in the last few years, & I wish him luck with this one.
Ahh, the irony of your sig file.. "Kill 'em all and let God sort it out later..."
Usually attributed to Arnaud Armaury, spiritual advisor to the crusade against the Cathars in the south of France in the 13th century. When the Pope's troops arrived at Beziers and the locals refused to hand over the Cathari heretics in their midst, the leader of the army asked Armaury what to do. He is reported to have replied "Kill them all, God will know his own".
The army killed between 10,000 and 15,000 of the citizens of Beziers, presumably including the 200 or so Cathars estimated to have been living in Beziers at the time.
So you do indeed join an interesting tradition when you quote that motto.
I used to work at a small-town newspaper - we gave all the reporters old macs with nothing but simpletext and excaliber (drag&drop spellcheck, usually comes bundled with the mac version of latex). Reporters had to actually concentrate on content not layout. Once written, a story was kicked to a single layout person who pasted the whole lot into quark & fussed about with presentation. Jacked our production rate *way* up from an earlier system involving reporters prettyifying their work in word before layout people had to strip it all back out before pasteup..
One of the nicest things about OS X is Apple is a company most IT departments and PHBs have heard of and have even worked with.
Why does this matter? Well, let me give an example. Recently I worked on a research project which needed some mapping done, & had no leftover budget to purchase an expensive proprietary solution (the usual preferred solution of our "where's my kickback" IT department through whom all software aquisition must go). Looking around, I found the GrassGIS package (http://www.baylor.edu/grass/), an open source & free-as-in-beer solution.
Great, except the IT department hated the idea - no receipt, no box, no CD, no kickback, and, probably most importantly, it ran on Linux* & they were (still are) deadly afraid of linux-in-the-workplace for a wide range of reasons not limited to the fear a lot of people might start asking why we're paying $$$$ for M$ solutions if free-as-in-beer solutions can do the same thing in many instances.
To get it past them, I had to sell the entire concept to some PHBs. This took months, and required explaining a lot of things, ranging from what-is-linux through to why-there-is-no-receipt-for-this-'purchase'. Ultimately, the only reason we finally managed to get it up was that we had, literally, no money left in the budget. And even then we had to promise never to connect the necessary linux box box to the rest of the network for "security reasons" (ok, fair enough, someone clueless like me setting up a redhat box could certainly compromise network security - I'm a sociologist, not a professional geek, sue me : ).
Anyway, to actually get to the point, now OS X is released, Grass, along with almost every *nix package I actually use to do non-computing related work, is being ported to OS X. And the IT department has worked with apple machines on their network before. And the PHBs have heard of Apple. They even use macs. So as I see it, this makes getting OS software solutions and operating systems into my workplace a lot easier, because it splits it all into a two step process (and I an *so* sick of seeing non-trivial chunks of my budget disappear in operating system licenses).
Step one is to introduce software solutions that 'happen' to be open source as "mac software" - not a hard sell to PHBs who like pretty macs and an IT department who is used to plugging the PHB's titanium executive toy into their NT network. Step two is introducing the idea that this very same software that is now an integral part of their operations can also run on x86 hardware - which tends to have cheaper up-front price tags and which tends to be laying about the place in abundance anyway. Oh, and we need to install another piece of software (called linux..) to make this happen, but it's also free, so no problems there.. : ) As long as we're not threatening to take away the PHB's titanium laptop, the bottom line makes it a no brainer.
* ok, so there's an NT port/version of Grass, but it was in beta at the time and we really needed something as stable as possible
"Bottom line is that "joe-average users" don't give a shit about ads, and aren't going to alter their media consumption patterns to keep them
away from what you may consider "lousy ads." The advertisers know this, and so are keeping up with technology in the name of
competition."
Yeah, sausage theory - keep adding sawdust bit by bit & your original customers won't notice that they're no longer eating the 100% meat sausage they became addicted to 10 years ago. Works fine until you have to flog your product to people who haven't been using/eating it for years.
Your dad might be resistant to looking for an alternate service, but my mum who is probably out there right now looking for the weather online for the first time, isn't going to put up with a long slow load and a lot of distracting crap when google gives here six other choices without the graphic spam..
Sites who implement this kind of thing may not loose a lot of their current users, but they won't attract a lot of new ones & at the speed things change on the internet [struggles to avoid buzzphrase..] that means they'll be on fuckedcompany within 6 months. How sad, never mind.
"Assume that phone numbers have at most 11 digits (ie 1-910-xxx-xxxx). Each digit has 10 different values. So there are 10^11, or 100,000,000,000 possible 10 digit phone numbers."
In Australia (where these guys are) you don't have to dial the first 1 to call long distance. All Australian numbers are 10 digits -> 10^10 -> 10,000,000,000. Even that's an excess - the Northern Territory has a population of barely 150,000 people and a whole area code (089) to itself. Heck, the whole country has only 20 million people..
Slashdot, where pointless nitpicking (often) == karma : )
Re:Where's the outrage for the other crap going on
on
Sklyarov Indicted
·
· Score: 1
"Okay, we've got protests getting organized left and right. I've received fundraising requests in my email. I see people up in arms and outraged with righteous indignation. Good for you. But where the hell were you guys for all the other crap going on in this country and all the rest? From the looks of things, you all act as if this were the first injustice ever perpetrated in history."
Oh, get over it. The fact that people who have never stood up to join a skirmish in the never-ending struggle to Prevent Injustice (tm) have suddenly done so is a GOOD THING. Even if this is the only fight a given individual gets involved in in her life, this is still a good thing. As a bonus, some of the people who get outraged about this will be exposed to the broader picture - that there's lots of Bad Things going on in the world, and that action by ordinary people can sometimes make a difference - and go on to contribute to other moves to reduce injustices in their communities and around the world.
Berating people for not having 'seen the light' about [insert injustice of choice]is exactly the sort of thing that discourages people from making a habit of contributing towards this sort of process.
I do research with coroner's / medical examiners files. I've done this kind of research both in Australia (where the files are _not_ public domain) and in the US (where, at least in California, they are).
These files contain a _lot_ of information, much of it connected to people other than the deceased. For example, the files contain the names, phone numbers and addresses of next of kin. They contain notes made by social workers about the details of their conversations and grief counselling with next of kin.
I'm kind of twitchy that this information is available in the public domain in the US - I think a good idea (letting the general public have good access to information that lets people work out for themselves what sorts of things are killing people in their area (eg unusually high levels of certain kinds of cancer due to illegal dumping of X)) - has been poorly implemented.
If you want to stick 'public records' on line, you might regard this as a good opportunity to look at the threshold between genuinely public data (that Joe Smith died 1/1/2001 and here's the case report and toxicology) and stuff that might not be regarded as public domain if people thought about it in more detail (that Joe Smith's mum's name is Jane Smith and here's her phone number, home address, place of work and the intimate details of her grief counselling following her son's death).
"In his article, "In Defense of the Hard Drive," Judge Rosenbaum cited an
example of what he thought to be an overly broad search -- a 1999 probe
by The New York Times Company of employee computer records at its
office in Norfolk, Virginia"
..and for those without the time / technical expertise (or the time & expertise to set up all of one's friends and relatives) there's always sneakemail: http://sneakemail.com
Lets you set up as many unique addresses as you want & forwards the mail sent to them to your regular account. If you get spammed, a) you know exactly where it came from, and b) you can shut down the forwarding. Very easy to use, very good for grandma Jones who doesn't have a clue about "all this technology" but who is already sick of spam..
Dunno if anyone's noticed the new 'phone book' function - type "your name" {your city/state/zip code} if you live in north america and see what comes back as the first google find. Your home address & phone number, at least if you're in the phone book.
I first noticed this function when searching for information on the professional work of someone who I was going to be working with - and the #1 thing google spat up was his home address and phone number. I know I could have found this almost immediately if I went actively looking for it, but it was a bit creepy anyway. I guess the reason I'm disturbed it that it wouldn't have occured to me to go looking for that information, but once it was thrust in my face like that, I could immediately think of reasons it might be handy to have it.. In the event, I didn't copy it down anywhere, but, well, I could think of people who wouldn't hesistate to call me at 3am if they had my home number..
Fortunately google seems willing to at least let you opt out - http://www.google.com/help/pbremoval.html - which is fine for people who know about google and its more esoteric functions, but ain't going to help Jane Shmoe when she starts wondering why so many more people seem to know here she lives and what her home number is - people who wouldn't necessarily have gone looking for the information (that would be rude..) but who don't mind having it when it's 'handed' to them.
Slashdot Mirror
ah, here's the actual bug report & more detailed workaround info:
2 311
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=
Looks like the fix has been made, but so far only on 'internal' builds (whatever that means) & will be added to the next public release. But yeah, this was one of a handful of bugs that annoyed the crap out of me when I switched from SO5.2 to SO6/OO.
As you say, even 'minor' bugs like this mean you still need a copy of Word around to idiotcheck douments you're working on in collaboration with MSOffice users. Let alone if you're required to submit final VeryImportant documents in Word format.. Gah.
"Spellcheck time! Uh, "The spellcheck is complete". I don't think so. Try again."
That's weird - the problem goes the other way with 'standard' open office & SO6 - save a document as W98/00 and Word would refuse to spellcheck it. The workaround is to select all & set language to [anything]. Fixed in the development version of openoffice, but needs the workaround in the stable release.
"An email containing a username and password is sent to the registrant a few hours after submission" [emphasis added]
Unless what you're selling is the one and only tool on the market which does the job it does, in "a few hours" I've found three other products which do what your thing does and I'm busily evaluating them instead. And one of them did the job I need it to. And I've forgotten you even exist.
Unless you really do have a stranglehold on a niche, go have a look around at how your competition deal with evaluation downloads. If some of them are making it even one step eaiser to test their junk, you can bet you're losing sales to them.
Kind of ironic that SciAm is wailing about the demise of the hobbyist magazine - they themselves used to be one of the pre-eminent tinkerer's magazines before a change in ownership in 1948
It's fairly natural to see any particular field go from producing information exchanges (and prior to the 'net, this pretty mich mean magazines) adressing the nuts and bolts of pursuing the field to producing information exchnages which largely address the contemporary problems to which the field is being applied.
Ever since that halfwit in the US patent office said "there's nothing left to be invented" at the turn of the century people have said that there was no longer a role for garage engineering in the advancement of technology. As we've seen repeatedly since, there are always new fields which depend for key bursts of work on people who use too much speed and can't find the key to the garage door. The only thing that's changed in recent years is the switch to the internet as a forum for trading ideas and techniques, hence the apparent dissappearance of the qunitisential tinkerer's magazine.
you must concede that the United States already has by far the most technologically advanced military in the world, and even without devices like this no other country can seriously challenge the United States in a conventional war
.. said [insert a random American pundit, cira 1964]
um, who won the Vietnam war again? who give a shit about "conventional" war - all that counts is whose political aims get furthered by the killing.
" But if worse comes to worse I'll buy up a bunch of microwave ovens, trip the door sensor, point a million pringles cans towards the sky, and show them what real 2.4 ghz interference is like :)."
Worked for the Serbian army : ) - US Navy was wondering why their extremely expensive radar-station detecting missiles kept thumping into empty fields.
Turns out the Serbians were using old microwave ovens on long extension cords (!) with the door open & pointing at the sky, door sensor jammed. Instant $100 missile honeypot.
type "dumb motherfucker" now & you get ten stories about the "dumb motherfucker" -> gwb search hit..
..except the fact the US continues to run simulations 'forces' other countries (notably France) to continue to test nuclear weapons to "calibrate" *their* simulations, which they happily admit don't match the sophistication of those conducted by the US.
Every time the US boasts about simulations like this one, they effectively encourage countries like France to crack another one on some poor innocent south pacific atoll.
" First, India's really a second-world nation. The first/second/third world definitions were western/communist/other, but India's definitely not 3rd world (Uganda, Sudan, Afghanistan), and definitely not first world."
Kinda ironic india invented the term 'third world' and applied it to themselves - the idea was the world was polarizing into the russian / american camps, & India saw that small, poor nations that cozied up to one or the other didn't do all that well, so decided to go down the route of 'independent neutrality'. Supposedly the rationale for this was all sorts of world-peace type reasons, but the (presumably hoped for & planned) outcome was the US and USSR outdid each other to see who could throw the most money & toys at the Indian Govt. Dig out an old copy of Janes from the 80s or earlier & have a look at which countries produced major chunks of hardware in the Indian military - a weirder mix of USA/USSR you won't find almost anywhere.
Can't think of too many other countries that did as well out of joining the 'third world' camp though, and it quickly became a catch-all term for places mostly thought of by westerners as stupefyingly poor.
So if I pay my subscription do I get back the ability to metamoderate and moderate that mysteriously disappeared after I modded up 'the post'?
"hey sarge, my infra red detector is barely working!"
"don't worry kid, the yanks are using those stupid self-heating jackets - stand out like a sore thumb no matter how clapped out our gear is.."
" "Drug & Alcohol Review", for example, is one of the more consistently relevant journals in my field
Rock star? Nightclub D.J? Record company executive?
"
Grin. Ah, alas, no such joy. Research on the harms to individuals & society caused by the mixture of said substances and government policy.
The other problem with online scientific journals is you have to convince *indexing* services to buy into it as well.
When I go to publish, I look at potential journals partially in terms of where they're indexed. "Drug & Alcohol Review", for example, is one of the more consistently relevant journals in my field - but it isn't indexed by PubMed. So as an author, I'm better off submitting to "Addiction" (also good, but for different reasons) because if accepted, my article will turn up as a result in more people's literature searches, which means I'll get cited more often, which helps a lot in the early stages of a research career.
So if a well established, reputable print journal like D&A Review can't get itself indexed by some of the more important indexing services, what chance has some brand new web-based journal got, no matter how big the names on its editorial board? And if it isn't indexed, there's no point in submitting to it unless absolutely no-one else will publish your work. Nasty chicken and egg situation setting itself up immediately there..
Having said all that, Soros has cracked a few interesting nuts in the last few years, & I wish him luck with this one.
well that kind of logic was working fine for whoever flew those planes into the WTC towers.. :)
Ahh, the irony of your sig file.. "Kill 'em all and let God sort it out later..."
Usually attributed to Arnaud Armaury, spiritual advisor to the crusade against the Cathars in the south of France in the 13th century. When the Pope's troops arrived at Beziers and the locals refused to hand over the Cathari heretics in their midst, the leader of the army asked Armaury what to do. He is reported to have replied "Kill them all, God will know his own".
The army killed between 10,000 and 15,000 of the citizens of Beziers, presumably including the 200 or so Cathars estimated to have been living in Beziers at the time.
So you do indeed join an interesting tradition when you quote that motto.
I used to work at a small-town newspaper - we gave all the reporters old macs with nothing but simpletext and excaliber (drag&drop spellcheck, usually comes bundled with the mac version of latex). Reporters had to actually concentrate on content not layout. Once written, a story was kicked to a single layout person who pasted the whole lot into quark & fussed about with presentation. Jacked our production rate *way* up from an earlier system involving reporters prettyifying their work in word before layout people had to strip it all back out before pasteup..
One of the nicest things about OS X is Apple is a company most IT departments and PHBs have heard of and have even worked with.
Why does this matter? Well, let me give an example. Recently I worked on a research project which needed some mapping done, & had no leftover budget to purchase an expensive proprietary solution (the usual preferred solution of our "where's my kickback" IT department through whom all software aquisition must go). Looking around, I found the GrassGIS package (http://www.baylor.edu/grass/), an open source & free-as-in-beer solution.
Great, except the IT department hated the idea - no receipt, no box, no CD, no kickback, and, probably most importantly, it ran on Linux* & they were (still are) deadly afraid of linux-in-the-workplace for a wide range of reasons not limited to the fear a lot of people might start asking why we're paying $$$$ for M$ solutions if free-as-in-beer solutions can do the same thing in many instances.
To get it past them, I had to sell the entire concept to some PHBs. This took months, and required explaining a lot of things, ranging from what-is-linux through to why-there-is-no-receipt-for-this-'purchase'. Ultimately, the only reason we finally managed to get it up was that we had, literally, no money left in the budget. And even then we had to promise never to connect the necessary linux box box to the rest of the network for "security reasons" (ok, fair enough, someone clueless like me setting up a redhat box could certainly compromise network security - I'm a sociologist, not a professional geek, sue me : ).
Anyway, to actually get to the point, now OS X is released, Grass, along with almost every *nix package I actually use to do non-computing related work, is being ported to OS X. And the IT department has worked with apple machines on their network before. And the PHBs have heard of Apple. They even use macs. So as I see it, this makes getting OS software solutions and operating systems into my workplace a lot easier, because it splits it all into a two step process (and I an *so* sick of seeing non-trivial chunks of my budget disappear in operating system licenses).
Step one is to introduce software solutions that 'happen' to be open source as "mac software" - not a hard sell to PHBs who like pretty macs and an IT department who is used to plugging the PHB's titanium executive toy into their NT network. Step two is introducing the idea that this very same software that is now an integral part of their operations can also run on x86 hardware - which tends to have cheaper up-front price tags and which tends to be laying about the place in abundance anyway. Oh, and we need to install another piece of software (called linux..) to make this happen, but it's also free, so no problems there.. : ) As long as we're not threatening to take away the PHB's titanium laptop, the bottom line makes it a no brainer.
* ok, so there's an NT port/version of Grass, but it was in beta at the time and we really needed something as stable as possible
"Bottom line is that "joe-average users" don't give a shit about ads, and aren't going to alter their media consumption patterns to keep them away from what you may consider "lousy ads." The advertisers know this, and so are keeping up with technology in the name of competition."
Yeah, sausage theory - keep adding sawdust bit by bit & your original customers won't notice that they're no longer eating the 100% meat sausage they became addicted to 10 years ago. Works fine until you have to flog your product to people who haven't been using/eating it for years.
Your dad might be resistant to looking for an alternate service, but my mum who is probably out there right now looking for the weather online for the first time, isn't going to put up with a long slow load and a lot of distracting crap when google gives here six other choices without the graphic spam..
Sites who implement this kind of thing may not loose a lot of their current users, but they won't attract a lot of new ones & at the speed things change on the internet [struggles to avoid buzzphrase..] that means they'll be on fuckedcompany within 6 months. How sad, never mind.
"Your .sig contains mismatched parentheses"
grin. ahh, but I stand disproved - your score still sits at zero..
Now should it be
(pointless nitpicking (often) == karma : )
or
pointless (nitpicking (often) == karma : )
"Assume that phone numbers have at most 11 digits (ie 1-910-xxx-xxxx). Each digit has 10 different values. So there are 10^11, or 100,000,000,000 possible 10 digit phone numbers."
In Australia (where these guys are) you don't have to dial the first 1 to call long distance. All Australian numbers are 10 digits -> 10^10 -> 10,000,000,000. Even that's an excess - the Northern Territory has a population of barely 150,000 people and a whole area code (089) to itself. Heck, the whole country has only 20 million people..
Slashdot, where pointless nitpicking (often) == karma : )
"Okay, we've got protests getting organized left and right. I've received fundraising requests in my email. I see people up in arms and outraged with righteous indignation. Good for you. But where the hell were you guys for all the other crap going on in this country and all the rest? From the looks of things, you all act as if this were the first injustice ever perpetrated in history."
Oh, get over it. The fact that people who have never stood up to join a skirmish in the never-ending struggle to Prevent Injustice (tm) have suddenly done so is a GOOD THING. Even if this is the only fight a given individual gets involved in in her life, this is still a good thing. As a bonus, some of the people who get outraged about this will be exposed to the broader picture - that there's lots of Bad Things going on in the world, and that action by ordinary people can sometimes make a difference - and go on to contribute to other moves to reduce injustices in their communities and around the world.
Berating people for not having 'seen the light' about [insert injustice of choice]is exactly the sort of thing that discourages people from making a habit of contributing towards this sort of process.
I do research with coroner's / medical examiners files. I've done this kind of research both in Australia (where the files are _not_ public domain) and in the US (where, at least in California, they are).
These files contain a _lot_ of information, much of it connected to people other than the deceased. For example, the files contain the names, phone numbers and addresses of next of kin. They contain notes made by social workers about the details of their conversations and grief counselling with next of kin.
I'm kind of twitchy that this information is available in the public domain in the US - I think a good idea (letting the general public have good access to information that lets people work out for themselves what sorts of things are killing people in their area (eg unusually high levels of certain kinds of cancer due to illegal dumping of X)) - has been poorly implemented.
If you want to stick 'public records' on line, you might regard this as a good opportunity to look at the threshold between genuinely public data (that Joe Smith died 1/1/2001 and here's the case report and toxicology) and stuff that might not be regarded as public domain if people thought about it in more detail (that Joe Smith's mum's name is Jane Smith and here's her phone number, home address, place of work and the intimate details of her grief counselling following her son's death).
Just my 2 cents.
"In his article, "In Defense of the Hard Drive," Judge Rosenbaum cited an example of what he thought to be an overly broad search -- a 1999 probe by The New York Times Company of employee computer records at its office in Norfolk, Virginia"
..and for those without the time / technical expertise (or the time & expertise to set up all of one's friends and relatives) there's always sneakemail: http://sneakemail.com
Lets you set up as many unique addresses as you want & forwards the mail sent to them to your regular account. If you get spammed, a) you know exactly where it came from, and b) you can shut down the forwarding. Very easy to use, very good for grandma Jones who doesn't have a clue about "all this technology" but who is already sick of spam..
Dunno if anyone's noticed the new 'phone book' function - type "your name" {your city/state/zip code} if you live in north america and see what comes back as the first google find. Your home address & phone number, at least if you're in the phone book.
I first noticed this function when searching for information on the professional work of someone who I was going to be working with - and the #1 thing google spat up was his home address and phone number. I know I could have found this almost immediately if I went actively looking for it, but it was a bit creepy anyway. I guess the reason I'm disturbed it that it wouldn't have occured to me to go looking for that information, but once it was thrust in my face like that, I could immediately think of reasons it might be handy to have it.. In the event, I didn't copy it down anywhere, but, well, I could think of people who wouldn't hesistate to call me at 3am if they had my home number..
Fortunately google seems willing to at least let you opt out - http://www.google.com/help/pbremoval.html - which is fine for people who know about google and its more esoteric functions, but ain't going to help Jane Shmoe when she starts wondering why so many more people seem to know here she lives and what her home number is - people who wouldn't necessarily have gone looking for the information (that would be rude..) but who don't mind having it when it's 'handed' to them.