by jeffwah on 15.01.1999 20:42
Attached to: Compaq to bundle Linux and provide support
Yup, close to a decade old. The others comments are somewhat younger (like 2004).
Underneath the all the conflicting rationales behind Paulson's bailout plan is a simple fact: US citizens, on average, owe more on their mortgages than property valuations justify. Giving Wall Street firms bunch of the Public's money to offset their losses won't change that underlying fact. Further, it will worsen the situation for homeowners given that the very same people who are unable to pay their mortgage loans will be required to pay off the bailout. Just who are they trying to save anyway?
Here's a Main Street solution: Why not change the rules for 401K retirement accounts to allow individuals to liquidate all or part of their retirement holdings without penalty, as long as the money is transferred to their mortgage holder to pay down principal on their home. The money should also be available to help individuals refinance out of dangerous variable interest rate HELoC (Home Equity Lines of Credit) and ARM (Adjustable Rate Mortgage) loans.
In each case, if the homeowner has enough funds saved in his or her 401K to offset their negative equity stake and/or get out from under a risky loan, the homeowner wins and the mortgage banks win. Society wins. Also, no public funds would have been used. And US citizens wouldn't be held responsible for paying off a bunch of Wall Street parasites who lost everything due to their irresponsible profligacy. Thus, a moral hazard for the rich would not - this time, at least - have been promoted as U.S. fiscal policy. Just an idea.
Discuss.
Moderation Rated As Unfair
sent by Slashdot Message System on Tuesday April 08, @12:05AMSome of your past moderations have been meta-moderated by other Slashdot readers. Here are the exciting results:
* Re:Moon landing 1969 from the discussion "Design of Next-Gen NASA Rocket Showing Flaws" which you moderated as Interesting was voted Unfair.
Summary of your recent moderation: 50% Fair
For your poor moderation, you have been assessed a karma penalty.
Thank you for moderating.
Not that I give a shit about karma, but go click that link I was m2'd as unfair for moderating as Interesting. That was an interesting comment. Which just shows that the social problem moderation was created to solve is not amenable to systemic solutions. Programs can't fix this brokenness. And yet more programs to re-massage the social milieu the previous programs had already failed at doing
Not that I have a solution beyond giving up. So far, online society has been shown to
As my date laughed, the crow's feet by her eyes widened from lines to full crevasses, like a river having carved out little ravines. Certainly, by the look of her forty-two years, she had been born in a prior geologic age. But then, so had I.
She had just uttered some quip about a college internship, which I missed because my attention had been diverted by a young waitress, with a very tight figure, performing the bee dance with her ass. The waitress waddled along provocatively to some other table holding several full plates in one hand, but my date's eyes had slow-blinked in laughter at just that moment. I don't think she noticed.
"He was so little, so precious, " she said, "I just knew right then that teaching was going to be my future." She lifted her glass of Chianti, rolled the red liquid seemingly entranced in thought, and then took a shallow sip.
I didn't have a good followthrough, but fortunately that waitress intervened to check on our dinner.
"Excellent. Thank you." I took a small bite of the creamed spinach with pine nuts to show my appreciation. My date ignored her.
"So, what do you do again?"
"I'm a chemist."
"Where did you go -"
"- Penn State for undergrad; UT for my Ph.D."
"Interesting." At that instant, her eyes appeared to fix upon the wine label, unwittingly expressing just how boring she felt my career path had been.
"Yup."
"So," she tried again, "why not the university life of a professor? Don't like teaching?"
"No, it's not that. My research didn't pan out like I expected. And it took a bit longer than most to earn the Ph.D. When it was over, I had a string of publications with obvious and predicted results. I took this big risk on radioactive solvents as catalysts, which went nowhere. And -"
"- Oh."
Her face showed the confusion everyone outside my field does whenever I try to explain its more obvious details. I should have known better.
"It's just a job. Pays the bills."
"Hey, we all need a job." She smiled and our eyes touched for the first time that evening.
Hypnotized, I forgot to sneak a look at the waitress as she passed by toward another table. For just a second, imperceptible to others yet for us like a slow-blues riff ringing out a whole note in vibrato, we existed together not as one flesh but as one soul. And then it was over.
My date found a spot in the tablecloth to be distracted by. Her forefinger slid up the stem of her wineglass to the rim, whereupon she made circling motions along its lip. Her face pointed toward the table, but her eyes just then peaked back through strands of auburn hair and I felt the stirring of flesh deep inside.
"Hey," she said, "try a sip of this wine." Her hand pushed the glass across the table toward me. As I reached for it, I felt her finger ever so slightly press against mine as the glass passed into my hand. At that instant, I heard the slight whisper of a gasp uttered from her lips.
"Excuse me," she said, "I'll be right back." The mood vanished before the napkin was off her lap and on the table. She stood up and walked to the nearest waiter, who pointed to the restroom.
The waitress stopped by to ask if we would like anything else. She had that perfect mix of professionalism to deter unwarranted advances by customers, yet while somehow also wearing unreasonably revealing attire. Nipples pierced back at me through her low cut white blouse like the eyes of a mountain lion. Her stomach flatter than Kansas, and think I noticed a belly button ring extruding out underneath black silk fabric. She wore some kind of rosemary light oil scent, but all I could smell was sex. Sex all over her. In that second I imaged that her boyfriend had just bent her over their kitchen table, lifted her miniskirt, and quick-fucked her silly on the spot only minutes before her shift had started. And I wanted to be him.
She stood there patiently waiting for my reply.
PLEASE CLICK HERE TO FINISH STORY
Copyright ©2008, J. Maynard Gelinas.
This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommerial NeDerivs 2.5 license.
So that's how they got Litvinenko.
It was a bit thicker than a thread of hair; no longer than a BB pellet; dead black, with little spindly appendages wiggling and grasping about upwards. He rolled the device between his thumb and forefinger until it was but a thin reddish smear.
I survived! This time. Miniature bots. Nanobots. They can be bugs, parasites watching and listening to every second of your life. Or killers, filled with Polonium 239. Tiny things designed to attach and listen until they're told to exercise extreme prejudice. That's how they kill these days. Christ I need a cigarette.
"Cigarette?"
Am I kidding? I can't smoke a cigarette. It takes just one drag off the wrong butt and you're dead. Within seconds. Not like in the old days, when they killed over decades. Cancer was no conspiracy.
Oh fuck. There's a pebble-cam. Time to move.
A blur of imagery and sensation follows. Warmth changes to cold. Sirens honk. Time drops not by drip but by staccato bursts. Then he finds himself standing outside a cafe door holding a warm cup of coffee. A thing flashing intense blue and wailing like a dying cat screams by across the road.
Fucking UFOs. They hide. Sometimes they're only whirling blobs of gas. Other times they're like that. Who do the aliens want today? When will they come for me? They take us one by one. Up those beams of blue into their big round floating space ships. Big eyes they have. That time I saw it. There's gonna come for me. I saw one of them. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!
"Cigarette?"
Only if I want to die. Where's my knife? I can feel the worms twisting inside my brain.
He saw a Pterodactyl fly overhead, lazily swooping in circles, floating up upon an atmospheric thermal. It was beautiful and so he felt compelled to stop and watch nature, basking in the glory of God's creation. As his head was turned upward and his eyes locked upon the sight, suddenly he lurched forward off balance as an alien, briskly walking, bumped into his back. He turned as the man past by and saw that the man's face was that of a pig.
They're on to me again! I have no time to spare.
"Spare."
Sharp ice crystals burned themselves into his forearms and he shivered. A mob of moving and intertwined figures spread out ahead, bobbing up and down out of time, as the aliens moved to and fro on the sidewalk. Golden rays beat down upon the afternoon asphalt and cement. Occasionally, a human being was spotted among the masses. He pressed his back against a great glass wall and slithered until he reached a corner, allowing passage into a small alley. An alien, somewhat resembling a female human mannequin, wore a heavy mink coat that could not hide the thing's ridiculously overlarge breasts nor its thread thin waist. Cherry colored cheeks and puffed out lips set the face. It floated along the sidewalk with the air of royalty - its legs never once shuffling to take a step; its perfume, smelling of rose colored shit, dissipating in slow motion like fog upon a coastline. He escaped in the other direction toward darkness in the alley beyond.
PLEASE CLICK HERE TO FINISH STORY
REVISION 1 ROUGH DRAFT
Copyright ©2008, J. Maynard Gelinas.
This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommerial NeDerivs 2.5 license.
Full paper in PDF form (warning: very large pdf!)
"Curl-Free Vector Potential Effects in a Simply Connected Space"
Raymond C. Gelinas
Scanned from the 1986 Tesla Symposium
ABSTRACT:
A gauge invariant expression for the phase difference between two points of a wavefunction is derived using the Schrodinger equation for a charged particle in the presence of a vector potential. Such a phase difference is found to be the gauge invariant in a simply connected space in the quantum formalism. As applies to the Aharonov and Bohm effect, these findings therefore show that a multiply connected space is not an essential condition for establishing gauge invariance. That the Aharonov and Bohm experiements are constrained by a requirement for a multiply connected space, is a consequence of the properties of electron beams which cannot provide two separate sources of mutually phase coherent de Broglie waves. The macroscopic quantum interference properties of the superconducting Josephson junction are described. It is shown that a Josephson junction provides quantum interference between two mutually phase coherent souces of superconductive wavefunctions and therefore enables detection of curl-free vector potential effects in a simply connected space. An experiment is described to detect a change in phase difference of the superconductive wavefunction across a Josephson junction caused by a remote source of curl-free vector potential.
Ann Margaret? How many on Slashdot have heard of her?
I recently had a comment censored and my account posting privileges revoked at Huffington Post after submitting a single comment. The article concerned Depression, not mainstream politics:
My comment questioned the author's use of a NY Times lay article to refute an assertion quoted by another author, a psychiatrist whose quoted work cited peer reviewed studies to support his assertion. For this my comment was not published and my posting privileges suspended.
I've send two emails to the editorial staff at Huffington Post, none of which have been returned. I must now assume this is policy at the site and not a rogue editor.
QUESTION: Has anyone else experienced this type of arbitrary and capricious censorship there? If so, may I quote you? Please reply here or contact me by email. I am working on an article about the issue.
If, like me, you believe Attorney General Gonzalez, Vice President Cheney, and President Bush have all committed high crimes and *cough!* felonies *cough!* but fear that removing these criminals from office would be a distraction at best and a nightmare for Democrats at worst, here I offer one possible way this could happen successfully. But you're going to have to stand with a few Republicans to make it work. Just like we did during Watergate when Nixon got the boot and Vice-President Ford was handed the Reigns.
Thus, it is Republicans who will decide the success of impeachment and removal. If you want to impeach, you're going to have to make a few friends with the GOP. One in particular, John McCain, would appear to have most reason for revenge against the Bushies. But feel free to imagine this scenario with any of your most palatable Republicans.
"But
Well, sorry. As much as it sucks, the Democrats lack a supermajority to force the issue. And further, doing so would only incite yet more partisanship warfare at a time when national unity is critical to success.
There is ample evidence to impeach on the grounds of Obstruction of Justice and Conspiracy to Commit Obstruction of Justice. These men are criminals. And if they are let off without sanction, we will set a precedent for lawlessness in the executive that threatens the very foundations of our republic. Thus, seeing Justice done is far more important than Democratic partisanship. Or Republican partisanship. Equal justice is mandatory for the functioning of our constitutional republic. Partisanship wins, less so.
Here is one possibility for how a successful change in leadership might occur. We need seventeen Republican senators and only a few (if any) congresspersons:
No debates. No bullshit. No media storm before it happens. Just walk in, do the deed, and get the fuck off the house and senate floor in one day flat. Don't let them prepare. Don't give the Bushies one inkling of the shitstorm coming their way. Do it all backroom and then stick the knife in once you've got the votes. Gonzales, Bush, and Cheney would be then out of office without recourse. Plus, the Democrats would have not used impeachment for partisan gain. So at least a minority of Republicans would have cause to support the action. Certainly McCain, who I think would consider this fair turnabout.
Everybody wins. Except for Gonzales, Cheney and Bush. Who get what they deserve.
[EDIT]: A hat tip to Bill White, who proposed much the same plan over in this discussion at theforvm.org. Original text maintained at daduh.org.
Madam Speaker,
As a registered Democrat in the state of Massachusetts, I contact you not as a California 8th district constituent, but as a citizen of the United States first, and a party member second. I have already contacted my representative, congressman Capuano, with these concerns.
Our president and vice president have committed grave crimes against the republic and the office of the Presidency. The most obvious and recent was the commutation of Scooter Libby, Vice President Cheney's aide, after a jury convicted and a judge sentenced him to a standard 30 month jail sentence for his crime of perjury and obstruction of justice. These are felonies. But President Bush, while admitting that Mr. Libby broke the law, commuted his sentence anyway - even though he has never done so before for anyone else convicted of the same crime. Citizens must conclude then that rule of law is only for those without friends in the White House.
This is more than just the appearance of conflict of interest. It undermines the whole judicial system. Rule of law has been tarnished at the very top. One could detail any number of other examples where the president has flaunted law, but this is instance is so obvious, so contemptuous of our most basic and cherished principals as set forth by our founders, that there is no more rationale needed to impeach.
In fact, Ms. Pelosi, I argue that it is your RESPONSIBILITY to begin impeachment hearings immediately. If you do not remove those men from office, it will set a precedent that we - the citizens - may never undo by legal means. I fear that we are at the precipice of despotic tyranny. You swore an oath to defend the constitution. Not the Democratic party. Not your congressional seat. And most certainly not Mr. Bush, as his aide seemed to imply recently during senate testimony.
Seek out responsible conservatives who realize the danger to our republic. They exist. As Bill Moyers has shown in his interview with Bruce Fein and John Nicols. It is clear that the Democrats do not have a supermajority to force the issue. But you could raise one with the help of responsible Republicans who would be willing to take the helm after Bush and Cheney's removal from office. All we need is another honest Republican, like Gerald Ford, at the ready.
If you fail to act, you and the 110th congress, may well be remembered in history as that feckless and cowardly legislature that handed a modern Caesar his dictatorship without even a whimper or a cry. Today, you needn't hide a knife under your senate robes, legal means exist to achieve the same result. Tomorrow, that may not be the case. Democrats are watching, Speaker Pelosi. Please act. I don't want to live under the thumb of a despotic state. I am a citizen, not a subject.
Thank You,
J. Maynard Gelinas
ADDRESS REDACTED
Registered Democrat
Description: An implementation issue exists in QuickTime for Java, which may allow reading or writing out of the bounds of the allocated heap. By enticing a user to visit a web page containing a maliciously-crafted Java applet, an attacker can trigger the issue which may lead to arbitrary code execution. This update addresses the issue by performing additional bounds checking when creating QTPointerRef objects. Credit to Dino Dai Zovi working with TippingPoint and the Zero Day Initiative for reporting this issue.
BTW: the bug is/was not limited to Safari (as was initially reported), but also works on other browsers and probably on Windows too.
Apple is now [EDIT: OFF] my shit list. Not that I think Steve Jobs actually reads the email sent to his public address [EDIT: HE DID! AND HE HAD AN EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT COMPLETELY RESOLVE MY PROBLEM! SEE COMMENTS FOR DETAILS], but here's my letter in an electronic bottle meant for him:
[EDIT: to include email header info]
Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 16:33:54 -0400 (EDT)
From: maynard@some.hostname
To: ****@apple.com
Subject: Apple Support NightmareMr. Jobs,
My name is J. Maynard *******. I am a longtime Apple customer. In fact,
I have an original Apple II (not II+) still in my basement (and it still
works!). I am also an IT Manager for one of the labs at MIT.So, I am most disappointed by this experience I will relate. In
September, '06 I bought a white 2Ghz Macbook to replace a four year old
15" TiBook G4. Immediately I had problems with the unit, which finally
went back for service under Applecare. The system was returned still
broken. So I sent it back again. This time the unit has been out in
service for nearly a month.See Dispatch number: D11412***.
After three weeks of my laptop staying "On Hold" waiting for a part, a
CSR recommended I speak with "Customer Relations". I called and spoke with
"Tina", who offered to replace my laptop. And then the process just halted
as I tried calling to confirm and never received any callbacks. I have no
idea what happened.See Case ID: 76882***
Further, Tina informed me that I would not get my boot disc back, even
though the boot disc had not failed. While I did back up my critical
documents, I have GBs of ripped music, application installs, etc which I
will lose.At this moment, I still do not have confirmation of a replacement unit,
I'm out a laptop for a solid month, and I will lose my data. Mr. Jobs, you
have a serious problem with your support process and procedures. If
someone at Apple does not resolve this pronto, your company will lose not
only my future purchases, but also my purchase recommendations to graduate
students, professors, and support staff at MIT.That computer is a TOOL, not merely a product. So, to sell me a
nonfunctional computer, and then destroy the data it manipulates, is to
negate its very utility; the raison d'etre for my purchase.I just want to make this one comparison: Apple II; 30 years old, still
works. Macbook; failed within months, could not be repaired even under
Applecare, customer waited a month for unresolved "service".Sincerely,
J. Maynard *******
24 ****** St.
*******, MA
021**
Lyndon Frigging Baines Johnson? "Hey Hey, LBJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?"
I've noticed several design suggestions in your code.
