The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Alan Hamilton:

To be strictly fair, "child of a friend" who sent an e-mail sounds a lot like "friend of a friend" to me. I'd want to see a little more documentation before going any further.

Tke a look at this old NTSB report. It's a 1974 report on an a blown tire on a DC-8.

This was a typewritten document, scanned into Acrobat. Note the funny font substitutions, even though the original was certainly typed on a Selectric.

When a document is scanned into Acrobat, it tries to do some basic OCR so that text is treated as text rather than just a graphic image. For example, you can copy and paste it as text. On a fuzzy original, this leads to the font substitutions seen in this document.

The Bush memos I've seen are also Acrobat documents. Note that you can copy/paste text on the Bush memos -- you can highlight text and copy it into another programs. If whoever prepared the copies did it by scanning into Acrobat, you can't rely on the fonts and spacing staying the same. You'd need to see a GIF of the original.

Interesting article on Costco. I go there almost every week, and I do like shopping there. Nice hearing about Fed-Mart. This was one of the major retailers in the southwest -- until it was sold, when it went down the tubes and finally went out of business.

I haven't been much of a whisky drinker, but I'm going to be in Edinburgh next month and I like to experience the local culture. Clearly, I need to do some more research.

I think one think they're relying on is that people will link "honorable discharge" to "honor", while in reality you don't have to be all that honorable to get an honorable discharge.

Speaking of Scotland... I'm going there in April. Woo hoo! Never been there before. I went to New Zealand in 2001.

Apple has released iTunes for Windows 4.1.1, which is supposed to fix the problems with Win2K.

The "DOS mode" in Win98 is exactly MS-DOS 7.1. The DOS-in-a-window in 2K/XP is indeed an emulator, but it generally does a better job than the DOS box in Win9x/ME. Since DOS programs think they own the entire system, they can mess with 9x/ME and crash it. The tighter security in 2K/XP doesn't allow this, although it might make the DOS program misbehave.

You can set up an XP system to dual-boot to some version of DOS, or you can just use a DOS boot floppy. XP can make one directly, though 2K can't. The advantage to the XP DOS disk is that it supports large hard drives and FAT32 partitions, which DOS 3.3 doesn't.

I did download iTunes and give it a try. It worked fine for me, other than the store being understandably slow. If you do have problems, just remember that Jobs said, "This is the best Windows application ever written." Either he thinks iTunes for Windows is fantastic, or he's commenting on the state of Windows software -- you pick.

My only real complaint is the clunky (to me) user interface. Yes, I know they drive on the left in Japan, but when I buy a Toyota in the US I still don't want the steering wheel on the right. Windows has a control panel for setting the style, size, and color of scroll bars, buttons, menus, lists, etc. iTunes ignores all of these settings, something I wouldn't expect from the "best" Windows program. It instead looks like something transplanted from OS X. You may be able to change the appearance of these things in OS X, but iTunes for Windows doesn't come with an OS X control panel.

So my preferred fat gray scroll bars are now skinny blue blobs. Apart from my taste or lack thereof, it also means the accessibility options (large fonts, high contrast colors) don't work either. And it's irritating to know that they had to go to a lot of effort to program their own skinny blue blob scrollbars, rather than use the built-in Windows ones.

Firstly, don't write off running DOS programs under Win2K or XP without trying them first. I can still run GEnie's Aladdin (a cranky DOS program if I ever saw one) under XP. (Too bad there's nothing for it to connect to.) The only change is a patch to its CPU speed measurement routine -- this program from the days of 16MHz CPUs blows up when it sees 2GHz. This affects all programs based on Turbo Pascal for DOS.

The main non-starters in 2K/XP are DOS games.

Secondly, I'll bet the exclusion of the 9x/ME series has to do with digital rights management. Thanks to the security in 9x/ME (none), it's hard to enforce. WinME isn't all that old.

I'll have to try iTunes on a test 2K machine and see if I can crash it.

That's actually a "spending habits" check. If you suddenly start using your card at different kinds of merchants, or far from your home, that's considered suspicious. Someone who took out a card in your name could develop a spending habits profile on it that wouldn't arouse suspicions.

I agree with your main point. I've said it over and over -- 90% of what's being done is just to give the appearance of doing something. So we get intrusive, very visible, but ineffective security.

As for identity theft and credit cards, it normally comes to light because the thief runs up bills and doesn't pay them. If a terrorist took out a credit card in someone else's names and paid the bill on time, it will go undetected 99% of the time. Only if that person happened to scrutinize their credit report would it be noticed. There's also a slight change the multiple address on the credit report would be detected, but many people move often so that's not a good flag.

I'm not sure that that bulk operations are that easy. The site does say

If you have more than three personal telephone numbers, you will have to go through the registration process more than once to register all of your numbers. There is a limit on the number of phone numbers you can register in this manner.

I assume this means they're limiting the number of operations per e-mail address. So after say 6 or 9, someone wanting to do a bulk remove would have to open up many e-mail addresses to do it, which would be awkward and/or leave a trail.

I did get three messages, but I was blocking three phone numbers.

Sigh. No, they didn't introduce foot fetishism. Chasing the pirate's food. FOOD.

The rehab a few years ago of Disneyland's "Pirates" gave the women being chased by the pirates trays of food, switching from lust to gluttonry. The last, fat woman is now chasing the pirate's foot.

The "wife auction" scene is still there, and little else has been changed. "Show us yer larboard side, dearie."

You can still enjoy the dated ethnic humor in the Tiki Room at Disneyland. The Disney World version was updated with Iago from "Aladdin".

As for Frontierland, the Indian Village (where you could see Real Live Indians) is long gone. The other big attractions were

1. Golden Horseshoe Revue. A dance hall show, now replaced by a shorter variety show.
2. Nature's Wonderland. Desert and cavern scenes, which you could tour by train or pack mule. Replaced with Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, a mine train themed rollercoaster.
   
3. Mike Fink Keelboats. These lasted as late as 1997, when one tipped over and ducked some tourists.
4. Indian War Canoes. Now Davey Crocket Explorer Canoes. Surprisingly, these are still operating.
5. Shooting gallery. This is the same, except the pellet guns were switched for light guns years agon.
6. Tom Sawyer Island. Also the same, though the guns in the fort have been removed. That may have been because a kid injured his finger on a trigger, not directly due to anti-gun sentiment.

Probably the most fiddled-with item is the burning cabin on the far (inaccessable) end of Tom Sawyer Island. It has been

1. Settler's cabin burned during an Indian attack
2. Not burning, because such a waste of fuel during an energy crisis is irresponsible (1970s, and the cabin was actually a trivial percentage of DL's gas bill)
3. Home to a sleeping moonshiner, whose still has set his cabin on fire
4. A carelessly watched fire that's endangering a bald eagle nest

Yesterland has a great gallery of discontinued Disneyland attractions.

Very sorry to hear about Teresa's grandmother.

And very glad to hear about your award.

At least she missed the blizzard. Highs are in the 70s here.

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