It's funny, really, that so many people think that big vehicles are safer. In reality, they only seem safer. While you may have a better chance of surviving an accident, you have a lower chance of avoiding an accident.
If you are in a situation that requires quickly steering out of the lane you are in and back in again (perhaps because there is a stopped vehicle in front of you) a higher, heavier vehicle is more likely to lose control at the same speed as a passenger car.
There is one additional way in which heavier vehicles (like SUVs) make us less safe. If you are in a car and are low to the ground, you feel less safe and might drive more slowly and carefully. If you are high up and surrounded by lots of metal, you might feel invincible, go faster, and take more chances.
I think I cut the article and have it at home, but I am not at home. I vaguely remember it listing the Toyota Avalon as having one of the best accident statistics.
A normal subway system might have DC power delivered at the third rail at either 600 Volts or 750 Volts. It can provide several thousand amps (6000 Amp IIRC). So using the lower voltage figure, thats 3600 KW.
I think third rails are about 5 inches by 5 inches.
You should see what a CRT monitor looks like 50 feet away from third rails when a train approaches.
I took Amtrak once a week between Roseville, California and Oakland, California for about a year. This is about 100 miles.
It took longer than the shortest drive time in a car. I think the longest it was late was about 45 minutes. But when you drive, your time is lost. You can't read a newspaper or a book. You can't break out a laptop and do some work. You had better not be enjoying an alcoholic beverage while you are driving your car. I used some of the time on the train to study for certification exams.
I have been working in Southern California lately and took Amtrak between Oceanside and Burbank. The only thing bad about that train was that it was standing room only. I got a seat, but some people didn't. For that trip, taking the train was more pleasant than driving across the greater Los Angeles area.
I have lived in California since 1973 and I am amazed at how much passenger rail has grown here in the land of the car. Metrolink in all over greater Los Angeles.
The thing I like about the train versus flying is that you don't have to show up 2 hours early at the airport. You don't have to go through security and worry about what you have packed in your bags. You can show up at the last minute and buy a ticket before walking on board. Oh just try buying a ticket and walking on a train that goes between major cities in Europe. You need reservations for that kind of trip on a European train.
Once, I was flying United to Sacramento with a stop in San Francisco. The flight into San Francisco was late and I could not get a seat on any of the remaining flights that day. United said they could get me on a flight the next morning. I responded that I could get home in 3 hours by train and got a refund for the final portion of my trip. With the money, I rode the subway to Oakland, took the Amtrak to Sacramento, then took a cab to the Sacramento airport where my car was parked.
To me, occasional bad experiences on the train compare favorably to "road rage" incidents driving on the highway.
When you are near the border with Mexico, you might get stopped.
I was stargazing very near the border between California and Mexico and was driving home early in the morning. I was stopped and asked what state I was born in and maybe some other questions I don't remember 20 years later.
It used to be, and perhaps still is the case that if you are near the border between California and Nevada, you might be asked if you have fruit with you.
I guess if you have an out of state piece of fruit, it might have a bug in it that could wipe out some of the crops here in California.
Comparing GIMP to the full version of Photoshop is a straw man argument. Compare it instead to Photoshop Elements. Elements is about $100, not about $700.
I have used both Elements and GIMP and find Elements much more intuitive. This is even though I used GIMP first. Elements also supports the RAW mode for my Nikon D70.
I now only use GIMP when I don't have access to my home machine, where the one licensed copy I have is installed.
Elements also allows you to organize your photos into categories without having to create a directory structure. It has built in partial and full backup functions.
I see this as the equivalent of waving a toy gun in front of a cop.
They will shoot you under those circumstances. Afterwards, the cop will defend his actions as saying, "I wasn't going to take the chance that I or someone the surrounding area would be shot."
You think this is overreaction. I think it is a good self-preservation strategy to avoid looking like you are armed with a deadly weapon when you are near police. It is the sort of thing that may ultimately determine whether a young person gets to be an old person.
This time, the police managed to figure out it was not a real bomb before shooting her.
I can understand how a cop, after making those decisions in seconds, might be a little worked up and say "She's lucky not to be dead."
You might not be concerned if a cop is shot or blown up, but the cop sure is.
I like the part about the three different railroad gauges in the Southern United States contributing to the Union victory in the Civil War. Sometimes innovation bites you in the ass.
It generates passwords for you, letting you set the length and what characters are included. Then it stores them all for you. You can use one password to protect all your other ones. You can even set expiration in the program to remind you when to change a password.
I used to re-use the same three or four passwords everywhere. But now nearly all of mine are quite random.
Democracy could work well if the electorate valued education and knowledge. One could imagine a country where even low-skilled, less-educated people hoped their own children went beyond their accomplishments by getting more education and going into higher skilled fields than they did.
These same people might vote for candidates they felt had more knowledge and expertise than they did because they wanted such people running things.
That pro-intellectual drive is always countered by an anti-intellectual drive. Some people to distrust elites and vote for people who are "just like them." Those people might think that a college education ruins people.
The ideal political figure is either educated or knows who to call on for each area of expertise. But they also have to have the ability to speak the language of the anti-intellectuals in order to get elected.
I think the ideal populace is one where the leaders don't have to "dumb it down" in order to get elected.
A non-democratic system might be able to dictate that elites are in control of areas in which they are knowledgeable. But it might also end up differently. A king or oligarchy might make good decisions or bad ones. They might be benevolent or not.
In the early '80s, I bought a used, rack-mounted electronic device. I also got some analog multipliers along with them.
I took it to work where they had oscilloscopes I could use. One of the owners of the company recognized what it was and told me it was an analog computer.
It had op-amp boards in it with a power backplane (you need +15 and -15 volts plus ground for example). On the end of each board was a row of holes connected to various inputs and outputs on the board.
There were other boards with nails coming out of them, that you could solder together to make a "program". So you could switch from one program to another by pulling out all the boards with nails and wires, re-arranging the op-amp boards, and putting in a different set of boards with nails and wires.
I was in college at the time and they guy who explained how it all worked was Ro Favreau. He had worked with analog computers for solving artillery trajectory problems.
I remember fondly talking to him about it all and learning. I hope I will be able to pass on something I've learned over the years to some young man or woman engineer.
I am not a pro, but I researched this a little before buying my photo printer. I think I would be considered in the "Pro-Am" category.
Epson Ultrachrome pigment-based inks are fairly long lasting. I bought an Epson R800 printer, which works with these inks, and I use it a lot. According to Welhelm, the prints should last 100+ if framed under glass. These are the photos I care about as I hope to sell prints someday soon. I don't want to take someone's money and have them disappointed when 3 years later, the color has faded.
I started taking 35mm photos in the late '70s and the colors have definitely faded since then in both the prints and the negatives. The black and white photos look the same as the day I printed them.
Making your own prints is more expensive than having someone else do it. But if you are into photography, you might enjoy the control you get and the learning process of how to produce good digital photos.
The ink-jet, Epson Ultrachrome inks produce prints that last longer than film based color prints.
You always have the choise of not taking the job in San Francisco or Silicon Valley.
I also live 100 miles from the San Francisco Bay Area, but I work 2.2 miles from where I live. It takes me 8 minutes to get to work.
There are lots more IT jobs in the Bay Area, but in my mind, the cost of real estate, the crowded roads, the expensive parking almost everywhere are just not worth it.
When my job requires me to travel to the Bay Area, I try to take the train.
Slightly Offtopic Rant
After taking the train between Sacramento and Oakland, California many times, I was on vacation in Europe. I was surprised to find that our trains compare favorably to those in Western Europe. Of course, YMMV.
The European trains charge foreigners more than locals for the fares. This not immediately apparent until you realize that locals can get a discount card. If you are going to Europe everybody says "get a Eurail pass." Then you find out that some routes only have so many seats available for rail passes. Our US $500 rail passes (for two people) were no good between Paris and Brussels. We were told we would have to buy additional full fare tickets to ride the train. That was four days in advance!
It turned out to be 1/3 the cost to buy bus tickets instead. And the bus was pleasant. Another time, we were trying to make reservations at the train station in Amsterdam. Their computer was down and they didn't know when it would be back up. So that's three trips to the train station for one train trip.
My point is that at least in California, trains are getting better and better. Here, I can buy a ticket for a 100 mile train ride for under $20 at the last minute and just get on board. After hearing for years how much better European trains are than ours, I was quite surprised to have the opposite experience.
Paris to Brussels is 200 miles though. The full fare ticket would have been about 80 euro or US $100 per person.
End of Slightly Offtopic Rant
Although there are people who spend 3 or 4 hours a day, 5 days a week. They are making a choice. They choose a bigger house and a bigger yard, with less time to spend in it. Or you can get a job closer to an affordable place to live.
On my land line, I have an answering machine. I screen 98% of my calls. If you really want to talk to me, leave a message. I also got caller ID on it.
Telemarketers call all the time. If it is right about dinner time, you can be certain it is a telemarketer. But they here my answering machine message and hang up. I get a little kick out of it. I imagine them saying "Is this guy ever home?"
People that know me, know they have to leave me a message.
When I want to talk to someone in my family, I use the landline because it sounds much better.
In the early 80's, a VAX was a good solution for runnnig FFTs. They had a great FORTRAN compiler and that was what FFT code was written in.
I suppose they could have used an IBM mainframe or an array processor at the time. I think the first VAX, an 11/780, was about a third the cost of a mainframe. I don't know what array processors cost back then.
By 1990, VAXes became underpowered relative to RISC processor based systems.
My current job involves, amoung other things, safety wiring and control systems.
One thing I found interesting is that the emergency stop button for safety systems always has electrical current going through it. In the case of a saws and robots, that current might hold a relay closed, which in turn delivers power to the saw or robot.
The reason they wire it that way is so that if the wire ever breaks or becomes disconnected from the emergency stop button, the machine stops. For those systems, stopping the machine when you don't mean to is preferable to not stopping the machine the one time in ten years that you really need to.
I had worked with computers for years and would never have though of doing it that way.
The most common "big red button" I see turns off the power to subway third rail power. Now if they could do something about workers getting hit by trains.
I had two points in my post. One was countering the idea that you couldn't rent the movies that are winning Oscars.
The second point is why would I care about watching movies on a computer. Computers are more expensive than DVD players. My computer is not in my living room.
Meanwhile, the average/.'er is bashing a for pay movie download service because they only support Windows. Outside of/., how many people are worried about this? How many people go down to the video rental place to rent a movie or sign up for NetFlix or use video on demand? Lots and lots of people.
How many people want to watch movies on their computer? A relatively small number. How many of them have a problem with using either an Apple based solution or a Windows-only solution ? An even smaller number of people.
Perhaps you are looking for a solution to a problem most people don't have.
That's funny. We rented "The Departed" a week and a half ago from our local video store.
We only watched it once. But we don't watch movies on a computer.
They are turning their backs on the enourmous market of people who want to watch movies on their computers, but are only willing to do it on Linux or Mac OS.;)
I read in TFM that he was tried and convicted based on his picketing activities outside a Scientology film studio. Since then, I have not been able to get to TFM.
So he was not arrested for that usenet discussion. He has been sued in civil court for publishing Scientology documents. He defended himself and lost, to the tune of $75,000. He then declared bankruptcy. At that time, he started repeatedly picketing a Scientology film studio.
When he was convicted and sentenced to six months in jail (for the picketing), he chose to flee to Canada because he believed that Scientologists would have him killed in prison.
He applied for political asylum in Canada. After three years, Canada asked him to appear in person to hear what the decision was. Fearing deportation, he packed up and left Canada the night before.
So no, usenet posting, in this case, did not get him arrested.
I used to run Linux as my desktop 95% of the time. That was for about 4 years. Then I switched back to windows.
Quicken is much better than GNU Cash. On windows, I can choose between Photoshop Elements and GIMP. On Linux, I can only run GIMP. I can also run Open Office on windows. Same for PostgreSQL, JBoss, Eclipse.
I got busy and no longer had time to figure out why when I upgraded my OS software, my CD burner didn't work anymore or my sound driver, or my digital camera program stopped working. Also, Eclipse works, but you can't use it to print (this was over a year ago) on Linux/Unix. Yet another feature.
The final kicker was when my system failed and I needed to get a new computer up and running quickly. Do I re-create my triple boot system out of the Windows box I bought? I had just gotten Fedora Core with SELinux properly configured (which took some doing back then) just before the crash.
Another big annoyance was trying to do my taxes and doing something simple like reports of transactions for a given category. The OSS answer: learn Scheme and write your own reports. Yeah right.
With windows, I spend a whole lot less time keeping my desktop going. I have more software options. I can buy hardware without searching the web to see if it is compatible.
It was on a previous/. password discussion that I heard about KeePass.
I have started using it to keep all my web passwords and a few router passwords. It has a built in random password generator. The combination makes it easy to have every password hard to guess, different, and not have me forget it.
It reduces, for me the problem to having one easy to remember password on the file itself and to maintain physical security on the file itself. Someone could get access to the file, but they would have to be up to the task of cracking it. That is better security than a sticky note.
Slashdot Mirror
It's funny, really, that so many people think that big vehicles are safer.
In reality, they only seem safer. While you may have a better chance of surviving
an accident, you have a lower chance of avoiding an accident.
If you are in a situation that requires quickly steering out of the lane you are in and
back in again (perhaps because there is a stopped vehicle in front of you) a higher,
heavier vehicle is more likely to lose control at the same speed as a passenger car.
There is one additional way in which heavier vehicles (like SUVs) make us less safe.
If you are in a car and are low to the ground, you feel less safe and might drive more
slowly and carefully. If you are high up and surrounded by lots of metal, you might feel
invincible, go faster, and take more chances.
Source: Malcolm Gladwell, Commerce & Culture, "Big and Bad," The New Yorker, January 12, 2004, p. 28. This article is abstracted here: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/01/12/040112fa_fact_gladwell
I think I cut the article and have it at home, but I am not at home. I vaguely remember
it listing the Toyota Avalon as having one of the best accident statistics.
A normal subway system might have DC power delivered at the third rail at either
600 Volts or 750 Volts. It can provide several thousand amps (6000 Amp IIRC).
So using the lower voltage figure, thats 3600 KW.
I think third rails are about 5 inches by 5 inches.
You should see what a CRT monitor looks like 50 feet away from third rails
when a train approaches.
I took Amtrak once a week between Roseville, California and Oakland, California for about a year.
This is about 100 miles.
It took longer than the shortest drive time in a car. I think the longest it was late was about 45 minutes. But when you drive, your time is lost. You can't read a newspaper or a book.
You can't break out a laptop and do some work. You had better not be enjoying an alcoholic beverage while you are driving your car.
I used some of the time on the train to study for certification exams.
I have been working in Southern California lately and took Amtrak between Oceanside and Burbank.
The only thing bad about that train was that it was standing room only. I got a seat, but some people didn't.
For that trip, taking the train was more pleasant than driving across the greater Los Angeles area.
I have lived in California since 1973 and I am amazed at how much passenger rail has grown here
in the land of the car. Metrolink in all over greater Los Angeles.
The thing I like about the train versus flying is that you don't have to show up 2 hours early at the airport. You don't have to go through security and worry about what you have packed
in your bags. You can show up at the last minute and buy a ticket before walking on board.
Oh just try buying a ticket and walking on a train that goes between major cities in Europe.
You need reservations for that kind of trip on a European train.
Once, I was flying United to Sacramento with a stop in San Francisco. The flight into San Francisco was late and I could not get a seat on any of the remaining flights that day. United said they could get me on a flight the next morning.
I responded that I could get home in 3 hours by train and got a refund for the final portion of
my trip. With the money, I rode the subway to Oakland, took the Amtrak to Sacramento,
then took a cab to the Sacramento airport where my car was parked.
To me, occasional bad experiences on the train compare favorably to "road rage" incidents driving
on the highway.
YMMV.
I have had the same experience back in the 1980s.
It is not just something that started recently.
When you are near the border with Mexico, you might get stopped.
I was stargazing very near the border between California and Mexico and
was driving home early in the morning. I was stopped and asked what
state I was born in and maybe some other questions I don't remember 20 years later.
It used to be, and perhaps still is the case that if you are near the border
between California and Nevada, you might be asked if you have fruit with you.
I guess if you have an out of state piece of fruit, it might have a bug in it
that could wipe out some of the crops here in California.
Comparing GIMP to the full version of Photoshop is a straw man argument. Compare it instead to Photoshop Elements. Elements is about $100, not about $700.
I have used both Elements and GIMP and find Elements much more intuitive. This is even though
I used GIMP first. Elements also supports the RAW mode for my Nikon D70.
I now only use GIMP when I don't have access to my home machine, where the one licensed copy I have is installed.
Elements also allows you to organize your photos into categories without having to create a directory structure. It has built in partial and full backup functions.
Of course, YMMV.
I see this as the equivalent of waving a toy gun in front of a cop.
They will shoot you under those circumstances. Afterwards, the cop will defend his actions
as saying, "I wasn't going to take the chance that I or someone the surrounding area
would be shot."
You think this is overreaction. I think it is a good self-preservation strategy to
avoid looking like you are armed with a deadly weapon when you are near police.
It is the sort of thing that may ultimately determine whether a young person gets to be
an old person.
This time, the police managed to figure out it was not a real bomb before shooting her.
I can understand how a cop, after making those decisions in seconds, might be a little
worked up and say "She's lucky not to be dead."
You might not be concerned if a cop is shot or blown up, but the cop sure is.
http://www.timetools.co.uk/
They are a lot more than $20. Now I am just waiting for the customer to
provide another hole in the roof so we can get our GPS antenna outside.
I like the part about the three different railroad gauges in the Southern United States
contributing to the Union victory in the Civil War.
Sometimes innovation bites you in the ass.
The situation starts making a lot more sense after you read the parent's link.
KeePass
It generates passwords for you, letting you set the length and what
characters are included. Then it stores them all for you.
You can use one password to protect all your other ones.
You can even set expiration in the program to remind you when to change
a password.
I used to re-use the same three or four passwords everywhere. But now
nearly all of mine are quite random.
Give it a try.
Democracy could work well if the electorate valued education and knowledge.
One could imagine a country where even low-skilled, less-educated people
hoped their own children went beyond their accomplishments by getting
more education and going into higher skilled fields than they did.
These same people might vote for candidates they felt had more knowledge and
expertise than they did because they wanted such people running things.
That pro-intellectual drive is always countered by an anti-intellectual drive.
Some people to distrust elites and vote for people who are "just like them."
Those people might think that a college education ruins people.
The ideal political figure is either educated or knows who to call on for each
area of expertise. But they also have to have the ability to speak the language of the
anti-intellectuals in order to get elected.
I think the ideal populace is one where the leaders don't have to "dumb it down" in order
to get elected.
A non-democratic system might be able to dictate that elites are in control of
areas in which they are knowledgeable. But it might also end up differently.
A king or oligarchy might make good decisions or bad ones. They might be
benevolent or not.
In the early '80s, I bought a used, rack-mounted electronic device. I also got some
analog multipliers along with them.
I took it to work where they had oscilloscopes I could use. One of the owners
of the company recognized what it was and told me it was an analog computer.
It had op-amp boards in it with a power backplane (you need +15 and -15 volts plus ground
for example). On the end of each board was a row of holes connected to various inputs
and outputs on the board.
There were other boards with nails coming out of them, that you could solder together
to make a "program". So you could switch from one program to another by pulling
out all the boards with nails and wires, re-arranging the op-amp boards, and putting in a different
set of boards with nails and wires.
I was in college at the time and they guy who explained how it all worked was
Ro Favreau. He had worked with analog computers for solving artillery
trajectory problems.
I remember fondly talking to him about it all and learning. I hope I will be able to pass on something I've learned over the years to some young man or woman engineer.
I am not a pro, but I researched this a little before buying my photo printer. I think
I would be considered in the "Pro-Am" category.
Epson Ultrachrome pigment-based inks are fairly long lasting. I bought an Epson R800
printer, which works with these inks, and I use it a lot. According to Welhelm, the prints should last 100+ if
framed under glass. These are the photos I care about as I hope to sell prints someday soon. I don't want to take someone's money
and have them disappointed when 3 years later, the color has faded.
I started taking 35mm photos in the late '70s and the colors have definitely faded since then in
both the prints and the negatives. The black and white photos look the same as the day
I printed them.
Making your own prints is more expensive than having someone else do it. But if you are
into photography, you might enjoy the control you get and the learning process of how
to produce good digital photos.
The ink-jet, Epson Ultrachrome inks produce prints that last longer than film based color prints.
You always have the choise of not taking the job in San Francisco or Silicon Valley.
I also live 100 miles from the San Francisco Bay Area, but I work 2.2 miles from where I live. It takes me 8 minutes to get to work.
There are lots more IT jobs in the Bay Area, but in my mind, the cost of real estate, the crowded roads, the expensive parking almost everywhere are just not worth it.
When my job requires me to travel to the Bay Area, I try to take the train.
Slightly Offtopic Rant
After taking the train between Sacramento and Oakland, California many times, I was on
vacation in Europe. I was surprised to find that our trains compare favorably to
those in Western Europe. Of course, YMMV.
The European trains charge foreigners more than locals for the fares. This not immediately
apparent until you realize that locals can get a discount card.
If you are going to Europe everybody says "get a Eurail pass." Then you find out
that some routes only have so many seats available for rail passes. Our US $500
rail passes (for two people) were no good between Paris and Brussels. We were told we would have to buy additional full fare tickets to ride the train. That was four days in advance!
It turned out to be 1/3 the cost to buy bus tickets instead. And the bus was pleasant.
Another time, we were trying to make reservations at the train station in Amsterdam.
Their computer was down and they didn't know when it would be back up. So that's
three trips to the train station for one train trip.
My point is that at least in California, trains are getting better and better. Here,
I can buy a ticket for a 100 mile train ride for under $20 at the last minute and just get on board.
After hearing for years how much better European trains are than ours, I was quite
surprised to have the opposite experience.
Paris to Brussels is 200 miles though. The full fare ticket would have been about 80 euro or US $100 per person.
End of Slightly Offtopic Rant
Although there are people who spend 3 or 4 hours a day, 5 days a week. They are making a
choice. They choose a bigger house and a bigger yard, with less time to spend in it.
Or you can get a job closer to an affordable place to live.
Answering machine.
On my land line, I have an answering machine. I screen 98% of my calls.
If you really want to talk to me, leave a message. I also got caller ID
on it.
Telemarketers call all the time. If it is right about dinner time, you
can be certain it is a telemarketer. But they here my answering machine
message and hang up. I get a little kick out of it. I imagine them
saying "Is this guy ever home?"
People that know me, know they have to leave me a message.
When I want to talk to someone in my family, I use the landline because
it sounds much better.
In the early 80's, a VAX was a good solution for runnnig FFTs.
They had a great FORTRAN compiler and that was what FFT code was written in.
I suppose they could have used an IBM mainframe or an array processor
at the time. I think the first VAX, an 11/780, was about a third the
cost of a mainframe. I don't know what array processors cost back then.
By 1990, VAXes became underpowered relative to RISC processor based systems.
My current job involves, amoung other things, safety wiring and control systems.
One thing I found interesting is that the emergency stop button for safety
systems always has electrical current going through it. In the case of a saws
and robots, that current might hold a relay closed, which in turn delivers power
to the saw or robot.
The reason they wire it that way is so that if the wire ever breaks or becomes
disconnected from the emergency stop button, the machine stops.
For those systems, stopping the machine when you don't mean to is preferable
to not stopping the machine the one time in ten years that you really need to.
I had worked with computers for years and would never have though of doing it that way.
The most common "big red button" I see turns off the power to subway third rail
power. Now if they could do something about workers getting hit by trains.
I had two points in my post. One was countering the idea that you couldn't rent the
/.'er is bashing a for pay movie download service because they /., how many people are worried about this?
movies that are winning Oscars.
The second point is why would I care about watching movies on a computer. Computers
are more expensive than DVD players. My computer is not in my living room.
Meanwhile, the average
only support Windows. Outside of
How many people go down to the video rental place to rent a movie or sign up for NetFlix
or use video on demand?
Lots and lots of people.
How many people want to watch movies on their computer? A relatively small number.
How many of them have a problem with using either an Apple based solution or a Windows-only solution ?
An even smaller number of people.
Perhaps you are looking for a solution to a problem most people don't have.
That's funny. We rented "The Departed" a week and a half ago from our local video store.
;)
We only watched it once. But we don't watch movies on a computer.
They are turning their backs on the enourmous market of people who want to watch movies on
their computers, but are only willing to do it on Linux or Mac OS.
I read in TFM that he was tried and convicted based on his picketing activities outside a Scientology film studio. Since then, I have not been able to get to TFM.
You can read about it here.
So he was not arrested for that usenet discussion. He has been sued in civil court
for publishing Scientology documents. He defended himself and lost, to the tune
of $75,000. He then declared bankruptcy. At that time, he started repeatedly picketing
a Scientology film studio.
When he was convicted and sentenced to six months in jail (for the picketing),
he chose to flee to Canada because he believed that Scientologists would have him
killed in prison.
He applied for political asylum in Canada. After three years, Canada asked him
to appear in person to hear what the decision was. Fearing deportation, he packed up
and left Canada the night before.
So no, usenet posting, in this case, did not get him arrested.
In the old days, we used to call them tobacco scientists.
You may or may not remember all the scientists the cigarette companies
paid, who just happened to find that cigarrettes were not bad for you.
Of course, their results were not published in peer reviewed journals.
Pointing out that "They were paid by ExxonMobil" is an ad hominem attack
doesn't mean these scientists are right.
Let their results get published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
Until then, I for one will ignore them.
Remember the tobacco scientists!
for that link. It led me eventually to a wonderful web site.
That site, in turn, got me to Are You a Quack?.
Years ago, my being a Physics major qualified me as a crank magnet. I guess the Physics professors were too busy so I was dealing with the overflow.
I used to run Linux as my desktop 95% of the time. That was for about 4 years. Then I switched back to windows.
Quicken is much better than GNU Cash. On windows, I can choose between Photoshop Elements and GIMP. On Linux, I can only run GIMP. I can also run Open Office on windows.
Same for PostgreSQL, JBoss, Eclipse.
I got busy and no longer had time to figure out why when I upgraded my OS software, my CD burner didn't work anymore or my sound driver, or my digital camera program stopped working.
Also, Eclipse works, but you can't use it to print (this was over a year ago) on Linux/Unix.
Yet another feature.
The final kicker was when my system failed and I needed to get a new computer up and running quickly. Do I re-create my triple boot system out of the Windows box I bought?
I had just gotten Fedora Core with SELinux properly configured (which took some doing back then) just before the crash.
Another big annoyance was trying to do my taxes and doing something simple like reports of transactions for a given category.
The OSS answer: learn Scheme and write your own reports. Yeah right.
With windows, I spend a whole lot less time keeping my desktop going. I have more software options. I can buy hardware without searching the web to see if it is compatible.
It was on a previous /. password discussion that I heard about KeePass.
I have started using it to keep all my web passwords and a few router passwords.
It has a built in random password generator. The combination makes it easy to
have every password hard to guess, different, and not have me forget it.
It reduces, for me the problem to having one easy to remember password on the file
itself and to maintain physical security on the file itself.
Someone could get access to the file, but they would have to be up to the task
of cracking it. That is better security than a sticky note.
I had heard of the problems with iTunes 7.0. So until recently, I stayed
with the previous version. Then I recently relented and did the update.
It seems that I skipped over the bugs, since I got 7.0.2.16 and it works
just fine. I listen to podcasts and buy about one song a month.