I use a vintage 1984 Model M "compact" model -- with no keypad. I can type 100WPM on that keyboard. Any other keyboard and my speed falls in half.

The best explanation of the purpose of the color system I have heard is as follows. Potential suicide bombers are, by definition, not afraid of death, because they believe that their murder/suicide will bring them paradise. They are, however, terrified of being captured. This would mean an ignominous death in a jail cell of old age, and they would be denied their afterlife reward. As a result, AQ is said to be extremely skittish. If AQ believes that a plan has been exposed, they will scuttle the plan and go into hiding, sometimes for years.

The color system was designed to work in conjunction with the sort of intelligence we were getting -- where we knew from traffic analysis that an attack was likely about to be executed, but did not know the specifics. The idea was that the color level would be maintained at yellow, but when U.S. intelligence felt that an attack was imminent, but had no specifics, they would make a public announcement and raise the color level. This would, it was hoped, spook AQ enough for them to postpone or cancel the attack. Then, of course, there would be no attack, and the talk show hosts would mercilessly mock the government officials, who would have to console themselves with the knowledge that they had possibly saved hundreds or thousands of American lives, but not really knowing for sure.

The article gives no indication that the current Homeland Security understands the actual purpose of the system. They seem to be dismantling it for no other reason than that being mocked by the media rubs them the wrong way. I certainly hope that there are no more successful AQ attacks, but it is sobering to realize that the U.S. government is dismantling what may well be a very well functioning part of our national defense system because they find using it to be embarrassing.

I suppose that by failing to elaborate on how they came up with the value, they invite speculation.

Sometimes, when asked the value of a document, companies will give a figure that corresponds to the cost of producing that document. In other words, if you were to add up all the engineer-hours involved in designing a car, it might add up to $50-$100M. Since Ford is not deprived of access to their own design (because they still have copies of it), this does not represent $50-$100M losses to Ford. They could be saying that, by stealing the design, the Chinese company saved themselves $50-$100M in engineering costs, but that explanation isn't really complete, because the design was manufactured, so the Chinese company could easily buy one and reverse engineer it. So, by stealing the design, the Chinese company at the most saved themselves the cost of a full reverse-engineering job on the Ford car. This might still be a substantial figure. However, automobile manufacturers regularly buy each others products and reverse engineer them anyway, to keep track of what the competition is doing, so the Chinese auto company's engineers were probably already pretty familiar with the basic Ford design before they stole the documents. They probably had already done most of the reverse engineering. These documents let them fill in the gaps in their knowledge.

This has damaged Ford to the extent that the design revealed trade secrets that the Chinese car company might not have been able to reverse engineer from existing cars. This might allow them to improve their cars to the extent that some number of people choose to buy Chinese cars instead of Fords. That is the real value of the stolen documents and might be worth $50-$100 million or more.

Actually, the temperature in my computer room is controlled by how many computers I have on. My Linux machine generates very little heat. My windows box, quite a bit more. Turn off both and the temperature falls quite low. Both on, and it's the warmest room in the house.

Oldest file created by me: I have a PDP/11 floppy disk formatted for RT/11 V01-01D. On it are a few MU-BASIC programs that I wrote as a high school freshman in 1981. My grand achievement was a version of Missile Command written using text graphics, playable on a VT-52 terminal. hj brings back fond memories!

Oldest timestamped media I own -- A distribution tape for an IBM/360 text editor dated 1968.

Oldest printout I own -- A complete assembly printout of the IBM APL/1500 operating system (fanfold paper, about 5 inches thick), dated 12/1/1968.

Let's see if the Wildwood Casino experiences a drop in customers. There's no way in hell I would play the slots there.

My god. Is there anything that nuclear weapons can't fix?

The data in question catagorizes fatalities. Elderly people are often
killed by accidents that would only injure a young person. This could explain
the data skew regardless of whether or there is an actual accelerator defect.

Check out the black Bell and Howell branded Apple II on the cover. Apple was having trouble selling Apple IIs to schools, because the computer needed to have an interlock to power it down when you opened the cover to meet purchasing requirements. B&H manufactured a special Apple II with the required power interlock, a black case, black keyboard, a B&H logo in place of the Apple logo, and a B&H sticker on the bottom covering over the Apple sticker. The disk drives were also black.

There was an optional back attachment that provided a couple of additional power plugs, three line level audio inputs, and I think a video output. There was also a joystick socket on the right side of the case.

I got one of these because my dad knew a Bell and Howell distributor and bought it from him. Unfortunately mine is missing the space bar. Try and find a black Apple II space bar. Talk about unobtainium!

For sale: One Death Star. Full size. Somewhat lumpy. Amateur construction. Needs work.

Window glass used to be made by blowing giant glass discs and cutting rectangles or diamonds out of them to piece together to make leaded windows. The method of blowing the glass discs resulted in glass that was often thicker on one side than the other. The person building the window would naturally orient the thicker side of each piece to the bottom of the window, to work with gravity to make the window stronger and longer-lasting.

If the glass were really a flowing liquid, then the edges of the pieces would be rounded and deformed, but they are not. They are as sharp and straight as the day they were cut.

Compare the images to Louis Sullivan's late 19th and early 20th century ornamentation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Van_Allen_Column_Capital.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Van_Allen_3.jpg
http://www.harboearch.com/getProject.php?projname=sullivancenterc

"Relatively little is known about Nomura's jellyfish, such as why some years see thousands of the creatures floating across the Sea of Japan on the Tsushima Current, but last year there were virtually no sightings."

Hey there! FlashMob4Jellyfish is using Twitter

WhN? 2day. Where? Sea of Japan. What? Jam as many of us into
a fishing net and capsize the boat.
4:48 PM Oct 9th from ocean

Sending a mouse to disturb the eternal footprints of giants. Sort of a metaphor for the current state of NASA, sadly.