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CHAOS MANOR MAIL

Mail 210 June 17 - 23, 2002

 

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IF YOU SEND MAIL it may be published; if you want it private SAY SO AT THE TOP of the mail. I try to respect confidences, but there is only me, and this is Chaos Manor. If you want a mail address other than the one from which you sent the mail to appear, PUT THAT AT THE END OF THE LETTER as a signature. In general, put the name you want at the end of the letter: if you put no address there none will be posted, but I do want some kind of name, or explicitly to say (name withheld).

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I try to answer mail, but mostly I can't get to all of it. I read it all, although not always the instant it comes in. I do have books to write too...  I am reminded of H. P. Lovecraft who slowly starved to death while answering fan mail. 

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Monday  June 17, 2002

For starters see Sunday's mail on spam. I'll get more up later today. There was a fair amount of mail Saturday and Sunday anway.

Regarding Palm and InfoSelect and Tornado Notes:

I used to use Tornado Notes. I bought InfoSelect too, although I never liked IS as well as TN. I don't use either, anymore, because I have a Palm PDA.

Palm PDAs have a built-in application for keeping notes. You can enter the notes in random fashion. You can create major categories (Work, Personal, Information, whatever helps you organize your notes) and you can move notes from one category to another. There is a list view, where you see the first line of each note (not unlike how IS does things).

There is a search function. It is slower than TN or IS (because a Palm PDA is slower than a desktop computer) but it works just fine, and it generates a list view with the first line of each note containing the search text.

TN and IS have some odd features that I didn't use, such as the "forms" for taking phone messages. The notes application in PalmOS doesn't have these odd features, but you can get special-purpose applications for PalmOS that do just about anything.

With a Palm PDA you also get Palm Desktop, software for your desktop computer. (Palm PDAs come with Windows software, and Mac software is also available. On Linux I use something called JPilot.) You can use your desktop computer with its nice keyboard to edit your Palm notes, and when you syncronize your Palm PDA with your desktop computer, all the changes you made on your desktop or on your Palm get reconciled.

In short, I think that Palm Desktop (or JPilot) are Good Enough replacements for TN or IS, even without a Palm PDA; and having your notes in a Palm PDA turns out to be very nice indeed. Just as with TN, I keep all sorts of random things in my Palm notes, and surprisingly often I pull out my Palm and look something up. I've even been thinking of entering all my recipes (not just my favorite recipes, *all* my recipes) into Palm notes so that I can share them with friends whenever they might come up in conversation.

My Palm PDA is a Visor Deluxe. Any Handspring PDA will be more than Good Enough. I am lusting after a Handspring Treo 90, a tiny and cute color device that weighs 4 ounces and has a keyboard like a RIM Blackberry pager.

If you want to look at Palm devices again, I suggest you try the Visor Deluxe because it is only about $90 now. Sony makes some really nice devices that have 320x320 resolution, and they have nice fonts that take advantage of the resolution; perhaps with your eyes, one of the Sony units might be best. Sony's newest has a huge 320x480 screen and a cleverly hidden keyboard, but I am not willing to spend $600 to play with it.

-- Steve R. Hastings "Vita est" steve@hastings.org http://www.blarg.net/~steveha

Thanks. One of these days I may get back to Palm type machines but I find I just don't use them. I thought I would.

And Greg Brewer just couldn't resist:

"GeForce 2 and 1.5-MHz Pentium 4" wow. That's about half the speed of my old old PC-XT. How fast does it boot? It must be low power consumption so it would probably be great in a laptop. Imagine, battery life measured in days. Of course, it would probably take a day to load Word or any other word processor.

Greg Brewer

Aaaarrrggghh.

… all parts for the servers and workstations I build from scratch come from:

www.motherboardexpress.com 

My contact is Scott, but anyone can help. These guys bend over backwards to help, and have even recommended competitor’s products if they didn’t have something in stock, or couldn’t answer a specific need.

Tracy Walters <;)))><

Rocky Mountain Technology Group

Thanks. I have more parts than I need just now, but I will have to put together a new generation server at some point. I haven't decided what it will be.

And now 

Dear Friends,

Mohamed Atta, the apparent ringleader of the 9/11 terrorist squad that destroyed our World Trade Center and killed 3,000 Americans, was clearly a very bad man, at least by American standards.

But although his attack automatically placed him beyond the reach of American (as opposed to Divine) justice, we may rest assured that he went to his death having already suffered considerable punishment from our federal officials. For although newly disclosed documents have proven that our incompetent FBI and CIA bureaucracies miserably failed in their security mission, a far more effective government agent, namely one of our humble federal loan administrators, did not. The misery this unsung American hero inflicted upon the unfortunate Mr. Atta should easily assuage all unrequited cries for vengeance from our thousands of widows and orphans.

For it seems that Mr. Atta, being a particularly thrifty terrorist, apparently made long and frustrating attempts to secure a federal loan of $650,000 to finance his worthy effort to destroy America (or at least a considerable portion of it). Yet from the accounts recently provided in the media, it appears that the poor man was completely unprepared for the volume and complexity of the official paperwork with which he was bombarded, particularly since the loan officer assigned to his case was but a mere lowly "female," one Johnelle Bryant.

Poor Mr. Atta seems to have originally labored under the mistaken impression that he could merely walk into any government office, describe his profession as martyrdom-seeking terrorist, fill out a simple loan request---for destroying America--- and within fifteen or twenty minutes be walking out the door with $650,000 cash in hand, merrily humming Koranic verses as he priced out light aircraft, industrial-size nerve-gas-spray- canisters, and high-explosive devices.

But such is the false myth of American efficiency, especially in the Third World whence Mr. Atta hailed. In actual practice, we can imagine the severe annoyance that poor Mr. Atta felt at his encounter with the loan officer, and the probing and intrusive nature of the questions she asked. We can equally well contemplate poor Johnelle Bryant's growing horror as it gradually dawned on her that the seemingly well-intentioned murderous terrorist in her office actually possessed an absolute disregard for every civilized American multicultural norm.

Consider that his death squad contained no designated affirmative-action officer and had never undergone proper sexual-harassment training. Not only was there no proof that efforts were continually being undertaken to properly recruit, train, and promote female terrorists, but this lack of female empowerment was very likely due to the creation of a hostile working environment, as implied by Mr. Atta's belief that immodest females should be stoned to death. Furthermore, there was no evidence that the guns, knifes, and box-cutters that constituted the daily working tools of Mr. Atta and his colleagues had been properly modified for use by the differently-abled. We need only guess at what his official policy was for providing health benefits to the committed partners of gay or transsexual terrorists.

Furthermore, Mr. Atta was downright rude in his behavior, straining even those generous limits of multicultural understanding that our government officials are encouraged to display toward the different cultural customs of our international visitors.

For example, once it began to seem his terrorism loan might not be immediately approved, the increasingly annoyed Mr. Atta suggested to Miss. Bryant he might simply decide to cut her throat instead and steal the millions in cash she surely kept in the safe behind her desk. Fortunately, she reacted according to the best multicultural principles, coolly pointing out that her safe held no actual cash and that anyway as a fully-liberated modern feminist she would vigorously resist any attempt to verbally-disempower or brutally murder.

Given Mr. Atta's rude behavior, Miss. Bryant was far less than sympathetic to his efforts to make amends by expressing strong interest in America's greatest national monuments in Washington DC, and suggesting that their destruction would garner much favorable worldwide media coverage.

Similarly, her lack of a sufficiently broad multicultural education left her sadly ignorant of important world political and religious leaders. Thus, when Mr. Atta repeatedly expressed his fervent devotion to his great leader, Osama bin Laden, whose previous attacks against American targets had already left many hundreds dead, she could merely nod her head blankly, rather than intelligently discuss his merits as opposed to those of other great Third World multiculturalist heroes such as Mummar Ghadafi and the late, lamented Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran.

Finally, the crest-fallen Mr. Atta gave up, presumably deciding that if America were ever going to be destroyed, he'd need to raise the necessary funding from other sources, perhaps even from his own notoriously stingy terrorist superiors. We might guess that he left the government office muttering darkly to himself that federal loan officers probably had an unspoken policy of quietly discriminating against foreign anti-American terrorists, regardless of how well planned their proposed attacks, probably reserving their funds for native-born terrorists instead. Perhaps a detailed investigation will reveal he filed a complaint with the EEOC registering his suspicions on this matter.

Conservative critics of affirmative action policies should note that for historical but certainly less than rational reasons, Arabs and Muslims, regardless of their foreign or even terrorist status, are officially classified by our government agencies as "other whites," being no more members of properly recognized minority groups than are American terrorists tracing their ancestry back to the Mayflower. We might thus suspect that if Mr. Atta had not been an honorary WASP, but had instead been a member of a recognized minority group---or perhaps of the female or indeterminate gender---his terrorism loan would have been approved immediately. Perhaps the Federalist Society should recruit one of its members to sue pro bono on behalf of Mr. Atta's heirs, thereby establishing a strong legal precedent for all future "other white" anti-American terrorists who apply for government loans.

Finally, this incident clearly shows that the diversity training materials for our federal loan officers must be substantially improved and updated. There can be little doubt that the confused Miss. Bryant had never been taught the proper multiculturalist procedure for dealing with an agitated foreign terrorist when he threatened to cut one's throat and steal millions from one's office safe. Presumably, once he stormed out in a huff, she consulted both the table of contents and the index of her 1872-page federal diversity manual, searching vainly under "Throat-Cutting," but finally gave up and decided to take an early lunch instead.

During this great national crisis we face, all of us, even including our shrewdest and most alert federal loan officers, must redouble our efforts to properly understand the thoughts and values of our foreign friends and visitors. Miss. Johnelle Bryant Should stand as a lesson to us all.

Sincerely,

Ron Unz, Chairman English for the Children

===============

"Face to Face With a Terrorist" Government Worker Recalls Mohamed Atta Seeking Funds Before Sept. 11 Brian Ross, ABC News Thursday, June 6, 2002

Four of the hijackers who attacked America on Sept. 11 tried to get government loans to finance their plots, including ringleader Mohamed Atta, who sought $650,000 to modify a crop-duster, a government loan officer told ABCNEWS.

Of course Ron is being unspeakably incorrect here...

 

 

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Tuesday,  June 18, 2002

T

Dear Jerry

In yout Byte column 17th June you said:

One main advantage of Windows XP is that you don't have to reboot after most hardware installations

Just prior to that you said:

The whole operation took about three minutes: Shut the machine down, insert the card, power up,

Am I missing something here? Surely a shut down/power up cycle must include rebooting? Did you mean operations that can be performed as a "hot swap" not forcing a reboot?

--

Regards, etc. Jonathan 

I don't know how to insert a PCI card into a system without powering it down first.

From Eric:

Following the recent changes to Windows Update for Win2K users to give them the same automation features built into XP, Microsoft has announced another XP feature that will migrate backwards to Win2K

http://news.com.com/2100-1033-936822.html

The native wireless support in XP is a big draw for those who care about such things. In the past it seemed the obvious pattern was to push upgrade sales with new features but the addition of new value to Win2k appears to indicate that MS doesn't expect to get as much mileage from that carrot and stick anymore. Plenty of big corporate sites want the wireless features but aren't going to budge from Win2K for a good while, probably not until Longhorn. Thus continued sales of Win2K licenses for wireless laptops must be a significant business.

Eric Pobirs

Then we have the world's goofiest people:

Subject: How dumb can people be?

Very, it would seem.

http://www.petitiononline.com/twotower/

-Andy

My comments on this tend to the ribald.

GoBack

In XP on one occasion I used Go Back successfully. Luck? Thanks for the heads up.

Jerry Miller

No data, but thanks for the data point.

Wheep Wheep Wheep

Hi,

I am flabberghasted! I use IBM Disks for many years now without any problems. But this very model does the same wheep wheep wheep, very sporadically though. I once uninstalled wavelab, Steinberg's great wave editor. Chaos! Wheep, wheep, wheep the whole morning. After this I could not start Win2k anymore. Everything's gone. The second time this happened after having tried a beta version of my ATI Radeon 8500. Wheep, wheep, wheep - hit the row, jack and my Xp was no more no more no more. I checked it and found that the drive was manufactured in Malaysia whereas all my other IBM's came from Hungary. Funny.

Reinhard Czwiertnia

rhc consulting real human creativity web management Hammererstrasse 24 A-2542 Kottingbrunn AUSTRIA / EU

That's the drive.

And Eric on Ghost etc. for copies:

This has always been a stumbling block for imaging. The thing to do is add another piece of hardware and another step to the process. Connect a secondary hard drive and make the image on that. You'll then be free to move the file onto any media desired from within Windows or other OS. The simplest and least expensive way is to use a IDE drive connected to the PC. This has the least required investment but is the most labor intensive since it requires opening up the machine in most cases.

The one type of external drive that is easily supported from DOS is a SCSI drive. After all these years and the advent of USB and FireWire this is still true. DOS level support of USB and FireWire devices isn't unknown but with SCSI it's nearly guaranteed. There are some parallel port drives that run from DOS but their slowness is very impractical considering the ample size of modern OS installations.

Given the cost of new hard drives this is certainly one way, and in fact is what we do: copy to a hard drive. Or several if it's critical.

g

And from Andy

Bayesian spam filter in postscript (.ps) form: < http://research.microsoft.com/~horvitz/junkfilter.htm  >

PDF version at: < http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/sahami98bayesian.html >

And on Nigeria

re: Nigerian Quarantine

It is too late to quarantine Nigeria. I have received similar offers purporting to come from Hong Kong and Gibraltar. (Gibraltar? For some reason my prejudices boggle at the idea of corruption in a tiny British colony, though I guess it's possible). I've received an offer from a cancer patient in Saudi Arabia who wants to give my "church" all her money before MOVING to Nigeria. This is in addition to endless offers from Sierra Leone or the Sudan or other countries that my geographic ineptitude cannot keep track of.

Like a pig or rabbit in Australia, or a dutch elm or Nile virus in America, this scam has escaped Nigeria, and anything you could do to the source would be pointless. It may be time for another argument about memetics.

Greg Goss ( mailto:gossg@mindlink.com ) (permission granted to publish mail address. Everyone ELSE has it...)

Alas.

You mentioned that it’s difficult to change a PCI card with the power on.

 

Did you know that some of the higher end servers have hot swap PCI ports? I have some HP boxes that I can do this on. The first time I did it I was pretty shaky. It works, though. Win2K Advanced Server detects the new hardware, and we’re off and running.

 

Tracy Walters

Wow. No I didn't know that.

 

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Wednesday, June 19, 2002

Turns out hot swapping PCI cards has been done, and not on just systems designed for it. I still wouldn't try inserting a USB 2.0 card into a running machine and I do not advise you to do it. And that may be enough on that subject.

Mr. Pournelle;

I thought you might find this interesting.

A few years ago during a very busy evening I accidentally inserted a PCI sound card into a running Win98 machine which had gone into power saving mode (controlled by BIOS); I was very busy and didn't realize the machine was running. Upon insertion of the card Windows came up on the monitor (startling me pretty badly) and proceeded to plug and play the card, with no apparent damage.

Now I'm not saying that this will work all the time - and in fact in the interest of not blowing up any hardware I have not tried to experiment with this (maybe someday ;-) but it does appear possible. I suspect that the PCI bus was not powered up while the machine was in powersaving mode. Why Windows came up after plugging in the card I have no explanation for.

I'd be interested in hearing whether anyone else has had this experience or knows anything about it. I do have some semiscrap machines around here and may sometime experiment with it myself. What I'd particularly like to know is whether or not one can plug in a IDE HD when the IDE is powered down (ie, hard drives are turned off by powersaving features in bios).

Andy


 

Thanks for all the mail about WCPUID. I am now convinced that it's easily available. I wish I had never mentioned the problems we had getting it. Those were temporary. It is apparently easy to find and download again. Good. Wonderful.

I apologize for reporting otherwise. I abase myself. And I don't intend to say much more on the subject.

From Sue Ferrara:

To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5144-2002Jun18.html

'Ranger' Vs. the Movie Pirates

By Frank Ahrens

Ranger is burrowing through the public parts of your computer, sniffing around, turning over bits of data, trying to find out if you've stolen a movie over the Internet.

Ranger is scouring the globe -- Web sites, chat rooms, newsgroups and peer-to-peer file-sharing sites -- spanning 60 countries, searching in English, Chinese and Korean. Ranger's work is helping to bust illegal movie sites in Iran, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Ranger is 24-7. Ranger is relentless.

Ranger is a piece of software that acts like an Internet search engine. It is the latest, most far-reaching weapon in the movie industry's constant and escalating battle against movie piracy.

Hollywood watched in horror as Napster corroded the music industry -- last year, worldwide revenue from CD sales dropped 7 percent as billions of songs were legally and illegally downloaded from the Internet. The movie studios -- led by their lobbying group, the Motion Picture Association of America -- is determined not to let that happen to them.

"We are trying to stem the tide as best as we can," said Jack Valenti, president of the MPAA. "I worry about the future."

I don't know if Ad-Aware will detect this thing. Surely there is software that will. 

Apparently we are to be delivered into the hands of the RIAA whether we like it or not.

"Hollywood watched in horror as Napster corroded the music industry -- last year, worldwide revenue from CD sales dropped 7 percent as billions of songs were legally and illegally downloaded from the Internet."

I was under the impression that CD sales were steeply up during the active life of of Napster and didn't drop until after Napster was shut down. I have seen this stated several times though I don't have any references handy. Perhaps you do?

Owen Strawn

You know, I don't know. You see various things asserted by the RIAA people; of course my point with that above was to call attention to Ranger, but it's a good question. I had the impression that Napster actually didn't harm sales at all, but I haven't evidence one way or the other. Thanks.

Heh, Evidence that Napster probably helped CD sales more than it hurt:

http://news.com.com/2100-1023-898813.html 

And the RIAA and Record Industry are engaged in price fixing:

http://scriban.com/movabletype/2002_04_12.html#002506 

and are being sued by a number of people.

Pete Flugstad

Fast work. Thanks!

 

 

 

 

 

From Mike Zawistowski:

An addition link for this page http://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosreports/macarthur.html 

All about the space ship model, the AMT Leif Ericson Galactic Cruiser http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~frank/le.html 

Thanks! Why don't they sell things like that any more?

Do you think the current "Trade America" qualifies as a "Trade Empire" like the Romans in the BC era? Jeff Pelton Livermore, CA

This is worth a longer essay than I have time for today. The Romans became obsessed with putting the world right (and enriching their leadership class while doing it).  "To protect the weak and make humble the proud." But also to send Senators out as proconsuls and to set up tax farming operations everywhere.

The average Roman citizen had little benefit from all this, but was expected to contribute his military service; until that became burdensome and they went to all volunteer career soldiers...

JoAnne Dow has some thoughts on UPDATING;

Hm, it just struck me today.

I logged into www.microsoft.com and tried to reach it that way and still got the problem. So I sent a missive to the "contact us" address. And on a whim decided to update "thing," my Sony Viao laptop. It worked right off. So on a further whim I went back to my main machine, Wednesday; and this time Windows Update worked.

Of course you haev to install Windows Update V4, which is a serious downgrade from the prior version. Ah well, Microsoft is somewhat more than crazed these days. So what should one expect?

I suspect the problem is overloaded servers because of new software that hits the servers harder.

{^_^}

My problem with infinite loops MAY be done. I have to check with some other systems. I know that dialup and the satellite behave differently.

And a comment on an observation in view

What women do not understand is that the dirt-seeing gene must appear on two
X chromosomes to function. Therefore, no man ever born can see dirt like a
woman. Women don't believe this, but it is true.

--
Robert Bruce Thompson
thompson@ttgnet.com
http://www.ttgnet.com <http://www.ttgnet.com>


I suspect you have the cause. There is no solution...

Tasmania had a minor earthquake on Sunday, 4.4 on the Richter scale, but sufficiently remote it just rattled our windows and doors a little. She Who Must Be Obeyed disagreed that it was an earth trmor. She thought it was the dog scratching himself. After coming home from work on Monday evening, she reported that *all* the women at work thought the same thing: "it's just the dog scratching himself".

Vive la difference...

Jonathan Sturm www.sturmsoft.com

The world's most famous "pompous git" according to Google!

Hmm. 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/
europe/newsid_2053000/2053549.stm
 

"Peroxide fuel has been a staple of the Russian Navy in the post Soviet-era because it is so cheap, but other countries have abandoned its use because it is thought too unstable."

I guess sailors are worth less than fuel to the Russian Navy.

Good riddance for Communism, "because it is so cheap".

Francis Gingras

I have never been fond of peroxide for storable energy sources. It tends to decompose when you don't want it to...

 

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Thursday, June 20, 2002

On the issue of women and dirt, Joe Zeff adds:

From your Wednesday mail:

What women do not understand is that the dirt-seeing gene must appear on two X chromosomes to function. Therefore, no man ever born can see dirt like a woman. Women don't believe this, but it is true.

-- Robert Bruce Thompson thompson@ttgnet.com http://www.ttgnet.com <http://www.ttgnet.com>

I suspect you have the cause. There is no solution...

I take it neither Mr. Thompson nor you ever went through Basic Training as an enlisted man; Company Commanders can see dirt no woman would ever find. Back when I was in Uncle Sam's Navy, we'd put a pair of socks over a push-broom for a final sweep to get that last, little bit of dust off the floor because the inspector would find it if we didn't.

Of course you know I went through Basic although at the time the Army was more concerned with getting people into the pipeline than cleaning the barracks. Still we got our share of white glove inspections. My suspicion is that drill sergeants get some kind of implant.

Another anti-spam suggestion. I have a lot of these and I need to look into them. When? I am so busy deleting spam that...

Here is an interesting Anti-spam service (currently free)

http://www.theregus.com/content/6/25317.html 

Kind of a Anti-spam democracy. Enough people select something as Spam and weighted by their past accuracy, it determines if the e-mail is listed as Spam.

Charles Butler

Thanks

And another

This sounds workable... I'd give it a shot for free :)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/25811.html

Jason Jones

There seem to be many suggestions for this one.

Dr. Pournelle

Thanks very much for your web site. It is full of wonderful technology and political museings and I enjoy it greatly.

Knowing you problems with spam and smap filtering when I saw the following story on the Register I thought it might be another great help to you.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/25811.html 

It is about www.cloudmark.com  and it looks useful enough that I am downloading it to test out now. I hope this is useful to you.

Miles

==

Well, it says it will stop 75% of spam, since you receive a ton, thought you might want to look into it. http://www.cloudmark.com/

Douglas Moak

 

With luck I'll get to it.

And then:

Jerry,

Perhaps using this as the home page of your site would keep out the riff raft

Rick

http://www.riversoft.com/newsroom/disclaimer.shtml 

I am not trying to filter out the riff-raff ( I seem to recall once knowing the origin of that term, but I have forgotten); but that is the darndest disclaimer I have ever seen! Thanks!

And a new twist:

Jerry

Re: http://www.petitiononline.com/twotower/ 

Take a look at Kevin Klerck's e-mail address! I think this was a fishing trip which netted a rather large no. of fish (3485 and rising).

Having looked at some of the signature comments I'm not sure who are the more gullible, those who signed to complain about the idiocy or those who signed because they agreed with the petition.

Still it brightened my day somewhat.

Keep dancing and doing the things so we don't have to.

All the best

Ian Crowe.

Shark bite...

From Sue Ferrara:

 

To view the entire article, go to
 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/
articles/A14093-2002Jun19.html
 

Mexican Workers Pay for Success

By Mary Jordan

TIJUANA, Mexico -- Cesiah Ruiz Brena came to Tijuana in 1989, deliriously happy to get a job at a new Japanese factory. Her work space was grand, the lights were bright and the pay was unimaginably good: $100 a week to start.

But after 13 years during which her wages rose to $200 a week, Ruiz Brena lost her job on June 1. Her Canon inkjet printer factory shut down. She and her co-workers shared a cake, snapped photos of one another and said goodbye. The factory, they were told, was moving to Thailand and Vietnam, where wages are as low as $15 a week -- less than what she earns in a day.

All along the Mexican border with the United States, once-busy factories are closing. Since the end of 2000, tearful farewell parties have been held for 250,000 factory workers in Mexico. Some of the same jobs that left North Carolina textile plants and Ohio auto-parts assembly lines for Mexico in the 1980s are now moving to Asia. The reason is the same: cheaper labor.

The loss of jobs here in part reflects the slowdown in the U.S. economy. But many of the plant closings are just the globalized economy at work. Factories came to take advantage of low wages; now that success has driven wages up, they are moving on. Mexico is left with a bittersweet legacy: higher wages, but fewer jobs.

More than 500 foreign-owned assembly-line factories in Mexico, called maquiladoras, have closed in the past two years, in part because wages have doubled in the past 10 years and are no longer considered low in the world economy. An entry-level factory worker in Tijuana earns $1.50 to $2 an hour, compared with 25 cents an hour in parts of China.

<snip> That giant sucking sound?

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

On NHK World Daily News (Japan) tonight it was reported that the Japanese Space Agency will contract out maintenance and support for their ISS module. They will also allow the company to run the module as a profit-making enterprise.

Seems everyone but NASA sees the value of private enterprise...

Regards,

Gordon Runkle -- "Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing." -- Theodore Roosevelt

Indeed

And on FANS and Fandom, a phenomenon some of you know well and some of you won't believe...

In science fiction fandom there's an expression for those who don't "get it" -- they're called Mundanes. S.f. fans hold themselves out as special: Fans are Slans, as the old rallying cry goes. It's a defense against the put-downs so many fans received from the '30s through at least the late '60s ("You reading that crazy Buck Rogers stuff? That pulp trash?"), until Apollo 11 put a sock in most of that.

However, it's still fashionable in the mainstream culture to make fun of s.f. fans by holding them as all the same as their worst examples, as in the famous William Shatner "Get a Life!" sketch on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE or the film documentary TREKKIES.

I hadn't thought about it in some time, until Nila and I today rediscovered just how far out of mainstream culture we are.

Jack Buck, long-time play-by-play commentator for the St. Louis Cardinals, died about 24 hours ago as I write this. He was by all accounts a great guy, genial, generous, gentle, and decent, and he fought gallantly against the diseases which ultimately took his life. I'm not much of a sports fan, but my dad listened to Cardinals games on KMOX as we went on the long recreational drives he took us on the Sunday afternoons of my childhood, and I've always had a couple of friends who were baseball fans, so Buck's voice has always been in the background of my life. I'm genuinely sorry for his death, and have great sympathy for his family.

But for me, that's the extent of it.

Others see it differently.

He died just short of eleven o'clock last night. The local TV stations ran it as a special bulletin, interrupting late night programming. By one a.m. ball fans were showing up downtown at Busch Stadium to lay flowers at the bust of him outside of it which he had received to honor his career. (I dunno, maybe the existence of that should have given me a clue to the public reaction.) This continued all into today, and is still going on as I write. People are crying in public. KMOX's talk show 'phone lines have been devoted to nothing else. The local TV newscasters are wearing black suits.

Missouri Governor Carnahan's death in an airplane crash during his U. S. Senate election campaign didn't get as much air time.

Tomorrow there will be a public viewing of his casket. It will he held in the *stadium*, partly because it was where he worked, partly because there's a game later in the day anyway, and partly because no other venue can handle the number of people who are expected, perhaps double the attendance at a home game when the Cardinals are in first place, which they are.

That means that perhaps as many as 90,000 people will file past. Yes, ninety thousand.

What really brought it home to me is that the flags are at half-staff at City Hall and the county courthouse -- you'd think a sitting president had died. This entire metropolitan area is mourning.

And Nila and I don't see it that way. We're that far outside the mainstream that we're just not reacting as everybody else. No disrespect to Mr. Buck, but he didn't affect our lives in the way he has seemingly everybody else's around here.

It was for Gene Roddenberry that I couldn't go to class the day he died. It was for Robert Heinlein that I cried. It was for DeForrest Kelley that I mourned.

I guess to mundane, mainstream society, I just don't "get it".

------------------------------------- David K. M. Klaus 

"In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." -- Thomas Jefferson -------------------------------------

I don't know where I fit in this world. I write science fiction. I go to increasingly fewer SF conventions as my old friends die off. My first knowledge of Jack Buck was after he was dead, and I am astonished to find that the United States is somehow involved in a soccer tournament in either Japan or Korea, and my local newspaper features the (divorced, not typical soccer mom) mother of one of the US players on the front page with continuation inside with pictures. She seems a decent sort with her priorities in order, but I never heard of her or her son.

I do read newspapers, which I gather is not typical of either fans or most of my neighbors.

Ah well.

 

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Friday, June 21, 2002

Happy Summer Solstice

Start with CrossEyes, a Reveal Codes program for Word.

From Monty:

Subj: There *IS* justice in the jungle!

Suspect Escapes Jail, Is Eaten by Crocodile Fri Jun 21,10:32 AM ET

PANAMA CITY (Reuters) - A 28-year-old Panamanian accused of killing a judge was eaten by a crocodile as he swam across a river after escaping from prison, police said on Thursday.

http://www.reuters.com/news_
article.jhtml?type=humannews&StoryID=1118710
 

Rod Montgomery == monty@sprintmail.com

Hoo Hah!

And on a familiar subject:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?
table=old&section=current&issue=2002-06-22&id=1977
 

"Prepare for the big chill A new ice age is due now, says Andrew Kenny, but you won't hear it from the Greens, who like to play on Western guilt about consumerism to make us believe in global warming."

He manages to wedge just about everything about why global warming might not be (isn't!) real in there.

ash

"I feel like a fugitive from th' law of averages." ***************************************************************** Riven against a Black Sun twosixone ...that which we are, we are. ootdontspatteredwemandanabundanceofthreatsandsecretlawsuitsgiveme myRepublicbackyoulyingthievingbastardssuemenowbabyalltheyllreally dointheendisturnthecountryintoonebigconcentrationcampgetoffmywave

Me I don't know if it's heat or ice; I do know we ought to be doing more to FIND OUT before we try to prevent it.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/article
php3?table=old&section=current&issue=2002-06-22&id=1977
 

The English magazine, "The Spectator" has published succinct article about the current fears of global warming. It covers a lot of ground . One paragraph demolishes arguments against nuclear power. There is a two sentence explanation of how scientists estimate prehistoric temperatures with isotope measurements. It talks about failures of climate modeling and describes the temperature fluctuations known to have taken place in the past five millenia. A few quotes:

"When the global warmers tell us that the stakes are very high, they are quite right. Global warming has become an immense international gravy train worth billions of dollars."

"For the last two million years, but not before, the Northern Hemisphere has gone through a regular cycle of ice ages: 90,000 years with ice; 10,000 years without. The last ice age ended 10,000 years ago. . . . the ultimate irony might be that the increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are warding off the ice age."

Peter Miles

Indeed. And we don't know what's happening. It might be nice to find out. Instead of releasing with fanfare yet another inadequate GIGO computer model.

 

And in the tradition of cocktail party theories, this one for seminarians:

Jerry -

I was reading something about the fall of man in the garden of Eden, and it made me think of toxoplasma - what if the apple was filled with a protozoan that "unlocked" man from what we were, to what we became, which is why Adam and Eve were the first humans.

Just a thought before my morning coffee, and I know that I must get to Beowulf's Children before the end of this summer.

Ryan Greene

thanks

More than you want to know about riff-raff:

From:

http://www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-rif1.htm 

To trace this one, we have to start in medieval French. There was then a set expression rifle et rafle. These words are from the verbs rifler, to spoil or strip, and raffler, to carry off. The phrase referred to the plundering of the bodies of the dead on the battlefield and the carrying off of the booty.

The French phrase moved into English in the forms rif and raf or riffe and raf, which meant at first every scrap, from which we may guess that medieval plunderers were extremely thorough. It's known by at least 1338 (it appears in Mannyng's Chronicle of English of that date). Later it shifted sense through a series of stages, first referring to one and all, or everybody, and then later taking on the idea of the common people, those of no special social standing. The phrase was abbreviated to riff-raff and can be found in Gregory's Chronicle of London of about 1470. It seems to have taken some decades longer for it to have gone even further downhill and for it to be associated in particular with the dregs of society. It's likely that the negative associations of common soldiers ransacking the bodies of the dead coloured the expression even after it had shifted its meaning.

We're familiar with descendants of both of the original old French words in English, by the way. Riffler is the origin of our riffle in the card-shuffling sense, amongst others, and of rifle, for searching hurriedly through possessions for something, or to steal. It also gave rise to the firearms sense, since a rifle takes its name from the spiral grooves cut in the barrel of such a gun to improve its accuracy; this comes from a different sense of the French word, meaning to graze or scratch. And raffler lent its name to a game played with three dice, perhaps because the winner snatched up or carried off the winnings (we're not quite sure of the connection). In English the game was called raffle, and the word was only much later applied to another form of gambling, a lottery.

And in the early nineteenth century raffish appeared. This adjective originally referred to somebody who was disreputable or vulgar. Only later did it acquire the undertones it now has of a person who is attractively unconventional. This may have come from the second half of riff-raff, or from raff, which had survived by itself in dialect usage in much the same sense of the lowest class of the population.

Jonathan Sturm www.sturmsoft.com

The world's most famous "pompous git" according to Google!

--- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). 

and

Riff-Raff Reference

To look up almost anything imaginable in English vernacular, I recommend World Wide Words. http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-rif1.htm 

Greg Goss (public address mailto:gossg@gossg.org )


Mac people won't want to miss this:

Aaron Adams provides followup information to his Mac commercial here:

http://homepage.mac.com/adamsa/ 

Bob

----

And several from Roland:

Yet another prediction coming true:

http://www.cnet.com/techtrends/
0-6014-8-20013825-1.html?tag=ld
 

Shades of Asimov:

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/
06/20/1023864460978.html
 

A brave and honest man:

http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID
=18062002-044316-3353r
 

PBRs.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl
=story&u=/020619/168/1ptnz.html
 

Free software from Hayden Planetarium

http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/hp/
vo/partiview/pv_download.html
 

Embrace and extend:

http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/view/wlg/1602 

This is your chance . . .

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-938272.html 

Roland Dobbins

Thanks!

 

 

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Saturday, June 22, 2002

From Jim Warren:

Note the headline on this AP story.

Then note what all but the final paragraph says.

Then note the ONLY thing that Bush is QUOTED as saying. It's buried in the last paragraph.

--jim

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/
news/a/2002/06/20/national1406EDT0697.DTL
 

Bush disagrees with Southern Baptist leader's remarks on Islam

Thursday, June 20, 2002 

(06-20) 11:06 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) --

President Bush disagrees with statements by a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention that criticized Islam and said many of America's problems can be blamed on religious pluralism, the White House said Thursday.

The Rev. Jerry Vines told thousands of delegates at the convention's annual meeting last week in St. Louis that, despite what pluralists say, "Islam is not just as good as Christianity."

"Islam was founded by Mohammed, a demon-possessed pedophile who had 12 wives -- and his last one was a 9-year-old girl," said Vines, pastor of First Baptist Church of Jacksonville, Fla. "And I will tell you Allah is not Jehovah either. Jehovah's not going to turn you into a terrorist that'll try to bomb people and take the lives of thousands and thousands of people."

The Rev. Jack Graham, the new president of the nation's largest Protestant denomination, has said his colleague's comments are accurate.

"It's something that the president definitely disagrees with," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.

Bush has taken pains to call Islam a religion of mercy and peace and to stress that the U.S.-led battle against on terrorism is not a war against Muslims.

"Islam is a religion of peace, that's what the president believes," Fleischer said.

In remarks to the convention a day after Vines' address last week, Bush praised the Baptists for being "among the earliest champions of religious tolerance."

Jim Warren has little tolerance for politicians of any flavor, but the irony here is more the reporting than anything else. The history of religion is not the strong point of either the President or the media.

Now certainly the Baptists have been solidly behind what used to be called Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and in that sense were strong for "tolerance", but they're always true to that in their fashion": Baptist voters were behind many of the blue laws and other such religious-inspired legislation of the South, including local censorship of books and movies. 

(Incidentally, while I would not myself care to have movie censorship in Los Angeles, I believe that states have the legal right to allow it. When I grew up in Memphis no movie could be shown in the city without the approval of the Benford Commission, which meant old man Benford . The principal effect on me was that to see Jane Russell in The Outlaw we had to find someone with a car to take us across the Harrihan Bridge to West Memphis, Arkansas, pay the $5 fine (all Memphis cars were stopped by Arkansas police and fined $5 on one pretext or another, but they had a system whereby you only got nicked once a day), and go to the movie in West Memphis. I don't think that law ruined any lives. While I am not in favor of having, say, Studio City ban the sales of my books here, I would certainly think they have the RIGHT to do that. The First Amendment applies to Congress specifically, both regarding freedom of speech and establishment of religion and at the time it was enacted 7 of the original 13 states had religions established by law with ministers paid by state taxation. But this is irrelevant here.)

At its foundation Baptist were hardly tolerant. See Cohen's Pursuit of the Millennium for details. The Anabaptists of Munster inspired Martin Luther to exhort the Princes to "burn, slay, kill" because of their intolerance. As to the Muslims being a peaceful religion, the same might be said of world communism: inside the communist empire was the Peace Zone, but everything outside was trucial at best. The Prophet made a "peace" with Mecca but broke it as soon as he had the power to do so successfully. "Islam or the sword" was the inevitable proposition for all conquered peoples other than "the people of the Book", Jews and Christians, who could escape forced conversion by payment of tribute, and a handsome sum it raised, too. The Janissaries were tribute children, Christian boys taken to Istanbul to be forcibly converted and raised to be slaves of the state and shock troops (and administrators) of the Ottoman Empire. The term "peaceful" applies to Islam only when force isn't possible. And note that there continues bitter war to the knife between factions of Islam to this day. (Please do not answer that Christians had their era of persecutions; I'm well aware of the history of both the Crusades and the Inquisition, and why Luther broke from the Catholic Church, and why Calvinists and Lutherans had their own war to the knife in places where the Roman Church was weak. My point is that Islam is not a religion of peace: witness that every single Jew was expelled from every part of the West Bank and Gaza territories following the 1948 Israeli War of Establishment.)

The President is in a dilemma. The Framers thought this a "Christian" nation and often said so. Most of them were nominally members of a formally Christian church, although personally many of the Signers of both Declaration and Constitution were Deists in belief, and one can make the case that a couple of them were atheists. Most, though, were solidly Christian. Religious tolerance in the US meant no established religion at the national level, and also at the national level no religious test for public office as was employed (at least in theory) in England where you had to take Communion in the Anglican manner to hold a commission or be a minister of government. In practice there were ways to tolerate Roman Catholics like Burke, but the religious tests were still on the statue book. English religious persecution was fairly mild by 1776, but even so the absence of a religious test or established religion was built into the Constitution.

It did not, however, contemplate large numbers of non-Christians in the United States. This leaves us with problems today after our importation of Bosnians and many other non-Christians, in part because the non-Christians often take religion far more seriously than the vast majority of US citizens who remain nominally religious but hardly dominated by it.

The US until very recently was still a Judao-Christian nation, and I can't recall many important public ceremonies in Memphis that were not opened by a Protestant Invocation, closed by a Catholic Benediction, and graced with the presence and some kind of blessing from a rabbi. Memphis wasn't that atypical of the nation, although the Baptists in Memphis were as anti-Catholic as elsewhere, and I don't suppose there was less anti-Semitism in Memphis than in the rest of the country. (I grew up in a Unitarian family but attended Catholic schools my first 3 years and in High School. My father had a Jewish partner in a couple of businesses. So I learned 'tolerance' at a fairly early age.) My point here was made by Irving Kristol years ago: think of the US as a tolerant Christian nation and it works quite well.

Muslim tolerance in Muslim lands is a different proposition: try to send evangelists to any Muslim nation, or for that matter grow up Bahai in Iran. 

President Bush is, I suspect, doing the best he can under fairly trying circumstances. The people of the US have much the same problem. We haven't had many large militant anti-tolerant religious presences in the US since Mormonism (the intolerance was against them in that case), and we don't really know how to deal with them. I guess we will have to learn how.

As to The Prophet, I have no evidence of his possession by demons. I am told his last wife was 11 years old, not 9 as stated.

Jerry Pournelle quoted Jerry Vines as saying: "Islam was founded by Mohammed, a demon-possessed pedophile who had 12 wives -- and his last one was a 9-year-old girl,"

Back in the 19th Century, the age of consent was much younger than today. In the late 19th Century, most places in America it was age 10 or 12. In Delaware it was age 7. According to this story anyway:

http://womhist.binghamton.edu/aoc/intro.htm 

Clearly what we perceive as pedophilia today was not considered so in the past. By way of comparison, Britain raised the age of consent from 12 to 16 c. 1830 IIRC.

Jonathan Sturm www.sturmsoft.com

The world's most famous "pompous git" according to Google! 

Well, yes, of course.  A boy came of age in Rome in the Republic at 14 and was thereafter subject to conscription as well as voting. It varied with girls. In general puberty was thought of as the marriageable age, and in fact there were marriages arranged at much earlier ages although consummation was delayed until at least after menses and often later than that depending on the perceived maturity of the girl.  I thought I covered that when I pointed out the Prophet's final wife was 11? Since his own Koran states that marriage is not legal until menses but is after that, one presumes this was an athletic and well fed young lady who commenced early; or at least that consummation of the marriage awaited that event.

I can charge Mohammed with many things, but I am not one who makes him a pedophile. 

 

And a new subject:

Jerry,

Isn't it interesting that our governement decides what vaccines we may get? Not what they recommend, not what they pay for, but what we may have. Also, they talk about a one in a million reaction. Has enyone see a statistic for us old farts that had a vaccination in our youth? Is they any risk for us at all?

John Monahan

Indeed. Now you will understand that one strategy is to get everyone else to be vaccinated while you don't: that way the disease is damped out and you don't have any shot reactions. Is that fair? 

Which is to say, you can make a pretty good case for compulsory vaccination even in a libertarian-oriented state. What you can't make a case for is most of the prescription system we have in the use, and the prohibition of "unusual" treatments including vaccination. I would argue for rigidly and brutally enforced TRUTH IN ADVERTISING and in labeling, including warnings like "FDA physicians think you would have to be out of your mind to take this stuff" and "The FDA believes that this is expensive ditch water that can't possibly do you any good," and "The Surgeon General has determined that this stuff will probably kill you."  Beyond that, let the citizens be responsible, and let the buyer beware....


Jerry,

much is made of the 'industry' that benefits from the support of the global warming theory. However, this theory works both ways. For example, on opening up the Spectator article, what do I find blinking at me but an ad for the Shell oil company.

I have a friend who is working on global warming modelling. He takes his science very seriously. When I ask him if global warming is happening, he says yes. If I ask him will it cause a global disaster, he doesn't believe it will. We have a conservative government in power, and it please them incredibly for him to tell them that global warming is a nonsense. His job depends on his being paid by them.

What he does tell them is what he believes the science is saying nothing more, nothing less. The suggestions by many people do that such a person is merely pandering to those who will pay him the most is an incredible slur on the integrity and professionalism of a dedicated scientist.

Steve

Let me see: you are saying that because some scientist types really believe there is global warming, we should not point out that there is little evidence and there is a lot of grant money in acting as if you believe it whether you do or not? 

I fear I do not know the point of your letter.

 

 

 

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Sunday, June 23, 2002

 

Dear Dr. Pournelle, A few weeks ago I discovered that kmail, the mail client that comes with KDE can import Outlook Express folders, storing the mail in the 'standard' text format. Now I have email going back 4 years. Since much of it is consists of replies back and forth between myself and others, I'm considering hacking together a mysql or postgresql database for the mail which would have a field for tracking that. This would require a mail client that could work with a database backend. It would allow spam filtering via SQL. But it's a beautiful summer, and if I'm not spending the weekend swimming and hanging out at Ocean City, I'm spending it at the Potomac River, or in the mountains. Maybe this winter when it's cold and nasty out.

There's a move afoot to add "Taxation Without Representation" to the DC flag (it's already on the license plates) to make people aware that, while residents of DC pay full Federal taxes, they have no Federal Representation. The proposed solutions are to make DC a State or exempt residents from taxes. Neither is likely to get through Congress. DC votes overwhelmingly Democratic, so the Republicans will do whatever they have to to prevent statehood. They won't allow the latter proposal either, as then they might have to deal with irate constituents who would want to know why they pay taxes, and DC residents don't.

Friday last week I did my weekly backup, and went to the beach. Monday I turned the PC on and heard grinding noises as the 10 Gb hard drive started spinning up. That was the drive with linux on it. So I installed linux (RedHat 7.3) on the other drive, which used to have windows on it, and restored the backed up data. It recognized my ATI Radeon card automatically, likewise the monitor, and configured X properly. All of it hands-off. It also auto-configured my cable modem connection. It was all plug and play. Very nice.

I then bought a new hard drive on which to install Windows. 40Gb for $80. 2$/GB. Wow. Do I need to install Windows? Especially since the version I have is Windows 98? Which tells you how much I use Windows at home. I can't think of anything I use a PC for at home where I need Windows. Video? DVD burning? If I did video, (I have the hardware, but don't do much with it.) or had a DVD burner (wait six months for the format wars to wind down). Maybe XP, but then I have the registration hassles. Well, I'll just install the drive, and if I do need Windows for something, I'll install it then.

Editorial in the Post today, sort of a taking-the-measure of where we are piece. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29821-2002Jun22.html , "the war has evolved much as the Bush administration predicted it would" and "this shadow war is being fought well, and successfully."

The Padilla case shows the problems with this war. A citizen may be held indefinitely without charge, or judicial review? If it can happen to him, who can it not happen to? But. Wars are fought between States, and this war isn't being fought against a State. I like the "letters of marque and reprisal" you mentioned last fall, as well as treating terrorists as pirates. But can you imagine the outraged howls if we actually did that? Glad I'm not the President. Also glad that the guy I voted for lost.

Kit Case Reston, Va

Thanks for the Linux experience data. Real Soon Now here; if I were younger and and less enthralled to so many other things to do I'd be doing that myself. It won't be long.

Regarding DC, the Constitution makes it clear that it's not SUPPOSED to have representation, and the people there didn't have to be there. Indeed, if I were in charge, I would make DC like the old Panama Canal Zone: you can't live there unless you have a reason to. You can't just up and move there. I would certainly restrict the District to people who own property and have jobs, and I would cut off all welfare services not employer related. Don't live in the District unless you have a good reason to, and you knew the place had no representation when you moved there.  The Framers had seen what happened to Capital City politics in other countries and were determined to see it didn't happen here. And up to WW II or so that worked just fine.

I'll be interested in seeing how the data base turns out.

Regarding Padilla, I'll have a lot more to say another time. Much of this idiocy results from the courts sticking their noses in and giving non-citizens both legal and illegal the same rights as citizens. That causes many problems.

One question: did Padilla in effect swear allegiance to a foreign prince or power? What is Al Queda? Throne, Dominion, Principality, Power, Nation? If one joins it has one forsworn the United States?  How would Padilla plead to that, anyway? This is a small time thug who talked big; he wouldn't be able to assemble the ingredients for a bomb, and it's not likely he could make one if he had them. But he is a citizen, and that creates problems: he at least deserved his day in court to determine if he IS a citizen, which is to say, has he effectively foresworn his citizenship? Those are questions I do not hear our Masters asking.

 

 

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