Date: Thu, 07 Jan 1999 09:20:00 -0500
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
To: largo@chambana.com

-> Oh, Doug!  You got it mixed up with _Bentonville_!  Benton is
-> probably a somewhat saner place.  After all, in Bentonville (and

Just to confuse the foreigners, Arkansas has *two* towns called
"Evening Star" and two called "Evening Shade." Fortunately they're in
different ZIP codes.  Also towns with rustic names like "Oil Trough",
"Forty-Nine", "Fifty-Six", "Possum Grape", "Bald Knob", etc.  And
interestingly named unincorporated areas like "Toad Suck", which amuses
even the locals...  Toad Suck is about 70 miles north from Benton; they
sell T-shirts.



Date: Thu, 07 Jan 1999 10:14:00 -0500
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
To: largo@chambana.com

-> the national flag of Chile over it for months until someone from
-> South America pointed out the difference!  The Lone Star Flag of

Chile, chili, what's the difference?  

I read a story some time ago about an Army base in Germany.  The base'
main flag was falling apart and had to be replaced.  The flag detail did
the honors, pulled a new flag from Supply, and ran it up the pole.

A few weeks later, someone noticed there were only 36 stars on it.

That flag had been in the Army Supply system for a long, long time...

They pulled it and replaced it with a correct one, but I always thought
they should have left it up there; it had waited a long time, and that's
what it was *for*...  something that old isn't just obsolete, it's a
piece of history.



Date: Thu, 07 Jan 1999 19:12:00 -0500
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
To: largo@chambana.com

-> country straight to hell.  What's next, fast food??  How come they
-> haven't gone after "big booze"?

They did.  Remember the Prohibition?  Big Booze whupped Federal butt in
the end, too.

That's why I consider the whole "War On Drugs" to be a bunch of
political bullshit.  A Constitutional amendment and J.Edgar's
Tommy-gun-toting G-men couldn't stamp out beer, nobody's going to make a
dent in cocaine.



Low Fangled Auto Tech
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 1999 01:39:00 -0500
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> Any others? I think that's the lone exception. I remembered that too,
-> after I'd posted (and I did the same thing in the paper, no one
-> noticed that either.)

Still, Star Wars made a major contribution to realism in space SF
movies.  Prior starships were all immaculate altars to technology - the
Bellerophon from Forbidden Planet, the Enterprise, even the Jupiter 2
from Lost In Space never seemed to have any dirty laundry, kid toys, or
whatnot cluttering it up.

I still remember the shock of the first scenes of the Millennium
Falcon.  Solo reaches for the ramp button, which is in the center of a
ring of years of dirty handprint spooge.  Hydraulic oil is running down
the landing legs.  Inside, loose junk, bits of paper, coffee cups,
and whatnot are scattered; panels hang open with high-tech
paraphernalia hanging out, patched up with spit and baling wire.  Hey!
This isn't vacuum-packed-for-your-protection!  And the Falcon turns out
not to be exactly *reliable* all the time, either.  Kinda reminded me of
a spacegoing hot rod.

The characters were interesting as well.  Han Solo was, unfortunately,
a quite predictable stereotype.  But Princess Leia was ugly and had all
the personality of a pit viper, and it was glaringly obvious that Luke
Skywalker wasn't real bright.  Back in those days it was a major
deviation from The Way Movies Are Done.



Date: Tue, 19 Jan 1999 21:14:17 -0500
From: fanglers@xephic.dynip.com
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> At the last swap meet a guy was selling a kit like this except his
-> was made of wood (yes the stuff from trees) street legal and

Don't laugh.  Lots of pre-WWII cars were mostly wood, and some of them
were quite fast.  The last of them was the Marcos of the '60s.  Wooden
airplanes also went out of fashion, except for the De Havilland
Mosquito.  PT boats were made of wood as well.

Winston Churchill was quite un-British in that he was a technophile
instead of a technophobe.  One of the Brit secret projects during the
beginning of WWII was "Habakkuk", a Canadian-designed aircraft carrier
made out of... ice.  The idea was to use an on-board refrigeration
system to freeze a mixture of sawdust (plentiful in Canada) and seawater
(available free in the ocean) to make a ship-shaped iceberg with a flat
top, suitable for landing aircraft.  Habakkuk's other advantages,
besides being cheap as dirt, huge, and self-repairing at sea, was that
the prototypes simply laughed at torpedoes.  The cellulose localized
cracking from the explosions; think of the material as being a very hard
sponge.  Had they been built, the much of the tonnage lost during the
Battle Of The Atlantic would have stayed afloat.  For example, the loss
of Tobruk in Africa nearly toppled Churchill's government, not to
mention crippling morale.  The British *should* have had several
squadrons of the newest-design fighters for that battle.  So they did...
but the engines had been shipped separate from the aircraft, and the
U-boats sank that particular ship.  The planes sat on the ground.

We don't *need* Habakkuk technology any more, but during early WWII the
Empire hung on by that stream of ships crossing the Atlantic; later in
the war much of that tonnage was forwarded on to the USSR via Murmansk.
They needed Habakkuk *badly*, but Churchill's advisors thought the idea
was silly, Roosevelt was unimpressed, and the Canadians weren't inclined
to push forward on their own, so battles were lost due to inadequate
shipping and loss of those to the U-boats.


Churchill's six-volume history of WWII gave me an appreciation of how
much of military history is due entirely to logistics.  If you get
enough men and guns to the right place at the right time, battles are
usually easy to predict.  Much of the maneuvering that I couldn't make
sense of from a strictly combat standpoint became crystal clear when the
Big Picture was unrolled; every combat soldier was at the end of a long
chain of people whose efforts were solely to make sure he arrived at the
right place, at the right time, with the right equipment.

Habakkuk was technology that lost out due to politics, and a lot of
people died who would probably lived had it been implemented.

- Dave "On a roll again" Williams



Low Fangled Auto Tech
Date: Tue, 19 Jan 1999 20:33:00 -0500
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> S.F. bay area; I found myself parking in the pyramid,

You call *that* a pyramid?  Bah!  Cruise through Memphis, junction of
I-40 and the Mississippi River, and you'll see a pyramid.  Khufu, eat
your heart out...

- Dave "the ancient Egyptians never discovered stainless steel" Williams


Low Fangled Auto Tech
Date: Tue, 19 Jan 1999 19:59:00 -0500
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> "Civil rights" apply to every citizen, not just libral kolige
-> stoodnts.

Having spent some time in court waiting to be called as a witness, I've
seen more than I wanted of American court procedure.

Anything involving "civil rights" resolves to "pay the bailiff on your
way out," with attendant snickering.



Date: Wed, 20 Jan 1999 10:43:00 -0500
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

-> Wow, the guys on this list that heave intake manifolds and heads into
-> and out of engine compartments by themselves must be burly dudes!

A Performer 289 intake weighs 15 pounds.  Even I, in my advanced state
of aged decrepitude, can handle that.

On the other hand, the Ford service manual shows a cherry picker being
used to change a cast iron 390 intake.  They weigh 78 pounds - the same
as a T5 transmission, or *two* mounted light truck tires on steel rims,
or *fifteen* six-packs of Green Mountain Woodchuck Draft Cider...



Low Fangled Auto Tech
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1999 12:48:00 -0500
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> my friend and said, "He did" to which the fellow replied, "He'd
-> better have a damn strong set of lungs."  I didn't try to explain the
-> difference between generation and amplification of a signal.

The police are usually well behind the smarts curve.

"Accident reports" used by most Arkansas PDs ("accident" is a misnomer
- an "accident" is when you couldn't make it to the bathroom in time in
the first grade; what they're reporting is a *crash*) have a space for
"skid marks", which are supposed to be measured and written down.  For
police purposes, if there are no skid marks, they assume you didn't use
the brakes to avoid a collision.  Besides the fact that many tires leave
little or no marks when sliding, particularly in the wet, it sort of
ignores vehicles that have ABS.  And if you take evasive action to avoid
hitting another vehicle, like one that pulled out in front of you, and
you hit some stationary object like a sign or fence, it's a sign that
you "lost control of the vehicle."  Apparently, Arkansas police expect
you to put both feet on the brake and ride it in.  Screaming is, I
believe, optional at this time.



Low Fangled Auto Tech
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1999 18:50:00 -0500
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> What book was that, pray tell? 
->
-> Donald Norman was a bigwig at Apple, so no surprise there. He's
-> written other books too, which you might enjoy.

I sampled Dock's library while I was visiting; he's referring to Donald
Norman's "The Psychology of Everyday Things."  Mr. Norman has an
occasional insight, but overall he's so full of it he squelches.  I plan
to dissect it at my leisure and post a review on my web site.

Mr. Norman's fundamental problem is that he assumes engineers and
designers design things with the end user in mind, then builds his cases
based on that.  But in the real world, nobody gives a damn about the end
user, they have to satisfy their bosses/upper management/Accounting.

Whenever anyone tells me something is "easy to use", my question is
"compared to what?"  Since "easy to use" is an essentially meaningless
phrase nowadays, the question tends to bring some conversations to an
abrupt halt.



Low Fangled Auto Tech
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 10:31:00 -0500
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> down in the small office !  HAH.  I have seen countless offices get
-> up and running over the past two decades.  The first thing that
-> happened... hire one half time to enter data.  Then once up and
-> running hire one full time to tend the machine !   Thus a simple
-> paper shuffle adds 60 hours a week in payroll. What a great time
-> saving invention :)  Ya' gotta love 'em.

Bearing in mind I'm a fairly serious computer geek, there are some
damned good reasons *not* to put a small business on computers until you
get fairly large.  Old style paper accounting ledgers don't crash, don't
get incompatible upgrades, it's hard for people to mess with them, and
so forth.  Maybe I've read too much of comp.risks...

Office automation often equals "Now you are doing your part to support
computer literacy."  Plus a vendor and a couple of consultants...


My favorite local business is Pipe & Tube Supply in North Little Rock.
They sell metal.  They're the only place in the state that has no
minimum order, while most others have $300 to $500 minimums.  They'll
happily whack two inches off a twenty foot bar and sell it to you, and
they'll just as happily order anything you want that they don't have in
inventory, and sell you a piece off *that*.  And while you're waiting,
they'll wave you off toward the warehouse and tell you "why not wander
out there and see if there's anything else you want."

Downright un-American.

Some years ago they decided they needed an inventory control system.
Since they sell lots of odd lengths instead of nice neat mill stock,
none of the commercial packages they looked at really fit their idea of
what a computer inventory system should do.  So they decided they needed
to write one of their own.

At this point, most companies would hire a programmer.  I've sometimes
been a programmer in that situation, trying to learn a strange business
and write software for it, often when the buyer wasn't really sure what
they wanted.

Pipe & Tube made a hard left turn and sent their stock manager to
programming classes.  He wrote a simple database (dBase, I think),
running on Novell, with a dead-simple hotkey pick-a-number user
interface.  The salesmen can reach over to their keyboards and pull up
anything they have in half a dozen keystrokes.  Seriously.  P&T's
inventory system looks pretty primitive until you see it in action, and
then it kicks ass.  It's a good example of fitting the software to the
job.

Over the years they've begun to outgrow the capabilities of the system,
and now they'd like to interface it with the accounting system, etc.
The guy who wrote their original software has moved up in the company,
and he's not really thrilled about writing a new system.  He's sharp
enough to understand it would be cheaper and faster to start over from
scratch than it would be to patch up the existing one.   Nowadays there
are dozens of vendors selling specialized software for their kind of
business.  Prices are high, but they're willing to buy.  They know what
it costs to develop software.  They could do it a bit cheaper than
buying it from a vendor, but they don't want to go through the hassle
again.

Since you're talking about some substantially expensive software, the
vendors will fly in to give demos.  Here's where P&T makes another turn
- the people who use the software the most are P&T's salesmen, so it's
the salesmen they wind up talking to.  And their commentary is biting -

"I don't care how many colors it uses, it's slow."

"Where the hell am I going to find a place for a mouse on *my* desk?"

"This is 'Windows'?  It's too small to read!"

Most sales calls are from shoppers.  Someone calls up, wants to know
how much a 5-foot piece of channel iron costs, something like that.  A
salesman keys through steel->fabricated->channel->size and gives him a
price.  They hang up.  Elapsed time: often under 15 seconds.  I've
watched.  The commercial software all works by "customer ID".  You have
to set up an account for each new caller, then enter what it is they're
asking about, etc.  The idea is, if they call back, any salesman can
resume working on the order without having to look things up again, and
they have the customer's sales history right there on the screen.  But
P&T's existing system will price an order faster than the new ones can
dig it up off the disk, as there is so much interaction involved in
getting to the stored data.  And P&T's salesmen don't really give a damn
if you bought three feet of 2x2x1/4 angle iron four years ago, so why
key all that crap in?

Like one of them said, "I bet most sales software works like this.  I
bet it's why any place I call on the phone, they want to give me the
third degree before they will give me a price on something."

Now, rather than gritting their teeth and taking the best of a bad lot,
P&T's people are giving the vendors demos of *their* system.  "This is
the way we do business.  If, next time you upgrade your software, you
will consider adapting it to our needs, we will talk to you.  No, we're
not interested in a discount.  Go away."

That's right.  They're sitting on their old system and pressuring the
vendors to give them that they want, rather than what's for sale.

God, the number of times I would have been thrilled to have a customer
who simply knew what he wanted...



Low Fangled Auto Tech
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 14:25:00 -0500
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> Desensitizing folks to war is about the worst thing that can happen.
-> It boggles my mind how quick people raise a gun to settle an
-> agrument.

Part of that, I think, is what is known as "violence on TV", which
comes and goes as a media issue.  Kids grow up watching people get blown
away on the toob.  Not all that long ago Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry"
character was shocking; nowadays we can see almost the same thing on "Cops."

Properly administered violence is a very useful tool, but for all too
many people, it's the only tool they know.  That's one reason I'm a fan
of Dick Francis' fiction.  You will almost never see one of his
protagonists use violence; instead, they manipulate the situation in a
sort of social judo.  Kind of nice to see someone push the point that
violence isn't *always* the proper answer to a situation.



Low Fangled Auto Tech
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 01:13:00 -0500
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> If you are going to be talking British bands don't forget us
-> keyboardist's favorite, Deep Purple. One of the original metal bands.

I did a web search on "dave williams" the other day and came up with
two rather interesting hits.  One was a deejay in Sacramento.  We're the
same age, same build, both bearded and wear glasses, and both from
Sacramento.  Very strange.  His e-mail is broken.

The other interesting hit was The Official Uriah Heep Web Site.  I
smurfed through it without finding any obvious reason it came up, though
I'm beginning to suspect some percentage of search engine hits are truly
random nowadays.

Speaking of random... does anyone remember who did "One Tin Soldier"
from the movie "The Born Losers"?  I keep thinking it was America, but
whenever I think of the lyrics I hear Grace Slick.



Low Fangled Auto Tech
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 01:53:00 -0500
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> Why you dirty...
->
-> No, it's fine. I'm glad; I thought you were going to dissect the book
-> from memory, which I would have had a little trouble with. Whew!

Another G. Harry Stine quote: "Only your friends steal books."

Well, I didn't really *steal* it.  I just *borrowed* it.  I fully
intend to return it.  Someday.



Low Fangled Auto Tech
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 02:21:00 -0500
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> This is the thing...it ain't music and it is hard to imagine HipHop
-> really transplantingthe nearly 50 years of rock and roll.

First rock was going to be replaced by acid, then heavy metal, or maybe
disco, then punk, or maybe fusion, now rap... hasn't happened yet.  Sort
of like the End of Unix, predicted every year since 1980 or so.  But
we're not dead yet.  In fact, we're feeling much better now...

The media tend to concentrate on the new and/or outre, which is why the
music stores and radio stations are full of junk few people want to
buy or hear.

The last few years have shown an interesting phenomenon - thirty year
old bands blowing the dust off of instruments they haven't played in a
decade, calling up their agents and going off to the studio or back on
tour.  Because somewhere in the mid-'80s, the media forced a lot of the
old rockers out of business when they concentrated only on 'new' music.
But an awful lot of people out there like the old stuff, and they have
money.

A couple of years ago some k00l d00d on Fordnatics was raving about
"all you old people, cruising down the freeway listening to your
digitally remastered Rolling Stones on CD".  I wish I'd saved that
message; it was pretty funny after you thought about it.  He was trying
to insult the old-fanglers who didn't leap for joy at every "new"
thing, like the 4.6 Mod motor.  It was a classic example of total lack
of understanding - what *he* saw as a mortal insult resulted in a
couple of people responding more or less along the lines of "thank you."
I think it was about the time Kemper was raving about mud bricks,
potatos that looked like Jesus, and the Second Coming.



Low Fangled Auto Tech
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 02:24:00 -0500
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> me in for happy hour.  Metal detectors at the door and a box for what
-> they found with it.

That reminds me.  In the last year or so, damned near every public
business around here has put up 'metal detector' posts at their
entrances.  They look like the magnetic detectors libraries use.  I
noticed them in Raleigh too.  Auto Zone has them, and Wal Mart, and
Harvest Food.  They don't *do* anything I can see; at least the one at
Auto Zone doesn't go off it someone carries a starter through it.

?Que pasa?  Surely they're not installing them for nothing?  Or is it
some weird new OSHA thing?



Low Fangled Auto Tech
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 10:20:00 -0500
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> > business around here has put up 'metal detector' posts

> Anti-theft devices.

I was at a K-Mart in Atlanta that had little ferrite tabs stuck on
various items.  I was with jgd at the time; he said they were high theft
items.  I don't remember if they removed the tabs at checkout or zapped
them somehow.  But I'm pretty sure there aren't any anti-theft tabs at
AutoZone, or at that grocery store in Raleigh.



Low Fangled Auto Tech
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 09:48:04 -0800
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

  The Space Shuttle makes me so mad I get tunnel vision.

  Billions of dollars, and it's not *quite* as good as the reuseable
 lander Von Braun and Ley sketched out at Peenemunde in the 1940s.  Hell,
 it's not even a match for the USAF's Dyna-Soar of the 1950s, which was
 based directly on Von Braun's designs.  The Shuttle program was just an
 open wound in the space budget, with crazily expensive airframes with a
 very limited service life.

  We need a shuttle, but we don't need *that* Shuttle.



Low Fangled Auto Tech
Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 09:51:00 -0500
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> Being totally tune deaf, I'll stand over here, and just wish for
-> Simon to sing "Your sooo Vain".

"Well, you walked into the party
 like you were walking onto a yacht
 your hat strategically dipped below one eye
 your scarf, it was apricot
 you had one eye in the mirror
 as you watched yourself gavotte..."


-> I guess liking Sinatra, and the Doors puts me in the group "W". Bruce

"Motel party
 leather madness
 movin' fast
 from glad to sadness
 cops in cars
 and topless bars
 never saw a woman
 so alone, so alone
 so alone, so alone..."



Low Fangled Auto Tech
Date: Mon, 01 Feb 1999 02:44:00 -0500
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

I had picked up a datum somewhere that Koko the gorilla had done a chat
session on AOL.  This topic seemed ripe for some commentary on Turing
tests and the generally accepted quality of AOL chat rooms, so I did
some web smurfing.

In 1966 there was Washoe the chimp, who was raised in a more or less
'normal' human environment and taught sign language, much as deaf human
children are taught.  Washoe's command of language greatly surprised her
handlers as she eventually mastered around 300 words and was able to
form sentences of three to five words.  That's not a whole lot by human
standards, but it pretty well rocked the anthropology people.

In 1971 an anthro student looking for a Ph.D, thesis wanted to do some
follow-up work with chimps, but no chimps were available to her at the
time.  However, she was able to make an arrangement with a local zoo to
work with an infant gorilla.  The gorilla, Koko, uses over 500 words,
recognizes 400 more, constructs sentences with up to nine words, and
supposedly tests between 70 and 95 on human IQ tests.  Considering a
'working' human vocabulary is under 1000 words, that makes Koko smarter
than half of the people I went to school with.

Some web smurfing turned up sites dedicated to Washoe and Koko, who are
both still around, and have supposedly taught other chimps and gorillas
sign.  And Koko really *did* do an AOL chat session, back in April of
1998.  There was a transcript of it on the Koko web site.  Koko's
handler conducted the chat by telephone, relaying messages between AOL
and Koko.

Unfortunately, Koko either didn't understand what was going on, was
totally bored, or is as dumb as a rock; she didn't come across too well
even by comparison with AOLers.  Drat.  Practically all of the
conversation was spiel and excuses from her handler.  Koko's 'sign'
evidently requires considerable 'interpretation', for example, she uses
'foot' to mean 'man', 'lips' to mean 'woman', and 'nipple' to mean
'many', according to her handler.  This would be okay if they were
developing Gorillese, but they claimed she knew regular Ameslan.  It
could be that Koko is spoiled rotten and temperamental, and few of her
handlers are willing to argue with a primate who is capable of ripping
their arms and legs off if she gets pissed.  Or she could be dumb as a
rock.

I was interested in how the apes were taught and the limits of their
comprehension.  Unfortunately, both sites were limited to pictures, "buy
our T-shirts", and "send money".

I seem to remember a chimp who could type messages on a special
keyboard, using an artificial language.  Loglan?  Anyone remember
anything besides Washoe and Koko?




Low Fangled Auto Tech
Date: Thu, 04 Feb 1999 21:52:00 -0500
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> Another story about such stuff. Stuffy bitch at an inaugural ball in
-> DC sez to another lady--"I can't believe that guy wore COWBOY BOOTS
-> to this kind of a function!!"

LBJ used to wear his cowboy boots at official functions; if it was good
enough for a President, to hell with the etiquette Nazis.

- Dave "can often eat an entire meal without cutlery" Williams



Low Fangled Auto Tech
Date: Thu, 04 Feb 1999 22:07:00 -0500
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> Please enlighten me, what is the hidden agenda?  I always
-> believed, however niave, that the hidden agenda for any
-> company is to make money, keep motivated well trained
-> employees, and make more money.

I thought that for the first few years I was in the workforce.  Then I
discovered most companies are comprised of management who simply want to
maintain the status quo until they suck the place dry.  Then they move
off to someplace else, like the giant flying pizza monsters in that old
Star Trek episode.



Low Fangled Auto Tech
Date: Sun, 07 Feb 1999 12:17:00 -0500
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> edible. Although the one I've been talking about is called DHEA, I
-> think. It is an industrial solvent that was once hailed as a miracle
-> drug some years ago. Absorbtion directly through the skin into the
-> bloodstream.

DMSO?  There was a big flap about dimethyl sulfoxide back in the '60s.
It's a relatively common industrial solvent, but the quacks and New
Agers latched onto it and the FDA got involved, with yet another
schizophrenic set of regulations.

For a while DMSO was used for epidermal patches and the like, since it
would take meds right through the skin without need of a needle.  This
meant some drugs could be administered by hospital personnel who weren't
trained/authorized to use hypodermics.  Then the derms fell out of
favor, which is strange considering the needles/AIDS furor nowadays.

The CIA supposedly used DMSO and curare to make contact poisons, though
I'm not sure how useful they were; surely the stuff would evaporate
after a while?



Low Fangled Auto Tech
Date: Fri, 12 Feb 1999 13:44:00 -0500
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> About six years ago, I think, the legally-mandated volume of a flush
-> was cut to 1.6 gallons.  These things can't flush a Shih Tzu's daily
-> production.

Pretty soon the People's Democratic Republic of California will require
you to defecate into all-natural-post-consumer-waste paper bags and save
them for the monthly recycling pickup...



Date: Fri, 12 Feb 1999 19:07:00 -0500
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
To: largo@chambana.com

-> Don't you mean as dictated by the poles using such questions as "Are
-> you still molesting children? [Y]es [N]o"

Don't laugh.  Back some years ago I received a letter from my Senator,
who wanted to know if I thought President Carter's handling of the
Iranian hostage affair was:

[ ] good
[ ] excellent
[ ] outstanding

This was right after the US "rescue team" came crawling back with their
tails between their legs and shortly before Unkah Jimmuh ransomed the
prisoners.

I sent a flame-O-gram back to the Senator, telling him Carter was an
idiot and any leader with balls would have given Khomeini 24 hours to
have the prisoners ready for pickup at some predetermined point.  For
every day they were late, send the B-52s over and erase a small city.
For every prisoner they were short, erase a large one.  And if they
balked entirely, do to Teheran what the Romans did to Carthage.

Amazingly enough, I got a handwritten reply back from that Senator,
apologizing for the questionnaire.

- Dave "Peace on Earth, and death from above" Williams



Low Fangled Auto Tech
Date: Fri, 12 Feb 1999 19:36:00 -0500
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> Where I live in Maryland it's technically illegal to put pet poop in
-> the trash.  But just like everything else there's no advertised
-> alternative.

Well, like Johnny Fever said in that classic episode of WKRP, "gather
it all up and put it on the steps of City Hall."

And after having had the pickup people ignore my trash for four
straight weeks, I have done that.



dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
fangle  22 Feb 1999

-> increases YOY and from the previous quarter.  Jerks.  It took me a
-> while to figure out that the only thing of importance to the high
-> level management there was their compensation - the health of the
-> company, its competitiveness, its employee morale, etc. were all
-> irrelevant.

Back in my innocent days I thought companies existed to make money.
Then I slowly realized they exist to provide nesting places for
managers, which are analogous to tapeworms.  Managers reproduce until
they start choking a company, at which point they drain it of assets and
move somewhere else to start over again.



dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
fangle  24 Feb 1999

-> Hey!!! People who don't have that movie memorised might think you're
-> serious.

Who could fail to know it?  It's... it's... it's an ARCHETYPE OF THE
AMERICAN PSYCHE!


"Prepare the car.  I'm going to paint."

"No, Commander.  The *other* Battlestar."

"aaawwww, Mondo straight!"

"What we have here is a failure to communicate..."

"Can you squeal like a pig, boy?"

"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!"

"Hey, it's the U-Boat commander!"

"Welcome to the party, pal."

"Open the pod bay doors, HAL."

"Do you have that in an adult size?"

"Snake Plisskin.  I heard you were dead."

"It's a sin!  It's a sin!  Beethoven only loved music!"

"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

"I love the smell of napalm in the morning..."

"Senior citizens count for double points!"

"I'll be back."

"You're a scum-sucking vampire!  Wait'll I tell mom!"

Asp's!  Very dangerous.  You go first!

- You ship drugs to my country, and one morning you will wake up and
find your testicles floating in a glass of water next to your bed. (Red
Heat, 1987)

- Consider this a divorce! (Total Recall, 1990)

- Hasta la vista, baby! (Terminator 2, 1991)

- Big mistake! (Last Action Hero, 1993)



>How about "Lithium will no longer be available on credit."

Buckaroo Banzai

A few more:

These are my friends, I made them.

Listen up you primitive screw heads, this is my BOOM stick!

Water, that's what I'm getting at... Water.

I'll be taking these Huggies and whatever's in the drawer.

Screw the force, use the compter.

Are you guys really from the Internal Revenue Service?

You are the product of too much inbreading.



dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
24 Feb 1999

-> > "Prepare the car.  I'm going to paint."
-> ???

Corvette Summer.  That was always one of my favorite lines - I saw the
movie at the theater when it came out.  My friend Tommy was with me.
Tommy was moonlighting doing body work back then, and I'd just finished
restoring a '65 Mustang after major bodywork.  We both laughed so hard
people were edging away from us in the theater.

For those who didn't get the joke, any fool can wave a spray gun.  It's
the prep that consumes 95% of the work - and 4% of the rest is cleanup.


-> > "As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!"
-> Les Nesman, WKRP in Cincinati

Actually it was Mr. Carlson, but I'll give you credit anyway.  


-> > "Welcome to the party, pal."
-> Bachelor Party?

Die Hard


-> > "Do you have that in an adult size?"
-> ???

Jumping Jack Flash


-> > "It's a sin!  It's a sin!  Beethoven only loved music!"
-> ???

A Clockwork Orange.  Aw, c'mon, droogie!


-> > "Senior citizens count for double points!"
-> ??? (Death Race 2000?)

Yep.


Try a few more:

"Lots of space in this mall!"

"What's-a behind me is not important."

"I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you."

"...attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion..."

"Dammit, Janet!"

"Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a mechanic!"

"Kundalini wants his hand back."

"We are from... France."

"But I'm not dead yet!"



fangle
25 Feb 1999 20:56:00 -0500
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> Show him the marks, brothers.  Show him the pretty, pretty,
-> marks.

"The Omega Man."


-> If you can catch us, you can have us.

Aw, heck.  One of those car chase movies.  Cannonball Run?

More MadMax:

" Johnny the boy has done it again... and this time it's a scrubber"
" She is of the bronze, and full of treachery"
" He'll never learn"
" But you must teach him, Bubba."
...
" Goes to water, the dummy!"


"We're here to meet a friend, he came in on the train"
"Nobody came on the train, except a coffin..."
"Our friend..."


-> > "Kundalini wants his hand back."
> Mad Max - I'm a fuel injected time bomb

During the beginning of the movie the POV switches between various
Main
Force Patrol cars.  The common thread between scene changes is the
radio
chatter on the police radios.  If you can stop gawking at cool
Australian iron, there's a lot of interesting background material in
the
radio chatter.

"I am a rocker!
I am a roller!
I'm an out-of-controller!
born with a steering wheel in his hand...
I'm out and I'm never going back
do you see me, Toecutter?
DO YOU SEE ME, MAN?!"


" ... we're out the game ...send a meat-wagon ... charlies copped a
saucepan in the throat ..."



25 Feb 1999 21:30:00 -0500
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Ford

-> >    Goldenrod

-> I don't know, but this 49 yr old "kid" just doesn't get what you're
-> trying to say. Sorry.

Goldenrod held the wheel-driven Land Speed Record for about 30 years,
at just over 400mph.  It was broken recently, but only by a few mph.

That's one hell of a record, and the Goldenrod was a real, wheel-driven
car, not a missile on a skateboard, but toys like the Spirit of America
and Thrust 2 attract more attention from the drooling masses.

Goldenrod was built by the Summers Brothers, the same ones that still
sell axles today.  And if you buy their axles, there's a little sticker
on the end of each one, with a picture of Goldenrod.


fangle
26 Feb 1999 06:16:00 -0500
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> Some of the setup programs for the DOS apps and Windows itself
-> bent over backwards to detect if they were running on genuine MS-DOG
-> systems and printed confusing messages down the road if they were.
-> The code was done in oddball ways intentionally to obfuscate the

I was on the Windows 3.1 beta, back when they were real betas, not
glorified ad programs.  MS had a beta forum up on Compuserve, and lots
of Windows developers were *mad* when MS started doing the OS checks.
The guys running DR-DOS patched around the traps quick enough, but a lot
of pro developers were running Windows 3.0 on top of OS/2 1.3.  Windows
3.0 recognized OS/2 long filenames, etc., and if it crashed (not unusual
at all in the 3.0 days) the developer just closed that session and
opened another copy of Windows.  The Microsoft rep got nasty to some of
the people who were complaining, and shortly after MS patched out long
filename support from the 3.1 betas and added multiple checks for OS/2.
De-contenting, as it were, to reduce competition with the forthcoming
NT product.  Windows over OS/2 made NT look paralyzed, which was only
reasonable, considering they were developed to play together from the
very beginning.

Brad Silverberg had made some snotty comment to one of the guys running
DR-DOS (as I was).  Turned out there were a number of DRI people in the
beta, much to MS' horror - and one of them was Richard Williams, CEO of
DRI.  He and Brad got into it, resulting in the wondrous line, "We
reverse-engineered DOS, and if you screw with us, we'll do Windows too!"
And they *could*, as they'd proved with their clean-room MacOS clone,
which vanished when DRI got assimilated by Novell.


-> Microsoft is an evil empire.  I think Gates got some lessons on from
-> Clinton.

More like Stalin, not Klinton.



fangle
26 Feb 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> The success of Microsoft is a classic example of a failure of the
-> market.  No doubt, it serves as a study focus for numerous theses in
-> psychology and marketing.

I got into micros when there was still variety.  I sometimes have
trouble realizing newbies see a whole different thing.  My brother
was almost comically astonished to find out there were "alien"
computers, and he thought Windows *was* the computer.  It never occurred
to him you could boot something else.

Unfortunately, it never seems to occur to a LOT of newbies, and *most*
people are newbies, given the rate of market expansion.  Microsoft's
marketing has achieved total victory.



fangle
26 Feb 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> It still amazes me thou that they (MS) were able to jump that far out
-> infront
-> of everyone, and now, stay there.   Is software a matter of really
-> just throwing money at a project now?.

Microsoft has never been at the forefront of programming.  Their
successes came from marketing, pure and simple.  Well, and a big chunk
of luck landing that initial contract with IBM after they got pissed off
with Gary Kildall.  The IBM PC was *supposed* to run CP/M-68K on a
Motorola 68000, but Motorola couldn't supply processors in the quantity
IBM needed, so IBM fell back to the 8086/8087.  But Intel was having
problems fabbing the 8087, so IBM shipped the machines with an empty
socket for them.  Supposedly they were to be shipped to customers as
soon as they became available, but it was *years* before Intel could get
8087 production up, and by then nobody cared.  The target OS changed
from CP/M-68K to CP/M-86, but DRI, who was the Microsoft of its day, was
intransigent.  Bill Gates, Robert Allen, and Gordon Letwin ran a little
company called Microsoft, who heard about the problem and offered to do
a version of MS-BASIC as an operating system, like a C-64 or Sinclair.
IBM wanted a 'real' loader program, which MS couldn't do.  Bill Gates
actually wrote the original MS-BASIC, but MS was a language house, not
an OS house.  But they knew of a small local company called Seattle
Computer who was doing an S-100 Bus machine (a descendant of the
original Altair from Popular Electronics, the first PC).  Seattle was
using the new 8086 chip and was hoping to attract customers by offering
their own CP/M workalike, QDOS.  CP/M cost $495/copy retail back then.
They made a deal with Seattle, which resulted in Tim Paterson, their
programmer geek, spending many long nights cross-assembling code on a
DEC mini to load onto a prototype IBM motherboard...

Something few people remember is that you couldn't *buy* Microsoft DOS
by itself.  It was only "licensed" with the sale of a microprocessor.
Seattle Computer actually sold MS-DOS that way (part of the deal for
licensing their OS to Microsoft) but was still bound by Microsoft's
draconian "licensing" legalese, so they dropped an NEC V-20 CPU in every
box.  Otherwise, if you bought bare DOS over the counter, the only legal
option was IBM's PC-DOS, which they sold to anyone with $39.95.

$39.95 vs. $495.00 is why DOS took the market from CP/M.  Windows made
no market penetration worth noticing until MS made OEM deals with
computer manufacturers; now Windows is "free" with every computer, so
free took over from $39.95... well, $99.95 by the time DOS 5 came out.



fangle
26 Feb 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> Enjoy stocking your cube with exotic teas, going to lunch as a
-> department to scheduled resturants (Wednesday is tai day!), have

Programmers in group activity?  Who could stop when they were on a
roll?  Programmers live on simple foods that can easily be stocked in a
cubicle - doughnuts, Oreos, Twinkies, Moon Pies, Fritos, and Froot
Loops.  Thirst is taken care of by hitting the Coke machine on the way
to the bathroom.  Programmers who are *seriously* coding sometimes get
lost while making the trip and wander around in a daze; it's good
practice to gently guide them to the pissoir or their cubicle, as seems
appropriate.


-> trouble relating to multiple people at once

Prozac can be a way of life.


-> harbor a desire to say things only other programmers would think
-> are funny? This is the job for you.

"Do you know why women aren't good programmers?  They have trouble
counting - they don't have a carry flag!"

- Dave "used to count bytes in assembler, now writes multimegabye "OOP"
  code to do essentially the same thing" Williams



fangle
26 Feb 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> Unices.  As far as she was concerned, the most worthless, most
-> clueless individual users of this product were the
-> supposedly-very-technical staff of one local very-high-end Unix
-> workstation manufacturer.

It could be a parallel to the main hospital campus where I used to
work.  They installed a Novell system back in the mid '80s, back when
the whole hospital had probably a dozen PCs.  As the network grew, the
department managers managed to gain and control their individual
department servers and guarded their perqs jealously, to the point
that if a server went down, sometimes you'd have to wait for the
department manager to come back from vacation, because nobody else knew
the admin password.  The PC support department installed software and
replaced entire machines; if it involved opening the case, the "bad"
machines were sent to a local computer store for repair.

The hospital's main routers were also under political control, and when
they bridged us to the main campus, I found my private WAN was now
broadcasting all over the internet.  I used my trusty pocket knife to
cut the end off the router cable, walked into the IS Director's office,
and gave him a thirty minute lecture on network security.  Shockwaves
went through half a dozen corporate divisions, but oddly enough, nobody
ever said one official word to me about that incident...



fangle
01 Mar 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> Lets ship more jobs to Mexico please!
-> Did anyone notice that Mexico devalued their currancy right after
-> NAFTA? Labor is even cheaper still.

So?  Those jobs weren't going to stay in the US anyway; all Mexico did
was scarf them from the PacRim and South American countries.  If the
money is flowing the wrong way, it might as well go to Mexico; who needs
a slum on their doorstep?

What tends to annoy me is how many jobs go to Canada; a hell of a lot
more dollars' worth than Mexico.  But nobody cares if they go to Canada.
Must be too many videodrome signals on the toob.

Besides, it's a self-limiting problem.  When we export enough of our
industrial base to foreign countries, we will no longer be able to
afford the products we used to make ourselves, so we won't be able to
pay for Korean computers, Japanese cars, or French aircraft.  Then our
balance of trade problems will settle out nicely.

Adam Smith on one side, Karl Marx on the other - but to create wealth
someone has to *make* something; Klinton's "service economy" pretends we
can all get rich selling rocks to each other while playing with the
interest rates and printing funny money.



fangle
01 Mar 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> I don't think a country can arbitrarily devalue its own currency;
-> that task is left to the other countries who wish to trade there.

Sure, happens all the time.  To the USA, too.


-> fire up the printing presses and print up a few million pesos while
-> nobody is looking...

That's exactly how it's done.  Roosevelt's Raw Deal plan to lever the
USA out of the Depression was based on printing tons of funny money with
nothing to back it; successive Congresses continued doing it, printing
money as required to buy votes.  That's the major reason we have
inflation; it's been going on so long few people realize it's not the
normal state of a balanced economy.  As long as you're the one printing
the money you come out ahead by devaluing everyone else's money in
relation to yours, but once you start riding the tiger, you find it's
damned difficult to get off.



fangle
01 Mar 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> I was watching the History Channel last night and they interviewed a
-> German Afrika Corp. vet who said the Germans feared the NZ army guys
-> the most because they were the most ruthless.

There was a kind of positive-feedback thing on that.  The NZ commander,
- uh, Freyberg? - whichever, volunteered the NZ troops to take point
position on all attacks, and so they did, in most cases.  This resulted
in the Zeds obtaining lots of time under fire, becoming more skilled in
combat than the rest of the Empire troops, etc.  German propagandists
made a big issue of how English commanders were wasting Zed troops to
protect English soldiers, which caused a minor ruckus.  A major ruckus
was caused when Churchill tried to promote Freyberg to a higher
position and what amounted to the entire English officer corps
revolted.  No fuckin' *way* were they going to stand for Englishmen
under a colonial commander; it was one of the few times Churchill was
utterly defeated politically.  Churchill got even by putting all the
Empire troops under American command... which oddly worked out okay.
As "foreigners" the Americans weren't part of the sometimes-bitter
Empire interservice rivalries.  And the American chain of command, no
matter how FUBAR it got, was a marvel of simplicity and logic compared
to the utter chaos of the British military, which occasionally was
beyond even Whitehall's comprehension.

Anyway, the Zeds, early on, collected a lot more combat time than most
other troops, though the South Africans weren't far behind.



02 Mar 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
eec

-> What does TK/TCL stand for?  What kind of software is it?  What
-> platforms does it run on?  Sorry, this Linux and TK/TCL stuff is new

TCL stands for "Tool Command Language".  TK is "Tool Kit."

TCL is a scripting language, on the general order of Perl, Unix shell
scripts, etc.  It's a relatively simple interpreted utility language.

TK is an extension of TCL.  It's essentially an abstracted GUI builder,
with primitives for windows, buttons, scrollbars, etc.  It runs on top
of other GUIs - Windows, X, Macintosh OS, etc.  The prices of
abstraction are speed and features, but the benefit is portability.  I
have a mail reader project I'm working on in TK.

TK's graphics capabilities are adequate for plotting, pictures, etc.

The major benefits of TK in a group situation like this are
a) it's free, so everyone can have it
b) everyone can have the *same* versions of the tools

Think about the hassle if you had to have everyone on the exact same
version of VC++...

If you can program in C, Pascal, or BASIC, or even csh, you can pick up
TCL/TK easily.  Ousterhout's 'Tcl And The Tk Toolkit' has all you need,
and there are many tutorials available on the web.


-> My problem is I have a dos/windows laptop that I plan to use

DOS is a convenient minimal toolset, and many people don't realize that
most major OSs will host well-behaved DOS programs, even on non-Intel
processors.  DOS emulators are available for most Unixes, the Macs, etc.
as well as all (Intel) versions of Windows.  For portable graphics,


however, you'd be better off with TK.




fangle
05 Mar 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> alt.binaries.cumshots.  I see your company needs a firewall
-> 

Feh.  That was a couple of years ago - back when we had to purchase our
own net accounts from somewhere.  Not that I would have permitted alien
IP running over my WAN - the bastards were too cheap to go for a
firewall, even fwtk.  It was a continual fight monitoring the routers to
the main campus, where the router admins would keep turning on IP
forwarding and I'd keep cutting the ends off the cables.  They couldn't
see any harm in hanging peoples' private medical information out on the
internet, nor did they understand why passwords were required.  I'm
serious as hell; they were psychopathic about anyone getting to the
mainframe, but anything on the Novell and NT networks was hanging out
for the taking.



fangle
06 Mar 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> This is one thing I enjoyed about remotely managed hub and
-> switch ports, and a stern "GreedyBank Inc" usage policy -
-> remotely turn the port off, then the user calls the help
-> desk.

I wish.  Unfortunately, our routers were controlled by the maintenance
group, and the main campus' routers were controlled by whoever had
political ascendance that week.  None of them knew what the hell they
were doing; Maintenance had a "consultant" up in Michigan somewhere who
would dial in using some wierdball remote-console Windows shell
(PC Anywhere?) and futz with the routers.

After the 'consultant' make three attempts to fix something-or-other,
I offered to fix it myself.  That's when I found out the company didn't
even have the passwords for their own routers or bridges - only the
'consultant' had them.  Consider this was a 500+ node WAN - two admin
buildings wired for Ethernet, a Token Ring bridge to the main campus,
ISDN, muxed fractional T1, and modem connections to 20-odd outlying
sites, the other Token Ring bridge to the 3090s...

I often felt like a square peg in a round hole, working there.  It was
probably the most fun I'd ever had as a job, though.  Even if they did
freak when I paneled the walls of the computer room in whiteboard and
started writing on the walls...  took me two 4x8 sheets to map out the
WAN, with router and bridge locations.  It had sort of 'just growed' and
nobody thought it was important until they misplaced a router one day.
I mean, it was right there on the network, but nobody knew where it
*was*, precisely, though they were pretty sure it was in one 5-story
building, or perhaps the third floor of the main hospital campus.  A
week later they found it in a janitorial closet somewhere.  I asked if
there was a UPS with it.  No.  And they couldn't understand why a $125
UPS would be a good idea.  They'd blow tens of thousands of dollars on
crap, but I was having to piece things together with string and soup
cans.  



fangle
09 Mar 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> Say what? Does this imply I could run my Windoze applications on an
-> Xfree86 -equipped Linux machine? Or would I be running those W95 apps
-> remotely via connectivity (LAN or net)?

X was designed by MIT, which had a shitload of graphics terminals in
their CS departments... but they were all different, incompatible types.
The GUI had to be able to handle any sort of hardware, and to
communicate between the application and the display - which were likely
to be on wholly different machines.

When you're running X, you can open a window onto any other system on
the network running X - it doesn't matter, because X' native
communication mode is TCP/IP.  The X client and X server are split and
talk to each other by TCP/IP, which isn't quite as fast as direct
hardware access from driver to video board, but the driver and the video
board now don't have to be on the same machine.

You can access X applications from anywhere to anywhere, just like you
can telnet.  With half a dozen windows open on your screen, each window
might be connected to a *different* machine - and they don't even have
to be binary compatible with your processor; you're just running a
really fancy graphic terminal emulator.

X has been around a long time.  There are compressed X implementations
to run over serial connects, too.  That's one reason we "obsolete" Unix
geeks howl with laughter when we see things like Citrix, and Microsoft
press releases about their new remote Windows products, which are
usually hideously complex imitations of old, old stuff, spiced up with
a bushel of proprietary Microsoft-speak acronyms and buzzwords.

The other neat thing about X is it's just a collection of primitives.
You have to run a manager program if you want a user interface.  *All*
of X is programmable, and there are many managers to choose from.  Most
let you program direct to X.  You want it to look exactly like Windows
95?  There are managers for that.  Want the status bar vertical on the
left?  One on each side?  Want to get bizarre?  Just program it.  Some
of the early X managers were pretty crude, but there are some nice ones
out there now.



fangle
09 Mar 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> I'm genetically left handed.   But at this point I generally

The brain is not symmetrical in the distribution of its functions.
Some functions are found only on one side of the brain.  Normally the
left side is dominant - people are right handed, as the brain is sorta
jammed in there backwards.  The most common left handers have reversed
dominance, which means their brains don't work quite the same way.  This
type of lefty tends to be less physically coordinated than righties and
tends to be better at some types of abstract thought than righties, as
tested by various standardized scoring systems.  We're talking fairly
minor differences, though.

The other type of lefty has a mirror-image brain; they're just a right
hander turned the other way.  They are considerably less common than the
first type, and are of considerably more interest to the researcher
types, as the physical mirror-image is normally the brain only; cases of
torso organs being on the wrong sides are much more rare.

Somewhere between three and ten per cent of Americans are left-handed.
It's hard to tell, because at least through the 1970s schools forcibly
"broke" lefties to conform, all the way to tying their left arms down
during school hours.  Children who still refused to be broken were
"helped" in various ways.  This sort of thing has become much less
common nowadays, but teachers still inform parents of the "problem" of
left-handed children, and advise them to seek "treatment."

Of children "broken" from left to right handedness, incidence of
stuttering, aphasia, and epileptic seizures is dramatically higher than
that of children left alone.

If I sound a bit bitter, I was one of those who refused to be broken.

Many foreign countries are considerably less tolerant of lefties, nor
has the USA been very tolerant for long.  Up through the 1950s
left-handed children were usually beaten until they conformed.

I would guess the true distribution of handedness, if left alone, would
be closer to 50/50.  There is some evidence it may be an inherited
trait, but the way social pressure works, it's often hard to tell if
someone was left handed to start with.  Also, in a right-handed world,
lefties have to learn to do most stuff right-handed.  It's normally only



fangle
09 Mar 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> Ever heard of alien hand syndrome?  In some severe cases of
-> siezures, they cut the carpus collosum (sp? - the membrane that
-> connects

Yep.  One side of the brain gets the speech centers, the other side has
problems communicating.  Depending on handedness, it's possible to get
someone who's had the operation to carry on two simultaneous
conversations, one spoken, one written.

The subjects say they really don't notice it much, and it's not a
problem in daily life.  Certainly not compared to grand mal seizures,
anyway.



fangle
11 Mar 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> P.S.  I've always been of the mind that controlling criminals should
-> probably come before gun control...but what do I know...

You treat the *symptom*, not the cause.  That way you can be seen
making enormous effort, and maybe collect more votes.  If you eliminate
the cause, you're endangering your job security.

Remember the Nazi Party's main platform was crime; Germany of the 1920s
was a rough place.  Imagine Capone's Chicago, except with political
gangs too.  Of course, the Nazis *caused* a big chunk of that crime with
their Brownshirts...



fangle
11 Mar 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> boat with that as with the Ruger. I'm thinking something more like a
-> .38 or .40 revolver with a short barrel, that will be economical (gun
-> and rounds), yet have some decent knock-down capability (is it
-> Ruger's P102 model? not sure now.)

For a carry gun, my favorite is still the Charter Arms Bulldog in .44
Special.  It's a compact, aluminum frame, 5-shot revolver designed for
concealed carry.  The .44 Special is ballistically close to the .45 ACP,
except you can load it with wadcutters for greatly enhanced expansion.
They're also cheap - if you ever have to use a gun, you'll never get it
back from the cops.

Some gunheads get all ripped up about "combat survival" and buy $3000
race guns to lug around, because "one chance is all you get."  They're
full of it.  If the guy is outside rock-throwing distance, you're going
to have a hell of a time justifying a shooting.  And within that
distance, you don't even need sights, much less a holsterful of trick
parts.



fangle
11 Mar 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> Solution #1: Drop barometer from top of building and find the time it
-> takes to smash into the ground. Apply simple physics.
->
-> Solution #2: Find the physical plant guy and say, "Hey, if you tell
-> me how tall this building is, I'll give you this really cool
-> barometer

That's a favorite of mine, but not for the same reason as most people.

Solution #1 gives you a substantiated answer subject to the limits of
the accuracy of your measurements.

Solution #2 lets you know what someone else thinks the answer might be.

On the 'net, you see an awful lot of people reaching for Solution #2,
apparently without considering the consequences.



fangle
12 Mar 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> A funny war over some of sheep grazing land.

The Brits didn't think it was funny at all.  It was By God British
territory whether it was worth a shit or not.

During the same general time frame the USA gave away the Panama Canal
and its bases in the Philippines, and we'd just avoided losing a war
with Iran by carefully not calling it a war.

I remember the Pentagon's 'informed studies' predicting the Brits would
last three to five days against the Argentines.  Creepy to think these
were the same people in charge of US defense and Mutually Assured
Desctruction.



15 Mar 1999
Dave Williams 
WWII-L

-> In 1776 Adam smith pointed out the economic nonsense of colonies.

Well, Mr. Smith may have had an axe to grind on that particular subject.

From times well back before WWII, colonies have played an important
part in the military power of many nations.  Neither Britain nor France
would have been able to offer more than token resistance to the Nazis
without backing from their colonies.

Americans in general have a sore spot about colonies, but we'd probably
still be happily British if King George hadn't been a nut case and his
Parliament had been a bit more powerful.  Even the home islanders were
upset; there was more than one attempt to continue the fine old English
tradition of regicide during George's reign.

The USA hasn't been a colony since 1776, but no matter how much
economic juggling you care to do, the British got every penny of their
investment back in 1939-1945, and more.  Same for most of their other
colonies, then-current and former.  France exited the war before their
colonies could help much, but take a look at what French Africa and
French Indonesia contributed to WWI some time.  There wouldn't have been
a France in WWII if it hadn't been for them.

Rhetoric and propaganda have turned 'colonialism' into a bad word, but
it has paid off handsomely over the years.



fangle
15 Mar 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> lies in a circle of about 7 inches diameter at 7 yards.  This means
-> that the shotgun has to be aimed, even at this maximum distance.

True.  The shotgun has the advantage, though, that it's easier to aim
under combat circumstances - high adrenaline, low light.  Just point the
stick and pull the trigger, no trying to line the sights up.


-> A shotgun is problematic because of its barrel length.  The
-> barrel forms a marvelous lever for the bad guy to twist it
-> out of your grasp, so you must be very careful that such an

If he gets that close, you've lost already.


-> that you can't lead with the shotgun as you go around a corner
-> becuase the bad guy might be waiting just around that corner,

True, but only valid where you are the stalker and not the stalkee.
In my state you have to wait for them to come to you before you can
start arranging circumstances where you're not likely to go to jail for
pulling the trigger.


-> On the other side of the coin, the shotgun has unsurpassed
-> psychological deterrence.  The sound of a shotgun being racked
-> is universally recognized by the bad guys, and usually causes

As Ayoob says, the best gunfight is the one where you didn't have to
shoot.  Any deterrent short of lethal force is worth its weight in
money.


-> For a lot of good information on defense, check out Massad
-> Ayoob's books "Stressfire" and "The Truth About Self Protection".

I have his "In Gravest Extreme."  I had several copies once, but they
got loaned out.

Ayoob stresses some points others tend to gloss over.  Like, you're
probably going to go to jail for a few days no matter what the
circumstances were, and you're going to get a worm's-eye view of the raw
end of the law enforcement/justice systems too.  And you're not likely
to get your gun back either.  And no matter how justified the shooting,
it's going to cost you a lot of money in bail and legal fees before you
walk.  *If* you walk, which depends a lot on how your local DA feels
about deadly force for self defense.



fangle
19 Mar 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> > Like Ayoob says, "the best fight is the one you didn't get into."

> Ayoob is by no means the first to come up with that.  Arguably, Sun
> Tzu was the first to actually write it down:

I dunno, China during the Warring States period did war more or less
for entertainment, not for anything we'd recognize as necessity.  I've
read Sun Tzu as well.

Nevertheless, what Ayoob was getting at was, once you have a gun, you
can afford to tone down the machismo, eat a little shit, and back out of
a bad situation.  You don't have to do the Dirty Harry number.

The martial arts guys seem to pick this up naturally, probably because
they train for a long time to learn their skills.

Unfortunately, the Holy Toob simplifies everything to "kill them all",
to the point where few people realize there are alternatives.
Judiciously applied violence is a wonderful tool, but to too many
people, it's the only tool they seem to recognize.  If all you have is a
hammer, all your problems look like nails, etc.



fangle
19 Mar 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> > John Erik Hexum was his name.  Absolutly the very best example of
-> Darwin at > work I ever saw or heard of.  It was a .44 Mag.
->
-> same thing happened to Freddy Prinz about 20 years ago

A friend was at a party where the host was showing off his new
wundernine something-or-other.  Popped out the magazine, put it to his
head, splattered half the room with brains.  Never occurred to him there
was one up the spout, evidently.  Mike was *freaked*, and wouldn't speak
to me for years after I laughed at the story.

Guns aren't toys, and if you fuck around with them, they will kill you.

"Accidentally fired shot while cleaning gun" is a common excuse.  The
real translation is "I was playing with it and it went off."

I once shared a hospital room with a guy who had been horsing around
with his brother, trying to grab a .357 out of each other's hands.  Shot
his penis off.  They were trying to graft sections of skin from the
insides of his thighs to give him something to piss with, and it wasn't
working too well.  Stupid is as stupid does.



fangle
25 Mar 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> I liked _RFA_, but had some heartburn over the criticism (implied and
-> explicit) of Heinlein.  It was reminiscent of the "yuk, what a
-> fascist" comments I've heard.  That silly _Starship Trooper_ movie
-> didn't help matters, either.

I grew up with Heinlein's tales.  Somewhere in my teens I read "The
Past Through Tomorrow", where he inserted pieces of rather nasty
commentary about his readers between stories.  My opinion of him started
to erode then.  Later I came across commentary by other writers, mostly
Pohl, and some people on BIX who had known Heinlein.  The final straw
was "Grumbles From The Grave", which established beyond any doubt that
RAH was a flaming asshole with clusters.

No problem; I can still sit down and enjoy anything through "Stranger
In A Strange Land" just like before.  He wrote nothing of consequence
afterward though.



31 Mar 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
largo@chambana.com

-> BISMARCK, N.D. - When he's looking to unwind after a tough day, state
-> Rep. Rex Byerly reaches for his pistol. ''I start off by blowing away

Aaron Burr used to go out in the alley behind his law office and do
some target shooting during his lunch break.  No word on what his
neighbors thought of the practice, though.

Burr acquired a reputation as a marksman.  When Alexander Hamilton set
him up for a duel, Hamilton's guns were used, as was customary.
Hamilton's gun went off before he even got it aimed at Burr, who then
plugged Hamilton.  This caused great public outcry, as Burr was
relatively caustic and unpopular.  Interestingly, it was Burr's first
and only duel; Hamilton had survived several.

A few years ago the Smithsonian X-rayed Hamilton's pistols and found
they had gimmicked hair triggers, similar to "set" type target triggers
nowadays.  Ironically, most of Hamilton's opponents, using these guns,
had fired harmlessly into the ground, much to their surprise, while
Hamilton calmly gunned them down.

Burr was a good enough marksman to know not to play with the trigger of
a strange weapon until it was pointed in the right direction.  Hamilton
probably set his trigger inadvertently.

Hamilton got a pine box.  Burr went on to a very long (he died in his
80s) and colorful career.  He managed to get on the ticket for the
Presidential elections along with Jefferson, whom he tried to double
cross.  Jefferson booted him out of town, so Burr rounded up some loose
Army units and decided to go off and conquer Mexico.  His plan was
undone when one officer, whom he had tried to bribe with an offer of a
dukedom under the fief of Aaron I, wrote off to ask what the hell was
going on.  Burr was intercepted, chained to a horse, and hauled back to
a Congressional enquiry, which became that era's version of the OJ
Simpson trial, and gave rise to the expression "argues like a
Philadelphia lawyer."  Burr's career got sort of strange after that.
After he got older he married the madam of a bordello and worked out of
there.



fangle
01 Apr 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

This week's issue of Internet Week had an article on Mac OS X.  One of
the major features they touted was its ability to boot a local machine
from a remote server over a network.

I guess Macs didn't know about bootp?  Even DOS and Novell workstations
had loaders available to remote boot with from their LAN card; that's
what the empty socket is for on almost any LAN card you'll find.  I
always *assumed* you could still do this with Weiners, at least Weiners
95/98.  Hauling NT off a remote server would be a good way to clog a
LAN, though.

"The operating system includes WebObjects 4.01, a tool for building and
deploying content to large e-commerce sites..."  This defied translation
from marketing-speak; it could be anything from Clipboard to a full
blown web site generator.


I've been just coasting along on my vacation from serious computer
geekdom.  For the first few months I felt like I was being left behind,
reading about all these new alliances and technologies that seemed to be
sprouting all over.  But in the end they all proved to be the same old
marketing chimera, and the same old stuff is still there, dressed in the
Emperor's new clothes.

I can hardly wait; anyone want to bet next year will be "The Year Of
The LAN?"



fangle
01 Apr 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> I wonder if the poor man who drove away a freshly nuke'd Truck is
-> alive and well today?

Leslie Groves and Robert Oppenheimer were photographed standing at
Ground Zero, Trinity within a couple of days after the first test.  I'm
sure there was some residual activity, but it was apparently considered
safe - Oppenheimer could have been replaced, but Groves was the key to
the Manhattan Engineer District and would hardly have been risked.



fangle
01 Apr 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

I was perusing the new issue of Information Week when I came across
an article on "shredder" software, which irretreivably deletes files
from your hard drive.  Supposedly such software is marketed to large
companies; the article mentioned RJ Reynolds had recently bought Novell
Data Shredder, then went on to discuss whether other companies would be
interested.

Jeez, I guess they don't know about Norton Secure Delete, which shipped
from at least 1985, or PC Magazine's freeware file killer, or...  such
programs write multiple patterns of bits across an erased file so it
can't be recovered by 'undelete' or even by specialized disk recovery
hardware.

Everything old is new again.  Particularly if it's marketed for "32 bit
Windows."  I wonder how much Novell charges for their particular
product?



fangle
02 Apr 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> (The problem is that if a block goes bad, it gets dynamically
-> re-mapped to the spare block pool, and you can't get to it any more.
-> If classified data was on that block, well, you're SOL...)

I thought that was an implementation thing, not part of the SCSI spec.
My Future Domain controller's utilities claim it can address absolute
blocks; surely the drive doesn't hide it from the controller?

Journaled filesystems and backups would put the kibosh on file killer
stuff, but I don't consider anything on a common server to be secure
anyway.  Once you turn your files over to someone else, you just made
them inconvenient for others to access, not secure.


fangle
02 Apr 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> Joe (Atoms for Peace) Boucher

By all means!  The bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the only weapons
I know of that saved more lives than they took.

Based on what had been learned with amphibious assaults against the
Japanese at Tarawa, etc., the Pacific Theater people were estimating
Allied losses of approximately one million men for the pacification of
the Japanese main islands.  Not outrageous by WWI figures, but more than
the USA had lost in all of WWII up to that point.  The Japanese almost
never surrendered, even for insignificant islands of rock in the middle
of nowhere; it would have been silly to expect them not to defend their
homeland at least as hard.

A couple of enemy cities was a very cheap price to pay; we'd've
firebombed them out anyway prior to the invasion.



fangle
02 Apr 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> the oxide had been chemically removed, so they bent the platters to
-> prevent heads from being near the surface.

IBM Atlanta was embarrassed some years ago when they sold a bunch of
PCs.  Various people used file undelete utilities to recover some
sensitive internal memoranda.  After that IBM ordered the hard disks be
destroyed before the computers were sold.

For a while, IBM Suits and Flunkies fought over the privilege of
disposing of used hard disks.  It seems there's an indoor range nearby
that rents automatic weapons...  alas, that didn't last too long before
they came up with a system that wasn't nearly as much fun.



fangle
05 Apr 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> it is much better if the management understands that no news is far,
-> far better than any news at all - that the money they spent is

I'm not sure what the problem is.  Classical business organizations had
their full share of 'non-producer' employees - secretaries, draftsmen,
janitorial staff, etc.  Support of any kind seems to get the short
shrift compared to that.  Case in point - building or plant maintenance.
I've seen entire factories with 300 employees - only one of whom was
responsible for "maintenance", which could be anything from repairing
CNC machine tools to fixing leaky faucets.  And when he went on vacation
- or quit - the whole place ground to a stop.



fangle
08 Apr 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> technology has improved to the point where this is a winnable war,
-> but I think this is a Bad Idea (TM).  If you're out to destroy
-> someone's war making capability (as They have said) you better
-> obliterate them

Picking at them with air strikes is liable to backfire.  It didn't
cause the Viet Cong to give up, or the North Koreans, or the British or
Japanese or Germans.  It's only worked in a few isolated, minor
instances, and then always with support from ground troops, like the
Netherlands in WWII.

One proven method is just to invade and take the damned place over, set
up an occupation government, and arrange things to your liking.  It was
a bitter lesson we missed in WWI, but it worked excellently in WWII.
Unfortunately it seems that lesson has been forgotten.

The United States in particular took a long time learning that many
cultures aren't impressed with *seeing* a big stick, you have to beat
them a few times to put the point across.  Reagan's strike in Libya was
sufficient to persuade Qaddafi that Carter was no longer in office.  The
Iraq thing was decently managed - large amounts of force on specified
targets.  It wasn't the military's fault the politicos left Saddam in
office.  Now we're involved in another multinational operation, but
whoever's calling the shots is bumbling about like Eisenhower, Kennedy,
and Johnson when they kept dropping the ball in Vietnam.

Either go in and *DO* something, or let them kill each other in peace.
Just don't fuck around with half measures; we've seen what results from
that too many times.



fangle
08 Apr 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> That gives us warm fuzzies all right, but I don't think any majority
-> consensus is going to solve the problem, no matter WHAT it is.

Sure it will:
more Welfare
less police harassment
free cable TV
24 hour Coliseum Channel
change liquor tax to liquor subsidy

Depends on what sort of problems your electorate is worried about.

Unfettered democracy can be a horrible thing.  Hardly anyone remembers
the Romans were a republic almost as long as they were an empire; the
republic devolved into one of the first Welfare states, then collapsed.

There were damned good reasons the Founding Fathers didn't write
universal enfranchisement into the electoral system.



21 Apr 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
largo@chambana.com

-> that you refrain from further comment even in jest unless you wish to
-> be labeled as anti-Semitic racists!

A couple of weeks ago I got some spam promoting a white supremacist web
site.  Sounded like generic ANP/KKK stuff from the blurb, including
"creative" spelling - apparently they were too dumb to spell it
themselves *and* too dumb to find their spayul chekker.

One of the promotional features for the web site was "multiple chat
rooms."  I immediately thought "hey, I bet I can make a whole bunch of
nasty comments and jokes about this, append them to this message, and
forward it to some friends for a few yuks."  Alas, I got tripped up on
the "multiple chat rooms" part.  The potential for amusing parody
discussions in white supremacist chat rooms quickly boggled my mind.
Then came the capper - given the type of people who'd likely be using
such a thing, how could you *tell* which was real and which was parody?

The mind, she boggle.



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
21 Apr 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> Wow! Thanks for finally explaining that antennae festooned Jeep CJ
-> that came flying down my dead-end gravel road at 75mph, did a
-> broadside 4 wheel lockup right-hander on two wheels, and disappeared
-> into the woods. I was wondering about that one for a while...

If the occupants were white, wearing sunglasses, and casually dressed,
they were ham radio enthusiasts.

If the occupants were white, wearing sunglasses, and uniformed, they
were cops, rangers, or INS agents.

If the occupants were black, wearing sunglasses, and well-dressed, they
were Haitian tontons macoutes.

If the occupants were Hispanic, wearing sunglasses, and casually
dressed, they were Colombian pharmaceutical distributors.

If the occupants were *not* wearing sunglasses, they were yuppies, and
very lost.



23 Apr 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
largo@chambana.com

-> Herb - My take is that 1) the present day educational protocols are
-> misdirected in what is called "outcome based education."

Someone once referred to public schools as "ghettos for the young."  He
had a point, though I tend to view it more as socialized day care.  I
could see the rapid degeneration from the 1960s to the 1970s; I left
high school without graduating, easily able to make As and Bs with what
I had learned up to the third or fourth grade, which is where the school
system pretty much gave up on anything new.  I kept on repeating the
third grade for the next eight or nine years while the teachers...
excuse me, "educators", devoted their time to the losers who didn't "get
it" the third, four, fifth, or sixth time.


-> Colorado creeps were tied into all sorts of internet linkups with
-> strange and weird psychological programmings that poisoned their
-> minds and lives to the extent they became lost causes to human
-> society.

Oh, I'm sure the media will harp on the Internet aspect after they tire
of yet another guns-are-evil expose'.



27 Apr 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> Aaaacck! Keep that slaw in the styrofoam cup where God intended it to
-> rot!

Cole slaw seems to exist mainly for fulfulling the dietary requirements
of school lunches.  I went to school all over the USA, and I could
depend on one consistant fact of life - no matter where we went next,
the fat lady with the hair net would reach into a 55-gallon drum with an
ice cream scoop and dump 1.3 pounds of oozing white crud somewhere on my
tray.  I never saw anyone eat the stuff.  I tried it once and understood
why.  You can eat a #2 pencil if you're hungry enough, but even rats
won't eat school cole slaw.


-> we prefer a tomato based sauce here. Somewhere to the north it goes
-> to a vinegar based concoction.  I'm glad I don't live *there*.  :)

Local/Arkansas seems to be heavy toward molasses concoctions.  If I
want something that sweet I'll just spoon it out of the sugar bowl,
thank you...  and a few places that seem to think barbecue should be so
hot it removes the lining out of your mouth.  Bah.



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
27 Apr 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> 'Course, things could be worse; the boys on 50natics out in
-> California have grilled salmon at their gatherings. "Psst. Which fork
-> do I use for my broccoli sprouts?"

Etiquette at a Southern-style barbecue is simple - it's considered
gauche to eat any vegetable dish with your fingers (fork or spoon is
okay, but a knife is classy), but for anything else, if you can pick it
up with your fingers, fingers are all you need.

"Ah eats mah beans with honey
Ah done it all mah life
folks think it's kinda funny
but it sticks 'em to mah knife."



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
28 Apr 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> We're not.  In fact, we're not even part of the United States!  (That
-> annexation thing wasn't legal.)
->
-> (I think I may regret saying that...)

Austin and his merry band of Yankees petitioned the government of
Mexico for citizenship and land grants.  Hoping to build up some
population in that territory, the Mexicans agreed.  The Yankees were
happy until Santa Anna came by in his role as tax collector; suddenly
they didn't want to be Mexican citizens any more, and were quite rude.
Santa Anna, roundly defamed in American history, did everything except
kiss the settlers' collective asses before he crushed their little
rebellion, as was his duty.  But the Mexicans couldn't field enough
military power that far from Cuidad Mexico to defend their territory
from the US Army, and were ordered back south after only token
resistance.

Texas was only kindasorta part of the Confederacy, and after the War Of
Nothern Oppression they rolled over and kissed carpetbagger ass.



01 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
largo@chambana.com

-> crime.  I sponsored legislation in the past to increase the mandatory
-> minimum sentences to ten years for those who commit violent or drug

That's simply posturing.

Most judges consider sentencing to be their personal privilege, and
they don't like legislators trying to usurp their powers with
"mandatory" sentencing.  In many cases, the judges will find the
defendant "not guilty" rather than have their authority imposed upon.

In many jurisdictions there simply isn't enough prison space for all
offenders, so sentencing is only a matter of ensuring the prisoner stays
incarcerated for as long as it takes a committee to turn him back out on
the streets.

In almost all US jurisdictions the police, the courts, and the prison
system are separately authorized and separately funded; *if* someone is
arrested and *if* they are convicted, the prisons may still be unable to
hold someone for the duration of their sentence.

This is basic grassroots politics.  When one of your legislooters
starts babbling about mandatory sentencing, you know you're being fed a
bunch of propaganda.  Mandatory sentencing is almost entirely a
meaningless concept, useful only to make it look like your legislooters
are "doing something" about a problem.  And it also tells you that they
*aren't* doing anything, nor do they intend to - because if they did,
they wouldn't be wasting time with mandatory sentence laws.



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
02 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> That incident or the one where they hit my bone convinced me to stop
-> donating blood.

One place I used to work called us all outside one day.  There was a
Red Cross van there, and they were marching everyone through it.  Nobody
was asked if they wanted to donate; you were just marched in under the
eyes of your supervisor and told to sit down.  I refused.  There was a
minor flap; apparently nobody had refused before.

Another place, I got a little card in my pay envelope, already
pre-filled-out, ready for my signature, to make a *substantial* donation
of every paycheck to the United Way.  I tossed it in the trash.  After
the next pay period one of the corporate higher-ups called me and wanted
to know why I hadn't signed and returned the card.  I told him it was
against my policy.

My employment didn't last much longer at either place.  I can't prove
anything, but I suspect both incidents were contributory.

Nobody cares what you *do*, just how much you conform.

"When my fist clenches, crack it open
before I use it and lose my cool
When I smile, tell me some bad news
before I laugh and act like a fool"



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
02 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> It now seems quite likely that at least one of the Littleton killers
-> was on a psychoactive drug, probably Ritalin or Prozac.

Public schools, at least here, can *mandate* the use of Ritalin for
"problem" students.  They can even arrange for the prescription if the
family doctor is reluctant.

Maybe I escaped the school system just in time...



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
02 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> You'd be amazed how zen can be applied, to pain control.

The proper mental state works.  Many years ago I had a problem with my
big toes' nails growing out the side of the toe instead of out the end
like they're supposed to.  Apparently it's not that unusual.  Anyway, I
went into Outpatient, filled out a ton of paper, went to a little room
where I got my feet washed, then stuck in one of those little cubicles
to wait for a doctor.  Presently a guy came in, rummaged around in an
ordinary Craftsman toolbox, selected a pair of duckbill pliers, and
jammed them under the nail of my left big toe.  I asked him to wait a
few moments while I composed myself, which seemed to irritate him a bit.
Then I told him to go ahead, and he pulled the nail out.  Then he did
the other one.  He left.  A few seconds later a nurse walked in with a
hypo and told said it was time for my shot.

"What shot?"

"Oh, this is the anaesthetic for when they operate on your feet."

"That guy just pulled my toenails out with a pair of pliers."

"You didn't have a shot?"

"No, I didn't have a shot."


I walked out of there under my own power, too.  Assholes wanted to make
me sit in a wheelchair.  *Then* they tried to bill my insurance for
anesthesia...

Practically all of my experiences with modern medical care have been
along the same lines.  I'll take a veterinarian any day, given a choice.



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
03 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> Dave...you really are gonna have to get a TV  :)

Noo, I don't think so.  I'd have to give up shop time, keyboard time,
reading time, or snoozing time to make room for the Toob.  I also have
this problem with picking out bad cinematography, plot holes, and prop
dysfunctions.

Some days ago I got several dozen pieces of email from people on
another list who were OUTRAGED that I didn't have a television going all
the time.  A few of them sounded like they were ready to go into
convulsions over it, spewing their pitiful flameage.  It was extremely
weird.  A whole *bunch* of people a few cans short of a six-pack,
formed into a net.mob.  Several of them were petitioning the listowner
to have me kicked off the list unless I apologized for not having a TV.



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
03 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> At this date, the phone booths were enclosed and had an closable door
-> on them.  After getting his fill of abuse, the manager says

I remember those.  Back in the bad old days, when you didn't have to
stand out in the rain and keep screaming "WHAT? WHAT?" over the traffic
noise.



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
03 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> that every North American recieves their dose of mindless drivel,
-> flagrant abuses of the advertising act, wonton violence commited
-> against their fellow man, and public service annoucements ( which may

Back in the mid '80s, before I kicked the TV habit, I watched one of
those "violence on TV is bad" specials.  It was hosted by Dan Rather,
whom I loathe.  About halfway through the show one of the guest talking
heads was Gene Simmons of Kiss, which had been defunct for a while then.
Simmons was pushing 400 pounds, going bald, and, probably in his
mid'30s, had a case of acne.  Looked like he had an IQ of seventy or so.

Rather started in with his yammer, then paused for Simmons' reply.
Simmons leaned forward, came alive, and started tearing Rather a new
asshole.  "Nobody forces you to watch slasher movies or go to rock
concerts, but if I want to get tomorrow's weather I have to sit through
"news" shows concocted by the likes of you, cramming rape and arson and
murder down people's throats all the time..."  He got on a *roll*, and
Rather got mad and started waving at someone offstage, and suddenly
there was a bit of dead air before a commercial came on.  They ran for a
long time, and when they came back online Simmons had been replaced by
some nobody.

Attaboy, Gene!



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
05 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> of the other people at the table decided to interpret the delay as a
-> personal insult.  He proceeded to get very loud and vocal concerning

After 20 minutes of trying to flag a waitress down, I once pulled out
my cellphone and called the phone number conveniently printed on top of
the menu.

"Hello.  This is the guy over by the big potted plant.  I've been here
20 minutes, and I'd really like for one of those waitresses to stop by
next time they head this way."

I've also been known to behave similarly to Exidor from "Mork and
Mindy."   "GOLDEN FLECKS!  THERE ARE GOLDEN FLECKS IN THE FORMICA!..."

or get Shakespearean:

"O SHIT!  WHAT ROCK THROUGH YONDER WINDER BREAKS?
'TIS THE POLICE!  AND JOLIET'S IN ILLINOIS!"



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
06 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> I found out today a friend's girlfriend who always
-> appeared normal to me is diagnosed with depression,
-> has suicidal thoughts, is non-responsive to the normal
-> drug treatments, and is undergoing electro-convulsive
-> therapy.     Sounds pretty scary.

Electroshock and insulin shock "therapy" basically consists of burning
out the victim's brain in slow steps until they are too dull to display
the "symptoms" they're being "treated" for.  Then they are declared
"cured".

It's roughly equivalent to drilling a hole in someone's head to let the
evil spirits out, except people with holes drilled in their head usually
survived without major problems.  Shock therapy causes dramatic
personality changes (by inducing brain damage) and considerable drop
in IQ scores, among other things, like motor dysfunction and
incontinence.

Back in the old days both used to be done quite freely to "problem"
patients in institutions.  Nowadays it's not quite as common, but it's
used far more than necessary.  I can't come up with any justification
for the procedure - it'd be kinder to just kill them.  They're killing
their personality anyway, they just keep the body around to extract
every last dollar from the estate/relative/insurance.


You want to know something interesting?  In most states it only takes
the signature of an MD - any MD - and one witness to fill out the forms
to declare you as mentally incompetent.  These are rubber-stamp jobs for
the court.  Then you don't even have the right to a lawyer since you're
incompetent, Q.E.D.  And they could burn your brains out with complete
legality.  Most people's reaction is something like, "Oh, they couldn't
do that!"  But they *can*, and it's a typical scenario for
"deprogramming" people or getting rid of elderly relatives.  It's one of
those nasty little legal black holes in American society.  And its
victims, if they survive mentally, have no legal recourse.



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
11 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

I read an SF novel recently which had a lot of the usual stuff, with a
small widgit tossed in.  Several of the characters had, as well as fancy
brain-computer interfaces, a small reserve of computing power and high
speed storage built right into their heads - a 'skull liner' of 1 Gb of
static RAM and enough microprocessor to drive some simple storage and
lookup functions.  The book was written about a decade ago.

Oddly enough, current off-the-shelf technology could probably put
several gigabytes of RAM in the surface area inside the skull, and a
couple of orders of magnitude more microprocessor power.  In the story
the 'skull liner' was just a plot prop, sort of a built-in address book.
Actually *interfacing* to something like that is still beyond current
technique, but it's interesting that the technology, like Maxwell
Smart's shoe phone, is just ordinary stuff nowadays.

One old game is 'name those books'.  In the game you assume all of
human civilization is wiped out.  You can pick ten books to pass on to
the survivors so they can rebuild civilization.  Most people pick
religious tracts or "classic literature".  Bizarre sociopathic types
agonize between Marks' Engineering Handbook and the Physician's Desk
Reference.

Back to the skull liner, the question becomes, if you had one gigabyte
of computer storage wired directly to your brain, what would you put
there?

I guess you could complicate the question.  Let's assume you have a
couple of implanted chips that let you access your home computer by
wireless LAN, either when you're in your home (or office) or near some
sort of wireless internet portal.  Now you're into more complex two-tier
information structuring, much like palmtop computer people already face.

As a guide to relative size, an average book runs around one megabyte
of ASCII text.

Hmm, the implications of network access are so much more interesting -
imaging dropping a quarter in a pay phone and downloading all your email
so you could do your mail while you were waiting for the elevator...



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
12 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> Oui.  I remember hearing about them in city schools, and even metal
-> detectors.  I grew up in sleepy north east suburbia, but I'm not sure
-> why they were so slow on the uptake.

Incidence of social dysfunction is strongly related to population
density.  IE, the 'paths will mostly be found in the cities.

I haven't yet figured whether the cities *create* them or they tend to
gravitate there on their own, but if you put too many rats in the same
cage, they'll start killing each other, while less-populated cages have
no troubles.



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
12 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> Screw off-line storage, I want an IP stack in there.  Count me in for
-> the network access, but only when I initiate it!

The thought of online access like that just warms the cockles of my
hog, as the Pharaoh would say.


-> I definitely don't want the spambots getting access to my head.

I have this feeling it's going to get worse.  I've been around long
enough to remember when even the *insinuation* of commercial content in
netnews would have people dialing up your sysadmin in fits of rage.
Then AOL and Prodigy came along, with advertising built right in to
their access software, and then the ISPs, where the Drooling Masses,
indoctrinated by TV commercials, brought their advertising with them.

I predict it won't be too long before online services like Compuserve
make a comeback, providing *filtered* news and mail access for a fee.
There signal to noise ratio online is so poor a lot of people would pay
for a better ratio.  I would.

The spambots already have your head.  Count the number of ads you see
in a day sometime.  It's a sobering experience.

I still don't believe most ads accomplish much, but they're an integral
part of modern Western civilization now.



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
12 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> In an environment like Spence, where the parents won't take
-> initiative, and the teachers CAN'T, law enforcement is about the only
-> thing left to keep things merely at a boiling point.

So the school system teaches them, very early, that there's little to
fear from the police either.  This is good?



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
12 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> do less and less every year.  At some point the parents have to step
-> in, and many parents don't.  THIS is a problem.  It's not the only
-> one, but it is a BIG one.

It is the root problem.  The ability to produce a rug rat is not
related to aptitude to raising one to adulthood.  Many people can't even
properly keep a dog, much less a kid.  But the holy mantle of parenthood
is supposed to fix all that.  Right.



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
12 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> At the present rate of increase of computing power, you'll be able to
-> buy and use a content filter in about 3 years.  You'll have to teach
-> it what you like and don't like and it will sort things into
-> differing categories - for example, "return to sender with nasty
-> note", "discard", "save for casual perusal", and "urgent - read
-> now!".

Sure.  I have a simplistic sort of that stuff now.  But bulk filtering
of the type you are describing isn't as efficient as a controlled forum.
Let's say I ask a question about coil impedance in netnews.  I get ten
replies, varying from irrelevant to contradictory.  I now have data -
but far more often, the metadata is more important than the data itself.
Data has no inherent value without its metadata - who, what, when, and
where.  A reply from Bob Hale carries a hell of a lot more weight than
one from some anonymous newser, for example.

Take another example.  Web-based, keyward indexed mailing list
archives.  You can't read them, you have to poke at them with keywords,
which results in you getting bunches of messages that fit the search
definitions, but are not only unrelated to each other, but stripped of
their conversational positioning.  Some people try to use "threading" by
subject line to retain this data, but it works so poorly it's not worth
the bother.



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
13 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> So, how do you feel about licensing parents?  I'll admit it has some
-> appeal.

I think it's a fine idea.

I also think the parents should have to post a bond covering the cost
of the child's upkeep and education until legal adulthood, should they
default on their responsibility.  Why should *I* have to pay for their
mistakes?



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
13 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> Oh hell, I wrote a demon-dialer in High School for chrissakes.  I
-> found all three banks in town, a Tymenet link(?!?) the High School,
-> and my buddy's PC.

Precisely.  I don't know why, but I have a really hard time getting
some people to understand the basics of security, or even regular
backups.  About four words into it, their faces go completely blank and
they act like they have to go to the bathroom.

Most of the same people worship the holy seat belt and air bag, but
they won't use passwords on the server or back up their business'
accounting records.

Sometimes I feel out of step with the rest of reality.



13 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
largo@chambana.com

-> What part of: "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be
-> infringed." do you not understand?

"What do you *need* a gun for?"

"I don't have to need a gun.  It's my *right* to have one if I want.
In fact, as I interpret the Constitution of the United States of
America, it's my *duty* to own at least one."



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
14 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> Yeah, but when the Klingons are attacking who would you want at your
-> side?

Kirk, with a toothache and a hangover.  Picard would try to negotiate,
and the Klingons would vaporize him.

Well, Kor-type Klingons from TOS would, anyway.  TNG Klingons were
approximately equivalent to overly aggressive telemarketers.


"So it looks like there won't be war this time."

"Ah, Captain... but if there had, it would have been *glorious*!"



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
14 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> I think it started when Madalyn Murray O'Hair
-> complained that she didn't want any prayer in our schools.
-> And we said, O.K.

In Arkansas, they still had school prayer in 1970.  I'd already been to
school in California, Florida, and Tennessee; this 'prayer' thing was
new to me.  First day of school I had my first head-on with Organized
Religion and Baptist intolerance.  I was obviously being a smart-ass, as
every child was born knowing the words.  I got to stand in the corner,
wearing a conical paper hat.  This was also something new, and it took
me until the next day to realize it was supposed to be punishment.  The
next day the old bitch hit me with a ruler, which was my first (and
shocking) introduction to 'corporal punishment'.  She was obviously
dangerously insane; I punched her in the nose.  You have never in your
life imagined such a shitstorm as evolved out of that.

It took several days of tedious contention before my parents, the
teacher, and the principal agreed that perhaps I really *didn't* know
the fucking words.  They agreed I would learn them.  By the time they
presented this to me, I had already decided I wasn't ever going to sing
the praises of "Gaw-duh".  More dissention, including beatings, which
only served to reinforce my decision.  Eventually, and for the next two
years of school, it was agreed that I would stand in the hall while
prayers were said.

This all went into my 'permanent records' which followed me through the
next nine years of school, ensuring every teacher knew what a rotten
sonofabitch I was as soon as they got around to reading up on their new
classes.  I could always tell when they got around to it by their
attitude change, even after prayer became "voluntary" when I was in
high school.  The Baptists and the teachers can all go straight to Hell,
and I'll urinate on their graves.

Oh, yes, childhood is a time of joy...



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
14 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> they didn't know what flush toilets were and, so, she would squat
-> atop the seat.  Her younger brother would sit facing the tank and
-> hold onto it.

Khruschev's memoirs talked about when the Bolsheviks occupied the
Summer Palace during the Revolution.  The peasant revolutionaries had
never seen flush toilets either, and would "perch like eagles" on them.
After jamming the plumbing and making the bathroom unuseable, they began
using the flower garden outside, which made the whole area pretty whiff.
Russians have never been really big on hygiene, at least by American
standards.  Up through the 1980s at least, in much of the USSR, you were
supposed to wipe with old newspaper and put it in a wastebasket, which
someone would empty sooner or later.

BTW, I mentioned some of the recent toilet thread to my brother.
Someone had described encountering the crappers with the little ledge in
the bowl in Germany.  Kevin said he encountered them in Italy as well,
and was curious enough to ask about it.  He was told it was so you could
inspect your download for worms before flushing.  Ri-ight.



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
18 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> Would want AlterEvil Spock and AlterEvil Sulu at my side.
-> Those guys would kick ass in a firefight.

From 'Mirror, Mirror'.  Yep.

Imagine if TNG's Picard had TOS' Commander Kor instead of Worf.  It
would take Kor perhaps an hour to secure the Enterprise; give him three
months and he'd be running StarFleet.  Probably wouldn't take him more
than a year to eradicate the Borg.  Kor kicked ass.

I always liked Kor; he was such a pure, monomaniacal character.  I
can't remember the name of the actor who played him, but you could
always tell he got a big charge out of the role.

[John Colicos, died 2000]



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
18 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> while at my last job... I "accidentally" sent them a 100MB encrypted
-> zip file of an NT swap file,

I wish I knew who started that "send the swapfile" thing.  I'd be happy
to sing his praises to all and sundry.

I've had people bomb me with their swapfiles.  They are usually like
manna from Heaven - just fire up the binary editor and browse around.
Amazing what you can find in a swapfile...



19 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
largo@chambana.com

-> Please. someone explain to me again why AMERICA has the Second
-> Amendment?  It's to safeguard our rights to go hunting and to do
-> sports shooting , right?

It was written in to make sure the militia could not be disarmed by
government decree.  All able-bodied free males were considered militia.
Jefferson stated in commentary that the unspoken reason was so the
populace could overthrow the government should it devolve into tyranny.
Remember representative democracy had been out of favor for a long, long
time; nobody was quite sure such a strange idea would really work as
expected.

The Constitution doesn't say anything about hunting or sports shooting.
It says "to keep and bear arms," not what you should do with them.


-> The police are there to protect us from criminals
-> just like in Germany and France!   Doug Cadwallader.

In 1776 there weren't any police in the USA.  Not that you'd recognize
by modern standards.  The local shire reeve (tax collector) might serve
you with a warrant if you complained to a judge, but there was nobody
cruising around looking for people breaking the law, or even
investigating crime.  Modern police-as-we-know-them originated in London
in the 1800s.



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
19 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> What I want to know more about is how DbFH is
-> organized - what are queries based on?  Is it subject,
-> keyword or otherwise-based?  What engine does it
-> run off of?  Dbase?  Access? ;-)  DIY?

It's a free-association text-based system.  That is, *after* wasting a
bunch of time with database software, I found it was much faster and
simpler to just keep it in subject files with my text editor and use the
search function to find what I want.  That way I have everything right
in front of me, freely searchable *and* editable, instead of peering
through a knothole with some sort of database lookup.

You can see some samples on my Web site - stuff pertaining to three
phase power, steam automobiles, Fox Mustangs, and German Capris.  I
posted the files pretty much as they appear in the DbFH.

I kill about 85% of the stuff I get as I read it.  The mailer file
grows to ten or fifteen megs after a month or two, so I strip it out to
ASCII and use my text editor to re-read everything, cutting out
interesting bits and tossing them into the data files.  Probably 25% of
stuff gets killed on the second hit.  Then, every few months, if I have
some slack time, I edit the new, raw data appended to the files,
stripping out extraneous stuff.


-> See, it does me no good to have large amounts of dead
-> trees lying around and my only recourse to finding
-> something is to re-read everything!

I've been clearing out most of a roomful of magazines.  Some have stuff
that gets entered into the DbFH in the time-honored "key it in manually"
fashion; the rest gets razored out to await the advent of cheap,
effective OCR software.  Effective meaning I don't have to spend so much
time proofreading I might as well have just keyed the stuff in manually
in the first place...



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
19 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> taking Luvox developed mania during short term controlled clinical
-> trials. Mania is a psychosis which can produce bizarre, grandiose,
-> highly elaborated destructive plans."

When I started reading about the firearms and all the purported bombs
at Columbine, the first thing that went through my mind was, "those kids
sure had a hell of a lot more money than *I* ever had when I was in high
school."  I had a part-time job, but my '65 Mustang sucked all that up.
My friends mostly blew theirs on dope or records.



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
22 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> sure this never happens again."  So now we get to see America attack
-> all the other high school weirdos in a draconian attempt to quell
-> potential

We'll see the schools make an even stronger attempt to induce
conformity at all costs.  And that conformity, of course, will be to the
lowest common denominator.

As I've been discussing with another fangler backchannel, this will
lead to more affluent parents putting their kids in private schools,
where there's at least a chance to get an education.  And this will lead
to a new class of haves and have-nots, and a social separation where
there is no common ground between the adults created by the two
processes.

I predict the US will have a caste structure similar to prewar
England's in a few years.  I'm already seeing the trend.



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
22 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> Depends what year Jag you are looking at. In 1986, Jaguar hired away
-> a top-notch QC manager from one of the big tractor manufacturers,
-> John Deere, or maybe New Holland. Soon after, the quality of the Jags
-> really got turned around for the better, and the problems steadily
-> went away over the years.

That's the "hired gun" thing.  Jaguar's problem wasn't that they didn't
know what their problems were, it was because they were so snarled in
internal politics that no single person could change things.  So they
brought in an outsider to do the butt-kicking for them.

It's a surprisingly common QC problem.  Most companies suffer from
*some* of it; in a few, they all stand around helplessly while the
company dies of it, with every damned one of them knowing the cause and
the cure, but unable to do anything about it.



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
22 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> Another shooting in Atlanta this morning. Kids nowdaz. No
-> origionality.

It's the media.  Remember the first Tylenol poisoning?  The media
turned it into an issue, and all of a sudden the copycats were all over
the place.  It happens on almost anything that gets a lot of attention.

I was reading a book about how the FBI investigates serial killers. The
book mentioned how whenever there were more than a few publicized
killings in a given area, the rest of the crazoids would get restless
and try their hands too, so the trail would be obscured by the excess
data.

Consider how many of today's problems are the result of the so-called
"free press."  I have the impression the Founding Fathers never
considered the media would eventually conglomerate into a corporate
power all by themselves...

The media can also create problems ab initio.  The local paper/TV
decided to climb on the "gangs" platform for a while.  After about a
year, we now have gangs for them to report on.  They created a vacuum,
and something filled it.  Now they have something to report on.



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
23 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> The mayors of Chicago and New Orleans have filed lawsuits on behalf
-> of their cities against the gun industry...  The mayors argue that
-> the firearms industry should reimburse their cities for the public
-> health and safety costs associated with treating and preventing
-> firearms injuries.

Chances of being the victim of a crime are more than ten times more
likely in urban vs. rural areas.  Perhaps the residents of these cities
should sue the city governments for endangering their safety and
well-being.



27 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Low Fangler Auto Tech 

-> I don't understand the charge of "Going Equiped".  How does the
-> possession of a weapon prove criminal intent?

Possession = intent.  Works all over the USA now.  Guilty until proven
innocent is a fact of life in modern courts.  Obviously you intended to
shoot someone, otherwise you wouldn't have been carrying the gun.

There are major differences between theoretical and practical law.
Intent is firmly established in modern jurisprudence.


-> Don't people have the
-> right of self defense in the UK?  It is well established in common
-> law.

They don't have that right all through the US.  Here in Arkansas, for
example, you can't use lethal force to defend yourself except under
certain very restrictive *and provable* conditions, which basically
means you can't do it at all.

I have enough armaments to fight a minor war, but if a burglar was to
enter my home, I'm limited to unkind words, fisticuffs, or possibly a
baseball bat, though I'd likely face weapons charges with the bat.  The
penalties I'd face for my shooting a burglar, mugger, or assailant are
far worse than the penalties they face for their own crime.

Civilized states have more reasonable laws.  Arkansas doesn't show any
signs of that, though.



28 May 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
largo@chambana.com

-> The subject is, what makes these kids plot massacres?

Having been caught in the gears of the machinery of conformity, I have
a certain measure of sympathy for the perpetrators.  I out-stubborned
many years of teachers and principals, but even by the time I graduated
I could see how the system was tightening up.  Conform or else.  Some
people just ain't gonna, and the stress levels can get intense.  As far
as I can remember I never thought about going on a killing spree, but if
someone had suggested it I might have thought it was a fine idea.

You lean on people hard enough, eventually someone is going to lean
back.  Even if they're a teenager.  Or maybe especially if they're a
teenager.  They're stuck in an institution that has made almost their
whole life hell, and they feel they have little left to lose.

Maybe they were just freakazoids, or on the wrong medication, or
cruising on PCP, or fell into bad company, or posessed by demons.  I'm
sure all those will be advanced as serious propositions.  But maybe they
were just someone who might have been perfectly ordinary had the system
not dealt them just a little more shit than they could eat.

==dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us======================================
I've got a secret / I've been hiding / under my skin / | Who are you?
my heart is human / my blood is boiling / my brain IBM |   who, who?
=================================== http://home1.gte.net/42/index.htm



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
03 Jun 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> I was really spoiled at the bank... being wall street and all...
-> anything we wanted hardware wise, we got in the name of "keeping the
-> traders going".

I had a hard time making the hospital understand what was going on.  We
were a subsidiary doing practice management, billing, and collections.
It was fairly new, and all the management had been sidetracked from the
medical campus.  I finally made the MIS director realize the company
wasn't in the healthcare business, it was in the data processing
business.  If a link to a clinic went down, the clinics couldn't even
get patient information; things would grind to a halt until the system
came back up.  As for billing and collections, those were classical data
based services.

I tend to get on a roll when I'm wound up; I'll never forget the
expression on the director's face when I told him we weren't in the
healthcare business.  He gnawed on the idea for a couple of months
before adopting it as the new party line.

If my servers went down, *everything* stopped.  But it was hard to get
anything at all, even extra tapes so I could retire monthly snapshots
offsite.  I kept >99% uptime, but the whole thing was held together with
spit and baling wire and cast-off desktop bits.

Uptime is like air; nobody notices until it's not there.



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
04 Jun 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> June is a common female name here in the US too.
->
-> However, brings up that old "Boy Named Sue" thing.

Carmen, Vivian, and Evelyn were frequently used for males not too long
ago.  There were US generals in WWII named Vivian and Evelyn.  Then
there are gender-neutral names like Robin and Leslie, and Cody.

After the craze for made-up names, particularly fake-African monickers
like La-Dawanda, a boy named Sue seems hardly worth comment.

Reminds me of a guy who claimed he tried to name his son "Ban The
Imperialist War In Vietnam" Jones, but he couldn't write small enough to
get it all on the proper form...



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
04 Jun 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> Oh, you mean like the serial number on the pentium III Xeon chips?

Apple used to serialize the BIOSes of their Lisa machines.  The OS was
copy protected; every copy of the OS was matched to a specific serial
numbered machine.  If you lost or destroyed your system disk, you had to
buy a new one from Apple.  I thought it was pretty stupid since both had
to come from Apple anyway, and OSs weren't frequent upgrade profit
centers back then.

Somehow the Xeon serialization has been turned into a privacy issue.
Bullshit.  It's a copy protection issue.  How'd you like for your
software to check for the serial number and refuse to run on an
"unregistered" machine?  So that every time you upgraded a processor or
switched motherboards, you'd have to pay through the nose, IF that
vendor was still around?  What if you were running a multiprocessor
machine and the task switched to a different processor in midstream?

Copy protection was *almost* dead; it was the proliferation of
nonstandard hardware and widespread networking that made it impractical.
But dongles are still popular, particularly with high-end packages...
like ones that would require lots of horsepower, like a Pentium III.

Most computer users are newbies.  That's understandable, since the
market is growing so rapidly.  But almost the same group of magazine
writers and columnists has dominated the media since the introduction of
the IBM PC, and none of *them* appear to be able to remember more than a
few years back either.  The world might as well have begun when
Microsnot shipped Windows 95.



08 Jun 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
mc-chassis-design@list.sirius.com

-> I remember reading Richard Finemann's autobio. and he decided to
-> invent his own system of units too - as he didn't like any of the
-> current ones. Of course he quickly realised that he couldn't
-> communicate with the rest of the scientific community so he went back
-> to metric.

I get a kick out of newbie engineers and electricians who had books
from the same author or series all the way through school.  They're used
to certain letters used for certain variables, and they get all twisted
up when they come across calculations that use different symbology.
Most texts agree on things like g for gravitation, but my esoteric
collection of textbooks doesn't agree on *anything* past the most basic
of common usage, so I tend to expect any equation to be accompanied by
a chart of which symbols are used to mean what.  This annoys the "this
is the way it always is, has been, and shall forever be" newguys, who
never can quite seem to accept the whole world didn't use the exact same
textbooks they did.

"Omicron, dammit, don't you know what omicron is?  What the hell is so
funny anyway?"



24 Jun 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
largo@chambana.com

-> London in May that "several" firms had approached him about
-> surgically implanting transponder microchips into their workers as a
-> way of keeping track of their hours and whereabouts. Cybernetics

I don't know why this keeps coming back up as fresh news.  You've been
able to purchase the same service for pets and children for several
years now.  It's marketed as a kidnap deterrent to the seriously
paranoid.

Various companies have been using transponder-equipped ID cards for at
least a decade.  Since the employers require the IDs be prominently
displayed by employees during working hours, it works, though not as
well as implanting the transponder, of course.  Most of the advertising
avoids the idea of 'monitoring' as it's frowned on by unions and likely
to be frowned on by labor courts when the practice finally comes to
litigation.  The "smart badges" are marketed as being useful for things
like routing phone calls to the telephone nearest the desired employee.
Besides the fact I used to leave my cubicle just to escape the damned
phone in the first place, I'd be annoyed if my phone started
interrupting me for someone else's calls; I got interrupted more than
enough to start with.



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
24 Jun 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> Anybody got anything to share about this issue?  How long do you
-> think it will take until Big Insurance refuses to cover you since
-> you're not a "licensed mechanic?"

Such databases have existed since the 1970s at least.  They started by
collecting the names of persons who had sued for malpractice; doctors
would pay to find out if new patients had a history of malpractice
cases.  Later they branched out into insurance.  In the days when your
medical information wasn't broadcast to all and sundry, insurers could
find out if you were diabetic, had high blood pressure, or other
problems that might make you a bad risk.  Now, of course, that sort of
thing is available to almost anyone who cares to ask, though the query
services make nice one-stop shopping for HMOs trying to figure their
potential payouts, etc.

Since these are private data stores they are immune from Federal and
State regulation, nothing can be done to these people, even if they
report untrue or incorrect data about you.  If you thought you had
trouble getting your credit record straightened out... most people don't
even *know* about the medical reporting agencies.


-> Heard the following from a friend of mine.  I predicted this
-> happening back in the mid-80s, and was treated like a conspiracy
-> theorist.

It was already happening then.  But people don't *want* to know certain
things, I've noticed.  And the media decides they're "not news", so they
vanish from public ken.  Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil...



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
24 Jun 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> The irony of this CDROM is magnificent!  Information regarding living
-> in primitive conditions is offered on one of the most technologically
-> advanced storage media in existence.  Somehow, there is something in
-> this that really pleases me.  Just call me perverse.

Some years ago there was a discussion on BIX that included the comment,
"what if you were to transport a CD-ROM disc from 1986 to 1886; what do
you think they could do with it?"

The poster was intending to mean something else, but in fact, all the
persons of 1886 would have to know was that there was data on the disc.
Ordinary microscopy would reveal the pits that form the ASCII
characters.  They would be somewhat obscured by formatting and blocking,
but cryptography was reasonably advanced by 1886; as the data would be
merely slightly obscured, it would yield easily to simple analysis.
After that, it would merely be tedium, rotating the disc a bit at a time
under the microscope, jotting down the dits and dahs, and passing the
pages along for decoding.

Any type of tape, however, would likely have been impossible to read
in 1886.  The technology for reading a narrow magnetic band did not
exist until almost 75 years later; unlike a CD, where you can *see* the
data, the configuration of magnetic media is much more subtle.

Later in the discussion I proposed the gap that can happen even with
less time.  What if you handed an 80386 microprocessor to an engineer in
1940 and asked him to figure out what it was?  It would take destructive
disassembly.  A diamond microtome and microchemistry could show that the
composition of the silicon varied from place to place.  It would take a
leap of intuition to infer that these were conductors and insulators,
and several more leaps to figure out what they were doing, particularly
without any of the peripheral chips required to make the chip do
anything.  Chances are they would still be working on it when Carroll
Killibrew filed for the patent in 1968.



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
25 Jun 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> yeah, I'm underwhelmed by the test. It has no point of reference. How
-> should I score on a test covering a book I would never read and some
-> rantings I would also never read, all taken out of context to forward
-> some guy's personal agenda?

I felt much the same way when I took the SAT ten years ago.  The
"History" section was pre-Revolutionary New England politics and the
Catholic Reformation vs. Martin Luther in medieval Germany.  Say what?



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
01 Jul 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> quite believe that the Amphetamine story was true. It would also
-> explain his paranoia and psycotic behaviour.

With a Russian, how could you tell if he was paranoid and psychotic?
They consider that perfectly normal.



20 Jul 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
shop-talk

-> the previous informational message was assuming (bad idea) that you
-> actually know how to set the clock and program your VCR... if this is
-> not the case...... please ignore previous message....we now continue
-> with your regularly scheduled program....

You can come over and program mine.  I managed it once; it took about
half an hour.  You use a random collection of buttons, which puts the
VCR into various of probably 20 different modes.  You can't tell what
mode you're in, you can't tell if you made a mistake, and the only way
you know if worked is if it turns itself on and starts to record.

It's an excellent example of a psychopathic user interface.

I've seen VCRs that programmed with on-screen menus via the remote;
even children have no trouble with those.  But old ones like mine...
it's not even worth trying.  I'll bet you $20 you can't do it faster
than I can, even if I can still find the manual, which is written in
stilted Chinglish.  I guarantee you won't do it without the manual, as
there is no other way to know what the button sequences might be.


Reminds me of some software I was trying to use once.  It had these
weirdball triangle icons, no text.  I couldn't figure out what the hell
they were.  Finally someone told me (complete with snide voice) that
they were "just like the buttons on a VCR."  Okay.  *MY* VCR says
"Pause, Reverse, Stop, Play, Record."  Not a triangle to be seen...



28 Jul 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
largo@chambana.com

-> sort. A few years back they renamed another very old street, High
-> Street in downtown LR, to "Doctor Martin Luther King Junior
-> Boulevard". Most people who live down there still call it High Street

There was *considerable* Federal pressure on that; only a few cities
failed to toe the line, on pain of losing all Federal monies.
Blackmail, in other words.

MacArthur Drive was named after General Douglas MacArthur, who was from
Little Rock.  Unfortunately, it's been split up into about three dozen
little block-long disconnected bitlets by half a century of urban
development, and almost all of it is in the section of town you don't go
into unless you're armed.  If they're going to rename a street for
Klinton, I doubt the General would object...

At least Florida finally renamed Cape Kennedygrad back to Cape
Canaveral...



Low Fangler Auto Tech 
28 Jul 1999
dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

-> have you seen penis bifurcation(sp?) where they slice their knob in
-> half right down to the balls.... looks like a strange sorta banana
-> split.

Yah.  Every male in the room crossed his legs when they showed the
first one of those.  Looked like a hot dog left too long in the
microwave.  I read an article later talking about it; apparently the
shaft still fills with blood as normal for an erection, but with the
slit it can't generate much internal pressure, so getting enough
stiffness for insertion is iffy.

People laughed at Van Gogh for cutting off his ear, but at least he
didn't have to sit down to take a piss...