The steering geometry and primitive tires of the day tended to wander on smooth roads and crosswinds. Bikers chopped the frame and raked the forks out a bit to get more caster. The big wraparound front fenders were just unsprung weight in a place where it seldom rained, and on all those brand-new roads, a 5" trailing-shoe front brake wasn't worth much either. California didn't have muffler laws then, so those could be disposed of, and anything else that could be unbolted to save weight.
Choppers of the early '60s were thoroughly practical machines, as closely tuned to their environment as an ISDT trials bike.
Being California in the 1960s, they started to show up at shows, where one-upmanship led builders to stretch the limits of what was practical, but it wasn't until "Easy Rider" came out that the masses in general even noticed the things, and after that, they became exaggerated burlesques of what they had been. And the way the media works, that's what most people think a chopper is. Well, it is now, anyway. Anyone in 1963 would have looked at the absurd contraptions being built nowadays and laughed his ass off.
Remember, the first choppers were made to be *ridden*, and they were made that way because it worked better than what you could buy from the showroom back then.
> Michigan has forbidden teachers from using the words America and American when they > mean us, people who live in the United States of America. > > Why? Because there are Mexicans who are Americans - Central America - and the > same with Guatemalans and Salvadorans, and because South Americans could also > think you mean them when you say American. And the Canadians are probably > confused if you call yourself an American and they look at the map and see > they, too, are in North America.That sort of idea comes up periodically. It's bullshit.
The term "America" was bestowed to common usage by none other the the King of England, referring to his American lands. (all of British America belonged to the King, and was rented, as opposed to given in feoff)
The United States of America is the oldest extant country in the New World.
The United States of America is the only country in the New World that has "America" as part of its official name.
So, for anyone who doesn't like it, "piss off."
> - Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)Churchill was an adult when the first automobiles clattered down the streets. He was over 30 when the Wright brothers flew. He watched London's famous gas lights change to that newfangled electricity. He persuaded Roosevelt to take on his "Tube Alloys" project, which resulted in the first reactor and first atomic bombs - and powering those newfangled light bulbs, too. He read about the Wright Brother's flight at Kitty Hawk in his newspaper, then watched aircraft change from wood and cloth to metal, the first supersonic aircraft, the V1 and V2, the first supersonic aircraft, Sputnik, Telstar, and the first manned space shots.
The Soviets had launched five probes to Venus during his lifetime. From the Edison gramophone to the Beatles, from silent movies to 3-D with surround sound. The rise of the computer, from the bombes and Turing's work during WWII to the first "computer billing" business systems. The rise of modern medicine - the first antibiotics, the first transplants, the discovery of the DNA helix. From "wireless telegraphy" to car phones and color TV. The fall of the Age of Kings to the rise of ideological nations. The reshaping of all the power structures of the globe - *twice*. "All this, and much much more!"
I admit to some jealousy. Churchill belonged to a generation that had some new wonder waiting for them every morning of their life - Progress, with a capital P. I was 12 years old in 1972, when the Door to Progress slammed shut and "progress" was replaced with Gaia-worship, self-hatred, and anti-Americanism.
Frankly, they looked just as stupid in real life as they did in pictures.
Since the woman was walking diagonally away I couldn't see if she was in goth facepaint, but she walked into one of the offices behind the tellers, so I guess she was an employee. This is a bank that, just a few years ago, had a dress code that required their female employees to wear dresses, and forbade facial hair - including moustaches - on male employees.
The 21st century creeps slowly into central Arkansas...
>> Cheap lasers - saw one today at the tool store, combined with LED >> on a keychain, $4.82. Including three batteries.To me, that's the marvel of modern technology. Multibillion dollar orbital weapons platforms with nuclear-powered laser weapons, yeah, all it takes it money.
Your laser key fob, on the other hand, requires a massive economic infrastructure, not just for the technology, but to hammer out copies for $4.82 in blister packs and get them to the consumers. A much more complex and difficult job than the weapons platform.
Civilization itself is the largest machine.
Asimov once commented that, while science fiction writers had no
problem scaling mainframes up to planetary size, not one of them ever
conceived of the pocket calculator. It's not really a fair comment, but
it's a good example of being blinded by what I call the Manhattan
Project mentality.
> I never answer the phone, my $12 answering machine is my DoNotCall, > and I never check the messages. If I didn't need a phone line for > DSL, I wouldn't even have one.I don't have caller ID or an answering machine. I still do it the old-fashioned way - if I feel like talking to someone, I'll answer it. Otherwise, it can ring. Doesn't bother me a bit.
Used to, I could call my Dad and see if he wanted to do lunch, or needed to run down to the lumberyard, or something. Now Dad has an answering machine. I might get a return call a day or two later. Too late. Most of my friends have answering machines. They don't feel obligated to return calls. On top of that, they all have the default anonymous computer voice; I have no way to tell I've connected to the right number in the first place. And with our local phone company, miscalls happen often enough - even with the little Radio Shack autodialer.
I can't contact any friends via e-mail any more. They've passed out their addresses everywhere, and they're deluged with spam. None of them have figured out how to filter their mail. Maybe I need smarter friends.
So if I need to contact someone, I have to drive over to their house, beat on the door, and maybe leave a piece of paper taped to their door if it's important.
Meanwhile, the idea that I might be home, yet not pick up the phone, annoys them mightily. Particularly my Dad, who has offered to buy me an answering machine. "Why, Dad? So I can ignore it until it fills up, like you do?"
It's odd... we have more, and more sophisticated ways of communication nowadays, yet actually getting hold of someone is at least as hard as it was in the 1800s.
> As an English teacher, I love that one. The one thing that annoys me > more than sloppy language is people inventing grammar rules that > simply don't work (the prohibition on split infinitives is another > example).That kind of stuff is only a couple of centuries old. Once colleges made up their own rules for how they thought Latin should be parsed, they tried to torture the English language to match Latin. By and large it didn't work. Collegiate English classes are full of "English" constructions that exist only in the minds of the people who invented them, like "gerunds."
Just going to school in various places across the country, I saw major differences between elementary and high school texts from school to school. But people who used the same textbook series throughout their school years seem to think there is only *one* "English", and that's the one they had. Alas, their belief is so strong it seems to resist disillusionment.
> Wow, do people still talk about gerunds?I first encountered them in some college-prep tests in the mid'80s. Hey, if they weren't important enough to even mention in the twelve years I spent incarcerated in public school, should I give a damn? I chose "no" and haven't felt particularly uncouth about it...
> I saw it - great film - and also a documentary on the History Channel. > they ran a series on great military blunders.Rabaul pretty much takes the prize. "The Fortress of the Pacific" was armed to the teeth... except they'd mounted the guns where they could *only* shoot out to sea. The Japanese simply landed at the other end of the island and marched right in. Then the Allies did the same thing a few years later, the Japs not having learned from the Brits' mistake.
> Linus Torvalds said why back up anything, real men just put it out > on the web to be mirrored everyhereThat's one of the several things I disagree with Linus about. Real Men make their own backups, verify their own backups, and keep snapshots offsite. Anything that depends on someone else backing up your data, or on the phone or cable company, is chickenshit, not to mention the various security issues.
I have files dating back to 1986, that have been safe across three OSs and a dozen computers. I have backups to three different hard drives (swapped and rsync'd regularly) and stacks of CDs and DVDs. There's 22 years of work there, that I'd be right pissy to lose.
If I ever meet up with Linus sometime, I'm going to ask him about kernel bloat. 2.6 is *enormous*. As soon as Tanenbum adds shared library support to Minix 3, I predict Linux is going to have a contender at the kernel level. Right now I have a copy of Minix 3 running under Bochs running under Linux... oh, and Windows 98 on another desktop, under Win4Lin. Because I'm a geek, that's why...
> Yes and just remember that a German named Adolf was a great public Speaker
When the Brownshirts make sure the crowds will be there, anyone can be a great public speaker.
I suspect his Austrian-accented German sounded stranger to a Berliner than Bush's Texan sounds to a Yankee.
> Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., in reaction to Abramoff's guilty > plea, has pledged to "examine and act on any necessary changes to > improve transparency and accountability for our body when it comes to > lobbying."Somewhere there *must* be a song called "I've Heard It All Before." I need to find it, so I can think of it as I read that sort of thing.
Lobbyist-money (and campaign contribution) flaps happen, oh, every three or four years, and they *always* talk about reform... but nothing ever happens, because it involves money, and to politicians, money is even better than votes, because you can buy votes with money if you need to.
> > Oh boy...off subject but well within the range of interests....every vehicle > > to be fitted with a remote "off" control, operable by police and others, > > when you are wanted for questioning or arrest.They've been slavering for those since the early '70s.
If they go to a simple radio system, it'll take about three days for DIY car zapper plans to float out onto the 'net. If they use encryption, it might take as much as a week. Once the systems start being installed, they're sitting targets for the kind of people who have nothing better to do than crack the system. Shortly after, police cars will be the targets.
The tattletale dataloggers on some US-market cars have already been deemed admissible evidence in court, and of course there are the various spy proposals that keep surfacing in connection with the forthcoming OBD-3 spec...
Meanwhile, RFID is coming at the retail level, and retailers are ajoy at the thought of scanning customers as they *enter* stores, where their socks, underwear, and so forth will obligingly broadcast their ID codes as they walk between the sensor blades. Exactly *why* they need to know this sort of thing is a mystery to me.
You'll know me; I'm the Luddite who will be putting his underwear in the microwave to kill the RFID bugs.
>> > > You'll know me; I'm the Luddite who will be putting his underwear in >> > > the microwave to kill the RFID bugs. > > Wouldn't running any 'smart' card etc. between the plug top and the HT lead > > for a moment or two do it for most of them?My latest driver's license has a magnetic strip on the back. The people at the DMV couldn't or wouldn't tell me what was on it, so when I got home, I introduced it to my Magnaflux unit.
The only time anyone ever did anything with the stripe was a store clerk who swiped it through the credit card slot on the register, got a disgusted look, and keyed the information in by hand. That was several years ago. None have tried it since.
30 years ago, an Arkansas driver's license was a paper card with your name and number typed on it with a typewriter and your signature. Over the years, they added plastic lamination, my photograph (first from an instant camera, later digital), your *digitized* signature from the digitizer pad (I have a "special" signature for those), changed from paper to plastic, added my thumb print, added a hologram of the DMV seal, and now the mag stripe. I'm almost afraid to wonder what's coming next...
A few moments in the microwave will also do nicely for zapping most magnetic data strips.
> > tongue. No one has used the word 'premia' since 1612 - It does not occur > > as a separate word entry, or as an admission of plural, in the complete > > OED, although they do quote its use from one source only: John2/3 of any "unabridged" dictionary seems to be ancient French, Old English, Latin, or specialized medical/botanical terminology which is probably the same across most Western tongues.
Besides, you can combine any words you want and make them "English" as long as they have Latin or Greek roots; there's long precedent for that.
On another list I'm on, a native Spanish speaker used the word "analphabet" when he had a temporary brainlock on "illiterate." After squinting at the word for a moment, its meaning was clear enough. And, hey, it's as English as "illiterate..."
Strac is now entering preproduction with a new series called "Lensman", based on EE Smith's books from the 1940s and 1950s. I read those in elementary school, and several times since. They're great space opera, but...
The books always bothered me. The Lensmen were... for you younger guys, imagine thousands of copies of Judge Dredd running around, except with even more power, both technical and legal - using alien technology, they could brainwash people at a distance, and they could (and did) topple entire civilizations without question or justification. They had authority over all civilians and their governments.
What it read like, basically, was something like the Knights Templar crossed with the Gestapo; an entire fascist regime dominating known space. But it was all okay, because these were "superior men" who would never think of using their powers for evil. Except the evil Boskonians eventually got Lenmen of their own... it never really made much sense, socially or politically, even when I was too young to really understand what the problems were.
Yeah, I could see where the Lensman universe would allow for Strac-type taletelling, but it's going to be interesting to see how he can softpedal the totalitarian aspects.
When I went to Linux I was delighted to find XMMS, which is not only a WinAmp lookalike, it can even use WinAmp skins. And everything was fine for a few years... except I've grown annoyed by two things: XMMS's playlist manager has a font hardwired to "microscopic". It also uses one of the more-primitive X file picker libraries; building a playlist is long and tedious; enough that I mostly don't bother.
The new player supported by most Linux distributions is AmaroK, which is insane. I guess the user interface emulates something Windoid; random clicking on shit to try to figure out what it might do. AmaroK, JuK, and the several others I've tried also default to using the ID3 tags to generate their displayed filenames; most of mine are either blank or hold garbage. There doesn't seem to be any way to force *any* of the players (other than XMMS!) to use the actual filename instead of the tag. Some of them go out to the 'net, grab mystery data, and then display all my mp3s sorted by "genre". No, I already have them sorted by directory, thankyouverymuch. Now show them to me. Nope, can't do that, Dave.
Most of them want to build a "database", for some reason. And building a playlist isn't much better than doing it in XMMS. And all of them are G-I-G-A-N-T-I-C, sucking up most of a display panel, or they're shrunk to a tray icon. No convenient credit-card-sized display like XMMS.
Even my little pocket player insists of sorting and displaying my mp3s by album-artist-genre. Which means I have to hunt quite a bit to find different pieces of a freakin' audiobook, which it will splat across half a dozen directories. And then it won't show me the true filenames, which means I have to guess... fucktards.
I guess it's all "fucktard user interface." Most people download Big Directories (they'd probably call them "folders") Full Of Shit, then depend on the player to make some kind of stab at organizing things. Which is fine for fucktards, but I think it bites road kill.
"Point and click." How hard can it be? All I want to do is make a few lists and pick between them, based on filename and directory, without the software hiding everything. But I guess that's too much to ask...
It's now valued (by the local tax assessor's office) at $325K.
He says there's been no notable construction or change in his local area; he thinks they are purposely valuing his property far in excess of its real value, which he estimates at closer to $225K. His property tax on a "325K" house is $4000/yr. He figured the assessment is revenue-driven and not a true value.
He's been butting heads with them for a year now, with absolutely no success. It appears most people are pleased to see their property value increase, so they treat him like a retard when he complains.
They pop up on some mailing lists I'm on. I understand there are cultural differences and language differences, but anyone who starts out with "you will tell me..." or "you will do..." or "you will give me..." is starting off on the wrong foot. They start off with the "asshole" flag set, and then their subsequent behavior reinforces it.
The flip side are the ones who grovel. And the repeated use of "dear" when groveling to people you don't know doesn't make them come across any better. Makes me want to kick them some more, just to hear them squeal.
I guess the PHBs and grovelers are matched sets Back Home, but (at least in the southern USA) they don't interact well with Americans.
Yesterday, I watched six hours of CNN. That's 600% more television than I've seen since 1986. Guaran-goddamn-truth.
So, what did I see?
First off, they might as well call it the Estrogen Channel. Other than one or two token bouffant-haired males who appeared briefly, it was all-women barking heads and "experts." You could see them squoze in between the bands of dancing advertisements at the bottom and top of the screen.
Next, content. There was about seven seconds of Palin at the RNC, repeated over and over. There are a couple clips of Osama Hussein talking to Working Class People with hard hats. They squelched Osama out and told us what he was saying. There were occasional reports of DISASTER IN NEW ORLEANS, with a still of a fallen telephone pole. And that was pretty much it, with minor variations.
One female barking head was particularly annoying. Some bitch with a Hispanic name, who apparently studied at the Marie Osmond School of Tourette's Facial Expression, with the added trick of jerking her face and upper body toward the camera for emphasis. She reminded me of one of those little barking lap dogs, about to launch herself through the Toob to bite at my ankles. If she had actually been within reach, I would probably have lost it and bitch-slapped her into next Tuesday. Her facial expressions were "anger", "psychotic rage", "confusion", and "assault with intent"; shooting her would only be self defense.
The interesting thing was, after six hours, I had seen NO NEWS OF ANY KIND. I did, however, see about five hours of commercials. The same ones, over and over, trying to sell prescription drugs (the only ones they could sell to would be MDs, who presumably would be working, so it seemed utterly pointless to run the ads), diabetic supplies, and electric scooters. Seemed like some fairly narrow demographics there.
I was exhausted when I got home, and went to bed. I have to take Dad back down there TWICE next week. It may piss him off, but I think I might wait in the car. The goddamned box was driving me crazy.
> My guess is that by the time this would become feasable, touch screens will > already be making big inroads into personal computing.Holy Baud, WTF?
I've bitch-slapped Cheeto-encrusted fingers away from my screen when some idiot coworker tried to point out something on my monitor. No, don't TOUCH the damned monitor.
For using it myself, holding my arm out in a half Nazi salute for hours at a time would get old *really* fast.
"Touch screen" is a BAD idea that should go away.
This is like the "voice recognition" thing. I've already locked horns with the assholes who turn on all the Windows beeps and boops and turn their speakers all the way up, so every click or message interrupts my train of thought. These are always the same people who put their phone on speaker mode, turn the volume all the way up, then stand outside their cubicle and shout at it.
"ALT-F-TEN-SELECT-FILE-CLICK-OPEN-DOWN-DOWN-DOWN-RIGHT-RIGHT-DOWN- CLICK-DOWN-DOWN-DOWN-DOWN..."
This one had the plywood painted white, but it was full of oddly-shaped holes, like it had been gnawed by giant beavers. As I was passing by, the lizard-visual-interpretation system finished processing and threw the result up to the foreground task: the uneven top edges and cut-out holes formed the outlines of GIANT WHITE RABBITS.
I looked again. Yep. Giant rabbits.
Ooo-kay.
DaveWorld. The more closely you look, the weirder it gets...
-- Terry Pratchett, "Fantasy Physics"
>> >> "It is amazing how may drivers, even at the Formula One Level, think >> >> that the brakes are for slowing the car down." -Mario Andretti > > I'd like to know what he was really saying there....Andretti's racing days were mostly in the 1960s, and a bit at Indy in the '70s after they came out with wide tires.
In his day, skinny hard tires limited both acceleration and braking, and you spent a lot of time drifting, though the term doesn't mean the same thing nowadays. You'd throw the car sideways to slow down, since the drums or skinny solid rotors would only be useful as "brakes" for a few laps anyway.
Modern racers may change tires several times per race. Jim Clark ran five Formula 1 events on the same tires back in 1965... things really were different then.
If you look at pictures of some of the old open-wheel racers you can see visible, horrible suspension geometry problems, like tierods half the length of the A-arms, or at bizarre angles. With skinny bias-ply tires bump steer and camber change didn't really matter that much. Then there was a brief period when wide tires came out, and it was important... but before everyone got their act together, wings and ground effect doodads came out, and they stiffened up the suspension until they were running go-karts. The camber curve doesn't matter if the rim doesn't actually move in relation to the chassis...
The general management page did something odd earlier this year; clicking on anything simply blows Konqueror away instantly.
Now they've done something to the fangle home page; there are buttons all over it to disable a bunch of new malfeatures they've apparently added. Except clicking on the buttons does nothing, so they're either Java or Flash crap. Or simply broken, which is common enough with Yahoo.
Comcast and godaddy are still the worst; they not only have to have Firefox, you must have the current version, with all the Javacrap and Flashcrap plugins, and all those have to be current, too. Things still look *very* weird and often simply don't work. I expect the authors of the pages did everything they could to lock them into Internet Exploder.
And I've already hit pages that IE6 can't render; you have to have IE7.
"Assholes do vex me!" - Robin Williams
I'd never heard of "early voting" before, but I was mostly concerned about how they had harvested that particular email address. The only place I had given it to was the city library. Apparently they share personal information with the county, and probably city. I was annoyed with that. Also, having been to the county courthouse several times recently, I wanted to return there about as much as I wanted to drill holes in my head to let the evil spirits out.
Thursday night I was deleting old mail and spam from that account, the message came back up, and for kicks I brought up the county web site. After drilling down, there was a tiny link off to one side saying something like "alternative voting sites." I found that one of them was the local city hall, plenty of parking, just a couple of miles away. It would have been nice to know that in the first place, since the original message implied voting had to be done at the county courthouse.
I had a number of errands to run Friday, so I figured I'd get there first thing Friday morning. With a few delays, I made it there at 0917. There were some computers and officious ladies bustling around, and a row of chairs. I was ordered to sit in one, which was fine with me. Normally, you have to stand for hours. There were five people seated; I was number six.
One of the officious ladies announced we would not be allowed to vote until 1000. Nice, almost 45 minutes to waste. There was no mention of time at the web site, so I had assumed it would be "normal working hours."
We were given clipboards and a form to fill out. It wanted name, address, and whether we had "moved recently", and if so, what our old and new address was. No explanation of "recently." It also had a spot for "party affiliation." I was just getting ready to ask about that when someone else spoke up; one of the officious ladies said it didn't need to be answered, that question was just for primaries. However, the next 150+ people to come in didn't ask and weren't told. I don't think that "party affiliation" is something they need to know, primary or not.
By 0930 the chairs were filled and people were standing. By 0945 there were maybe a couple hundred people, down the hall, around the corner, and out of sight.
About 1005 I got called and told to follow the taped line around the corner. And there were... electronic voting machines. Pulaski County has abandoned the paper ballots. The machines consisted of portait-mode LCD displays on stands, all in the open. I could lean over and see who my neighbor was voting for, and the officious ladies walking back and forth behind could see everyone. I managed to negotiate the touch-screen luser interface; it took several tries to tell it I was done. Then an officious lady instantly took me by the arm to hustle me out; I guess she'd seen the screen change. I asked if there was any kind of ticket or receipt. She said no, and seemed annoyed. Then she slapped an "I Voted!" sticker on my vest and bustled away.
Just shy of an hour; that's less than half the time I've ever had to wait, and I didn't have to stand in the rain, and I even had a chair: all good. The "party affiliation" thing on the form, the electronic voting machines, and the lack of privacy: bad.
Other observations: normally there are people with stickers or little flags supporting their candidates. I didn't see any this time. Demographics: About 50% black females, 30-50 years old. Maybe 10% white females, 70-80 years old, maybe 20% couples, all in the "seniors" range, and most of the rest middle-aged white males in construction-worker type clothing. Fairly much what I'd expect during working hours on a Friday.
You all know my opinion of electronic voting machines. "May the best hackers win." That is, of course, if they're even connected to anything. They might just be placebos, like the thermostats they put in office buildings that aren't connected to anything.
> We're sure it will get sorted out, but it shows that, even if the glitch > > is in the Netflix computer systems, shipping movies by post is and > > old-world way of doing things. With just about everything internet > > enabled these days, there's no technical excuse not to ditch plastic > > disks entirely and move to downloads.Sure. And the cable and phone companies are already busily putting bandwidth and transfer caps in place on broadband, and less than 10% of the country has broadband available... let's wire our entire entertainment system to something that's only useful in metro areas.
Ri-ight.
I was pretty happy with KDE 3, but KDE 4 is progressing further down the "Windows XP" road than I care for. Being KDE much of it can be tweaked back to the old look, but I've been with KDE a long time. My goal when I went to Linux was not to get hung up on a particular distribution or windowing system. I've been switching distributions every couple of years, as opposed to every three or four months as I originally planned... but after several weeks of alternating KDE and Gnome (odd days and even days) I went to KDE and never looked back. Gnome is butt-fugly.
Back in the '90s I experimented briefly with Enlightenment, which at the time was an eye-popping piece of software. You could do all kinds of crazy tricks, but it was a massive resource hog. Thirteen years later, it's lean and mean. So I gave e16 a try, and I still like it... but of all the tricks KDE does (and probably Gnome), there's one that Enlightenment, Whim, or any of the others don't do - it remembers all your window positions and running programs when you shut down. When you bring the system back up, everything loads just like you left it. Since my default desktop (two monitors wide) has three copies of Konqueror with half a dozen tabs each, two copies of Konsole with half a dozen tabs each, XMMS, Kmix, and gkrellm are always up, and so is a window with dosemu. I'd hate to have to load all that stuff back by hand.
Now, with a "KDE app", meaning one that ties into KDE's extensions, all your Konqueror and KWrite tabs come back up to the web pages you were looking at before and the files you were editing before - KWrite even puts the cursor back where it was. That's all KDE-specific, but it looks like a small daemon polling X to see what it is managing (the function calls are part of X) could at least restore your last state when you restarted the system. That way, *any* window manager could do the basic trick.
Alas, restoring the state of the system is the one thing I really don't want to give up. Hmm, I wonder if there's something out there now...
[google "x window manager restore state"]
Wikipedia says the program I want is a "session manager", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_session_manager . The article is much more detailed than the information I had. It indicates that the Gnome and ROX desktops have their own session managers, and something called xsm, at linux.die.net/man/1/xsm . xsm looks like exactly what I wanted, and it's part of the base Xorg package.
"man xsm" on my SuSE 10.2 machine comes up with a man page for it. "xsm -v" and it comes up... hot dang, it was here all along!
Now all I need is a 48-hour day to play with this stuff.
When bank robber Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he said "because that's where the money is." Banks don't keep much cash at the window now, and many have time-delay vaults, and armed security, and all are festooned with cameras and recorders, inside and out. Churches, on the other hand, are full of people wearing their nice jewelry, carrying money for lunch or shopping after services... and the collection basket. I had thought it was incredibly tacky when I read that some churches took tithe money by credit card... but even the cards are negotiable within a short time window.
On the flip side, many states prohibit CCW carry in churches, and even in places where it's legal, church policy forbids it.
I'd love to see the video if someone tried to rob a synagogue with a high percentage of JFPO members, though...
> "An armed society is a polite society." > Source: Robert A. Heinlein, Beyond This Horizon (1st > ed. Reading PA: Fantasy Press, 1948), pp. 222-223.In context, I'm not sure if Heinlein meant that seriously or as satire. The society he described there bothered me when I was younger; I eventually realized it was something like Leader-less fascism. Individuals were subordinate to an all-encompassing State; it took me a few readings to catch on, since we don't see the State directly, just its effects.
Over time, I noticed most of Heinlein's societies were fine if you were one of the ruling elite, maybe nowhere near so nice for the rank and file. They're also usually monocultures; there's only one society, only One True Way, only one set of ethics, only one set of morals, and everyone else is wrong.
Some of this was probably because such societies are simple to describe and easy to use as a backdrop for a story, which is why fascist/totalitarian societies are so common in older science fiction. I was just reading that Michael Straczynski (the guy who did Babylon 5) has a contract to do a new series based on EE Smith's Lensman stories. The Lensmen bothered me even when I read those stories when I was 12 years old; they were beyond any law, acted as judge, jury, and executioner of individuals or entire civilizations, could subordinate any government to their orders, etc. But it was okay, because they were the Good Guys. That part became less clear when the Bad Guys got their own Lensmen... think of the old Soviet Union, except Party members were all Judge Dredd with super-powers. I'm waiting to see how he sugar-coats that for modern audiences.
Technological security issues aside, it would mean giving up on secret voting. Not something to take lightly. Voting from the privacy of your home would make it even easier for people to force each other to vote for candidate x than the 'regular' abuse within the sacrecy of the home that's already happening on a grand scale. A public voting station, with secret voting, avoids that RISK.Actually, this is one I hadn't thought of, since secrecy in voting has never been an issue for me. But there have been times and places where it was critically important in the democratic process.
All of the e-voting systems I've seen discussed so far depend on some sort of authentication and transaction/response system. Even if the data is encrypted, there are only two or three possible transactions, which makes it trivially easy to figure out what's going on.
Back in my ignorant pre-computer days, I thought voting by phone would be very nice, particularly since standing for four hours in the rain at the polling station was no fun, nor was I happy about getting a reprimand from my employer for taking the time off from work to go vote. The polling station problem is very real, but I'd much rather show my papers to the old ladies at the card tables, enter the booth, and mark my paper card as I see fit. You get enough paper, it's hard to make it disappear, and though it can be forged or altered, it's time-consuming enough for it to be of little value for influencing an election. Unlike the Diebold and other voting machines, which exhibit more horrendous programming glitches every time they're used...
>> Saw where R.Bosch invented the spark plug 100 years ago this year, via >> a blurb in AW. What was the spark source prior to spark plugs for the >> early IC motors? A glow head, or what? NormPoints! The points were in the cylinder, operated by a gasketed pushrod. The small spark as the points opened (no condensor) set off the mixture.
Before points, "hot tubes" were common. A small tube (the texts usually mention platinum, but I suspect most were less exotic) went through the cylinder wall. A continuous flame kept the tube hot. The heat set off the charge on the compression stroke. Nowadays we would consider those "semidiesel" engines. The hot tube has been superceded by the glow plug, as used in many model airplane engines.
Ancient fangle. I expect Nippon Denki or Bosch will "invent" them again in a few years. Everything seems to get recycled if you wait long enough...
>> Taking the fifth, while legally not implicating, >> always tells the jury you're full of shit.I don't think it would matter by the time the trial ended. Juries in general seem to be dumber than toe jam. If not to start with, they wind up that way after a week or more of having their brains massaged by the lawyers, and sometimes unscrupulous judges.
Theoretically you can be judged by a "jury of your peers." In practice, you'll be lucky not to get a jury that has rusty zippers and yellow tennis shoes.
The "jury selection process" always seemed crooked to me. You grab a bunch of poor bastards and hold them up to a month, jerking their chain, as the jury pool. They get grilled by attornies (or, more likely, their flunkies or hired consultants) periodically. Then, if they're judged to be acceptable by both sides, they're empaneled for some further indefinite time. The right to a speedy trial doesn't apply to either the defendant or the jury any more.
The mysteries of the jury pool selection are hidden from us. It's supposedly random, but in practice, who knows? I'd like to see it done by something like the Chicago Powerball Lottery. Your number comes up in public, you're a juror. You report to the court on your assigned day and begin. If it's a truly random selection, you're fairly represented by "the people", even if some of the jurors are a few cans short of a six-pack.
Further, the "speedy trial" part can take years. That's not speedy the way I look at it. I'd like to see an amendment to limit a trial to no more than one week. Lawyers would scream, but few juries are going to remember more than a week's worth of legal bullcrap anyway. I know I wouldn't; my mind would be cream cheese after 40 hours of being in court. I suspect a lot of trials are dragged on until one side or the other feels the jury is favorable, then they close and send the jury out to make their decision.