I once saw a company whose business model was entirely based on deleting old (potentially embarrassing) email messages.
I think the company went under and/or got swallowed up during the dot-com un-boom, but ironically I just found an archived copy of their circa-2000 website: http://www.specimenbox.com/di/
Key quote from the article, I think: "Anything that is too big to fail is too big to exist."
The "thank you" email I got after I finished the questionaire referred to it as the "Princeton Judgment Aggregation Study (PJAS)", for what that's worth.
Terry, I think people (like the LJ/Six-Apart folks) immersed in the whole San Francisco/Silicon Valley Web 2.0 culture sometimes forget just how clueless seemingly clever, slick, hip people (like Hollywood marketers) can be about on-line communities. After all, *their* friends/associates/colleagues would *never* do something so obviously stupid, and these Hollywood publicists wouldn't have so much money to throw around if they were stupid, would they?*
I think neither side, LJ management nor Hollywood publicists, realizes how wide the gap between their world-views is.
[*] Always a silly mistake, assuming that people with money to spend got it because they're smart. About as silly a mistake as assuming the opposite.
Yeah, I too thought of "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" while reading this thread, as well as thinking of the "Whole Earth Catalog" that's probably still on my parents' bookshelf. I think those books may have represented the pinnacle of 1970s electro-mechanical self-publishing.
And I too remember the all-uppercase ASR-33 teletype, with its cylindrical non-changeable type element. The field tech who repaired my highschool's terminals said an ASR-33 had more moving parts than a car. We used to get in trouble for having chad fights in the computer room. A friend of mine wrote a Basic program to print human-readable text using the tape punch, which was my first exposure to a number of typographical concepts.
I never really had much exposure to electric typewriters; I learned to type on my father's ancient manual "portable" Underwood, which lived in a carrying case that was about 15" by 15" by 8" tall. Once or twice as a little kid I got to play around with the electric typewriter had access to at work, which could produce a variety of cool math symbols as well as letters and numbers.
I like "fear-mongers". That's what they're trying to do, spread fear. Bringing that out in the open and making it explicit helps make it less scary. It makes them sound more annoying and less terrifying. An added bonus is that the same term can be used for the suicide bombers and hijackers who want us to fear them, *and* for those in the current administration who also want us to fear the suicide bombers and hijackers.
Zak, you realize of course that the people collecting that data may have exactly the same thought? And they don't need an FOI request.
Larry Brennan, I'm not aware of the significance of 4/20, and your post is so tantalizing! I feel like I almost know what you're talking about. That kind of thing drives me nuts.
The thing is, Paula, will the law actually cut down on manufacture or use of methamphetamine?
I don't know how much sudafed is needed to feed a lab large enough to blow up a house; are these labs really normally supplied by buying sudafed over the counter? I'm sure there are "hobbyist" labs dealing in smaller amounts, but I suspect the people making large quantities don't get their supplies retail.
(On preview, what Matt said)
A few years back, my wife and I both read TdVC, Deception Point, Digital Fortress, and A&D, hoping for some pathetic reason that one of them would live up to their reputation. Boy, did we get sick of reading "POV-character-X saw the *most* horrifying|significant|amazing thing ever" just before switching to a different POV without revealing what thing was seen!
Anyway, my wife accused Brown of being sexist. I responded by pointing out that most of his books have a very smart, accomplished female sidekick (and usually love interest) of the main character. She responded "yeah, but they never do anything or figure anything out". We realized then that the female supporting character is always so smart and accomplished only so she can properly appreciate the hero's greatness.
One particularly hokey touch in A&D that's stuck with me (and no one else has mentioned yet) was the anti-matter containment vessel with the power supply whose battery would last for *exactly* 24 hours, complete with an LED display counting down the seconds until power failure.
I was 2, and a big Captain Kangaroo fan; I have a vague recollection connecting Kennedy's assasination with the show, but I'm not sure whether I actually remember watching and seeing the news bulletin interrupt the show, or whether I'm unconsciously reconstructing the memory.
My father was a Kennedy assasination conspiracy fan for many years, with a shelf full of books about different theories. Eventually he decided that he'd never really know the truth, and he got rid of most of the books.
I still like the theory I recall from one of Robert Anton Wilson's books (probably part of the Illuminati trilogy?). The book described how there were hit squads in Dallas that day from the CIA, the Mafia, the Soviet Union, and various other shadowy organizations, all planning their own attacks on Kennedy. The teams of professionals were all taken aback when some whacko amateur, all on his own, managed through sheer beginner's luck to perform far above his own ability, pulling off an astonishing feat of speed and marksmanship.
Shouldn't that be "rpdly", not "rply"?
I assume as a consultant he's getting paid better than he was as a mere lowly civil servant?
Though I think it might be worth paying him millions to promise never again to have any involvement in any planning effort larger than a toddler's pony ride.
As long as the terrorists don't use TV commercials for their research, Vasquez Rocks is probably safe.
I'm an example of someone who shouldn't take aspirin (at least according to my doctor). I'm in my 40s, with high blood pressure controlled by medication, and I was taking the usual 81mg of aspirin per day, until I developed unexplained gastro-intestinal bleeding while on vacation. Like an idiot, I ignored my symptoms of black tarry bowel movements and severe anemia (feeling like I would imagine it would feel to climb Mt. Everest w/out oxygen) until I got back home. The next day, my doctor sent me to the hospital. At the hospital, I was eventually transfused with 3 units of whole blood, and given a series of increasingly invasive tests (cameras inserted from both ends, x-rays, radio-isotope tracers, eventually even swallowing a tiny video camera which reminded me of Fantastic Voyage) to try to find the source of the bleeding, to no avail. After, my doctor said I'd be wise to avoid aspirin. I'll have to ask him about the advisability of taking aspirin in the event of a suspected heart attack. I suspect it would be a good idea, given that we don't know for sure that aspirin caused my bleeding, but I don't know.
Ah, I misunderstood Charles Dodgson; I thought he meant a total of 1350 kgs of sandbags (which isn't much), when it's really 1350 kgs *per* sandbag. Those are pretty big bags; I suspect each one might be about a cubic meter, or a cubic yard to those used to buying construction materials in the US.
FWIW, I've already seen many emails that use Javascript to defeat mousing over a link to see the "real" address on the status bar (the phisher just writes an onMouseOver function that sets the status bar text to whatever they want it to be). Of course, Mailscanner catches them, but "sophisticated" users who rely on the status bar can be fooled.
I've also seen a few emails that somehow defeat Mailscanner's checks. I haven't dug into the email source to see how they do it; I suspect there's an onClick method attached to the link which sends you to the phisher's site, even though the href text exactly matches the visible link text.
Basically, it's the same problem as stopping email viruses. No email client should be configured by default to trust executable content. It's not so much HTML that's the problem as Javascript.
What James D. Macdonald said. Pretty much any gunshot can be fatal; there's no way for the shooter to control the outcome so carefully as to disable reliably without killing. At close range, even the discharge of a blank can be fatal.
Even weapons designed specifically to incapacitate non-lethally, such as tasers and stun guns, run the risk of either leaving the target able to cause further problems, or fatally injured. Sometimes even both at the same time.
I'm very impressed by the discipline of police officers capable of firing only a round or two each at a suspect believed to be a suicide bomber. Here in Los Angeles, a dozen or so sheriff's deputies recently fired somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 rounds each (I forget the exact numbers) at a suspect who was driving a car slowly towards them. That pretty much means they kept pulling their triggers until their magazines were empty.
Of course, I would imagine that, as Jules and Charlie suggest, Britain's armed police are the cream of the crop. The incident here was even more embarrasing because out of all that firing, only one round hit the suspect (causing relatively minor injury) and another injured a deputy. News reports made reference to the "circular firing squad" phenomenon.
"...even nerdier than the chess nerds"
Yep, guilty as charged. Actually, we thought thought of it as taking a poke at the self-importance of the stuffy chess nerds.
A quarter-century ago, in high school, my friend Jim Bennett came up with several uses for typical cheap folding cardboard chess boards which through over-use had torn along the fold in the middle, yielding 2 4x8 board halves each.
The first game was "faultline chess" (I don't remember if that was what we called it then), where the chess board starts out as usual, with the two halfs re-assembled into a single normal chess board, the seam running across the middle halfway between the two players. However, after each move, one half board would be moved a square to the right relative to the other, until the two halves only touched at a single square. Then, the boards would start shifting back the other way, one square per move, until they reached the other extreme. Crossing the fold at the right time would cause a bishop to switch from red squares to black or vice versa.
The second variant, bagel chess, required 2 broken boards, in 4 4x8 pieces. The first half board was positioned in front of a player, with an 8-long edge facing the player, and was populated in the usual way. A 2nd half board was turned 90 degrees and placed to the left of the first half, with a 4-long edge facing the player contiguous with the first half board's 8-long edge. Then, a third half board was placed across the top of the 2nd half board, with their left sides contiguous. That third half board was the mirror image of the first, and was populated with the 2nd player's army. The fourth half board mirrored the 2nd at the upper right. The result was a 12x12 board with a 4x4 hole in the center, with one army arrayed in the lower right 8x2 squares, and the other army arrayed in the upper left 8x2 squares.
The trouble with bagel chess was that it took longer for the armies to come into contact with each other. Rooks became much more important (and bishops less), especially since the left hand rook could move immediately without waiting for a pawn to get out of its way.
We also discussed playing on the bagel board with 4 players, one starting on each half board, but I don't remember ever getting 4 enthusiasts together in one place long enough to try it.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 3 |
| 2008 | 1 |
| 2006 | 6 |
| 2005 | 11 |
| 2004 | 79 |
| 2003 | 91 |
| 2002 | 1 |
Total: 192 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Jeremy Leader finds comment spam:
Show all comments by Jeremy Leader finds comment spam.