Did you put the name in quotes, to get an exact match? There is a good summary in this InfoWorld article. Note that in his first computer scam he passed as "Col. David W. Winthrop, USAF retired" in a Santa Maria CA computer club. Santa Maria is a stones throw from Vandenberg AFB, and I imagine that a large part of the tech community there worked at Vandenberg. Amazing, I think that he pulled it off. I never met him, but heard that he was a *very* personable fellow.

In those days (1977 or so) it was common for computer start-ups to take money in advance of shipment and use that money to fund development. Hunt used that model, except that he was planning to skip town with the money. He did hire engineering staff and a receptionist to make DataSync (no relation to any current company using that name) look legitimate. I understand that the staff were made corporate officers, which meant they were working for stock options rather than salary.

After Hunt was caught the staff - which had not known that they were working for a con man - tried to make a go of what was left. The receptionist was required to warn customers with a script that went something like this: "I must inform you that the advertisements placed by DataSync were fraudulent, and the person responsible for them is now in jail. Knowing that, would you still like to order quality products from DataSync?" But DataSync finally folded before filling any customer orders.

Modded funny. Okay, but perhaps the moderators have forgotten the case of Norman Henry Hunt. Mr. Hunt was convicted of mail fraud (phony computer parts). He escaped from prison, was caught and convicted again (more mail fraud, plus the escape). After the second conviction, he was found to be running a mail order business out of a P.O. Box at NNCC. His ads represented NNCC as the Northern Nevada Computing Center; it was actually the Northern Nevada *Correctional* Center.

In one part of the article it talks about him involved in a libel suit over the suicide reports

Good point.

It wasn't actually over the suicide reports, but over an earlier article on "working conditions." A personal libel suit against the journalists and a court order freezing their assets.

Parent has history backwards. Disks were invented, and measured in megabytes, back when bytes were not necessarily 8 bits and computers were not necessarily sold as "binary" machines. The typical disk record was 80 bytes long, since it came from a Hollerith card. The IBM 1401 was typically sold with 4K bytes of main memory. Four thousand 6-bit bytes.

My favorite markup language uses this disambiguation: A period at the end of a line ends a sentence. Any other period does not.

No escape characters necessary to mark abbreviations. Just begin each sentence on a new line.

Pointer to an old 60 Minutes story on just this. The U.S. recycler in question was shocked that his dumpster-full of CRTs ended up in China.

> a standard that the industry has long since abandoned

Or rather, never adopted. IBM has specified disk capacity in powers of 10 since RAMAC.

For me, the kicker is the last paragraph. The likely use is to replace bikes and pedestrians in the Third World, not cars in America.

CMS Pipelines did some of this. Not with structured data, nor literally 2D, but you could split and combine flows, and code feedback loops.

Not so funny to those of us who have endured a DVD-resolution feature-length film on the big screen.

Isn't anyone bothered by government asking commentators to "sign a non-disclosure agreement" about a proposed law disturbing?

How does the government prosecute someone who broke the law? Make the jury sign NDAs? Or maybe use a military court?

People in California should get a chuckle over this. State universities (and a lot of other state agencies) currently have a furlough program in place. Workers are paid some fraction of a salary and work the commensurate time. I think it's 90% for universities. So what used to be a 30-lecture class is now 27 lectures as the professor must take three "furlough" days. That's all the state can afford.

Somehow the number of credits remains the same. I'm not sure how that works. Maybe the state thinks the whole "furlough" business will be over before the accreditation agencies notice.

You build a computer that works in base 10 instead of base 2 and then you can call it arbitrary.

The base 10 units for disk drive size were established by IBM, which made the first disk drive. (That drive held 5,000,000 characters, replacing 62,500 punched cards. Each punched card had held 2^6.3219 characters). They also produced base 10 computers. The IBM 1401 which was available with 4K (4000 characters, or digits if you were doing arithmetic) to 16K of memory.

The question of when, if ever, drive manufactures should have made the switch from base 10. Perhaps the introduction of fixed-block disks, which have binary block lengths (512) and cannot be user-formatted to say, 1000 byte blocks. would have been a good time. But that would have confused things too.

An image with more contrast (greater average difference between adjacent pixels) probably has more detail. But compressability, as has already been noted, is probably just as good a measure.