> USA Today is backing off part of its controversial report > accusing three major phone companies of secretly providing > phone records to the National Security Agency for a > nationwide database of domestic calls. The paper now says > it's unable to confirm that two of the three telecommunications > giants — BellSouth and Verizon — turned over any records to > the NSA. Both companies issued strong denials after a > national uproar last month.The NSA doesn't need to ask for call records, other than laziness.
For all practical purposes, the entire North American telephone structure is part of the NSA; they co-locate equipment closets, ferchrissake. They've been doing it for FIFTY YEARS. It's their freaking *JOB,* duly supported by every Congress since the Truman Administration.
Telcos have *always* provided that sort of information to the NSA when requested; due to the nature of the NSA's enabling act, they don't really have any choice.
All this has been public knowledge for, oh, the last forty-odd years. Every few years the media rediscovers that the NSA exists, and they fluff up all their feathers and crow like roosters. Meanwhile, the NSA keeps on truckin', doing what they're supposed to be doing, and Congress keeps approving their funding.
> 'Cept the fsck'n ones, rich or poor, who think their dogs > should be able to 'use' anybody else's site to do their business. > An then don't clean it up. Grrrr!We've occasionally had neighbors who thought that way. Most of them changed their behavior after I returned their leavings to them. Mat in front of their door, mailbox, the hood of their car...
We have a six foot wooden privacy fence around our lot. The house to the north has been occupied by a continuous procession of freaks and scumbags. And *every one* of those occupants has, at one time or another, lugged their trash out their back door and tossed it over the fence into my back yard. The insane part is, it's twice as far for them to carry it there as it is to put it out at the curb for the garbage truck.
The last time it happened, I used gloves, disassembled the mess of rotting food and dirty diapers, and carefully distributed it all where it would do the most good. I bet they'll lock their car doors from now on...
> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2300772,00.html > Iran's plot to mine uranium in Africa > Jon Swain, David Leppard and Brian Johnson-Thomas > IRAN is seeking to import large consignments of bomb-making > uranium from the African mining area that produced the > Hiroshima bomb, an investigation has revealed.I bet all three of these guys have at least a baccalaureate degree in English, and probably supplementary degrees in journalism. Not to mention an editor who approved the story, and at least one copy editor, all presumably literate.
Of course, stone ignorance could be a factor.
Jeez, I didn't know the Hiroshima bomb was produced in an African mining area... all this time, I thought they made it in New Mexico.
- Dave "subject and verb must agree" Williams
Twice, at $8,222 each, is $16,444. Plus the ER visit, CAT scan, two X-rays, various doctor visits... Assuming the second time works, it will cost around twenty thousand dollars. I'll be out about five thousand after deductibles and copay.
While leaving the office I told one of the office ladies I ought to buy myself a lithotripsy truck. She said the doctor only got about $250 from the procedure, the rest went to the lithotripsy people. I'm not sure I believe that, but those trucks are busy 8-10 hours a day, moving from hospital to hospital. Takes 30 to 60 minutes for a procedure, figure travel time, lunch, etc., you could probably still do six to eight per day. Let's say seven, at $8K each, that's $56,000 per day, minus truck payment, one nurse, and one X-ray rated operator assistant - the urologist did the actual procedure. Plus insurance, gas, etc.
$56,000 per day... you know, I really should follow up on that...
I'm having a hard time understanding why none of the local hospitals have their own machine. It's not large, and surely it can't cost that much compared to other capital equipment, and there's always a waiting list for the damned things. Or for that matter, most of the hospitals have clinics associated with them, and some of those do outpatient surgery; in fact, AB had carpal tunnel surgery down the hall in the same clinic as the urolgist I saw yesterday.
> I'm a little confused. Where in the hell is the original start of this > thread? Or is this it? Seems like Ron's original forwarded email > should be here somewhere but I don't see it.Who cares?
Just pick out a couple of key phrases and go off on a rant.
That's what *I* do...
I've ranted about this to people ever since, and all of them just gave me The Look. Yeah, Dave's got his freak on again. A few weeks ago my brother and Dad started picking up on it. They've also also tossed meals into the trash.
Every now and then I'll get bitters in something else. AB picked up some bacon at the grocery store that was bitter.
I've been blaming it on a change in fryer grease or cooking oil, Google sayeth not. Whatever it is, only a small percentage of people can taste it, and there seems to be some concentration point there it suddenly becomes apparent.
I'm still at a loss over the bitter bacon, though. I always thought they just sawed if off the pig and wrapped it. I guess they slather it with something along the way.
> > It's like you want your ass wiped for you, without having to give any > > instructions, and the wiper has to know exactly how and when you want it wiped > > auto-magically, even if your preferences change daily. > > > > Right?Exactly.
If we were happy with the original user interface, we'd still be moving patch cords from socket to socket, like ENIAC or the bombes.
Users weren't happy with that, so the card interface came about. No more patch cords! Just drop in a deck of cards, use the keypuncher, and put the deck in the loader. Such convenience! And - get this - instead of writing down the positions of which bulbs were lit (in binary) the computer would punch an output deck for you, no pencil and paper necessary.
Some lusers thought that was too hard, so they developed a washing-machine-sized box (I/O processor) that would let you use an ordinary Teletype machine. You just typed in your program, and, to the amazement of all, the machine typed out your answer right back on the same machine! And it was on simple tractor-fed paper that any schmuck could read, instead of punched cards.
Eventually someone thought about using one of those newfangled "television" things to save paper. They worked just like Teletypes, scrolling text vertically across the display. And then came graphics, and things really took off.
Xerox is widely credited as the inventor of the "modern" user interface - bitmapped graphics, mouse, and icons. However, Xerox chose the "desktop" as their metaphor, which was a bad choice that still haunts us today. The default view of Konqueror is still little yellow "folder" squares.
Unfortunately, while the "desktop" was useful for trying to explain things to absolute novices, it has shackled the imagination of most UI designers ever since. Four thousand years ago the Greeks quit using wooden pillars to hold up their roofs and went to stone instead... but people didn't trust stone yet, so they carved their pillars to look like wood. And *right now*, somewhere, a building is going up that still has pillars (probably fiberglass shells over steel beams) that are shaped like tree trunks with leaves at each end, because "that's the way it's supposed to be."
> Geography is not the key, it's how many illegal aliens there are. CA > has a HUGE problem!It's the snowbacks drifting down from Canada that annoy me. Everyone worries about Mexicans grabbing unwanted, low-paying jobs, while Canadians are competing directly for more desirable jobs... eh?
> http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110006614Another article written by someone whose grasp of history doesn't seem to extend past what she's seen on CNN since 1995... and with the resources of the Wall Street Journal and the WWW to draw on, that's pretty damned lame.
> Harry S. Truman, as president, once threatened in writing to kick > the testicles of a journalist (a music reviewer who had been nasty > about the talents of Truman's daughter).What Harry said was:
"I have just read your lousy review buried in the back pages. You sound like a frustrated old man who never made a success, an eight-ulcer man on a four-ulcer job, and all four ulcers working. I have never met you, but if I do you'll need a new nose and plenty of beefsteak and perhaps a supporter below. Westbrook Pegler, a guttersnipe, is a gentleman compared to you. You can take that as more of an insult than as a reflection on your ancestry."
Harry also made it plain that he was speaking as one private individual to another, not "as president" as the author implies.
> Richard Nixon is said to have snapped to an aide who came > to him with some issue, "You must have me confused with > somebody who gives a sh--." He also physically pushed and > humiliated his press secretary, Ron Zeigler.Having read up on what went on before, if I'd been in Nixon's place, I'd have figured out a way to have him shot. Zeigler was a scumbag.
As vice president under Eisenhower, Nixon once had his Secret Service bodyguards hold a man so he could kick him. Under the circumstances, it's hard to blame him. Read about it in Nixon's own words in "Six Crises."
> Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton.Hamilton set him up. Hamilton had fought several duels; that was Burr's first (and only). They used Hamilton's pistols; Hamilton's went off before he could aim, and Burr shot him dead. Later, it was found that the pistols had fancy "set" triggers, which trip if you give them a hard look. Significantly, most of Hamilton's previous opponents (using Hamilton's pistols) had shot prematurely. Burr was no duelist, but he *was* a marksman, and he knew well enough not to touch the trigger of a strange weapon until he had it on target. And tricky-trigger Hamilton bit the big one. The pistols, and X-rays of the trigger mechanisms, are in the Smithsonian. Any biography of Burr or Hamilton will tell you the circumstances of the duel.
> Sorry. I'm watchin a Geo show about the chunnel.That wasn't the only Channel Tunnel project. There were several, dating back to the 1800s. The new one is the only one where the money didn't run out before they finished; there were no engineering problems of note.
Oddly, there was considerable opposition to the various tunnels, from one side or the other. The first effort of the 1900s would most likely have made it had funding not been pulled because the Brits thought the Germans would use it to invade them. The one before that, the French canceled because they thought the Brits would invade them...
I never figured why anyone would want to invade France anyway. Hel-loo, people? It's full of Frenchmen, which pretty well tanks any property values...
In the Skylark books we had Richard Seaton, who discovered a source of cheap atomic power, invented a spacedrive, and went off into space. He set himself up as "Overlord of the Green System" through sheer military power, then wound up as virtual dictator of Earth, since he was obviously a superior being. He had a corps of superior aliens to act as his enforcers, and the did everything from killing people to overthrowing governments without a qualm, since they were so superior, anything they did was obviously correct and ethical.
On the other hand, the "bad guy" of the series was Marc DuQuesne, who simply wanted to be the boss. He didn't even want the Green System, just Earth was enough. I guess it was like the Coyote/Road Runner thing; even as a kid I rooted for DuQuesne, even though he was doomed to lose. At least DuQuesne was honest about what he wanted.
In the Lensman stories, an ancient alien race gives certain "superior" humans artifacts called "Lenses", which allow them, among other things, to read and control minds. These Lensmen have no compunctions about doing anything at all; obviously, since they're superior, their actions are always correct. The Lensman books came mostly after the Skylark books, so the totalitarian thing is worked out a bit more. Oddly, some of the evil Boskonian societies are described in detail, and other than not having Lensmen, seem to be laid out just like civilian versions of the Galactic Patrol - might makes right, and a person's status in society was determined only by might.
As I've grown older and read quite a bit of history, the word "fascist" comes to mind when thinking of Smith's stuff. Much as I like space opera, the stories were hard to take last time I read them.
These things bothered me, and I'd mentioned them online a few times. Then I came across an essay by Michael Moorcock, called "Starship Stormtroopers." Moorcock took Heinlein to task for totalitarianism/fascism in his stories. He was right, but Heinlein was a piker compared to Smith.
Some years ago I acquired a trio of paperbacks of some Smith books I'd never heard of - "Subspace Explorers" and "Subspace Encounter" being first and second of a pair, and "The Galaxy Primes", which was in the same universe and related. All were written in 1965, though "Encounter" wasn't published until quite a bit later. They were the last books Smith wrote.
In these, he took his might=right concept even further. Some people had psychic powers, therefore, all psychics had authority over non-psychics, and the psychics had a grading system rated on psychic power, with the strongest being the ruler, Q.E.D. The books were all pretty bad, and, frankly, they bothered me. If you're the biggest kid in the schoolyard, it's your duty to the race to stomp the snot out of all the other kids and make them do your bidding. I've read Clauswitz' "On War" and Hitler's "Mein Kampf", and if they wrote science fiction, it would probably read like these. I'm hardly any kind of liberal, but I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society based on unrestricted force.
All that said, you're missing some classic SF if you haven't read "Skylark of Space" and "Skylark Three" (the second in the series). It's hard to believe Skylark of Space was written in 1915! It's the kind of hard SF few people write nowadays. Also, the prequel to the Lensman series, "Spacehounds of IPC," from 1931.
Spacehounds was one of the handful of books that changed my life. The protagonist's spaceship is wrecked on an alien moon, and to repair it he needs to build a foundry and lathe, and draw copper wire from ore, and make the tools to make the tools to make the tools to fix his spaceship. I was probably 14 or 15 years old when I read that, and I thought those would be damned fine things to know, and that's what kicked off my interest in applied technology. I made my own furnace and cast aluminum, and made enough of my own tools to prove I could do the rest if needed. Well, not fix a spaceship, but enough to get a good grip on DIY 19th and early 20th century technology, anyway.
> Have you got a gas hot water heater?In Arkansas, we only heat our cold water...
> I was planning to come to some sort of point. At this > moment, I'm unsure what it was going to be."Dealers suck" would be a good one.
A friend of mine declined a job as service manager at the local Chevy dealer; he knew most of the people there, and how they'd been trained. Basically to run up the bill for maximum profit, assuming the customer, once screwed, would never voluntarily come back. He figured the whole department was too rotten to fix without firing everyone and starting over, something the dealership was unwilling to do.
As for parts departments... I actually worked in the parts department at the local Ford dealer, for a while. Ever wonder why service stinks so badly there? They all work on commission, at least in the several local dealerships. They make most of their money off shops and fleet operators, so when some schmuck like you walked up to the counter, they have to put their girlfriend on hold or quit playing solitaire, poke at their terminal a couple of times, and either send you away without actually looking for the part, since it's "not worth their time" to make a $6 sale, or they quote you the part at $40, because that's what they figure it's worth to go out to the warehouse area and find it.
> get rid of all the bloated, bureaucratic, monolithic entitlement > programs and replace them all with a single, simple Citizen's > Dividend. It would be a straight cash payment to every citizen, > rich or poor.There was actually a fairly detailed proposal for this at one time. It came from Richard Nixon in his first term, as a lever against the Roosevelt/Kennedy liberals in the House and the bureaucracies.
Nixon's staffers had figured up it would be cheaper to do exactly what you just proposed - a cash handout, or "guaranteed annual income" to everyone. By his figures, it would be substantially cheaper than than the massive HEW bureaucracy (even back then, in its comparatively svelte days).
Opposition to the proposal was practically unanimous from both parties. There were/are a lot of people whose jobs are dependent on "the poor," and most of them work for the government. Or as I like to say, "there's a lot of money to be made from poverty."
If the idea seems vaguely familiar, SF writer Mack Reynolds used it as part of the setting for most of his novels from the '60s and '70s.
If the numbers still hold true, I'm moderately in favor of the idea, though I would have to reconcile it to one of my more vehemently held ideas; to wit, people on public assistance shouldn't be allowed to vote. This may not be a real problem since the last few elections have shown how broken the electoral system is.
> > Take note of Operation TIPS on the CitizenCorps > > website. Get an extra-spy-point-bonus this week for > > reporting a family member! The Department of > > Fatherland Security! It's not just a cabinet level > > position--it's a whole new way to govern! > > > >From the New York Times, 7/16/02Same old stuff. All the pieces of that have been in place for a long time - all they're proposing to do is tie them together with a pretty ribbon.
Apparently the author didn't know about the FBI's tip line, which they've run since the 1940s, or that some school districts question children to verify demographic data, track drug use, firearm ownership, etc., that "deadbeat dad" and "child molester" hotlines feed nationwide databases, where you're automatically guilty, etc.
Those of us who tried to warn people about those things just got The Look (pity the poor paranoid) and ignored. Hey, the sky *already* fell, people; you didn't notice with your heads stuck in the sand, is all. We're tired of warning you; now we're just standing around saying "I told you so, you lusers..."
I've moved my prediction of Soviet-style internal passports up from 20 years to 10 years. I expect we'll see Federal ID cards well before that.
Thanks to the Miracle of Data Processing, you can create a police state with a few thousand dollars worth of PCs and a cheap PBX. Back in the old days it took a huge bureaucracy to really oppress people. With "progress", we can do that with cheap consumer electronics...
> So, I used them to strip the wires and while clasping the fourth wire > end connector, they came apart in my hand.The pivot pin and screw > were made of what appeared to be aluminum and simply sheared and > the pliers just fell apart.That's what I call "body snatcher" (from the movie) tools. They look like a real tool, but they're just an imitation.
Wrenches that spring their jaws open, sockets that strip out, screwdrivers with tips that twist right off...
A lot of the "body snatcher" effect comes with an US vendor takes a part to China and says "how cheap can you make some of these." The Chinese engineer, having no idea what it is or what it's for, then comes up with something that looks pretty much the same.
My favorite instance of this was written up in one of the auto service magazines a few years ago. The shop changed a front wheel bearing in a late model GM, then had an ABS malfunction light that refused to go out. In that design, the wheel bearing, hub, ABS reluctor wheel, and other parts are all one replace-as-assembly unit.
The shop spent a couple of days, replacing the sensor, swapping sensors side to side, checking wires, etc. Then one of the mechanics stuck his pencil magnet inside the sensor hole. Nothing. The reluctor wheel for the ABS is supposed to be magnetic; usually they're sintered iron. In this case, the reluctor was the correct size, shape, and color, but it was made out of some nonmagnetic material, and therefore the sensor couldn't see it.
> > This is a good question...one that I've thought about on several occasions, > > and unfortunately have no good answer for. Guerilla warfare (the most > > extreme version of which is terrorism) is ridiculously hard to fight. We > > found that out in Vietnam. We found that out in Africa. We're finding that > > out again in Iraq. The Israelis have been finding that out for years.The British found that out in 1776... a lesson we promptly forgot. And forgot again in the Philippines, though we wound up both fighting guerrillas and being guerrillas there.
The British have had a greater or lesser level of conflict between England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland for around a thousand years. Even intermarrying with the local nobility and establishing interdependent economies hasn't been a complete solution.
Frankly, as long as there are headcases with nothing to lose, who latch on to Welsh sovereignty, or a jihad against American infidels, or ridding the world of those danged Jews, or whatever thing takes their fancy, we're going to have some level of terrorism. Get enough of those headcases together, and we have a real problem.
> > I'm just not at all clear on what sort of real military power > > can be brought to bear against this sort of threat.Close to zip for conventional forces. A military is a concentrated force applied to a specific target, usually another army, a fortress, or a civilian city. Being concentrated, it's not much use against a diffuse enemy.
One possibility would be to create small tactical teams, put them in the field, and have them scout likely positions and engage the enemy as they find them, possibly with tactical air support. The US Army did something similar during the Indian wars in the 1800s, without the air support, of course. Modern thinking tends toward moving larger groups around, with lots of hardware, under close supervision. Turning small teams loose on their own grates against micromanagement types.
What we've been doing in the recent conflict is something a bit different. Satellites look down from above, and AWACS monitor radio signals. Over time, even small groups show themselves by their communication patterns or to the spy eyes. Then the HQ decides whether to bomb from high, bomb from low, or send in the ground and chopper guys up close and personal. It works fairly well against *organized* guerrillas. It doesn't work very well against very small bands or singletons, who are usually defined as "terrorists." There's not much you can go about a terrorist, other than vivisecting them on TV as an example to the next one who thinks it might be a grand idea.
> > As an aside, these sort of things actually turn out to be really good > > arguments FOR the second amendment. I often hear people spew nonsense about > > how the 2nd amendment is obsolete since the common populace, armed with > > sporting rifles and the like, are no match for the US Military. This > > rubbish is *true* if and only if the US Armed Forces can engage an aggrieved > > American populace in head to head combat.The Soviet Army vs. the Afghan hill people is a good counter example. "We'll use our handmade copies of century-old bolt action rifles to pick you off at extreme range, then walk over strip your bodies of any stuff that might be useful to us."
Again, it's a concentration of force problem.
> > In the case of a suddenly > > despotic US Government, a well-armed and motivated guerilla force is already > > embedded within the very fabric of the territory that would need to be > > subdued. Coupled with what is likely to be a high rate of AWOL among > > soldiers being commanded to fire upon their own friends and family, this > > presents a nightmare scenario for any military planner. Obsolete indeed.Ever notice that people who enlist in the military almost never get stationed anywhere near their home town?
The Soviet Union crossposted their troops across the various SSRs for the same reason. In their case, they had the advantage that many of them couldn't speak the language of the native populaces anyway, which made them even less likely to sympathize with them and disobey any unfortunate commands that might have come from Moscow.
> > Anyway, there's enough buzzwords in this email for Carnivore to chew on for > > a week, so I'd better stop now...besides, there are some strange men in > > black suits walking toward my cube....If they're carrying neat pop-out cellular phones that look like old Remington electric razors, you have nothing to worry about. If they're carrying Glocks, it might be best to sort of nonchalantly sidle out a side door...
> > If you keep repeating, "You'll wonder where the yellow went when you > > brush your teeth with...", people will believe that their teeth were > > yellow and that only your toothpaste made their teeth white.That's 1940s marketing. Immerse children in modern marketing from birth, and you have brand identification so strong they knife each other for their shoes.
> I moved on to ear plugs because I get tired of ringing ears.Any time I ride for more than a few miles I pop the plugs in. Which is a misdemeanor here, but if it comes down to it, a ticket is preferable to losing more of what little hearing I have left.
"HEY NICE BIKE!"
"YEAH, I LIKE IT."
"WHAT KIND IS IT?"
"ABOUT QUARTER OF TWO..."
Kevin's hand is still in a strut after surgery, so Tommy's son Brandon took the Malibu down the track. As usual, the car broke. This time it had a major oil leak at the back of the intake manifold. They wiped up the mess and made another pass at 7.66 in the 1/8. Not bad for a shakedown run. This problem was so trivial Kevin was actually reasonably happy as they loaded the car back on the trailer - a $10 gasket kit and a few hours work, and it should be ready to go back to the track. Naturally the leak didn't show up during the half hour of driving around the back roads near the house...
It an interesting track. I bet the BMWCCA guys in Memphis would have their brains explode if they saw it. It's a private track with the old-time attitude of "we're not your Mommy." No helmet rules, no leatherboy gear, no safety Nazis. Bikes run against cars, wearing T-shirts and flip-flops. Pay your $10, get in line, do your thing. Everyone thinks Centerville is run by Nazis because they require "a helmet" for cars under 9 seconds, and shoes and "a helmet" for bikes.
It took a while before I worked on it. The two-cylinder compressor has a non-counterweighted crankshaft, two die-cast aluminum connecting rods, two ordinary-looking three-ring pistons, and the rods ride directly on the crank. The mains, on the other hand, were needle bearings; tiny little things, about the size of a Ford roller pilot bearing.
The cylinder bores looked brand-new. I've been running Mobil 1, changing it every few years... since 1992! Seventeen years, plugged in all the time. Not bad for a home-duty compressor. The rods and crank journals were scuffed just a bit, probably from the time I let it get low on oil a few years back. A couple of days of porting cylinder heads, and it had habit of leaking oil on the pulley side. The seal there looked okay, except for being slightly larger than the shaft. It never had sealed very much. A local company is a C-H dealer and sold me a replacement seal for $5.63. It has a much longer lip and smaller ID; I expect the oil leak will be fixed.
Other than that, nothing was wrong with it. I honed the rods lightly, polished the crank on the lathe, cleaned everything up, and reassembled. There being no problem with the compressor, I looked at the motor. The pulley spun freely on the motor shaft. The key was gone. I've had problems with the pulley working loose before; in fact, I'd put a second set screw in it. The key slots looked okay, and a new key was tight in them. I'm figuring the pulley had worked its way loose again, and somehow the key had worked out, but damned if I can figure out how, nor why it would make such a horrendous car-wreck noise.
Got the thing back together, fired it up, and I don't think it has ever run so smoothly and quietly. Well, at least I got something in exchange for all the work...
Now to reassemble and finish the wiring for the stupid switches. After reading the Mach manual it sounded like a good idea to have them - if there's a software problem, they keep the machine from slamming against a stop and straining something. I'd wondered why so few people put switches on. Now I know why.
Fifteen minutes with the wrecking bar and I had the wooden floor boards pried off the floor joists. Fortunately they were parallel with the wall, so four rows left me some working space. 2x8 (old style, 1-3/4 x 7-3/4) floor joists perpendicular to the outer board, which was no longer attached to the floor at all; you could push on the wall and the whole bottom would swing out, and you could see the lawn.
The air conditioner(s) had leaked inside the wall (the structure below the window was gone) for decades, and the outer board had swollen and twisted. Most of the nails were pulled completely out of the joists, and the rest were rusted away. The board was sort of wrapped inside the (no longer attached) wall and the concrete block foundation, so simply replacing it would be quite difficult.
I considered the problem for a week or so, then decided to pull it back into shape and straight. Plan A was to screw some big eye bolts into the outer board, some rings into the joists, and use big turnbuckles to pull the board back up against the joists. I bought enough bits to do one, figuring if I pulled the middle in, the rest of the board would snug up. I used fat lag bolts, put the turnbuckle on, applied the wrench... and ripped the lag bolts out of the wood.
Okay, run some through-bolts with big washers. That moved the board oh, maybe a quarter inch, and then the turnbuckle stripped. It was pulling the bolts along the end grain of the joist anyway. Some of the joists are soft. Not rotten, but you can mark them easily with a screwdriver. Having cleared a bunch of rotten wood from the house already, I'm inclined to think these are just some kind of soft wood.
On the other hand, the outer board is NOT soft. I don't think it's hardwood, but sixty years of water and heat have curved it like a bow and it's harder than hell.
Plan B was to use the Sawzall and cut the outer board between each joist, holesaw access holes in the plywood outer wall (which is in fine shape, go figure...) and run big wood screws through them into the joists, and then screw short pieces of 2x8 to the pieces to join it all up.
It would probably have worked, but I decided to go for the thermonuclear overkill fangle. For Plan C I cut eight pieces of 2x4 inch, .100 wall steel tubing in triangular wedges, welded 5/16 x 2" plates across the fat ends, drilled holes, and made a bunch of angle braces. The lag bolts still weren't working too well, so I bolted them to the ends of the joists, then drilled holes through the outer board and ran bolts through it and the brackets. That's 32 bolts clamping to the joists, 16 to the outer board. 1/4-20s.
So, I cranked down until I stretched a couple of freaking bolts. Come ON, now! So I replaced them, cranked all the bolts down to guitar-string tight, and every week I've snugged them back up. Right now the outer board is about 3/8" away from the center joist, touching at the ends. I've pulled the twist out of it, too.
It may not be the "right" way to do it, but I guarantee it'll never move out of positon again...
That was Delphi 1, right when it came out. I had a hard time getting my mind around both "object orientation" and event-driven programming. This is fourteen years later, and I still maintain "objects" are just Pascal modules with a massive propaganda spin. It might have been a fascinating new concept to C programmers, though.
Anyway, I wrote half a dozen sizeable database applications for them, most deployed at a local hospital. Then I worked at an ISP, and wrote a billing application. I kept running into limitations on Delphi 1, but Borland had ratcheted the cost of Delphi 2 beyond what I was willing to pay, and since the employer wouldn't pay for it either, I made do with workarounds on 1.
After that, I didn't do any programming for a few years. I watched Delphi 3, 4, and 5 being announced, with four-digit prices, and then Borland issued a limited demo of "Kylix", which was basically Delphi for Linux. Since I had made the transition to Linux by then, I got a friend with broadband to download it for me, and got it up and running. I think I was running Mandrake 9.1 then.
I fiddled around with Kylix for a bit, but about that time I upgraded to a later version of Mandrake, and Kylix quit working. Borland had tied it tightly to version-specific system libraries; each version of Kylix would only run on a specific kernel and glibc. Which was an incredibly stupid thing to do, but Borland was busy shooting itself in the foot. They'd fired all their developers, spun their core products - their programming tools - off into some corporate backwater, priced themselves out of their market, charged almost full price for version upgrades (and let people upgrade from competitors' tools for less than they charged their own customers - the main reason I fired Borland), and only supported their products via netnews, which meant you had to have an internet account and a news server. Most ISPs charged extra for that, back then.
Borland went off into some "middleware" fantasyland, and their programming tools became "CodeGear", who seemed to basically just market the aging products. And as far as I was concerned, Delphi was dead. And Kylix vanished from their product lineup, too. Well, what do you expect for a product that sounds like a breakfast cereal...
A few years ago I stumbled across "Lazarus." It's an open-source Delphi workalike. "Yeah, let's take a free Pascal compiler, and we'll write our own version of Delphi, and it'll be backward-compatible with all versions of Delphi. Heck, we'll make it backward-compatible with Kylix, too. And we'll make it cross-platform and run on X, and Windows, and even the Macs. And it'll be free!"
Enthusiastic programmers come up with ideas like this, on a global basis, probably once every five minutes. Some of them might get as far as putting up a web page about it. Some tiny fraction might open a project at Sourceforge. Some infintisimal percentage might even crank out an alpha version. And every now and then, they actually get it working.
Two years ago I got Lazarus downloaded and running on a Fedora 5 machine I had as a spare box. It was a bumpy install - lots and lots of specific packages were needed, and I had to get help from the support forum a couple of times. But finally I was able to build "hello, world" in Lazarus. Then a bunch of stuff came up, and I forgot about it for a while.
A couple of weeks ago I was cruising through the SuSE 11.1 package manager and saw Lazarus was right there on the DVD. Well, hell! I clicked, and a couple of minutes later I was sitting in the Lazarus IDE. A few minutes later I had a project under way, with my old Delphi books scattered about as I creakily got my Delphi moves back. Holy moley, this thing actually works! I've been working on my little project a little every day.
> > The U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced last week that it has > > allocated $406 million in Clean Renewable Energy Bonds (CREBs) for a > > total of 312 renewable energy projects to be located throughout the > > United States. Unlike normal bonds that pay interest, CREBs are known > > as "tax-credit" bonds, and they pay the bondholders by providing a > > credit against their federal income tax.Uh. Yes. I guess the Revenoors had their own law, their own courts, their own cops, their own SWAT teams, their own machine guns and assault vehicles, why not issue their own "bonds" too?
The ATF, like the EPA, is an agency that is "autonomous", that is, it was created with a mandate to do certain things, not clearly specified, and given the authority to do as they please without Congressional oversight. Answerable to nobody, they're a whole government all to themselves...
In the end, most of the USA's problems come from Congress doing this sort of thing. The lazy bastards don't want to actually *work* at governing the country, so they slough it off onto autonomous agencies who send back occasional feel-good reports.
The book is written in a humorous fashion, but it is in fact a deadly serious commentary on management structures and how they (mostly don't) work. Parkinson's experience was with the British Civil Service, but it all looks perfectly applicable to 21st-century corporate America.
Parkinson's primary point is that the status of a manager is determined largely by how many people he manages; the manager with the largest body count has the highest status among his peers.
Though it sounded unlikely at first, careful review of employment-as-I-have-endured-it has shown there is much truth there.