Pretty much the same can be said of most other places where heat is required in the winter to not freeze to death.

Actually, Air Marshalls carry the .357 SIG, a round that was chosen for its higher penetration than more standard 9mm or .40 SW rounds. The reason a round with better penetration was desired is that it is likely they will have to shoot through a seat and the fact that, despite what Hollywood says, shooting a window on a passenger jet will not explosively decompress the plane and cause people to get sucked out like they are in outer space.

"...facts are stupid things..." - s.petry

Now add all the necessary safety equipment and let us know how comfortably it reaches 150km/h and what the efficiency drops to. Cars are much heavier than they were 25 years ago and therefore need more power to maintain a similar level of driveability. Those electronics are what allow a more powerful, heavier, much safer car achieve emission levels drastically below the 25 year old version.

So not an RTG then?

There are two electric companies in the Metro Phoenix area, SRP and APS. You are correct that last year APS wanted a connection charge but only got a fraction of what they wanted, around $5 per month. However, SRP is not required to get outside approval for rate changes like APS is and just introduced an additional $50 per month connection charge for customers with solar. Now APS has once again submitted a request for an increased connection charge and was able to get an additional $21 per month charge approved. I was in the process of putting solar on my home and had signed a contract when this new charge was announced. Luckily, I was still within the 3 day cancellation window and was able to back out.

http://www.aps.com/en/resident...

4.1 cents per kWh in Arizona.

More people die every single year simply falling off roofs installing solar panels than from nuclear power plants.

Sergeant Sousa of the San Jose, California Police Department rang me up at work then shouted at me for a solid hour about how he would arrest me for making terrorist threats, when in reality I had but pointed out to the opposing counsel in a civil lawsuit that I was bound to prevail, and further, that I would work to overturn the law behind IRS Section 1706 as being in violation of our constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the law.

He threateningly pointed out that our call was being recorded, so anything I said could be used against me in a court of law. but I had a hard time incriminating myself because every time I tried to speak he angrily shouted at me to shut up and would not let me speak.

I grew weary of his abuse as I had a lot on my plate, so whenever he would pause for breath I would demand that he tell me whether I had committed a crime. if I had, he need not send someone after me as I would drop what I was doing RIGHT NOW so I could drive to his station and have him arrest me.

Despite that it is my right as an American to represent in both civil and criminal court, he threatened to arrest me if I did not retain counsel with the week, then hung up on me.

I continued to represent myself but never heard from him again.

now I'm not so stupid as to actually do without counsel, but I wasn't born yesterday. our dispute simply had not reached the point that I required a lawyer.

It has been about 22 months so even if he could be prosecuted, the statute of limitations may apply. even so, if he would do that to me he would do it to others, so I'm going to find some way to obtain that recording, post it on my site then blast it's link all over Creation.

I do not yet provide full details but you can read more at

http://www.softwareproblem.net/social/color-of-authority/sgt-sousa-can-kiss-my-fat-hairy-ass.html

I'll be posting another essay soon that discusses this in more depth.

if you'd like to drop Sgt Sousa a dime the SJPD nonemergency number is 408 277 8900. from outside the US our country code is 1.

Be sure to let my dear friend now that if my new gig works out I'll be making a generous donation in his name to the Silicon Valley Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

A quite common, quite angrily stated misconception is that Free Software cannot be sold for non-zero monetary charge.

  The most casaul reading of the GNU General Public License as well as most if not all the other licenses that comply with the Free Software Foundation's Free Software Definition makes clear that one can charge whatever one wants for Free Software. Consider Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is collosally expensive, yet largely GPL or LPGL, and all Free Software.

Neither is charging money for the source code forbidden. The GPL specifically provides that one may charge a reasonable fee for duplication and shipping of the media, as well as the labor involved. For many years, the FSF raised much of its money by charging a premium for source tapes as well as binary tapes for various platforms.

One is not required to provide source over the Internet. Posting one's source on the Internet but not making it available through other means upon request violates not just the spirit but the letter of the GPL. One isn't actually required to openly release the source, but to make a written, legally binding guarantee that one will provide source upon request, as well as of course to actually provide the source upon receiving an actual request.

What one cannot do is retrict distribution of source by others, or to require those who redistribute source or binaries to pay a fee to the copyright holder.

That was meant to be "World-Reknowned Basebell Player Fidel Castro Not Dead Yet, Feels Happy".

Perhaps some Slashdot editor could shorten that to just "Baseball Player Fidel Castro Not Dead Yet".

A couple of the other pages I linked to are broken because my server fell over. I'll fix that in the next hour or so.

My sister calls herself the "Fat Witch With A Gun". Besides being heavily into books, one of her missions in life is to convince other women to learn how to use guns and to carry them around should the need to use one in self defense ever arise.

Should she ever hear you teasing your cute girlfriend about her love handles, the best that you can hope for is that you'll be turned into a newt then released into a cold yet refreshing Idaho mountain stream. Your only alternative would be puzzling over how to put your brain back together after you found it spattered all over the wall.

Don't Piss Her Off.

I sent my sister, my mother and my mother's twin sister this email just now. My sister is heavily into computing but Mom and Aunt Peggy are quite computationally challenged. However all three of them as well as myself regard libraries as one of the most valuable public services any government or school could ever hope to provide.

If you feel as I do that the word needs to be gotten out about what follows, please forward this email to anyone you might feel would be interested in or would benefit from it.

Something came up on one of the web sites I like to hang out on that is of vital importance to anyone that cares in any way about the continued existence of public libraries.

      The Looming Library Lending Battle
      http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/12/25/2117232/the-looming-library-lending-battle

      Publishers vs. Libraries: an eBook Tug-of-War
      http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/business/for-libraries-and-publishers-an-e-book-tug-of-war.html?_r=2

Book publishers have NEVER thought highly of public libraries, but it is only recently that they've gotten the idea of getting every public library in the land completely shut down. This isn't the first I've heard of that effort, but is the most serious threat to libraries that has come up since the publishing industry started working to put a stop to the free lending of books.

When a library purchases or is given a book printed on paper - what computer geeks call a "dead tree book" - it has the perfectly legal right to lend that book out as many times as readers want to check it out. If we could come up with books that never wore out, in principle every library book could be repeatedly lent out until The End of Time.

However I am sure you have heard that with the widespread availability of reference information, entertainment and reading material available on the Internet, traditional printed book libraries have suffered. When I was in school and was assigned to write a research paper, I would perform all that research from "dead tree books" in a library.

Today's students do the vast majority of their scholastic research on the Internet, at websites such as Wikipedia, without ever setting foot in a library. That has resulted in the loss of public support for libraries, as well as fewer people ever visiting one. Because libraries, like most government services, argue for the continuation of their funding by keeping records of the public's use of their services, public funding to libraries has been cut back drastically. Branches are being closed everywhere, with those that do remain open having to cut back on hours, staff and the purchase of new books.

However, just in the last couple of years libraries have found new relevance by - among other ways - lending out what are called "eBooks" or Electronic Books.

They aren't books in the traditional sense, but they are electronic documents just like the documents you save on the Desktop of your iMac. One always requires some kind of electronic computing device to actually read them.

One can read them with a traditional computer. I can use my iPad as an eBook reader. The Amazon online shopping website sells a popular eBook reader called the Kindle, as well as a wide selection of eBooks that can be read by the Kindle. The Barnes and Noble bookstore sells a competing eBook read called the Nook. The main advantage of the specialized eBook readers over computers like your iMac is that they are much smaller, lighter and so easier to carry, and can be powered just by batteries for quite a long time rather than having to be plugged into the wall.

Because eBooks are data files, and so are not subject to wear, tear, soiling, water damage or mechanical stress, they NEVER wear out and so really could be lent out repeatedly until The End of Time.

Unfortunately, while Amazon and Barnes and Noble sell eBooks, they are actually published by the same companies as publish dead tree books. eBooks are wildly popular these days, so all the publishers are coming out with new titles every day, but they are easily able to see that eBooks cut into the sales of traditional print books.

The traditional book publishers have come to regard eBooks in much the same way as buggy whip manufacturers regarded the automobile. Rather than finding some way to work with the new technology, to embrace it and to make the most of computing, readers such as the Nook, Kindle and iPad, and so to make a lot of money from eBooks in the same way as software publishers make money by publishing software, the traditional publishers are struggling to restrict what one can do with eBooks.

One such proposal that is being widely promoted among the traditional publishers is to forbid libraries from freely lending eBooks. Instead they have the idea that after an eBook has been lent a specific number of times, the library ought to be required to pay the full purchase price of that eBook, as if it had just purchased an additional copy from a bookstore.

That's Just Wrong. That's not why we have libraries.

Ever Faithful,

MIke

But that got harder when we shrunk our processes. That had the result of forcing them to learn how to design their own chips, thereby boosting their economy.

My cousin speaks fluent Russian. There is no room to stand let alone sit in his apartment because of all the giant stacks of books. I know enough Russian that I could tell what the books were about. All of them were advanced physics and electrical engineering texts.

The Russians are no fools. Their educational system is excellent. It had to be under the soviets to have any hope of them surviving the cold war.

You must not have ever worked for one.

A government-funded agency called the Manhattan Project avoided the need for one million American troops to give their lives by having a few hundred thousand residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki give theirs instead.

NASA put a dozen men and a few dune buggies on the moon in a government operation.

But on private industry's side, Enron manipulated what was intended to be a free market for electrical supply by creating rolling blackouts in California during its notoriously hot summer. I expect that more than a few elderly or sick people died when they couldn't run their air conditioners. It didn't work out so well though, as Enron when tits up after getting caught.

Or take the current economic crisis. created largely by "The Invisible Hand" developing a new form of investment vehicle that anyone with half a neuron knew was impossible to reliably valuate, with the result that Silicon Valley alone how has twenty-four thousand homeless people.

I don't live there anymore, but when I did, I used to see those poor fuckers all the time, smartly dressed and toting those rolling suitcases that are so popular, all night long on empty streets, because they had nowhere else to go. At least they were able to keep their fine luggage after their homes got foreclosed.