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Monday  September 18, 2000

More Short Shrift this week. Sorry.

Hi;

I was about to revive an old 486 of mine and use it as my NAT/Firewall for my new DSL modem. We have a PIII-550 HP Pavilion ('Pavlov') and an old P133 clone running Linux ('Dobbin') already in a two node network on a Linksys 5 port hub. This works fine. The interesting thing is that I posted a question on a couple of lists about whether or not I should use Linux or FreeBSD for the firewall. I got one very interesting reply suggesting Linksys's Etherfast WAN router (about $200 for the 4 port version).

I use Cobalt Linux boxes at work, and I have looked at the NetWinder, but it seems overkill for a small home network I run. So I'm wondering if you've heard any feedback on this Linksys product?

John Wunderlich

I have heard nothing, but I have used many LinkSys products with success and no failures. I am sure readers will know more.


Hi Jerry,

When I read in your column today "I tended to keep a dozen or more windows open, including several Internet Explorer windows looking at websites", I thought I might suggest a program to you. I only offer it up as I also surf with numerous windows open simultaneously, often 12-30, and have found this to be the best tool for the job in my case. Give NetCaptor a try, each site has it's own tab and seems to me to use fewer resources than seperate windows of IE. It has many other features such as the ability to block pop-up windows or open the browser with multiple sites at once. You can find it at http://www.netcaptor.com  . I believe the author's name is Adam Stiles, it's adware, but you can register it and kill the ads. Personally I don't find them that intrusive. It's always been stable for me and runs on IE 5.x's engine.

I've attached a zipped screen shot of it in action, if you scroll to the bottom you can see the tabs. You can have them scroll horizontally, or "stack" them as I have done.

Thanks for all your writing over the years,

Jason Nielubowicz

Never heard of it, but I'll see if I can look at it. I have to say that with Regina and 256 megs of memory I don't notice any problems with multiple windows open. The thin 56K pipeline is a problem, but with luck I'll have DSL or Cable Modem within 6 weeks.


And I am VERY PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE:

From: The Works of H. Beam Piper [mailto:PIPER-L@HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM] On Behalf Of John Carr Sent: Sunday, September 17, 2000 2:09 PM To: PIPER-L@HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM Subject: Kalvan Kingmaker Update

LAST CHANCE TO GET KALVAN KINGMAKER AT PRE-PUBLICATION PRICE

I just sent off the working final draft of "Kalvan Kingmaker" off to the typesetters. I'm still proofing the final manuscript and will continue to be making minor corrections for the next 2 weeks. Meanwhile, the typesetter will be 'creating' the book design. We are definitely on schedule for the December publication date, I'm happy to say. In fact, I'm hoping to pre-view the book at LosCon on Thanksgiving weekend!

On Thursday I heard from artist Alan Gutierrez. He had just finished some preliminary sketches, based on my ideas, and come up with some good ones of his own. If the dust jacket cover art comes out half as good as he makes it sound, it's going to be a dynamite cover! Since this book will not be sold in bookstores -- but only direct from the publisher via the Internet and from mail order -- I have kept the dust jacket cover text to a bare minimum -- i.e., only the book title and my name on the front cover and spine. I don't have any plans for text on the back cover at this time. I really want to emphasize the artwork, since this will be a wrap-around dust jacket. I don't want to use any blurbs or 'Quotes' by big names, which will leave the back cover free for displaying the artwork.

"Kalvan Kingmaker" has changed significantly from the working draft. I've added a new minor sub-plot, removed some unnecessary plot elements and beefed up the climactic battle scenes. I've also re-formatted the entire book; instead of 25 long chapters, it now runs 44 chapters of about the same length as those in "Great King's War," which contained 31 chapters. "Kalvan Kingmaker" is about 40,000 words longer, which accounts for the additional chapters.

When I finish and send off the final copyedited manuscript -- in 2 to 3 weeks, then I'll send all the "Kalvan Kingmaker" sponsors a photocopy of the working draft, which will allow them to see the 'earlier' version, so they can compare it with the final published book. I think they'll find the differences very interesting...

At this point, I'm very proud of "Kalvan Kingmaker." I believe I was able to both write a good adventure novel and do it in the spirit and (hopefully) style of "Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen," as well as successfully continue the Kalvan story we all love. "Kalvan Kingmaker" gives us a closer look at Kalvan and Rylla and the problems they face, than either LKOW or GKW did.

Also, I've been able to explore Hostigos at peace (well, in-between wars!) in more detail than in previous books. This book also delves much deeper into Home Time Line politics and culture. Plus, we finally get a Piper-esque villain of the same "stature" as Andray Dunnan of "Space Viking." Not Archpriest Roxthar -- he's a 'special case' being more a Savonarola, than a villain; he actually believes -- like most religious fanatics -- that he's doing 'his god's' work. And that's very scary...but in a different way.

In the interim between finishing the working draft of "Kalvan Kingmaker" and finding a cover artist, I was able to write the first five chapters of the sequel. At this point, I'm not sure of the title. I was going to call it "Gunpowder God" (I'd planned for the cover of GG to feature a great representation of Styphon's golden statue); however, since the fall of Tarr-Hostigos, is the primary focus of the book, I thought it would be more fitting to have the under-siege Tarr-Hostigos as the primary element of the cover, with several of Styphon's Temple Guard, aka Red Hand, in the foreground. So, ironically, I may save my favorite title for an upcoming book and call the next one "Siege At Tarr-Hostigos."

Of course, the sequel depends upon "Kalvan Kingmaker" selling enough copies so that I can payback the loan I took out to publish it , as well as pay most of the costs of the next book. Which means, I need to sell about half the print run -- or 500 copies. To that end, anyone who wants to purchase a copy at the pre-publication price of $35.00 should order it now. I will continue to take pre-orders until October. Send all orders to:

Pequod Press P.O. Box 280621 Northridge, CA 91328

In a manner, unlike any other series I am familiar with, the Kalvan Saga has become a collaborative effort between the Kalvan fans and the author. That is, my contract is to write good books and publish them; your part is to buy them, or help sell them, so that I can afford to write and publish the next installment of the Saga. I'm almost done my part; now, the ball is in your hands...

I look forward to your continued support.

Best,

John F. Carr ==

As you may know, John Carr was Senior Editor and Executive Assistant at Chaos Manor for almost 20 years. If you liked the Piper boos you should like this one.


Jerry, in the off chance your business didn't let you come across this:

http://www.ngnews.com/news/2000/09/09132000/blackseadisc_3014.asp 

It describes how Dr. Ballard has found settlements on the old shore of the Black Sea, ca 7500 BC, when (it is proposed) that the mediterranean sea levels rose with the dissolution of the last of the Spanish glaciers, overcoming an earthen dam in the Bosporous, and turning the Black Sea into a saltwater formation, rather than a large landlocked lake.

This change in the Black Sea may be reflected in the tales of Gilgamesh and Noah, among others in the region.

Ken Burnside

I had seen that. Thanks for the reminder.


Hello Mr. Pournelle,

you say your machines have a worm, that it doesn't seem to do anything, that it launches on machine startup and that it "sent an-mail to 'China?' "

Sounds like the perfect vehicle for launching DDoS attacks.

The e-mail could be sent to anywhere and as it weaves through the net it could register the IP of the infected machine with the virus owner and be passed along until it comes back as undeliverable or is swallowed somewhere along the way. The destination doesn't even have to be real. The mere existance of the message (and the sender's IP address,) can inform a modified sendmail "watcher."

The "worm" sits and waits, whenever your machine is turned on. It could be waiting for a ping from a specific address to tell it to launch a DDoS attach at an IP address date and time of attack tagged onto the pinger's address. It can be xor-ed or otherwise encrypted.

I believe you have seen one of the mechanisms which could be used to launch DDoS attacks from potentially thousands of machines, none of which are likely to attract attention due to reasonable resource and bandwidth demand, against single targets which would be flooded by tens of thousands of seemingly legitimate requests.

Welcome to the info-war. You ARE the front line.

-Charles-A.

I expect so. It won't work with me, but it sure could with some. And I have cleaned all that off.

Thanks

Dear All,

I notice that none of the major antivirus companies mention HOW the QAZ worm gets into a system.

On Thursday I definitely did not have it. Today (Sunday) while browsing     
news.bbc.co.uk  McAffee suddenly popped up a warning that notepad.exe was infected with the QAZ worm. I had not started notepad, in fact currently .txt files are associated with pfe32 on my pc.

I moved it to another folder and had a look around. Sure enough I now had a c:\windows\note.com file. However the registry was not modified. There was no wininit.ini file. I rebooted and all was clear.

As a working hypothesis I have to assume that this worm was transmitted from a web page I had visited today. McAffee would have scanned this file once it was created and before I could have run it and possibly triggered the payload. However SOMETHING renamed the original notepad.exe to note.com. Could this have been an activeX control?

I hope this helps in any ongoing investigations.

David Cefai

 

 


Hi Jerry,

A firewall does not necessarily filter out private addresses. If you do not actively stop these addresses from going out by configuring filters or disabling the route advertising, there is no reason why your ISP wouldn't see them, meaning any of it's other customers as well. However ISP's should not be advertising routes to these addresses at their borders and hopefully not between their headend routers either. But in the case of the @home network theoretically this means you could potentially see an awful lot of private addresses before the packets were dropped. And indeed with a little traceroute experimentation I find that while the @home network is not sending these addresses past it's borders it certainly is routing them within it's network. I can reach some RFC 1918 addresses as far as 5 or 6 router hops away.

Also on the @home network the outgoing interface (the "cable" side) of your cable modem has a private 10/8 address while your pc receives or is configured with a "real" address. Aside from seeing this on traceroutes, using a piece of less than common (and rather expensive) network equipment instead of a cablemodem, and configuring it with a 10/8 address on my cable connection, I have noted that it gave me a rather complete view of my local cable providers network. My own reason for doing so at the time was to solve a problem myself rather than wait on the cable providers generally less than competent technical support. I hope that the cable companies have increased security since then (aprox 18 months ago) however I won't hold my breath. Unfortunately, I believe I could do a repeat performance with a very cheap ~$10 card, and as a "tap" rather than as a replacement for the cable modem. I suspect the cable companies are basing much of their "security" (they claim you can't see your neighbors raw packets) in what is an inherently shared media network by either configuring virtual lans or by filtering inside your cablemodem, and of course they also seem to be counting on that most famous of all security paradigms "obscurity" which probably isn't a good idea since most early adopters of cable were much more competent than the cable providers counted on, and for that matter were probably more competent on networks than the cable providers are themselves.

John Biel

Thanks.


Jerry:

I have been using a serial mouse with windows 2000 for the past several months.

My Gateway GP-6 350 has a Intel Motherboard and Phoenix BIOS. For some reason, this Gateway BIOS does not allow you to activate or disable the MOUSE PS/2 port in the Bios.

For the first 11 months of use, I used a PS/2 mouse (Logitech Marble Mouse or kensington Orbit) with no problems with win98 and DOS 6.22 (I have a small partition that I boot to and run Partition Magic and System commander from. Win2000 and Win98 are installed into different partitions.

Anyway after 11 months, the PS/mouse would not be recognized in dos. The bios no longer identified a "legacy mouse" on startup. Both win98 and win2000 recognized the PS/2 mouse independently of BIOS.

The only way to have DOS and Windows recognize the same mouse was to use a serial Mouse (I used the same Kensington ORBIT and Marble Mice....)

DOS uses the Logitech or Microsoft Driver and recognized the serial mouse.

Windows 2000 recognized the serial mouse automatically. Same for windows 98.

JRS


Dr. Pournelle,

Here's another example of greed abolishing traditional fair use:

Is Taping a TV Movie a God-Given Right?

http://www.idg.net/go.cgi?id=313384 

As a followup:

It looks like the FCC has given the go ahead for requiring copy-protection technology in digital cable set-top boxes. The announcement can be found at http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Cable/News_Releases/2000/nrcb0022.html 


If you use the command line CONVERT.EXE utility to do the deed of making FAT32 into NTFS you get a disk with a ton of tiny 512 byte clusters. This absolutely kills disk performance - 2048 bytes is about ideal for a cluster size on most machines, and large disks need to use 4096. Unfortunately the /? help that comes with the convert.exe does not show any command line switches for changing the cluster size. Unless there is a workaround for convert.exe I suggest that you use Partition Magic to do the deed. For more detail see:

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q231/7/56.ASP?LN=EN-US&;SD=gn&;FR=0 

This article suggests using format.exe to convert to NTFS, but AFAIK that wipes the drive every time!

-------- Tom Elam


Jerry,

Tom Abbot's Aeroplane:

This icon is part of HP hardcopy network device discovery (probably HP JetAdmin - soon to be discontinued). I suspect Mr Abbot has installed (or has had installed) some network printing or scanning device. The aeroplane appears periodically as an indication that the software is searching his network for JetDirect-connected devices.

An end-user would probably not need a tool such as Jet Admin and I suspect it was installed as part of a "full install" of a networked printer. The best way to get rid of it would be to uninstall the printing system software and do an "add printer" and point Windows to the .INF file on the CD or to run a "custom install" and make sure that JetAdmin is deselected as part of the install.

Best wishes,

-- Howard Roberts Hewlett Packard Imaging and Printing Consultant UK Technical Consultancy Organisation Phone: +44 (0)1344 365736 HP Telnet: 3165736 E-mail: howard-cco_roberts@hp.com


And a reply from my friend Ed Hume (see View):

Jerry, when did you go to graduate school? There was always a third group of psychiatrists - - - those doing research on the mental illnesses that afflict mankind. Research from the twenties through the fifties on psychiatric epidemiology and symptoms patterns is still very useful today.

And by the 1950's the shock treatment doctors had moved on to medicines: Thorazine and its derivatives (our only antipsychotics for 40 years), the monoamine oxidase inhibitors (our first antidepressants) and sedatives, leading to Valium/Librium and their derivatives at the end of that decade. The tricyclic antidepressants came along about the same time as Valium and Librium. All of this in our first decade of the brain, the 1950's.

To understand the heavy use of shock treatments and such, one must understand that some illnesses are beyond the capacity of a human to tolerate. There are people who are beyond the reach of all therapy, including Dianetic auditing. We're talking brain disorders here.

Today shock treatments are still used, but no longer is insulin used, nor long strings of fifty or so. As barbarous as it sounds, it works, and it is safe. A comprehensive bibliography was prepared by a family friend, the late Edward Hutchinson, an engineer who had occasion to exhaustively research the scientific literature on shock treatments. He found no research that indicated any harmful longterm effects, and much research that indicates that it is safe (except for the anesthesia, of course). Research quoted to the contrary was either badly done, quoted out of context or misrepresented. The techniques used to administer shock treatments have advanced greatly since the 1950's, and a new form of electromagnetic stimulation is now being tested and shows some promise. But at bottom, there are some illnesses that respond only to shock treatments. And there are people come in to outpatient surgery centers to get maintenance shock treatments to keep their illnesses away.

Since the introduction of Wellbutrin and Prozac in 1987-1988, we have seen a breathtaking series of new medicines released: antidepressants that have few side effects and which are not fatal in overdose; antipsychotic medicines that cause few side effects; nonaddictive antianxiety medicines; mood stabilizers for the previously unsuspected unstable-mood bipolar disorder type 2. In fact, although managed care companies believe they are responsible for the enormous reduction in the number of psychiatric admissions in the past ten years, I believe that it is the use of medications like Prozac in the hands of family doctors who have prevented many cases of depression from getting bad enough to need hospitalization. We hardly ever see nongeriatric adults admitted for depression anymore.

Breathtaking as it all is, however, we shrinks today are the inheritors of the practitioners you deride in your View for 2000/09/18. I agree with you that psychoanalysis is mostly hokum, yet the discipline of carefully listening to patients allowed other psychiatrists to develop the successful methods of treating war-induced trauma used during WW2 (and forgotten for Vietnam). I also think that the psychiatric profession's suppression of Dianetics prevented a valuable therapeutic method from reaching the public. It is too bad, though, that your professors in your psychology grad school did not pay closer attention to what was really happening in psychiatry. You might have carried a different perspective from your education.

Want a taste? Look at let There Be Light, a documentary made just after WW2 by, I think, John Huston. Or watch the MASH episodes involving the psychiatrist Sidney Friedman, especially the finale. He was a shrink from the old school. I hope someday to be half the shrink he was - - - and he was just an actor on a TV show. And he represented what the shrinks of the day were doing.

Some time I'll give you a perspective from the psychiatric trenches of today. It's all about injured children growing up, ordinary people under extraordinary stress, and biological vulnerabilities (perhaps from infections). The purported "worried well" hardly figure in.

Ed Edward S. Hume, M.D. ehume@pshrink.com

I was at the University of Iowa in the mid-fifties and the University of Washington later, and in both places the professors of medicine in psychiatry fell into one of the two categories I mentioned: Freudian hokum based on made up cases and the rewards of being able to treat patients who never got cured and paid a lot for the sessions; and the butchers who thought shock therapy was the answer to just about anything. I was also able to watch the suppression of Dianetics as dangerous by those quacks, when it was pretty clear that the Dianetics people were no worse than the psychoanalysts and they sure charged less. This I suspect was the point. They charged less. And they carefully listened. It was pretty well all they did. (I recall one of my psychotherapy counselors saying he wasn't sure that a good bartender didn't do about as much good as most 'counselors' although the alcohol might be harmful.)

In the 50's at least in the Midwest and West things were not as you seem to think, or not around me.

Since that time science, real live data-respecting science, seems to have crept into psychiatry and witch doctoring, while still around in places -- Ilsa Bick was trained as a psycho-analyst before concluding that she could either continue to pay her analyst or buy a house and a house was more useful -- is on the way out. How that happened I don't know: I got out of all that in the late 50's to go into engineering psychology and operations research where the data were important; next time I looked at psychiatry things had definitely changed although I note that some of the government regulator types seem to have the same aristocratic 'we are enlightened and mere citizens are benighted' attitudes that were universal in the 50's, at least in the circles available to me. And I read the journals then, so it wasn't just the small circle around me who were sure they knew all and that only incremental improvements in their craft were expected. And those would not come from laymen or scientists.

I was fortunate enough to be steeped in scientific method by the Thomists of my youth -- there can be no real conflict between science and religion, and if there appears to be we have misunderstood one or the other -- and to have that attitude most of my life. Look for mechanisms: where does this "collective unconscious" reside? Given Lashley's work, just where is the "id" or for that matter the "reactive mind"? And so forth. But asking that kind of question and questioning the value of "therapy" as taught in those times was a sure way to bad marks.

And in political science studies we studied case after case, particularly in England, in which a police constable, a psychiatrist, and the governor of a mental institution (which would be paid for commitments and not paid if there were no commitment) could lock a man up for a very long time in a mental ward. In one case a man was questioning the way the National Health outfit gave benefits to his wife. He was a troublemaker, for certain, and kept writing his Member of Parliament until one night a constable and a police psychiatrist burst into his house and took him for a 'hearing' before the governor of a madhouse. The report said he was abusive and disrespectful! And on the basis of his cursing them for dragging him off in handcuffs for the crime of writing letters to his Member of Parliament he was locked away. No judge and jury involved: "he was sick and you should not subject sick people to the ordeals of the courts." I wish I were making that up.

There were many such cases, which was one reason we were concerned that people be PUNISHED FOR CRIMES, not "treated" "for their own good".  Punishment ends eventually. Treatment doesn't have to particularly if someone will lose money when the treatment ends.

Yes that's unfair to people like you. But it took a LONG time for the psychiatrists themselves to start policing their own profession. Many may have disagreed with what was happening and the continuing expansion of power to put people in storage for year after year for no crime, but since they had untreatable diseases they received no treatment either, but few spoke up. One man got a life sentence for getting drunk and urinating on a wall: he pleaded guilty to indecent exposure, was sentenced to 30 days, but then it was a 'sex crime' and he was held to be an incurable sex offender; when Professor Cole heard about the case he had been in Atascadero for nine years for urinating on a wall.  And he had never been accused of a 'sex crime' other than indecent exposure. Of course he had about IQ 70 but he had been an employed janitor prior to all that. Incidentally he was a "trustee" at Atascadero and employed as a janitor there. Not paid, of course. But it was for his own good that he never got a hearing on whether he ought to be kept in there as incurable.

When we tried to get some of those laws changed so that people didn't get locked up without a judge and jury, you should have heard the psychiatrists yell. It was not a pretty thing. We were accused of being indifferent to these suffering sick people. This was early 60's.  So it may have changed now, Ed, and you may have helped change it, but I can't blame people for residual resentment of a profession that did well by 'doing good' to others for so very long, and resisted even elementary safeguards on their god-like powers -- some still do.

And that is probably enough on the subject.  


 

 

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Tuesday, September 19, 2000

Jerry: There must be a few that still use Dos programs and would like to use one of the Linux distributions. Question: Can a Dos program, like Word Perfect 5.1+, be run under Linux? VM Ware touts their program to allow Windows programs to run under Linux -- why not Dos programs ? Fro sure, I don't see anyone porting Dos to Linux so it will have to be, I guess, run under Linux some other way.

I trust this isn't an imposition.

John Little

No imposition but you force a confession. I don't know, and my Linux boxes are not running (or like the NetWinder are too critically important for experiments) so it will be a while before I can find out for myself; but I bet someone here will tell us in hours. And they did. See below.


Thought you'd understand this comment -

Working in the gummint is like being part of a vast kinetic sculpture. You seem to see a lot of frantic activity around you, and there seems to be a lot of energy being expended, but when you step far enough back you realize you were just part of a closed system that is merely TAKING energy and giving nothing back in return.

What prompted this? Reflection, and the fact that while driving in this morning I realized that I spend most of Monday attempting to defend some office space for which another organization has designs... for this I spent 6 years in college??!!

On another subject: I just finished Cussler's latest collaboration (a polite term) and wondered if you, as an author, could explain what drives such an accomplished story teller to allow the publication of such pedestrian trash? The book (Blue Gold) reads like it was written by a high school freshman. I've read most of what you and Niven have written (alone and in collaboration), much of David Drake's works, and several others as well; and the injustice of it pains me. You guys never put out junk. You write better than most mainstream authors, and you've never put your name on something you should be ashamed of (or at least you've hidden it well!! =). What gives?

Rgds Ed

Sympathies. Kinetic structure. I used to use the image of the brightest people in finance going into the IRS or into accounting firms whose job is to defeat the IRS for a net vectorial sum of zero...

I haven't read Cussler (that I recall). Many well known authors "collaborate" by handing an outline (complete or incomplete) to a junior author and taking the lion's share. I don't do that: if I collaborate, the author's name is on the book, and we share equally in royalties. As to our being as good as "mainstream" I always though we were the mainstream...


Here's a Reuter's story (I had originally seen this on the Motley Fool, but thier link url was over three lines long...)

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000919/sc/heart_bacteria_dc_2.html 

One very interesting (and hopeful) excerpt: "Now several studies are being done to see if antibiotics can reduce heart disease -- one by Pfizer (NYSE:PFE - news) to see if its drug Zithromax, known generically as azithromycin, can reduce atherosclerosis in heart attack patients."

Looks like the medical establishment isn't ignoring the evidence, as they did with ulcers for so long.

Never go on an adventure without a hat! Indy

indy@interconnect.net , indy@cliffhanger.com
 http://users.interconnect.net/indy/ 

We can hope. Physicians for a long time were conservative because that was probably the right way to go. Although they also locked up Ignatz Semmelweis for daring to suggest that childbed fever was the result of physicians not washing their hands. But that was psychiatry...


Time for more steamed crow...

You said "... Fry's, which is big on the West Coast. East Coast and overseas readers will just have to bear with us for a few moments; ..." I'm confused. Is Indiana "East Coast" or "overseas"? Or do we just not use computers? Or just buy stuff in cow boxes because they look so at home on the prairie (or the range, for that matter)? Tsk, tsk.

You were much more careful when you wrote for InfoWorld <G>.

Steve Jones Systems Development Consultant Roche Diagnostics Corporation steve.jones@roche.com 

I can only apologize. I think I wasn't sure whether Fry's got to the MidWest or not but that's still no excuse. Sorry. Heck I grew up in Memphis on the Mississippi and went to the University of Iowa...


Dr. Pournelle:

I am currently using the Linksys router to support my connection of three systems connected to a cable modem. The box works extremely well. I paid $109.00 for the device which is only the router, not the version with the 5 port switch, as I already had a 5 port switch.

The box allows all the systems to function online at the same time. I have been to Steve Gibsons site and run his port scan and it was reported that my system was very secure. You can open up selective ports and we do that so that my son can use his webphone software. The box is configured from a browser from any machine on my net. To initially set the box up only required that I change a couple of settings to tell the box the DNS servers IP address. I can open up one system to the world if I like which I choose not to do. The box provides DHCP services for the rest of the systems and acts as a DHCP client to the cable modem.

As you would say "highly recommended" as a solution for multiple systems to access the net.

Ray Thompson Q Systems 

Dear Jerry...

Here's a review of the Linksys router: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/3q00/linksys/befsr41-1.html 

And it has some comparisons to some competing products.

I'd also recommend a look at FreeSco (as in Free CISCO, not Free SCO 8-), which is yet another Linux router on a floppy project, but this one is braindead simple to set up and provides just about every service you want wihout straining things...

http://www.linuxsupportline.com/~router/ 

Though if Mr. Wunderlich is working with Cobalt Cubes, I imagine braindead simplicity is a luxury rather than a requirement....but luxuries are nice...

Bruce

(and feel free to print this)

I have no negative comments on the LinkSys router and several other positive. Incidentally, I can also recommend the Kingston Networking Kit and the D-Link Network In A Box kits which have two 10/100 boards and a hub.


Roland sends this with the notre "Another example of how our policies can come back to bite us."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=000114832908976&;rtmo=V6sqDfJK&;atmo=ggggg3JK&;pg=/et/00/9/19/wspy19.html   Roland Dobbins <rdobbins@netmore.net> 

I don't think it needs a comment. You'll agree or not...


Dear Dr. Pournelle:

I read with a smile the excision of Dr. Blick's psychiatric background by ASI. I thought you might find this observation amusing.

Freudian auto mechanic when you bring your car into his garage for repair: Tell me when the problem started and what you think it might be.

Behaviorist mechanic: Let's take it for a drive and see what's going wrong.

-- Pete

But both are wrong. It's a car, not a human being. You can ask human beings what's wrong and if they are miserable. Cars can't tell you (well the latest ones have computers that can help) and they don't feel miserable (but give the AI chaps a chance). And besides the behaviourist would be likely to try to simulate the problem using a rat.

Ed Hume was right, at least the Freudians listened. But to what?  And so did the Dianetics auditors the psychiatrists suppressed in order to protect their incomes.


Dear Sir,

One of the things that really bugs me about the way we have chosen to live is the distance brought between communities by the automobile. It is true that the net and sites such as yours do much to bring diverse groups together, but the car has been about for two or three generations longer and so has had much greater affect on our habits.

I think that it's the move to suburbia after the second world war, made possible by the car, goes a long way to explaining the current USian political disenfranchisement. A car isolates one from home to destination. During travel, there is no time to chat with neighbours or random passers-by. Connection to community is lost. It does not matter if one lives here or there. All suburbs look the same anyway. Who cares who is running the place in a homogenised world?

Therefore, I'm encouraged when I read things like this:

http://www.suntimes.com/output/steinberg/stein101.html 

He was an image out of ancient Greece: the philosopher in the street.

"I have very strong ideas about the automobile," he said. "Bit by bit, we're destroying the public space that makes us a democracy. The problem is that the whole shape of the American city doesn't bring us together as a people at all. It limits our capacity for random interaction. We are not in a dialogue."

We need more philosophers out on the street. We need more pedestrians. We need less big box stores and more high streets. I know small merchants are less efficient, but they are a lot more fun to buy from. Also, you have a much better chance of meeting that cute girl next door at the bakery around the corner than at the giant block-and-a-half superstore which is only a twenty minute drive away from home.

Finally, do not think that I am implying that cars are the very distillate of evil; I am not. I own one myself, of course. I just do not like suburban lifestyle they have enabled us to live.

Kind Regards, Bruce Hollebone: hollebon (at) cyberus.ca

Well, Studio City is sort of suburbia. Single family houses on winding streets, some in the hills some on flats. It has been here long enough to have a settled feel. I know most of my neighbors. We sit on the front patio. Japanese tourist busses come by to photograph Chaos Manor (I am NOT making this up). And I can walk to the Post Office, a Bookstar, coffee houses, drug stores, and most other stores although we take a car and do grocery shopping weekly rather than buy just what we need for the day the way New York City people do.

As to "a public place the Greeks maintain so that they can tell lies to each other" no, we don't have one;  but neither does New York City so far as I know. I do miss clubs, which never caught on in the US or at least not out here, with a few exceptions mostly in San Francisco. But I like it here.


I have read lots of "stuff" about the Dean Drive. What I find curious is that "everyone knows it was a hoax" and "careful testing showed that the device did not function as claimed". But I have NEVER seen a reference to rigorous scientific study of the ACTUAL device itself.

Kevin Merrell

There wasn't any. Dean never let the device out of his sight. I never saw it nor did the Minneapolis Honeywell team that tried to buy it. Harry Stine and John W. Campbell did see it. Both were impressed, but they were never given a chance to conduct a real test, such as a pendulum test. So far as I know, the only people who ever saw it are long dead. The device itself was never found. 

Harry Stine was explicit: the device he saw was NOT the one described in Dean's patent. The device in the patent has long been shown to be worthless.


> There must be a few that still use Dos programs and would like to > use one of the Linux distributions. Question: Can a Dos program, > like Word Perfect 5.1+, be run under Linux? VM Ware touts their > program to allow Windows programs to run under Linux -- why not > Dos programs?

DOS programs can be run under Linux.

If you buy VMWare, you can run Windows, and you can run DOS programs under Windows. You could also make your VMWare virtual machine run DOS programs directly.

However, there is a free DOS system for Linux. It is called "dosemu", but despite the name it is more of a virtual machine for DOS. http://www.dosemu.org/docs/HOWTO/

I am using Mandrake Linux 7.1 Deluxe, and when I installed it, I got the dosemu system as well. I just fired it up for a test. It seems to run PC Write and the DOS version of vim just fine. I haven't tried Word Perfect.

On my Mandrake computer, dosemu came set up with freedos, so I didn't even need to scrounge a copy of DOS for it to run. But the dosemu documentation says that DOS versions 2.0 through 7.0 are known to work. http://www.freedos.org/

If your Linux system has dosemu installed, then if you type the command "man dos" you should get a manual page for it. If not, you can install it yourself.

ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/emulators/dosemu/

Source code is in this file: dosemu-1.0.1.tgz

Here is the RPM: dosemu-1.0.1-1.i386.rpm

If you want the source code version, there is a file called QuickStart included that describes how to build and install it. -- 

Steve R. Hastings "Vita est" steve@hastings.org

 http://www.blarg.net/~steveha

Thanks


On Civil Discourse

Jerry

You and I had an illustrative exchange. You said something negative about psychiatry. I concluded that your opinion was formed by what you learned in graduate school, and wrote to give you additional information. You wrote responses outlining your very painful up-close experiences with psychiatry of the 1940's and 1950's. Oops.

At that point I could have inflated myself and taken offense at your castigation of my professional forebears; but I did not. I could have discounted your experiences and stood on my professional dignity. But I've known you a long time; no way I could do that. Theory must fall when confronted with data, and I respect your reporting data. Our discourse on this painful subject has been polite, beyond civil. That got me to thinking.

I have corresponded with a man in Oz (Australia) whose first impulse is to flame. I always take care not to flame in return. In the past I thought of this as "You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar." But recently you drew our attention to http://www.forlovingkindness.org/content%20page.html . One Rule there really helps me: ANYTHING YOU FEED WILL GROW. I've been using it in my practice. And I don't feed conflict with the man from Oz, so we have developed an e-friendship.

Since I have been subscribing to your website you have received some flame mail regarding the educational practices of the nuns at your school and a hyperbolic proposal for a trade rule. They appeared eager to feed a conflict. Yet they read your site. There must be something they like about you and the people whose comments you attract. It seems to me that they could have made their points with civility, and maintained a civil discourse.

I believe that civil discourse fosters better information exchange. For example, some people have been harmed by the excesses of nuns in schools. Somewhere between no discipline and harsh treatment there is a middle ground that fosters learning. We are more liable to understand what that is if people express their concerns rather than simply expressing insults.

Likewise, the man from the UK who took umbrage at your trade proposal might reflect some of the anger that many feel toward the US because of arrogant actions taken by US businesses and government. We would have better understood this if he had shared some of that rather than letting fly with flame-mail.

It is an easy temptation to get one's desire for a fight satisfied by sending flame-mail, but I believe this is a temptation better foregone. Better to storm in private, verbally; then compose a reasoned missive.

Ed

www.pshrink.com 


ANYTHING YOU FEED WILL GROW:

Last week, a SWAT team in Modesto, CA fatally shot an 11-year-old boy in the back during a no-knock drug raid: http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread7033.shtml . This raid was part of "the culmination of a two-year federal investigation into the sale, manufacture and distribution of methamphetamine." The news article does not question why, after two years of surveillance, the police decided to execute a no-knock warrant with paramilitary officers on a house where school-age children lived, at 6:15 in the morning.

Ordinarily, when someone is killed in the commission of a crime, all the perpetrators are considered to be guilty of murder: when a police officer, in the course of executing a military operation against citizens, kills a child, he meets with a police psychologist to "talk about [his] feeling in a nonthreatening setting." ( http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread7046.shtml  .)

In less than a week, the police department issued a "final finding" that the shooting was accidental, evidently on the word of the officer that his finger was not on the trigger when his weapon discharged.

The Modesto police apparently were told by Federal agents that the occupants of the house were to be considered "armed and dangerous," that the Feds had conducted surveillance of the child's home and that they knew of no children living there (in addition to the dead boy, there was an 8-year-old girl and another boy, 14). http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread7081.shtml 

The official line on all of this seems to be that accidents will happen, the police were acting in good faith in defense of us all, and the end ("we ... have to get rid of these drugs") justifies the means.

I post the above without source (on request) and I have no verification. The web sites quoted are clearly partisan.

If we could wave a wand and make drugs disappear we probably should. But Constitutionally if it required the 18th Amendment to allow Congress to make possession and sale of alcohol a Federal crime, then there needs to be an Amendment to give Congress power over drugs. States have it. Federals do not.

My major objection to the War On Drugs is that we have lost it, and now the casualties are our entire law enforcement system which is subjected to strains that it cannot meet, and our prison system, which is already cracking up. And when we get a prison industry making profits off imprisonment we have lobbyists whose job it is to keep the prison populations up. I do not think this was what the Signers and the Framers had in mind.

But I concede that states have the power to deal with drugs. They always have. But I do not think the Federal Government has any business in the matter beyond prohibition of imports and interstate shipments. And I question the wisdom of the allocation of law enforcement resources to a situation that involves voluntary actions. Doesn't an adult have the right to make a damn fool of himself?

Later: Clearly the incident happened. The boy was lying on the floor, face down, when the shotgun "just went off." There were no drugs found in the house. His father was arrested. Money was found in the house; how much is not known to me. AP, LA Times, and the Sacramento Bee had stories on this. The officer swears his finger was not on the trigger as he pointed his shotgun at an 11 year old boy lying face down on the floor.

I teach my Boy Scouts: Guns are always loaded. You do not point a gun at anything you will not shoot. You will not shoot anything you will not kill.

In Littleton Colorado the police were willing to let a teacher bleed to death and let the young murderers kill again and again rather than risk having an officer hurt going in after them. In this instance apparently procedure says that 11 year old kids need guns pointed at them, presumably for the safety of the officers. Aristocracies always consider the safety of the aristocrat of prime importance. Then comes their convenience. In this case clearly pointing a shotgun at a boy lying on the floor was important to police procedure.

If there are any senior police officials among my readership I invite them to tell me why this is good procedure.

 

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Wednesday, September 20, 2000

Dear Dr Pournelle,

 Yesterday, I watched a British documentary on the use of Ritalin and allied stimulants, Prozac and sedatives in children. A figure of 25-30% was quoted for boys on Ritalin in some US schools. While agreeing in principal that wholesale 'doping' of children with ADHD/MBD is both unnecessary and potentially detrimental to their development, especially in pre-schoolers, the consensus was that in cases where diagnosis is correct, a moderate use of Ritalin can be beneficial. The tendency of pediatricians to increase the dose of Ritalin, thereby forcing them to prescribe Prozac and sleeping-pills to compensate for the side-effects, was, however, strongly criticized. Similar tendencies are seen in the UK and some other European countries. Also, improved diagnostic criteria are needed.

A recent Norwegian study has found 70% of the children requiring 'special education' are boys. The report concluded that the principal benefit from removing these children from the classroom was to the other children in the class, who thereby got more undisturbed quality time from the teachers. The recipients of the 'special' teaching feel stigmatized. Girls are rated higher than boys in social skills, and in all academic subjects except math, where they score equally, and in physical education, where the boys are rated higher. Boys who under-achieve academically and who have poor social skills are over-represented in the 70%. Many are hyperactive boys with neurological and/or biological disturbances often resulting in the diagnosis ADHD.

A comment on this report by a psychologist, with long experience in schools, suggests that boys are treated too leniently in school. Girls are better at accepting the limits imposed by the school system, whereas boys, often active and energetic, might benefit from having their behavior curtailed to a greater extent than at the present. The author invites a new debate on boys' upbringing, and suggests greater emphasis on boys learning to evaluate the consequences of their own actions on others. Boys can't be allowed to get away with unacceptable behavior just because 'boys will be boys'. The author sees this as a challenge to parents, schools, kindergartens and indeed, the whole society.

I am relieved that someone over here is beginning to open their eyes just a tiny bit!

(I would send you the links, but as they are in Norwegian, I'm not sure how much good that would do!)

Yours, Gaynour Sletten

Precisely. Self discipline is the most important lesson children can learn, and it is more difficult for boys. I could go into the evolutionary biology explanations for that, or simply appeal to long known conventional wisdom, but enough has been said, I think.

Thank you.


 

Dear Dr. Pournelle;

In response to Dr. Edward Hume's BTW query as to who played Dr. Sidney Friedman, the Army psychiatrist on the old TV show M.A.S.H., the answer is the distinguished actor Alan Arbus. I'll agree that the portrayal was most sympathetic, and the character he portrayed was everything a good shrink should be (and I've had some experience on the receiving end).

Alan Arbus came by much of what he portrayed during his own off-screen life. He was married to the brilliant photographer Diane Arbus, whose melancholy portraits probably reflected her own problems with severe depression. Eventually she took her own life. I cannot see how this would fail to influence Alan Arbus' own life and acting. I haven't enough information to make further conjectures, but there is, I believe, ample biographic material.

Yours truly - Hal Frank

Thank you.

Back to the Ritalin issue and the drugging of "the Children". The linked editorial identifies a connection between five recent high profile school shooting events and prescribed psychotropic drug usage by the perpetrators.

Hopefully this issue will be raised more and more.

"there are four million kids on Ritalin alone, one of the most powerful of the drugs now being given routinely to children in American schools. What is most disturbing, however, is the growing awareness that the increased violence among school children may have more to do with the drugs than with the guns they use to carry out their violence."

http://www.etherzone.com/blum092600.html

Jim Riticher

If they do not learn self control then what happens when drug control fails? A Republic should be training children to be Citizens, not passive drug consumers. Citizenship takes active participation. If the schools can't teach that then why are they compulsory and tax supported? We seem to have lost sight of the purpose of public schools in a Republic: but like all bureaucracies eventually the purpose of the bureaucracy is to hire and pay bureaucrats.

That doesn't mean government never accomplishes anything. It does mean that we no longer read Tocqueville on just what makes Democracy in America unique.

 


See Stokstad, Erik, "What Makes a Police Officer a Victim?", Science, 289:580-581, July 28, 2000.

I guess the officer didn't want to become a victim.

I think we need to remember also that police work (like infantry combat) is sometimes terrifying and otherwise mostly boring. It does not attract the wise, creative, socially sensitive, or highly intelligent. It does require character (initiative and a sense of social responsibility) at least to be a good police officer, but that is getting rare, especially as it often results in self-assertive behavior that the public schools try to discourage.

-- --- Harry Erwin, PhD, Computational Neuroscientist (modeling bat behavior) and Senior SW Analyst and Security Engineer. CV and papers available at: <http://mason.gmu.edu/~herwin/CV.htm>

A Republic can either foster self government, which means among other things a certain degree of self-reliance for law enforcement (and fewer laws to enforce, with more common sense) or the "leave it to the professionals" attitude. But since "the professionals" do not have the same interests as the citizens, the results can vary. The police of course encourage disarmament among the citizens -- although they know that this does little good in disarming criminals. But it does make it safer for the police: they can then treat everyone as a criminal with no problems of being shot down by an outraged citizen if they get the wrong address or believe a tipster who has a grudge against his landlord.

I fear I have increasingly less respect for the modern police, and the Littleton Colorado case was probably the best example of why. The few cops who wanted to go in there and save lives were prevented by policy. Not being a victim is now more important than keeping the peace. And no, that is not universally true, but it is the trend.

RE: 11 year old boy shot by police

Not only is it good practice to not point a firearm at anything you don't want to make a hole in, anyone who knows which end of the gun the 'bang' comes out of will agree that guns don't just 'go off' by themselves. With very few exceptions (dropping a poor quality or poorly maintained weapon, the slight chance of a slamfire when chambering a round -- which of course goes back to the rule about never pointing a weapon at anything you don't want to make a hole in) a gun will not shoot itself. The odds are about the same as a car starting and driving down the street by itself.

Clearly, this officer mishandled his weapon. For whatever reason, he pulled the trigger. He may be lying when he swears his finger was not on the trigger, or he may honestly believe that (it is certainly possible that in such circumstances he would block out the memory of his finger slipping inside the trigger guard). In either case, a boy in dead. This officer should probably never be allowed to carry a gun in an official capacity again, but his department will probably close ranks around him and all will be swept under the rug. It plays to the theme that the media runs with so often, that guns are an animate evil force that kills without human volition. "The officer didn't pull the trigger, the shotgun went off by itself and killed that boy. Bad shotgun, bad!"

An interesting bit of trivia; each year armed citizens in this country shoot twice as many criminals as the police, but the police are _3 times_ as likely to shoot someone by mistake. Yet we are told that only they can be trusted with guns. Which may be true, if you ignore the question, "Trusted by whom?"

(Please forgive the expository bits; I'm sure you knew all about gun safety and such before I was even potty trained, but I include it for the benefit of those readers, if you chose to post this email, who may not remember a time when the excuse 'the gun just went off' was something of a bad joke.)

--Robert Brown http://www.godofwar.com "Life is a constant IQ test, and not everybody passes."

I have supplied emphasis in the above. I do not know the source of that assertion. It does not surprise me, although I can see some difficulties in collecting the data: can ordinary murder be disguised as "shooting the wrong man"?  But in general a Republic must trust its citizens; if it does not it is NOT A REPUBLIC.  Now perhaps we would be far better off in one of those professionally ruled states that most people for most of history have lived under. Of those I prefer Feudal Aristocracy, but I would prefer a Republic more. 

Macciavelli had a very great deal more to say on the subject, but no one reads him any longer, and few read anything written by those who have read him: mostly we get comments on comments. Same with Cicero. 

Republics are seldom overthrown. They fall for lack of defenders. It's just a great deal easier to trust the professionals than it is to govern oneselves.

It appears I may have overestimated police competence. I found one source of my earlier statistic (the Lott/Mustard gun control study of a few years ago; I believe they're using FBI statistics for that figure in their report). You can find a link to the PDF file at http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/~llou/guns.html if you're interested. In a footnote (8) he notes that in 1993 police accidentally killed 330 innocent individuals, while private citizens killed 30 people who were mistaken for intruders.

I concede that in these cases the citizen has the easier job of it; he isn't trying to track the criminal down after the fact, he or she is being directly confronted by someone with criminal intent. And the police have more occasion to draw their weapons, or so one would think... though studies estimate 80-400,000 defensive uses of guns by citizens every year, and by their own admission criminals are more afraid of an armed citizen than a police officer.

I don't mean to turn this into a big gun control production. My point is just that if we are supposed to disarm ourselves, give up our right to defense and leave that to the professionals, who are supposedly better at it, those professionals should be held to a very high standard. If some private citizen had killed that boy, he would find himself in jail for a long time. Since it was a police officer, we'll be told, "Well, he's only human you know. It's a stressful job and people do make mistakes sometimes." In other words, we find the amateur held to a higher standard of ability than the professional.

At least when a doctor is incompetent, you can sue him for malpractice. It seems you can only make a case stick against the police if you accuse them of racism.

Oh, and as a sort of addendum I forgot to include in the previous email, I happen to be in the middle of Machiavelli's Discourses right now... I've read most of his other work and I'm still amazed at how sharply relevent it is today. A friend of mine has a B.A. in Politics and had never read the Discourses. I'm trying to shame him into doing so. It seems to me an almost criminal omission from the curriculum.

--Robert Brown http://www.godofwar.com "Life is a constant IQ test, and not everybody passes."

Unfortunately I agree entirely. I also think it is inevitable. When you cede your protection to the professionals, you must take what professionalism you can get, and the interests of the police are more to self-preservation than to keeping the peace: particularly as we pile on more and more restrictions on  how they can act. 

In this case it's clearly sheer incompetence, but the city can't admit that because that would make the city liable to lawsuits. That's another of the consequences of "leave it to the professionals." And finally we have now got a large industry in prisons. The Prison Guard union has one of the most powerful lobbies in Sacramento. Private prisons operated for a profit give a heavy financial incentive to keeping those prisons full to every one of the stockholders. Now those prisoners work at things like data entry and once again there is a big incentive to keeping those jails full.  This cannot possibly be a good trend for a Republic.  But is is a major trend.

Professionalism in law enforcement always and inevitably leads to a system more concerned with the rights and privileges of the armed defenders than of those of the citizens. How could it be otherwise, even with the best will in the world on the part of the police? Young warriors are hard to find, and as they get older and more experienced and have families they tend to think of themselves and their families. As they should, of course: we can't today establish religious warrior orders, and given the behavior of the Templars in Scott's Ivanhoe perhaps we don't want to. (Not that Scott's picture is necessarily accurate, but that kind of arrogance can emerge even in orders of warrior monks.)

I have no real solutions to this and it has taken more space than I intended. Probably best to leave the subject for now.

 

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read book now

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Thursday,

One of my favorite topics.

First, Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis. As best I know, he wasn't locked up because he suggest that childbed fever was the result of physicians not washing their hands after working on other patients (and cadavers!). He was locked up some 20 years after he first suggested that puerperal (childbed) fever was passed because of poor hygiene. He did end up locked up in an insane asylum, but apparently had some kind of mental problems. He had lots of support among his peers, but much less support among his "superiors". A fascinating side note is that he died of puerperal fever from a wound infection.

As to infection causing coronary artery disease:

Got to caution your readers...while chronic inflammation and infection have been significantly associated with arteriosclerosis (and thus myocardial infarction and stroke) association doesn't prove causation. There is a wonderful (and probably apocryphal) story of researchers who found that office workers who worked under fluorescent had more heart disease disease than workers who worked under incandescent bulbs on the factory floor. Of course, it had to be the fluorescent lights. In similar fashion, we really need to show causation, not just association for infection in coronary disease. The evidence is mounting and Hanna Valentines' (the Stanford transplant cardiologist) data sound exciting, but it is still associative. Your correspondent is correct in stating that the medical establishment "ignored" the evidence that infectious agents can cause ulcers. However, not all ulcers are infectious, and the data that supported an infectious cause wasn't all that strong at first!

warm regards,

Mark

mhuth@coldswim.com  I'd still love to get into space someday.

Possony told me they locked Semmelweiss up for accusing the physicians of being the cause of the puerpal fever. He may have been wrong but the old fox was usually right even in his casual remarks.

Considering that real medicine is quite recent the progress has been amazing. Dunno if this is a real infection but evolutionary theory says most "weaknesses" are.


Dear Dr. Pournelle:

 I have to disagree slightly with your assessment of the police shooting of an 11-year old. I think that the problem is much more the burecratic inertia of special assault units, combined with the lack of an independent oversight of the police. 

For nearly thirty years, special assault units (SWAT teams, etc.) have become increasingly common. Every department with more than a handful of officers seems compelled to buy submachineguns and black BDUs and hand them out. It's the fashion. 

The problem is that all this expense demands justification. Which means that these assault units get used for tasks that used to be handled by ordinary policemen, like searches. As a result, we have guns shoved in the faces of 6-year old kids, and 11-year olds shot dead. 

The other problem is that the police are responsible for policing themselves - a clear conflict of interest. Add to this a public that will not demand that the police be held to the same standards of behavior as the general public, and you have a recipie for disaster. The only question is how long it takes.

 As for corrective measures, I think there are two that would do admirably.

 First, I believe it is necessary to have a separate oversight commission, with investigative powers, to oversee all law enforcement personnel. This should ideally be vested in a separate level of government - i.e., local boards monitor state and federal personnel. 

Second, I think it is time to adopt strict gun control laws - for government. No self-loading firearms of any description, for a start. And a ban on double-action revolvers and repeating rifles held in reserve. Machine guns should be for the military and the militia. The police have no business with them. 

You've hit a hot-button issue of mine here. I've been watching the increase in police firepower and willingness to kill for a long time, and it worries me. Especially since I work in flight testing - which means that the notion that "the police have such a risky job that we have to cut them some slack" makes me sick. I took considerably more risks getting through Test Pilot School - and I certainly am not allowed to play badged bully-boy.

V/R: Michael McDaniel

Thanks. We don't disagree by much.


Jerry, Came across this today: "The Lord's Prayer is 66 words, the Gettysburg Address is 286 words, there are 1,322 words in the Declaration of Independence, but government regulations on the sale of cabbage total 26,911 words."

Kit Case kitcase@starpower.net

No Comment Nesessary


Nitpick only, although served by the Littleton Post Office and hence described as Littleton, Columbine High School is in unincorporated Jefferson County. Littleton is the county seat of Arapaho County and is adjacent to but not affiliated with Jefferson County. Neither the Littleton Police Department nor the Littleton School Board had any authority or responsibility for Columbine High School and substantially no connection.

I mention this only because I have family ties with Littleton and they get upset about this. Nevertheless there is some value to the distinction. Littleton is an established community, Columbine High School serves an area of rapid growth and sprawl where everybody just moved from someplace else. There is some reason to think large consolidated schools with lots of anonymous students have more social problems than smaller schools with identified students even if the smaller schools have older buildings and fewer resources. There may even be a tension between building citizens in a smaller school and training workers in a larger school with more resources.

Clark Myers

And I should note that the first deputies on the scene were willing to go in but were called back to wait for the intrepid SWAT bullies who thought it was a brave thing to make a bunch of terrified children run with their hands on their heads long after the shooting had stopped, and listened on the cell phone as a teacher bled to death in the library. But they did a great job of restraining the paramedics who insisted on going in to help the teacher whose location was known. The highly armedSWAT deputies were highly efficient in preventing those unarmed medics from going in. Well done, and I am sure they are all proud of their performance.

Dear Mr. Pournelle,

You are properly disturbed by the careless(?) shooting of a young boy, and yet are also disturbed by the police action at the high school Columbine. As the new Atlantic points out:

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/10/harper.htm 

police tactics are changing, emphasizing rapid response, and quick action by those first to the scene. Could these be all related?

I do not know anything about police procedure, but I am trained in emergency response. I work for a first entry, level A response organization, those people who enter spill areas or fires scenes of unidentified chemicals (although non-radioactive). My instructor went out of his way to emphasize that most deaths occur when people rush in without knowing the scene. Panic and poor preparation make for dead first responders.

My police friends tell me that the average cop has three to four months training, most of it classwork in laws and regulations. Physical training is significant, but not a major component. This is usually fine; everyday beat police work gets no more dangerous than breaking-up drunken fights, apparently.

Consider that this average beat cop arrives at a scene with panicked witnesses, knowing only what was relayed over the radio. What is their best choice? Do they contain or enter? They may have only seconds before more innocents die. Under pressure and in an unusual situation they are only half-trained for, it is not surprising that they sometimes make bad decisions and that civilians die as a result.

I am not going to try to defend every dumb officer out there, particularly those who point loaded weapons at prone 11-year-olds. Nevertheless, even with more training, we, the general public cannot expect perfection from the brave but imperfect humans who choose to become cops. We do, of course.

Kind Regards, Bruce Hollebone: hollebon (at) cyberus.ca

But with many volatile situations immediate action is the only way to prevent bigger problems. Small fires become big ones. Fleeing criminals take hostages. And as a former city official who had considerable dealings with the police back in the 60's as Executive Assistant to the Mayor of LA I have considerable sympathy with what, in City Council hearings, I once called "my cops" earning a rebuke since police supervision is a Commission not a Mayor's Assistant job. But that does not excuse things.

In the Army a soldier may have a long career without firing a shot. Or like a corporal in Korea who had survived WW II, and was nearly 50 years old, when told to hold a position while the unit retreated said

"Hold it how long, Captain?"

"I guess I just need you to hold it. We're running for our lives. Choose a volunteer."

"Right. Harvey it's our turn in the barrel."

"Jeez, Corp, and we got through Casino together. OK, it's our turn."

Similarly, sometimes it's a policeman's turn; and I put it to you that if you are fust on the scene and they are shooting kids in the high school, your number is probably up. It comes with the job, and I know a thousand policemen who understand that day may come. It's why their wives want them promoted to desk jobs even though the officer loves street work (See The Blue Knight by Wambaugh for as good a view as any) and has never been hurt on the job.

If you couple the "safety of the professionals comes first" with "leave it to the professionals and don't try to defend yourself", what do you get? And had that teacher who bled to death been carrying a pistol and had the training to use it, might there not have been a far different end to the story? If professionals want a monopoly on the means of resistance to violence, does that not imply some very strong obligations on their part? Not that I am advocating leaving the protection of our rights to the "professionals" but then I am a Macciavelli-reading advocate of self-government whenever possible. A Republic has no choice but to trust its citizens to govern themselves. Other forms of government can use other means.


And more relevant to computers:

http://www.securityfocus.com/frames/?content=/vdb/%3Fid%3D1699 

Roland Dobbins <rdobbins@netmore.net> 

Do have a look at this one.


hi! i'm looking for an instant-on machine with a good keyboard and i read your praises for the NEC 780. i need a machine only for writing on the go. are you still high on that machine? any updated models? thanks for the columns and the books. Dr. David Rabinowitz (drdoc@li.net)

Still Love It

 

 

 

 

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Friday September 22, 2000

See View for the background.

I guess I have too much time and a better than dial-up connection.

On the one hand run cabbage against the Code of Federal Regulations and look at the article total word count - left as an exercise for the reader - (37 distinct sections of Title 7 - Agriculture alone), On the other hand consider a given Regulation obviously includes cabbage in enumerated articles or there would be no hit on the search but the Regulation typically covers things by class and often by area - Guam has some regulations of its own for instance - so it is not just cabbage.

Sometimes a lot of words are necessary - The Gettysburg Address is notoriously short, the casualty list is not - closing out Pickett's command took a lot of record keeping. More to the point, except when addressing the bench - let's not make a Federal case out of it - used to make sense. Today let's make a Federal case out of it seems to be the rule.

Clark Myers

No comment....

From: Stephen M. St. Onge saintonge@hotmail.com

Subject: The Urban Legend

Dear Jerry:

The particular example given (regulations on the sale of cabbage) may not exist, but some years ago [i]Harper's[/i] magazine quoted at length some of the procurement regulations for chocolate cookie mix for the U.S. Armed Forces, and they may well have exceeded 26,911 words. On and on and on, about how the cookies should look and taste and ...

Oh, and there was once an Air Force Colonel in charge of procurement for the rounds for the Warthog 30mm cannon. He had pages of regulations given him, governing lighting, location of work benches, etc. He threw it away and specified three regs: 1)All rounds must chamber properly. 2)All rounds in a specified sample must penetrate a certain amount of armor. 3)The low bidder on the contract got 2/3 of the order, the next lowest got 1/3. Price plummeted over the years. The AF retired him a Col., of course. He hadn't created work for more military bureaucrats. 


 

On Columbine:

I am so glad your extensive police experience would lead you to go in guns blazing against an unknown foe. Maybe if you had done what you expect everyone else to do, you would be thankfully departed. What good would it have done for those deputies IF the perps were simply laying low waiting for them? They would be dead deputies, the teacher would still be dead, the paramedics would be dead. No one knew for sure where the perps were or how they were armed. That's how urban warfare is conducted - cause some destruction, play possum, and wait for the 'brave fools' to come and get wasted.

On LA: about the 11-yr-old boy - like Columbine, the situation was unknown - who had weapons and who didn't. People have gotten killed assuming that children don't kill. The boy had NOT been searched for a weapon. And until he is restrained, procedure calls for weapons to be aimed at him until he is restrained. Age doesn't mean a thing. 7 and 8 year olds are pulling the trigger these days. And like it or not, the training of qualified police officers takes time and money. When you get a dead cop, you have to spend the time and money to replace him/her. And for what? to preserve your sense of the 'brave' thing to do? Yes it is a pity that the boy died. But that is a misfortunate thing that comes from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Cops have gotten killed letting their guard down when someone appears 'harmless'. What if that 11-yr old had been pulling a gun and the cop died? what would you say then, Mr. 'high and mighty, holier than thou' Pournelle?

Be thankful that this IS a republic. Just as strong as it was 20 years ago, 100 years ago, 200 years ago. Otherwise, someone would be knocking on your door in the dark of night and hauling your butt to a special resort for insurgents.

Darren Remington (Sunrise) [Darren.Remington@WildCardSystems.com]

I am tempted to merely say 'Thank you for your kind and thoughtful contribution,' and be done with it, but your wish that I depart this vale of tears is surely a bit extreme?  Also, my title, which I earned, is Dr. not Mr. and I am rather proud of it.

I will let Benjamin Franklin answer: "Those who would trade essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." And those who say that in all instances "My police, right or wrong," very much fall into that category. In the case of the 11 year old you are close to unique in thinking that pointing a shotgun at a boy lying on the floor with his hands outstretched -- he was, this is now well established -- was necessary for the "officer's safety". And many in this Republic are armed, but I do not think they all deserve being shot for it. See any of the recent editorials on the over-use of SWAT teams.

If the entire purpose of the nation is to protect the police rather than the citizens, then we no longer live in a Republic under any definition -- although I admit that words have become fuzzy things, with the President of these United States of America publicly pleading that whether or not he is guilty depends on what your definition of the word 'is' is. Still, I think of no one among the writers from classical times until very recently who would have agreed that a nation that places the safety of the police above that of the citizenry merits the appelation "Republic." 

In the days when I held responsibility if one of my policemen had been killed because he was pointing his shotgun at the ceiling and failed to react in time when an 11 year old boy spreadeagled on the floor suddenly produced a weapon and was able to aim and fire before the shotgun could be brought to bear, I would have visited his widow, gone to his funeral, and asked the City Council to issue him a medal and see that his pension was paid properly to his survivors. That happens. And most of the policemen I know understand that this happens: that they, for whatever reason, have chosen to put themselves in harm's way or the protection of the rest of us. 

And had that policeman shot an unarmed 11 year old boy lying spreadeagled on the floor by accident, both the policemen and I would be well aware that the consequences would be severe, and while I have great sympathy for the risks he takes, actions DO HAVE CONSEQUENCES. And for that I remain unapologetic despite your thankful wishes that I should depart this Earth.

As to the Colorado school situation, even the deputies first on the scene wanted to go in in hopes of stopping the killing. If trained police are not a match for a couple of teen-aged nerds, then they are not. That can happen. But the odds are pretty much in favor of the policeman. In a gunfight the first aimed shot generally wins, and training counts. And confronting armed killers is a part of the job one undertakes in becoming a peace officer. One hopes it will be a rare part of the job; but it is part of the always difficult and sometimes dangerous job of keeping the peace.

You wish the officers to react in all cases to maximize their own safety to the detriment of the safety of the people. That is not an attitude I find congenial. Nor, let me add, is it an attitude that prevailed among police when I was involved with them. If things have changed since then, we as a Republic are in serious trouble. Or so say I.

SHORTLY after I wrote the above this message came in about Littleton:

Jerry,

John Barnes teaches at one of Colorado's premier teacher training colleges. He is familiar with Columbine High School's prior reputation. His college's education department refused to send student teachers to Columbine because the latter's administration ruined student teachers. Those who complied with their training and refused to go along with the destructive unofficial policies of the Columbine administration - the ones which brought on the massacre - were given unsatisfactory evaluatons. Those who complied with Columbine's unofficial policies tended to wash out of their post-graduation probationary periods at any other high school.

The unofficial Columbine policy was that some students were favored (about 25%) and could do no wrong while all others were disfavored and complaints by them concerning just about anything should be ignored. John said this years ago, right after the massacre, so my memory could be wrong, but he basically substantiated everything said about how favored jocks could physically abuse the majority of students. The latter had to form gangs for self-defense. One of the gangs turned homicidal.

In my legal opinion, the Columbine school district has major liability problems - far more than local law enforcement.

I also had an interesting on-line discussion with a Georgia police officer on John's GEnie topic. My day job entails, among other things, second-guessing use of force decisions by police officers. We agreed that the first two officers who responded to the Columbine massacre did everything right and saved many lives. They opened fire at once, drove the perpetrators inside and off their plan. The officers were driven to ground by superior firepower and did the right thing again by not pursing when the gunmen fled inside. Their job was to orient arriving backup and protect the students fleeing the school from both the gunmen and the arriving backup. It was a heads-up performance in a worst-case scenario and both should get medals.

What most surprised me, in talking with the Georgia officer, was _why_ the local chief refused to let officers into the building. He was afraid of friendly-fire engagements because of the complete lack of interoperable communications between the many local agencies on the scene. Equipment was different, frequencies were different and call-signs were different. Fire and ambulance emergency services pretty much standardized those across the country in the 1980's but law enforcement didn't.

This in no way excuses the local chief from denying entrance to unarmed paramedics. That was directly responsible for the slow death of the wounded teacher (I think his name was Sanders) who was shot while directing students away from the gunmen. "If you won't lead, get out the way." Parents now know that the only way to save their children from such a massacre is to go in and do it themselves. Some things are more important than your own life.

Tom Holsinger 


Hi Jerry:

I was absolutely disgusted to read the opinions of Mr. Remington, to say the least. You do us all a great service by publishing these pieces. It helps to remind us all (not that we need reminding when we get to hear so much from you and others anyway) of the danger our country is in.

The fragility of our "Republic" has probably never been more extreme than in the present day.

Mr. Remington's statement: "...And like it or not, the training of qualified police officers takes time and money. When you get a dead cop, you have to spend the time and money to replace him/her..." certainly shows the mentality that assists those who are motivated by the protection, perpetuation and empowerment of the bureaucracy. That statement, and all that can be read into it for the protection of the ones who should be doing the protecting at the detriment of the citizens, clearly shows where we are headed. Judge Dredd anyone?

What ever happened to presumption of innocence until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and the treatment that implies? When is it reasonable to treat a citizen of this country in the manner in which that boy was treated when they have shown no hostile action toward the police (not that that would not have been justified in this case), are apparently unarmed, are laying on the ground face down with arms spread? Certainly it would have been more than enough to watch the boy carefully with the gun pointed at the floor, not the boy.

This whole thing makes me sick. By the way, your quote of Franklin, "Those who would trade essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety", is THE quote on my home page for all to see when they first come to visit. On another subject: I am interested in your take on copyright law and how it should be enforced in order to protect the creator of a work for a reasonable time and then allow the work to become part of the legacy of humanity as compared to what seems to be going on with corporations these days lobbying for ever longer copyrights (how does the current life of the author plus 75 years benefit the author?) Based on inspiration from you and Robert Bruce Thompson, I have revamped my homepage and started my own journal. Keep up the good work. You are valued for your willingness to speak the truth as you see it and assisting in our understanding of all the we are losing.

Sincerely,

Bruce W. Edwards :-) Sr. I.S. Auditor and who knows what else www.BruceEdwards.com - Come by and visit my journal!

I was not unhappy with the old copyright law of 26 years renewable for another 26. I was certainly not unhappy with life plus 26 years. Life plus 75 seems lik wretched excess and probably is beyond the meaning of the words in the Constitution.


I predict Linux and GNOME will become very widespread in about two years.

In 1988 or 1989 I read in your column how you had tried out a tax-preparation program that ran under Windows 2.X. You said "Now I understand why Apple is afraid of Windows; it isn't ready yet, but it's close." (Not an exact quote, just from memory.) History of course shows that you were correct.

Linux and the GNOME desktop environment are not quite ready for prime time, but they are close. Within two years, all the sharp corners will have been knocked off, and it will be a system you would comfortably give to your non-techie friends.

Early adopters will have a few arrows in their backs. If you play around with it, I'm sure you will get some interesting columns out of it, and I would enjoy reading them. -- Steve R. Hastings "Vita est" steve@hastings.org http://www.blarg.net/~steveha

And indeed this may be. I need to look at those more, but I liked what I saw. The key is applications that work with it.


 

I had not yet thought to follow your "Velikovsky" link, not knowing who he was. I have been surfing "catastrophism" and "cult archaeology" web sites lately (mainly the sceptical ones, to balance the tenuous if interesting conclusions of Bauval, Hancock, etc). I am nearing the end of de Santillana and von Dechend's "Hamlet's Mill" (decent review at http://craigr.com/books/hamlets.htm ). Has anyone introduced that work into discussion(s)? I wonder what effect a coincident physical catastrophe and the end of an astronomical "world age" per "Hamlet's Mill" might have had on the psychology of our remote ancestors? Just rhetorical questions to stimulate more thought...

Brad Sallows

I have not thought about that book for nearly 20 years, but it had an effect on me when I read it. It was a present from the late Dan Alderson. And you raise interesting questions I haven't time to speculate on, but perhaps others will.


Dear Dr. P.;

I have two computery questions that you or your illustrious readers might be able to answer.

1) I currently have two hard drives, call them hda and hdb. Hdb is all right, formatted as FAT32. But for legacy reasons that no longer exist, I formatted hda as FAT16 -- which means, since it's 7 Gb, I had to turn it into four partitions, C:, D:, E:, and F:. (Hdb is then G:, of course, making my CD-ROM H: and my Zip drive J:, for some reason -- why not I:?)

This is ludicrous, obviously. I just got a bigger hard drive (30 Gb), and what I want to do is smoosh all those drives, C-G, onto the big drive, which I want to be my startup drive. I already put Windows on it and ran it a few times as the startup drive, just to get it to recognize all the hardware. My problem is that I have a bunch of programs scattered both willy and nilly across hda and hdb; there are some folders with identical names on multiple partitions (Program Files, for example, exists in every drive-letter); and of course, the Registry is going to expect Windows stuff to be on drive D, Microsoft Office on drive G:, and so forth.

How the heck do I do this? Am I mad even to think it? I would so much prefer to have only one drive letter, C:, for the big drive.

2) This may be easier: Under Netscape, I have many mail folders, into which I put different types of e-mail... sort of a poor man's manual version of Outlook. Some of those mail folders contain lots of e-mails -- over a thousand, in one case. I can't get rid of these; they're important for work.

Is there any way to export some of them to external files somewhere, say on my backup computer, so I can at least delete them from the Netscape mail folders, keeping only the most current stuff? I run Netscape 4.7 for Web browsing, but Netscape 3.04 Gold for e-mail because I don't like several things about 4.7's e-mail handling.

Thanks to you or whatever master reader demonstrates his offhand brilliance telling a computer journeyman how to do either of these things -- and please don't assume I can translate an instruction like "edit the Registry" without explicit directions! --

Dafydd ab Hugh

Safety Experts Say School Bus Passengers Should Be Belted

I know nothing of Netscape having got weary of it bringing the little AOL man into my tray every few weeks whether I wanted it or not, and I have pretty well expunged all of Mr. Barksdale's product from my system. I doubt he cares. Perhaps he will hire his old friend Joe Klein to make Netscape better. So I can't help you there. I use Internet Explorer and Outlook, which for all the curses I aim their way, do work, and with the O'reilly Outlook in a Nutshell I can even manage to get things done fairly easily.

Your first problem depends on the program. Often you can simply copy the program from, say, D:\PROGRAM FILES to PROGRAM FILES under C: and then go in and delete the old shortcut and add a new one; or go to the properties of the shortcut and tell it where to find the program. For complex programs that call for a lot of stuff your best bet is reinstallation; sometimes the simplest method is copy the program to the place you want it, UNINSTALL, then reinstall. It depends again on the program.

Don't edit the registry. But do run REGCLEAN when you are done. And look at msconfig or use the third party program STARTUP MANAGER (or both; I use both) to see what is being run on startup. You may discover things....

And see below.


And now from a former policeman:

Jerry, I have to weigh in here...

I was a police officer (Dallas TX) in the mid-seventies... perhaps that was "different times"... but I and other police officers at the time would NEVER have even considered hiding behind our cars, allowing two teenagers free-reign to kill dozens (potentially hundreds) of unarmed children, unhindered. We would have "gone in". Period.

Perhaps it was the times, and perhaps Texas is unlike anywhere else, but when I took an oath to protect life and property, I knew it meant, at times, risking my life... I was, BY LAW, required to stop any felony in progress being committed in my presence. I understand that a recent Supreme Court case found that police officers are no longer legally required to "save" anyone's life and property. I guess times have changed.

Nowadays, I wonder if it isn't lawyers for the Cities and Police Departments setting modern-day policy: it's often far less risky and makes one less liable to sit back and "be cautious" (a well-worn axiom for a cop: "You only get in trouble when you actually do something")... but when dozens of people are being killed, in your presence... I could not have simply "stood by" and listened to the gunshots. Didn't anyone, say, think to peek into the windows?

I understand there was a armed Sheriff's Deputy assigned to the school who ran upon hearing gunshots... unbelievable. (An ancedote: I remember once I was in a witness room full of lawyers at the Dallas County Courthouse when gunshots rang out in the hallway: the lawyers slammed and locked the door so fast, before I could reach it. I told them "You need to let me out" (I'll never forget the looks on their faces)... and I almost had to fight them to move them aside. I suppose "modern" procedure would have me join the lawyers hiding under the desks)

We were trained to slowly work our way into buildings, and we considered ourselves better trained (and better shots) than the jerks out on the streets. We were arrogant perhaps... and Texans (which likely explains a lot)... and perhaps even reckless by todays' standards: I had two friends killed in separate instances in a single week... one of them was by being a "reckless hero" by today's standards (he tried to talk to a barricaded, high-on-drugs kid that he knew)... and one was killed by simply walking up to a car to tell the driver he had a broken headlight.

Granted, we were expected to take all reasonable precautions, etc., etc., (I also taught procedure at the Police Academy)... but when dozens of kids are being killed and YOU ARE THERE... all bets are off... you quickly do the math, and you DO SOMETHING. It was expected. It was understood.

At that time, I believe, if I had NOT taken action--even at the risk of my own life--and not tried to stop the murder of dozens, perhaps hundreds of children being committed while I stood by... well, I would certainly have been scorned by my peers, I likely would have been fired, perhaps even prosecuted... and I would not have thought very highly of myself as a man and a human being... the last being perhaps the most meaningful personally.

Again, I suppose times were different then. But even today, here in rural Texas, I serve on a volunteer fire department where I see unpaid untrained and ill-equipped citizens regularly risking their lives putting out fires for their community... because, again, it has to be done.

I also think Columbine is famous precisely because it was ALLOWED, by many, to become such a disaster. I believe I remember another incident around the same time as Columbine: an armed gunman in a school was stopped by a teacher who went out to his car, got his gun, and WENT BACK INSIDE and shot the gunman. Didn't make much of a stir on the news. Wonder why.

Thanks, Tim McCanlies

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Saturday, September 23, 2000

Dear Jerry,

Regarding the drive consolidation problem posed in the Friday, 09-22-2000 CurrentMail:

The method I usually use is to copy the directory belonging to a particular application to the new drive &; then (re)install the application to that location from the original setup media.

Another method is to use the MagicMover application that is part of PowerQuest's PartitionMagic. I've had mixed results with this, but mostly good.

The copy and uninstall you mention usually will not work because the uninstaller will want to remove the application from the original location, not the new one. In fact, many MicroSoft products (the annoying part) require that the original media be provided to remove the application and (the absurd part) that it be the same drive letter used to do the install. Also, shortcuts (in the Start Menu &; on the Desktop) that have been moved or renamed will often times become orphans.

The move and re-link the shortcut method you mention does often times work as the application will simply recreate the missing Registry "file" the first time it is run. The preferences will be the program's defaults, but it is an acceptable (re)starting point.

It is imperative that the new drive be positioned in the letter chain where it will reside after the old drives are removed. In other words, if the new drive is to be C: when all is finished, it must be C: during the application moving.

John G. Ruff. J R u f f @ E x c i t e . c o m

I think I didn't make myself clear, and perhaps I took leave of my senses. First I copy the application folder from where it is -- often under Program Files on the disk it's own, so it goes to Program Files in the new location -- then I uninstall it, then I create a taskbar reference to where it is. On reflection this isn't an intelligent way to do things and I am not sure I ever did it that way. Better is to move the application's folder to its new home, delete it in the old, and see if putting it on the taskbar (or editing the properties of the taskbar entry) won't do the job. Uninstall may erase DLL's that are needed.

I agree with the annoying nature of Microsoft's latest uninstall systems requiring the original disks to get rid of something. Nuking root and branch followed by Regclean usually works. Norton's various utilities used to do a pretty good job of finding DLL's that had no calls to them, but I haven't used that since Windows 95 days so I don't know now. I do suspect you get orphan DLL's fairly often now.

The only really reliable way to move application is to reinstall from the original installation disks, assuming you can find them, which in Chaos Manor isn't always possible. And some applications can be moved but then demand a password. If you keep good logs (and I have learned from long experience to do that) you will find that password and all will be well. DiskMapper and InfoSelect (successor to Tornado Notes) work that way, for instance.

I haven't tried Magic Mover and I think I shall. Sounds interesting. Partition Magic works well, and I would guess that if it has a mover program, that will work in a failsafe manner. they're usually pretty careful.

Thanks.

Somewhere there's a folder <drive>:\Program Files\Netscape\Users\<account>\Mail\ in which are files which have the name of his mail subfolders. Each of these files holds all the stored messages sequentially in ASCII text. That makes them easy to archive, though difficult to sort to find a particular old message using any text editor. Easier than Outlook Express encoding, though.

-Tim Herbst

Thanks. As I said, I gave up on Netscape. Perhaps I should not have?


Dear Dr. Pournelle:

While I admire your web page and Byte column greatly, and have respect for your amazingly wide range of interests and pursuits, I must express dismay at the tasteless "transcript" of the last moments of the Kursk. 118 Russian sailors lost their lives in a tragedy that all who have worn a uniform, as I did for 20 years, can feel in a most visceral way. Anyone who has been to sea in a submarine knows of the ever-present threat of dying alone and most horribly at the bottom of the sea. This is not a subject for laughter, even in the abstract; to make jokes about the real thing is an egregious affront, and it saddens me to think that you gave this vile article your imprimatur. Shame; shame on you sir.

You may do with this email as you choose; should you post it to your site, I ask only that you withhold my email address.

Larry McGinn Arlington Virginia

Come now. Dante's INFERNO is a story about people in horrible conditions. Catch 22 is about dropping bombs on people. Are they shameful?

The ability to make a jest of death has long been common and even prized among soldiers, or at least soldiers I have known. Would it have been accepted if the victims were Klingons or other creatures of the imagination? As the father of a navy officer I know something of the comraderie of the sea which can extend even to enemies; but I've also been to regimental dining in. I am sorry you are offended but I decline to accept the shame. A jest is a jest, and perhaps this was in poor taste (I know people in Redmond WA who certainly think so) but it is hardly deserving of a double dose of shame.


Jerry

The observation by John Barnes (as passed along by Tom Holsinger) is echoed here in upstate NY. Here too athletes are allowed to run rough-shod over other students. Not, perhaps as bad as Columbine, but bad enough that I'm glad I don't have a son in this school district. Of course, there is the support for sports funding but little support for academics or the manual arts. This has been going on a long time up here. Aside from a few brilliant standouts, the only kids who get ahead in these schools are ones whose parents are able to give them a boost - - - a psychological one if nothing else.

This morning I was talking to our chimney sweep. His dad was with the NSA at Ft. Meade. Mom split, taking boy. He grew up with an abusive stepfather. It's the kind of thing I hear all the time in my business, but this guy is the son of somebody pretty smart. For naught. I'm looking at this guy as he tells me all this, thinking, Brother, you and I could have been colleagues.

He's the best chimney sweep in town.

Ed Hume www.pshrink.com

In this time of competitive highly g-loaded exams and rewards for doing well, opportunities to get oneself out of such situations do abound. But being a good chimney sweep is nothing to be ashamed of. Doing something needful, doing it well, and being a decent citizen is as much as the ancients thought one should aspire to.

The Bouchard Twin studies belie your observation. Twins adopted into really poor families have often done was well as their unknown twin adopted into a more traditional family. Intelligence often outs: Bouchard's observation was that with sufficient intelligence one forms one's own environment. I grew up on a farm in wartime and didn't see much of my parents for a couple of years. True the environment was benign, and I wasn't so much neglected as left to my own devices and required to do my own supervision: not the same as a place of active torture.

I would guess there is an interaction effect here. We don't seem to know all the causes, and there are almost certainly some non-linearities and even step-functions involved.

Thanks for the observation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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read book now

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Sunday,

I sort of took the day off. Shouldn't I?

 

 

 

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