On 8 Jun 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.unix.admin, in article
<slrng4oa17.2d93.read_the_sig@mantell0.local>, jpd wrote:

[Managed to get a whole week of vacation. Wow!]

Believe it. When I am hiring, I've got to justify the position to my
management - telling them exactly why I need this additional person.
They do not go with "hiring because the person may be useful down the
road". Generally, I've got to show a specific need for at least a year
to make a permanent hire. Even if I just need a temp, I've got to
justify the position as opposed to using existing people on overtime
(or loaners from another department) which I have to justify as well.

A "generic" resume/CV is less than desirable, because the chances of
you hitting the right buzzwords is less. The best deal is to have
WHAT APPEARS TO BE a resume/CV that matches as much as possible exactly
what they've advertised for. Maybe "more" than meeting the requirements
can be a disadvantage some times (they want 5 years, you have 7 - either
you are more expensive than they want, or something else is "wrong"). An
example from several years ago, we advertised for a junior engineer, and
one of the responders was a MS with 9 years experience. Why isn't he
being hired into a level suited to his education/experience? Why is he
trying for a position this "low" in the barking order? What's wrong?

Maximum power, ease up on the nose - positive rate of climb - gear up -
GET OUT OF HERE - this is not where you want to land!

That one smells bad. Yes, it's possible they might have something
opening up "soon" that they can't talk about yet, and want to have
viable candidates on hand, but I'd like to see some indications before
I'd agree to get within 10 KM.

[temp agencies]

It has two positives - it gets money into _your_ pockets, while at the
same time makes you visible (and able to see better).

========================
And it's a design criteria, I've got a textbook on airport construction
from 1953, which shows a wind rose for Idlewild (original name for JFK
in New York. It's showing "calm" (less than 1.8 m/s) less than 4 percent
of the time, and 6.7 m/s or faster, 28.9 percent of the time.

Most of the masts I've seen are such that the airship is level, and
the gondola is relatively low - a few meters. The key is to be able
to keep the tail off the ground. If you increase the height beyond
this, you get into control problems trying to keep the airship
entrance within a few centimeters - less than 20 - of the "platform
where the passengers are. And that platform can't be moving about
chasing the airship - or you'd be out of passengers right now.

As the British R100 and R101 were designed? The mooring mast at
Cardington was over 150 feet tall. There was an interior passage to
a scoop-like hatch just below the tip of the nose. There was an urban
legend that the Empire State Building in New York City was to be used
for this, with the airship mooring at the 102nd floor. I vaguely
recall some limited testing elsewhere rejecting the concept due to
erratic winds, and the fact that _everything_ (pax, baggage, fuel,
stores, etc.) had to use essentially the same access.

At least for the Goodyear blimp (I've never seen the others in a
ground handling situation), the attach point is the tip of the nose.
This takes a fairly healthy vehicle - possibly ten tons or more.

No - they have their own problems of mass/momentum.

At least one that I'm aware of is using 'ducted' propellers (which can
be swiveled to act as a vectored thrust), but all the rest use ordinary
props, exactly like older aircraft..

The mast also has to be strong enough to handle the sail area that the
airship equates to. Depending on the length of the "arm" from the
airship to the "unyielding ground", you may want to run over those
stress and fatigue calculations a couple more times. ;-)

Hiding.

Old guy

On Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:14:54 -0500,
Moe Trin <ibuprofin@painkiller.example.tld> wrote:
Good for you. :-)


Of course. Then again, depending on the situation and cluefulness
of management you can, or should be able to, get a certain leeway
``future-proofing the profile''. This might also depend on the
restrictions on firing people.


My former boss at $lastjob, titled VP of somethingorother, was kept
_well beyond_ his best-before date, think half a year, as a ``simple
programmer'' (his words, but at the same inflated salary of course),
``against future need'' (said the CEO). Which was remarkable as he'd
antagonised so many people that people were directly refusing to work
with him. That wasn't a hiring situation, of course, but, well....


Valid questions, but not necessairily reasons to become suspicious
before you hear an answer. Besides, so many outfits tout their amazing
commitment to personal growth and whatnot that nitpicking too much there
visibly belies potential employers intentions.


They'll get the polite notice they're shitlisted as soon as I get around
to sending it, as indeed the silence was deafening.

Apropos the same, dropped another re-inquiry on another recruiter, but
haven't seen any response yet. Given that he previously needed two weeks
to answer at all I'll give him a bit of leeway. I've sent emails to so
many recruiters that I can keep up this game for a while yet.


True enough. Now for a local agency that doesn't specialise in pipe-fitters.


Ships of the sea-going kind have had to deal with that for ages.
Moderate movement, when well-managed, is not a problem.

Fix the arm to the airship and have it move with it, and figure
something out to make the transition at the central turning point. A
circular lift cage would do nicely, provided it can correct its own
orientation when descending back down (if necessairy).


A quick google search didn't turn up much. I think erratic winds can be
sufficiently accounted for in the desing, and if not I'd be interested
to know why. The access problem is interesting, but if you can make one
connection, you can make it big enough to allow two adjacent walkways,
add a few hoses, that sort of thing. We've made a few improvements in
the necessairy technology in the meantime.

Also, greyhound busses aren't revictualised at every stop. Aircraft are.
Airships very well might not need to either.


I did a google search for the previous post and all mobile attachment
pictures found for goodyear blimbs showed attachment not strictly at the
tip. An old photo showed a beefed up delivery van, a newer photo had a
bus for an attachment vehicle. It wouldn't surprise me if that was to
prevent pulling the vehicle over, vertically.


Though compared to aeroplanes, the relative area of choppy bits to rest
of the vehicle is quite small, to say nothing of comparing to helicopers.
The latter tend to have a rather big rotor on top and a not so large one
at the end, but which can easily swing around and chop random bystanders
in an accident -- much more easily than a prop-plane.

According to the wikipedia article the drag will negate many advantages
at higher speeds (stated at >80mph or so). Presumably ducting the
propellers is easier on an airship, and I'm not sure it doesn't have
*other* drag problems before the drag-from-ducting becomes noticeable.

Airshops being quite large, large propellers shouldn't be too much of
a problem. On that note, internal propellers in a rigid section of the
airship might be an option. i don't what sort of problems the necessairy
airflow engineering will pose.


True enough, but that still is but one mast on an otherwise empty field.
No need for runways, keeping them free of snow, preventing aquaplaning,
and all that.


--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .
This message was originally posted on Usenet in plain text.
Any other representation, additions, or changes do not have my
consent and may be a violation of international copyright law.

On 18 Jun 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.unix.admin, in article
<slrng5i5b8.12gg.read_the_sig@mantell0.local>, jpd wrote:

Recall, I'm at an R&D facility, and we're looked at as a non-profit
making entity. They watch our costs fairly closely, and we're not
allowed to be fat and lazy. Generally, the restrictions on firing
(as opposed to "laying off") are dictated by the lawyers who want to
avoid having to defend the company in court (wrongful termination)
for any reason. Thus, someone has to screw up and have it documented
before we can fire them. 'Layoff' on the other hand is a different
set of rules. It _usually_ is better if the employee can be
transferred to another job within the company (there is a state tax -
really a insurance premium paid to the state based on the number of
employees who after being laid off apply for unemployment
compensation), never mind that good employees are valuable.

That's fairly well known - and is _sometimes_ an acceptable action.
In my first job after military service, I was building electro-
mechanical instruments, and had bought my first new car based on the
decent pay I was getting. Less than a year later, sales were down, and
business was slow - such that I was only working 35 hours a week. The
department I was in "loaned" me to another department where I was
drawing blueprints for special order machine screws. I was able to
continue to make those car payments. That loan only lasted about 10
weeks, before sales picked up, and I was recalled. On the other
hand, I've seen the "retained at full salary doing day-labor that any
new-hire could do at half the pay-rate" situation, and the company is
in dire straits because of high expenses / low (quality|quantity) work.

["over-qualified" employees]

As I say, it raises a warning flag.

I think you're missing my point. I imagine most companies would like
to hire a 'Gold' employee at 'Bronze' prices, but if the candidate is
willing to accept the lower position, "what is wrong"? Either the
economic picture as a whole is worse than we're aware of, or this
person really isn't a piece of 'Gold'. Before we hire, we'd like to
know which. (Even ignoring any job finder's fees, it costs a medium
pile of coin to hire anyone. Filling out all the forms, due diligence
checks, and the like are an expense - I've seen estimates as high as
two person/weeks which is to say between $14000 and $2000. True, very
little of that comes out of "my" budget, but it's still an expense.

About ten years ago, we had a modest expansion of this facility, and I
was watching the newspapers, several Usenet job groups, and the mail
to some scam-trap accounts set up at a couple of local ISPs. Most of
the head-hunters and job-shops in the area were aware of our expansion,
and were drag netting for warm (or at least breathing) bodies in
preparation for us announcing a bunch of job openings. We wound up
blacklisting nearly half of the pimps because of their "creative"
techniques.

[temp agencies]

They have GOT to exist there. Have you tried something stupid like
using a search engine? This news server has well over a thousand
newsgroups with the string 'job' in the title...

[compton ~]$ grep job .newsrc | grep nl | column
llnl.jobs.administrative! llnl.jobs.scientists+engineers!
llnl.jobs.ee.admin! llnl.jobs.technical!
llnl.jobs.ee.s+e!
[compton ~]$

except these are in Livermore, California (Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory - run by ucb.edu for the Department of Energy. ;-) I'm not
saying those who publish in such a group would be good, but it gives
names to start looking around.

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

Most passenger ships aren't using a single 'anchor' point when
loading/unloading passengers. They're tied up fore and aft against
the dock or slip way, and all the passengers have to worry about is
any residual pitching/rolling. If they're tied up to a mooring buoy
out in the middle of no-where, you're using some kind of launch or
small boat as the transfer mechanism, and it gets tied to the pier
when at land, or to the ship when out there - and is otherwise free
to move about. That would be much more complicated for an airship.

As long as there is no wind turbulence, and the winds are not varying
much in direction, things are not "as" complicated, but they can still
be very interesting.cn - you need only look at sailing vessels.

Watch the weight distribution - shifting ballast and all that. ;-)

I don't think I've ever had anything served on a bus - it's all done
at stops. (Busses here rarely carry more crew than the driver.)

Hard to say, but recall that weight is expensive. For "day trips" (say
anything up to 8-10 hours), you might only feed at "important" stops.

The few times I've seen ground operations of a Goodyear blimp, the
mast vehicle was a ten-wheeler (dual tandems aft) with the mast
folding forward over the cab. The "registered" weight was around 10
tons.

The airplane/copter driver is supposed to be in control of things, and
the times that they loose it, the bird tends to be damaged by hitting
the ground or big nasty objects more than people. People aren't
supposed to be that close when things are turning. It's bad for the
pilots morale when they chop up people.

Huh? Compare the ducted propeller with a large fan-jet, such as the
Pratt JT9D on a 747 or similar.

The main advantage of a ducted prop, whether in an airship or on a
tug-boat is that the whole mess can be rotated much as you would a
rudder (or elevator in the case of an airship). This gives a form of
vectored thrust. Couple this concept to a controllable pitch prop,
and you can have pretty aggressive control if needed.

Your bean counters may not appreciate that inefficiency. But then, it
was common to grow various crops on the perimeter of airfields - mainly
vegetables or grasses for hay - till it finally dawned on people that
such land use attracted vermin, which in turn attracted predator birds,
which in turn damaged engines when ingested.

You probably want it graded (avoid turbulence) and packed strong enough
to support a couple of fire trucks.

Old guy

On Thu, 19 Jun 2008 15:05:36 -0500,
Moe Trin <ibuprofin@painkiller.example.tld> wrote:
This guy was supposed to be fixing that, not doing it himself.


Not an either-or question. The person may not be aware of market prices,
is under unrelated pressure to take _a_ job, wants to enter this field,
(eg. IT within finance instead of IT at an IT shop), et cetera.

My point was rather that companies promising prospective employees
the world in terms of becoming gold but turn out to not want someone
who is halfway there -- he has to be at the very beginning and not a
step further -- are acting somewhat hypocritically. Perhaps the person
is willing to accept an immediate pay cut in anticipation of future
increases quicker and larger than attainable elsewhere.


:-)


I did that ages ago, and am monitoring a sack of local and not-so-local
jobs groups. The keywords are somewhat different though. Language
differences and all that. For those local groups, the pickings are
rather thin, so I'm also looking at a number of websites.

As to temp agencies, I'll dig into the local yellow pages as soon as
I've taken care of some more pressing matters.


If we're providing infrastructure anyway, an automatic anchor point
movable in a circle around the tower to which you can attach a rear
anchor line could go a long way. The ship can still move with the wind,
and other movements can be dampened.

Launching a smaller airship from an airship will probably be complicated,
but a larger lighter-than-air docking platform may be an option.

Another option is a hangar, but size is a problem. One could contemplate
putting some sort of sail over a small canyon to keep the wind out.

Airships are big, so thinking big helps, even if the idea turns out to
not be feasible. :-)


Add, say, a couple of water tanks distributed around the vessel, and
a system to monitor weight distribution and pump the water around to
compensate. Connect it to the tower to handle excess or add extra. Some
human input may be desirable but a large part, if not all, could be
automated.


Expensive, but not as expensive as on an aeroplane, since the lifting
costs very little fuel.


At a guess, the difference there lies in using the fan to compress
air for the jet engine. But for a better answer we'll need to ask an
aircraft engine engineer[1].


That is a serious problem for jet engines, but probably less of a
problem for airships. On a dedicated airship field I don't expect
to find many jet engine-equipped craft.


Some fire fighting solution will be necessairy, but it doesn't need to
be nearly as heavy-duty. I expect to the point of being able to make
the vehicles light enough to not be much of a problem even on a soaked
field, even without making them tracked.

A reasonably flat field is useful but not much work. Once flattened
it'll mostly stay flattenet, and any potholes don't require much more
than a bucket of sand and a couple minutes with the packing tool.

Alternatively, a concrete slab is easily poured as it has very little
structural requirements compared to a runway.


[1] The latter term probably derives more from siege engines than jet or
combustion engines. Though siege engines combusted often enough.

--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .
This message was originally posted on Usenet in plain text.
Any other representation, additions, or changes do not have my
consent and may be a violation of international copyright law.

On 21 Jun 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.unix.admin, in article
<slrng5pa7c.1d29.read_the_sig@mantell0.local>, jpd wrote:

["over-qualified" employees]

Certainly the latter would be valid, but I'm not sure the former would
be. The person should be aware of how much they were being paid, and
have some feel where that figure relates in respect to others doing
similar work. The words are "salary survey".

I'd agree, but don't see how this relates to the above?

We see this with some regularity, but in a slightly different context.
The "cost of living" is different in different areas. Both my wife and
I took a hit when we moved here (Phoenix) from the San Francisco area.
Simple numbers - housing costs were about half what they were in the
Bay Area. Food and motor fuel prices were about 10 percent less.

What I was actually aiming at was the names of the agencies. Yes, the
job news groups are quite slim pickings now, mainly because of abuse by
those offering jobs. What used to be an important jobs newsgroup here
has declined from ~670 valid posts (out of ~1100) a year five years ago
(that's the oldest data on the logs I have handy, but it was a LOT
busier ten years ago) to... would you believe just 4 out of 80 so far
this year? Even the most dense of the pimp-houses know they ruined
that means of attracting candidates.

If you have access to any employers, ask them for names of agencies
they are/have-been using.

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

I suspect this would require some mechanical considerations in the
structural design of the airship.

Look for "Frahm's Anti-Rolling Tanks" that were installed on the
HAPAG line vessels of the 'Imperator' class of Atlantic liners in the
1912-1914 period. No, they didn't work either. Problem is shifting
a LOT of water quickly, as we're talking about a cubic meter per ton.
The tanks, the pipes, and especially the pumps are going to be heavy.

Around 4.5 to 5 units of air goes around the engine (at an over-pressure
of 1.65 to 1.80:1) for every unit that goes into the core to run the
engine.

I've no idea what current vehicles are like, but the Air Farce Crash
Rescue trucks I'm familiar with carried 1000 US Gallons (just under
3.8 cubic meters) of water - with two pretty healthy engines (one to
run the vehicle, one to run the pumps) on a six wheel chassis. Even
with big tires (1.3 meters dia, 0.25 meters wide) they still had
a heck of a lot of foot-print pressure.

Modern aircraft, with high foot-print pressures and tricycle (note)
landing gear are what demanded paved runways. Prior to that, a well
tended grass was all that was needed. Lots of problems getting the
drainage right for long life, but there were a lot of them built
and the knowledge is there.

Old guy

On Sat, 21 Jun 2008 21:32:20 -0500,
Moe Trin <ibuprofin@painkiller.example.tld> wrote:
Well, I wasn't aware of local market rates, as I'd basically hopped in
as an interesting chance and a favour to an IRC-acquintance with similar
interests. Finding out the hard way I had been too trusting and was
getting royally shafted was part of the reason I burned out and why I
now will not work with any of the people responsible again.

You're right that one really should know something of the market, but
OTOH and especially where it is Not Done[tm] to talk about salaries,
it can be tricky to get right.

Still and all, yes, you're right that ``they should''. Doesn't seem much
of a reason to shove'em aside for, though. It's not the knowing how much
they'll be worth to you that you hire'em for.


It's the other side of expecting prospective employees to fit neatly
in the mold of the advert.


So they all moved to (ad-supported) websites. Fully justified even, now
that usenet is being villified as a fount of ch1ld pr0n. (Thanks so much
for starting another wichhunt, silly nooyawk attorney general.)


It isn't much different from the ropes the goodyear blimps sport, really.


Google gives me just two hits on that (with quotes), and a cursory
glance at the google books result[1] seems to indicate that such an
approach could work reasonably well.

Though even without that I'd counter with noting that an airship is a
lot lighter and that one needs to transport much, much less water to
achieve a comparable result than one would in an ocean liner. Though
the airship you mentioned upthread features expanding and compressing
additional helium, which is the much more obvious approach. Of course.


But as noted, those are for crash results of fast moving heavy objects
full of fuel and choppy bits and, if dealing with passenger craft,
confining the passengers to a sardine can type hull. I think that the
crash results of slow-moving large objects filled mostly with inert
gasses could be dealt with through less heavy means.

A city fire truck probably only carries one cubic metre of water and
less heavy-duty engines. Wouldn't be surprised if that would be enough
for an airship field. The vehicle at EHHO was even less fancy.


[1] _Liquid sloshing dynamics: Theory and Applications_ by Raouf A. Ibrahim

--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .
This message was originally posted on Usenet in plain text.
Any other representation, additions, or changes do not have my
consent and may be a violation of international copyright law.

On 22 Jun 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.unix.admin, in article
<slrng5ss7n.1hmj.read_the_sig@mantell0.local>, jpd wrote:

That sucks

You might have to jump through some hoops, but there are ways to gain
some understanding of the local market. One means would be to use the
SAGE surveys, and then put a fudge factor for the difference in the
local costs of living.

[usenet jobs groups]
Yeah, I have seen some of that, but it seems to be less common and
has the problem of candidates _finding_ some of the sites. This results
in a poorer selection for everyone.

He wasn't the only one with the ax, but the reality seems to be that
the ISPs in question (Verizon, TimeWarner/Road-Runner, and Sprint)
ignored multiple warnings that they had crap on their servers. Some
have gone so far as to suggest that this was intentional, with the
intent to eliminate this costly service that isn't all that popular.
Face it, the use of Usenet has declined over the years. I used to try
to track about 12 newsgroup, and see upwards of 1000 posts per day to
those groups alone. Now, I'm subscribed to 80 groups and the article
count (before/after killfile) for the week was 3203 - 851 = 2352, and
that's a little higher than normal because I've got 27 alt.* groups
and a significant number of posts in those groups are whines about
'what are we gonna do now'? To me, it looks like a windfall for
news providers outside of the .us (including several in .cn who
probably appreciate the wry humor of the issue).

But if you need the humor, I hear that the French government is pushing
to cut off ISP customers caught the third time downloading pirate
music and/or video for a year. See
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/...cle4165519.ece
if you haven't heard of this little jewel.

========================
["Frahm's Anti-Rolling Tanks"]

It didn't. The much later 'Denny Brown Stabilizers' were far more
successful, but only work at speed (basically side fins controlled by a
gyro which exert a righting moment when the ship rolls - think of
ailerons on an airplane).

[Air Farce Crash Rescue trucks]

So you're planning on heavy-oil engines? While a gas turbine (which
weigh 1/4 to 1/7th as much as a Diesel for comparable power) will burn
such oil, they're normally running on a highly refined and volatile
kerosene that burns quite well thank-you. That Goodyear blimp is using
~25 gallons/hour of regular NATO Type F-18 100 octane aviation gasoline.

The fire trucks at my two local airports (which do not have airline
service and are not rated by 14 CFR 139 "CERTIFICATION AND OPERATIONS:
LAND AIRPORTS SERVING CERTAIN AIR CARRIERS") have a minimum of ~2 meters
of water and there are at least three such trucks at the airport fire
station. I suspect (at least here in the US) that airship fields would
still fall under Part 139. Interestingly, Part 139 separates classes
of aircraft by length, not weight or passenger capacity.

Old guy

On Sun, 22 Jun 2008 19:10:55 -0500,
Moe Trin <ibuprofin@painkiller.example.tld> wrote:
Yeah, I (now) roughly know what I want, and I also know how much is
overasking to the point of making them go pale. Sometimes worth it,
though. >:-)


On the other hand, negotiating, saying ``in principle yes'', then going
entirely silent I thought quite bad form. But, well, negotiating is
something the ``civilised'' parts of the world do very badly. I never
could until I recently found a little book about it, and tried my
hand at talking to the local arab in his shop full of indeterminate
electronics. Interesting indeed.


That, and those sites also getting spammed with excessive amounts of
the same, and poor searching abilities[1], makes clear that the web
is a better everything. Not.

I don't suppose our comments here triggered the recent influx of dimwits
dumping jobs right here instead of the place people would look if they
were looking for a job, did we?


Not entirely without justification, as admitting you can filter could
easily mean you've just obligated yourself _to_ filter. Whoops.

People are stupid like that. Not saying these four were shining examples
of responsibility. Though nuking all of alt.* instead of the binary
groups (that are surprisingly well confined given the nature of alt.*)
is also nicely indiscriminate.


Partly thanks to the binary shitstorm. Another part is that beyond the
file-hungry masses only the quality customers appreciate this. Those are
much less easily fleeced and milked.


``Web forums'' is what the great unwashed sees and wants. I miss the
flexibility of choosing my own client and editor and so on, to the point
of refusing to bother with those piles of wonky security incidents
waiting to happen. Clearly, less choice is more power to the people.

There is a pointed comment about education in this but I'm foregoing
making it in favour of going to bed instead, seeing the upcoming
happenings tomorrow.


They're not the only ones (something about the Japanese trying something
similar). I think it has all the signs of a rear-guard battle for the
copyright conglomerates. It so shows the bankrupcy of a nice idea.


Going to take your word for it and perhaps find time somewhere in the
future to look at it more. :-)


Not particularly. I don't know if it's much of a factor, seeing your
comment on length below.


That probably either needs specific rules for airship operations or its
own rules in a different part, but we speculated on that uptread for
other reasons already.


I would like to know why that is.

I would've expected (landing) speed, maybe fuel carrying capacity,
things like that. But maybe those are implicit assumptions.


[1] Recently found one that did allow boolean search of sorts. There, NOT
is a binary operator. Really.

--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .
This message was originally posted on Usenet in plain text.
Any other representation, additions, or changes do not have my
consent and may be a violation of international copyright law.

On 23 Jun 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.unix.admin, in article
<slrng604cf.1m8t.read_the_sig@mantell0.local>, jpd wrote:

I'm not sure that experience exactly matches, but it's a start ;-)

I'm getting to the point where I think that websites are there to show
who you should avoid. There is the spam, there are advertisements and
fairly obvious fake offers (when your site is advertising for a temp
job and the starting date is over a year ago... WTF?) or has ludicrous
requirements (trust me - no one has two years experience in Vista right
now) - yet the clueless seem to think people will be knocking down the
doors trying to apply for the "job".

Filtering means two things - not carrying the obvious naughty groups
is a start - recall they are not Big-Eight, and such groups are
carried at the whim of the news administrator. But another defense
that has been used in the past (when the ISP isn't hosting the server
with the forbidden material) is that they are "common carriers". This
means they are carrying packages, and are not responsible for what is
inside those packages. They may set their own limits (you can't ship
high explosives in the mail or similar)...

Yeah, an most of the screaming I'm hearing is in non-binary groups
within that hierarchy.

My main objection is that the forums I've encountered have been nearly
useless - several were more interested in presentation/style, than in
the information itself.

Whadda mean you have to think??? Why???

There was the stink over Sony spyware some time ago, and of course there
is the on-going DRM rights thing at microsoft and region coding of DVDs..

Both copyrights and patents have gotten ridiculous. Part of this is
because no one wants to fund knowledgeable people to examine the
claims - resulting in a legal nightmare that stifles inventiveness
and original thought.

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

Part 139 applies to airfields (and heliports) serving aircraft (which
is defined as "a device that is used or intended to be used for flight
in the air" which basically covers everything) having a seating capacity
of more than 30 passengers. It's meant to be all-encompassing. What it
doesn't cover is water airfields.

Some years ago, I asked about this at the FAA Regional Office. The
answer is dumb - length because the fire-fighting capability is based
on a water hose (or equal) being able to throw water a certain distance
and you need more trucks to cover the physically larger aircraft.

I would have thought so too, but their job is to protect/rescue the
victims (the "90 second rule" 14CFR25.803 require all passengers/crew
be able to exit an aircraft using half the exits in 90 seconds - when
they did the test on the A380, they got 853 pax + 18 cabin crew + 2
guys in front out in 78 seconds with only one broken leg and 32 mostly
minor injuries). The requirements of 14CFR139.319(i)(2) are that the
_first_ rescue vehicle reach the furthest part of the airfield in 3
minutes, and the "rest" of the required rescue vehicles be there in 4
minutes.

Old guy

In article <slrng60raj.fe5.ibuprofin@compton.phx.az.us>,
ibuprofin@painkiller.example.tld (Moe Trin) writes:
<snip>
'Minds me of my days in college, when the joke around graduation was
that the recruiters were all looking for a 21 year old PhD with 12
years experience.

Sorta the same thing as "book time" for car repairs. "The book" says
the job requires 6.5 hours, so that's what's charged, even though
the job completed in, say 2.5 hours. Go figure.


<snip>

--
Robert G. Melson | Rio Grande MicroSolutions | El Paso, Texas
-----
Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable
reason so few engage in it. -- Henry Ford

On Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:43:25 -0500,
Moe Trin <ibuprofin@painkiller.example.tld> wrote:
Much like the recruiters who do claim to get CVs from here (presumably
from lurkers?).

I've been wishing for not just boolean search, but detailed agency
filtering. Somehow most search engines are really limited WRT negative
search (``look for these keywords but drop anything from this list of
nitwits''). Google does it, ebay does it, but most of the copycats
can't. monster, which seems to be one of the better sorted jobs sites,
certainly doesn't and its country selection options recently got more
convoluted and less useful. People, how hard can it be?

Bloody hard, that's how. But it can always be worse. Eures[1] is
completely stuck to its bureaucratic job classification modelling
wossname and has no keyword search at all.


Excercising that whim demonstrates to the uninformed that it exists,
thus that cencorship isn't merely possible, but _easy_. Which invites
demand for the second type of filtering.


A somewhat harder argument with USENET (the servers do carry locally
cached copies of the material, after all), but one I'd still accept
on general principles. That is, I find the service useful enough that
I'd like holier-than-thou cencorship to stay well away from it.


Agree. This also touches on a pet annoyance of mine; there seem to be
plenty of webmonkeys, executives, and other lesser-educateable-people
that think an input box in a browser is a perfectly acceptable substitute
for a specialized text editor, customized to taste. Same with browser
windows and reader software. Even the smart people at google do it.

And then there's the flock that copy random mailinglists and usenet
groups into their otherwise content-free forum and forget to explain
where their material comes from. Searching for my signature regularly
brings up new examples of that fuckwittery. That, of course, is exaclty
what sprang the three last lines of said signature into existence.


<monty python's gumby men> ``My bwain huwts!'' </>


Too much money in the whole circus to just abandon it, even with a very
clearly dysfunctional patent office and wanton copyright lawyering abuse.


Brings up an interesting question though. What should patents and
copyrights look like to make them functional again?


No wonder that previously mentioned airship was spec'ed at 28 passengers.

Brings up another question, though. What is magic about the number 30?


Put a big large fixed-but-movable water nozzle right on top of the
mooring tower. Seems fairly obviosu to me. Wouldn't eliminate the need
for fire trucks, but could easily reduce that need a notch or two.


It's probably a reasonable rule for tin can aeroplanes. But does it
still make sense for a relatively small gondola stuck on a large bag of
inert gas, nevermind the engines and fuel that can be kept well out of
the way?


[1] European union cross-border employment initiative website. I found
it useless. I explained this to them (well, their helldesk droid)
in detail and they didn't get it. Oh well.

--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .
This message was originally posted on Usenet in plain text.
Any other representation, additions, or changes do not have my
consent and may be a violation of international copyright law.

On 26 Jun 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.unix.admin, in article
<slrng67q6u.20ut.read_the_sig@mantell0.local>, jpd wrote:

I can't say that I've seen that much.

I think I'd get to the point of "show me stuff posted by" (a list of the
least incompetent - there can't be that many who are posting).

Haven't looked at them in a while, but I thought they had a "reasonable"
location capability.

As you say

Does 'wget' work?

Some one in the Usenet newsgroups 'news.groups' cross-posted to
'news.groups.proposals' mentions that the A/G's office identified 88
newsgroups (all in the alt.binaries hierarchy - and the server I'm using
carries 6703 ^alt.binar* groups) that had carried images his office
(not, as I understand it, any court) deemed to be child porn. The
several ISPs who included news service took advantage of that by
dropping tens of thousands of newsgroups (the server I'm using carries
35967 ^alt.* groups), which they'd long wanted to get rid of because
they were only an expense, not a profit center. I suspect their dropping
of _all_ of Usenet can't be far behind. I've been suggesting customers
of the clueless ISPs to drop them as soon as they can get replacements.
Obviously, these ISPs don't want the business, and their customers
should take the hint.

[common carrier defense]

True, and in this case, I'm somewhat siding with the A/G as (apparently)
the ISPs did receive warnings and/or complaints about the specific
groups. I'm tending to come down more against the clueless ISPs. I
almost wonder if the ISPs weren't the ones who anonymously complained
to the A/G about the "filth" on Usenet in the first place.

Part of this this boils back to the knowledge that everything on this
Interweb-thingy is a web page and the only application a luser has to
"learn" is a web browser. (Ran into this recently at an ISP when I
was reporting a news server gone tits-up. Klown on the hell-desk asks
me what the URL of the server was. HUH???) Several European ISPs
have come to the conclusion that you don't need to provide an 'abuse@'
address - all you need is some web page they can fill in. But then,
any information entered automagically goes to the the abuse handler
named Dave Null, so it probably doesn't matter. But the point is
that everything is a web page, so they expect web authoring tools
are all that exist.

A week ago, we got a WTF message from the NOC at some Spanish ISP
wondering why his customers can't access our domain. We tried to
reply, explaining that their domain is blocked for gross stupidity
and abuse - and the reply bounced because their NOC and postmaster
accounts return "no such user". And they wonder why we only accept
mail from/to role accounts now. From what I hear, corporate was going
to respond by snail-mail giving a brief answer that the Spaniards are
not bothering to follow basic Internet concepts, and until they get
their mail system and role accounts working, they and their customers
are going to have a problem communicating.

I assume the web pages you're accessing have finally learned the
different style of postal codes and telephone numbers - or do they
totally depend on your email address?

This has been a problem for at least ten years. That's why my
followup string states where I'm replying to. Back in the late 1990s,
someone had a run-in with one of the web based forums and explicitly
prohibited copying/saving/displaying his Usenet posts. My memory is
that he tried to take them to court - I _think_ both were in the UK,
but can't recall the result. But you see this often enough - there is
an Aussie web forum (heck, there are hundreds of them, not restricted
to those in Oz) that was recently trying to include gatewaying posts
to/from Usenet. They're in my killfile, but in the rare event of my
replying to someone who is replying to such a "post" I include some
pointed remarks about fake web forums and Usenet.

I also love the posts from forum creators (invariably using google
as the posting medium) breathlessly announcing this new forum and
inviting newbies and experts to subscribe so you can talk about this
or that problem (while being inundated with crap ads that have
nothing to do with computers or what-ever the subject of the forum
might be).

A long time ago, someone suggested closing the patent office because
everything had already been invented. Unfortunately, many of the patents
I see are strange. An example is US patent 5662408 which is for a plug
in "night light".

The night light has a case with a front side and a rear side. The front
side of the case has a portion defining a window. The lamp is secured
between the sides and covering the window. The lamp has conductors for
connecting to an electrical supply which are in electrical contact with
a first and second blade, the blades extending from the rear exterior
face of the case for engaging an electrical outlet. The blades are held
in a slot through the rear side of the case and by a portion of the
blades which engages the interior face of the front side of the case.

Wow - it's got a front and rear side - what an extraordinary idea. (It's
a snap-together housing holding an electroluminescent panel about 3 x 3.5
centimeters with two non-polarized contacts out the back allowing direct
insertion into a common electrical outlet.) I know electroluminescent
panels have been around for decades - as have molded light assemblies,
where the contacts are molded directly into the light, and designs where
the leads of the "lamp" mechanically touch the electrical contacts that
supply power. Why some klown was able to get this patented is beyond
me. While searching for this patent to get the description above, I find
that there is now another patent (6170958) that builds on this idea by
having the electroluminescent panel _curved_ (which should give better
light distribution). What this patent actually _claims_ is a mechanical
design that reduces the amount of plastic needed in the housing.

It _appears_ now that patents are granted as long as you fill out the
form, and the "examiner" is not immediately aware of any conflict. The
patent remains in force as long as some other person doesn't file a
complaint of patent violation or otherwise cite prior art. The crap
that is being patented now doesn't seem to be making significant
improvements. But patents are a business and yet no one wants to fund
well trained examiners (Einstein was a patent examiner in .ch) and
no one has come up with a "tool" that would recognize information on
a patent application (in various languages - character sets) to allow
easy searching of the existing patents. It's still going to take a human
to look at the "new" application and any "older" patents the tool may
find in various archives, but it could help eliminate a lot of useless
patents. If I had my choice, I'd also revoke "look and feel" patents.

========================
[14CFR139 - "more than 30 passengers"]

Part 139 is only part of the woodshed - there is a whole bunch of rules
in 14CFR121 which relates to "Certification and Operation, Domestic,
Flag, and Supplemental Air Carriers and Commercial Operators of Large
Aircraft". That also has an escape clause for 30 passengers or less and
a maximum payload of 7500 pounds - switching you to 14CFR135 ("Air Taxi
Operators and Commercial Operators") which applies if you are engaged in
air commerce (carrying goods/passengers for hire) but with no _minimum_
size limit.

Other than economics - I don't know. I was going to say something about
required crew size (Part 121 requires a flight attendant for each 50
passenger seats [meaning 1 for 0-50, 2 for 51-100, and so on), but
14CFR135 sets the minimum as requiring one for 19 passenger seats,

[14CFR139 classes based on aircraft length]

Assuming they only crash at the mast, and not anywhere else on the
airfield ;-)

["90 second rule" 14CFR25.803]

I'd suspect this would still apply even with a helium lifting gas
because the fuel can't be that far away, and the fabric cover is still
likely to be flammable. As flammable? No, but given passengers who may
panic on seeing fire, it's probably a due diligence type of thing.

It's an interesting thought for an airship - as the passengers begin to
exit with a lot of hustle, it becomes more buoyant and wants to rise...

Old guy

On Fri, 27 Jun 2008 20:41:56 -0500,
Moe Trin <ibuprofin@painkiller.example.tld> wrote:
I recall one or two gloating about it. The rest is plain write-only.


[search on recruiter-infested job ads sites]
It'd preclude seeing new entrants to the market, so I'd prefer to filter
out those who've proven themselves to be clueless. Yet I've not found any
that provide either.


They changed it to an arbitrary maximum of 20 locations and providing a
metric arseload of silly small locations. Also replacing the ctrl-clickable
drop-down box to a drop-down box full of tickboxes. Yay for the webmonkey.


(I think they do have keyword search, but only on subject, not on body.)


Wasn't about to filch their entire database then filter it. Not good
for getting in new ads, for one. So I have to admit I didn't try.


A minor point. All you have to do is get hysterics involved (``think of
the children'', ``terrorists'', ``commies'') and <flamebait> American
Citizens and American Politicians will poop on American Constitutional
Rights in trembling fear. It's apparently the American Thing To Do.
</flamebait> Not that Europe is much better, if any. The style in which
it happens is somewhat different, though.


I was under impression that 90% of the volume was in alt.binar*?

Who pushed for the entirety of alt.* then?


It's the natural next step.


*cough* aol *cough*


It's an argument that summarily dismisses the common carrier defense. You
can't insist on being a common carrier while excepting (list of groups).


Seems like an awfully convoluted way to go about stopping some service.
If true, it'd mean extreme stupidity on their part, but also that
usenet wasn't quite dead yet, as you'd only do that to tell masses of
complainers ``sorry, out of our hands now''.

I'm more likely to suspect dysfunctional abuse desks and management.


[web forums considered useless]
Lkely on the assumption that the least skillset meeting-or-exceeding the
absolute bare minimum is cheapest. Which it overall is not; it creates
extra work and is harmful to customer satisfaction. Management might
count on the customer being too stupid to notice where the real problem
is. Or simply not incapable of understanding what they're doing, either.


Not just European.


Which is pretty amazing, as the developers and webmonkeys doing it
are used to fancy graphical user interface integrated development
environments to come up with this stuff. Ergonomics design? Hah.


Har har. Annoying when that happens.

Though verizon dropping all of yurp on the router level was a little
overdone. It caused $lastjob's customer helpdesk lots of grief, that
with getting ever more irate messages from verizon users asking for help
and their replies staying stuck in my outbound queue on timeouts.

I was tempted to 5xx incoming verizon messages with a link to a page
explaining we couldn't reply, but my ``temporary boss'' didn't agree.
In hindsight I should've just done it, foregoing asking. That guy was a
good intention paving the road to hell. Far from the only one, though.


Which is somewhat lucid of management. Probably a better idea than
calling them (though I _would_ expect their NOC contact to speak English).


I very rarely give those out, so I wouldn't know. The last time I tried
to change my phone number at ePay it insisted on a NANP format number
(mine is longer, thanks guys). So I just pass it through a regular
message in the rare events that I use them.

Unrelatedly, ePay's email templates are fscked up something fierce.
Another example of not knowing how to write (form) emails so they don't
look like the usual unreadable jumble from spammers, though maybe with
less spelling and grammar problems.

Told them it could (and should, for various reasons) be done better and
offered to help. Doing so required upwards of 10 clicks in their ``help
system'', and of course I never received an anser.


Asking them why their thing is better than the thing they're using to
tell me about their contraption never gets an answer. Surprise, surprise.


[silly patents]
That much was clear.


Well, with the rather large number of patents, it's going to be a trifle
difficult for a patent examiner to examine them all. I think that's what
made the current situation possible, at least.

So, one could conjure up the idea of encoding the patent in some way
so that it can be automatically indexed if not compared. I don't know
how you'd some up with such a ``soundex for patents'' or whether such a
thing is even possible, but might be worth a research grant or two.


Agreed. That's taking the art bit to patents a bit too literally.
Might be hard to make stick on the ``where do you draw the line?'' front
for the examiner, but since they're not paying enough attention anyway...


Sure. The point was that it's an opportunity to install a heavier duty
fire suppression system than might be possible to bring to bear with
fire trucks (larger capacity, higher positioned, longer reach, quicker
time-to-target) at a point where trouble is likely to concentrate.

This presumes that the airship crashing won't disable the installation.


We've come a long way in making fabric fire retardant. I would hazard a
guess that fire will make passengers panic equal amounts for both. If not
a solved problem, I don't think dealing with it would be much different.

There is of course the stigma of the Hindenburg, but we really ought to
get over that. It's been a while.


Easy to make it leaky at the top, if that's not already the case because
the hull is on fire.


--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .
This message was originally posted on Usenet in plain text.
Any other representation, additions, or changes do not have my
consent and may be a violation of international copyright law.

On 28 Jun 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.unix.admin, in article
<slrng6bu59.299n.read_the_sig@mantell0.local>, jpd wrote:

New entrants - worries me because of their probable lack of skill, but
this may also block morphers.

[monster.com]

But it simplifies things for the low grade of monkey they are using to
manage the web-site. Doug had mentioned, and I don't think you
replied - does dice.com (or net-temps.com, or hotjobs.yahoo.com) cover
your part of town? 'dice.com' at least has a marginally decent
reputation in this country.

They may get bent out of shape if you tried that - but I thought you
could use it to grab a reduced set of the database, such as job titles.

That's true, and I suspect this is one of the important points. On the
other hand, the A/G's office could be considered to be overstepping
their bounds unless the alleged pr0n has already been classed as such
by a court. (Not every/anyone can say "that is pr0n" and have it stick
in court.) However, I don't know to many who would like to challenge
the A/G in court over his definitions.

I don't honestly know. The only server I have "behind the scenes"
access to is the one at work, and it doesn't carry ^alt.binar* so
without wasting time subscribing to a bunch of those groups (and
the server I'm using carries 6737 ^alt.binar* groups) I wouldn't be
able to say. A quick scan of .newsrc shows a significant variation
in group names - suggesting a wide selection of interests, from
computer binaries, photos of lots of things from cars to planets to
naughty-bits to cd/dvd images to games to... you name it. I've no
idea how many might be active, or (given some of the names like
'alt.binaries.hacking.couldn't.hack.their.way.out. of.a.paper.bag')
groups created by bored idiots, or groups a little past their 'Best
By" dates (alt.binaries.warez.atari8bit).

No details, but I suspect the ISPs volunteered.

We'll ignore AOL - but TimeWarner already took this step instead of
following the lead by Sprint and Verizon of merely dropping ^.alt.*.
Certainly the 'for pay' news services like slurp.net, giganews, and
newsguy.com are overjoyed. Another cloud on the horizon is that
California (governor and others) are pushing to get the same
censorship in their jurisdiction.

---
From rec.arts.sf.written, in a thread entitled "What is AOL?"
---
While they are still advertised, I'm not sure how many customers they
have. They've been overtaken by the cable and (to a lesser extent) DSL
providers which come with all the crap that AOL provides, at no extra
cost (but remember people in this category aren't very aware of where
their money is going) and no extra effort (just figure out how to turn
on this computer thingy, and everything is automagic). Really sad.

[common carrier defense]

Not really. Even the common carriers have to follow certain rules
(thou shalt not carry explosive on passenger aircraft/trains/busses).
The rules exist, but it's the common carriers that do the enforcement
(with the law as a backup if a customer wants to disagree).

Well... the result here is the same. They get to ditch a non-profitable
service, and can point at the A/G's office as the bad guy. "Nothing we
can do - the A/G made us do it".

as someone in the monetary suggested out-sourcing .nl hell-desks to
Suriname.

Probability they are correct: 0.98 - thanks to Gatesware lowering the
bar below ground level, while at the same time making everyone aware
that computers cause all mistakes and crash frequently.

"I can't see if it's plugged in - the lights are out because of the storm".

True - I think this is because they can hire web programmers at two
bananas a day who know how to auto-drop all input, whereas creating a
link from the abuse mailbox directly to /dev/null takes a highly skilled
*nix administrator.

But look at all the spam they get from there - saved their customers a
lot of anguish about their love-life.

The solution advocated by some (getting a North American mail relay)
might have worked here, but a slightly better response (if you had
snail-mail addresses of customers) is to send a letter stating that
the customers need to scream at Verizon. Perhaps having a web server
set to provide answers to said customers would also work.

You're assuming that the customers would actually _see_ the 5xx message
and have some understanding of what it means. RFC0821 section 4.5.3
and RFC2821 section 4.5.3.1 both set a reply line to 512 characters
max (including the 3 digit code and CRLF) to 512 bytes. Even though
they allow multi-line responses, Verizon probably only uses the
first line, and probably hides the actual response in a "translated"
section saying the remote mail server is b0rked.

Perhaps a better answer would have been a "Attention Verizon Customers"
section on your web-site explaining that Verizon is blocking .eu, and
proposing alternative solutions like hosting a webmail site on your
server that only allowed customer access, and only allowed mails to or
from the company to those customers (and no mail forwarding).

That assumes you can get through to talk to someone in the NOC, and
don't wind up on hold for 2-3 hours listening to crappy tinned music
interrupted every minute or two by "Your call is very important to us,
so please continue to hold and we'll answer the phone some day".

But then, I still don't even know why they bothered. Virtually all of
our customer interaction is through local sales reps so other than
stock-holders there isn't much reason for individuals to try to
contact us directly.

"It works here!!1!!"

The macaws from Suriname are doing the best they can. It's not their
native language. ;-)

Same monkeys wrote their abuse web page. It works the same way.

Not really - these are drive-by posts, and in most cases the forum
creator is unable to remember the web page where he was able to post,
and who uses Usenet anyway?

[silly patents]

Several problems - how many countries are granting patents? You'd have
to somehow get the various countries onto the "same page" and using
something resembling a common format - good luck there.

It's certainly possible, and may be the only solution. But who is going
to pay for encoding existing patents in every country that grants
patents? Who is going to come up with the encoding scheme? If it's
detailed enough to reduce the number of patents an examiner has to
look at to say 1000 or so, it's going to have to be fairly detailed.
In the early part of the last century, there were a number of
telegraphic/cable codebooks which reduced "standard" words/phrases
(and even entire messages) to a single "codeword". These lists were
created by people who analyzed messages to see what words/phrases
were common. Can you imagine the people who would be needed to go
through the existing megaton of patent documents? There's another
problem - you need to have people who are knowledgeable in various
fields. A machinist isn't going to understand chemical formulas or
electrical schematics, never mind the "illustrations" included in
many patents to explain the concepts. But then, we already lack
these kinds of knowledgeable people in the examiners employed now.

I think a number of companies (the least of which might be Lotus and
Microsoft) have patents on spread-sheet programs. I'd allow some
protection for the engine/code underneath, but spreadsheets have been
around since the Mesopotamian and Greek eras - so that's out. Shape or
location of some button/icon? Gimme a break!

I don't know what they were paying Einstein, but people of his quality
are not very common. Yet the examiner has to be at least _partially_
familiar with the field.

========================
I dunno - the Navy already has pretty fierce fire trucks on carriers,
but there are limits. Today, you aren't slinging water, but a foam
(AFFF = aqueous film forming foam) that has some problem if the
pressure is to high. By the way, the most common fire truck I see is
able to throw this foam about 80 or 90 feet in still air - and in
pretty healthy quantities. The trucks have two 300+ HP engines, one
normally used for the pumps, and one for driving, but either can do
the other's job or both at the same time.

Old guy

On Sat, 28 Jun 2008 23:06:49 -0500,
Moe Trin <ibuprofin@painkiller.example.tld> wrote:
Well, if you only positively filter for a limited list of recruiters
you could see if they have rss feeds or something and forego the
middle man entirely. Provided they're savvy enough to set it up.


I did -- but in <slrng4kn1a.273u.read_the_sig@mantell0.local>.

Those sites seems to be North-American only (or I'm looking at them
entirely the wrong way?) -- since I'm in .eu, that's not going to work.
Even so, thanks. :-)

Monster.com has sites in .eu (monsterboard.nl, monster.{de,ch,be,...})
and altough I regularly have to look where they hid the option now, I
can issue .eu-wide searches. I'm not aware of many others that do that.


Frankly, I'd given up before considering that.


[pr0n is what the A/G says it is]
Which is what allows him to get away with it. We discussed before
differences between .us and .eu legal systems -- here such an action
would be denounced on the sheer effrontery if not the legal details.


Alright. I'm going on comments by passing acquintance news admins, from
a couple of years ago, so it may've changed (likely for the worse) in
the meantime. IIRC 1GB/unit text, 9 or 10GB/unit binaries where unit
may've been `day' or `hour', but I don't recall.


Until some A/G chooses to go after them.


Or that.


But who sets the rules? If by law, then I can see ``common carrier''
stands, but if they themselves, well, *I*'d start to ask questions.


[no need for abuse@]
And everybody knows all of the interweb is a webpage, including the
regular email services.


Sure. Though various spam statistics disagreed that .eu was the largest
spam source. Blocking all of .us on the same principle would've been
unacceptable to them.


Such a thing was in the works but for various reasons didn't proceed
at much of a pace. The na subsidiary contained a bit too many
incomprehensible indians[1] and hotshot leftover ex-executive
salespeople for them to bother communicating with the systems
administration people (ie, me) to make much of anything work.


All that is really needed is a

5xx Please see http://www.company.com/mail/verizon-blocking-us.html

and a web page there with the full story. Perhaps a press release
on the site with the decision and pointing there also.


The webmail idea would've been a bit too much effort for those
circumstances, but it certainly a nice idea.


I would assume that the whois technical contact gets me reasonably
close to that, at least for bigger shops, yes.


Ten minutes of that we move to fax, failing that and if warranted, a
letter, no answer then silent permanent blocking. We're not customers,
we're doing them a favour: telling them their systems are broken and
give them a chance to fix it. No need to go overboard.


Because trying once is the polite thing to do and might just help.
The internet is still in structure a community effort.


May be worth telling the local sales rep what's cooking in their area?
Nothing they need to take action on, but useful information for them
to have available in case the issue pops up.


IMO that's looking for trouble. Let's make that work for one or two
countries first, then later work out how to combine them. There's
languages to consider too.


Patents are a government service. If the system doesn't work and/or
is easily abusable by patent trolls, it becomes a liability to its
citizens. The choice then between abandoning an useless liability and
replacing it with a new system that at least isn't a liability.

So the government will have to foot the bill at least initially, and
maybe have the service pay back for itself in, oh, 20 years or something.
Or jack up the fees and keep the old system until a new one is in place.


Well, didn't we have universities tasked with research? Or have yet
another commercial race like the ones the military are so fond of.


*Someone* will have to go through them *anyway* for the system to have
any semblance of functionality. Same thing as the next argument:


So nothing has changed WRT that requirement. If it proves insurmountable
then that leaves us only ditching all patents, and we won't need to look
for a better system.


Which is acceptable as the trucks are expected to move close enough
anyway, and the AFFF stuff is there to make better use of the limited
water carrying capacity of trucks. Suppose you have an unlimited water
supply, then the equation changes. Is mere water good enough? If so, you
can jack up the pressure and gain more reach. If not, a different AFFF
compound? One that's less foamy and more filmy, perhaps?

Interesting questions, but probably open research. :-)


[1] Not the `native-american' kind. The kind that studied at MIT but
still couldn't write a readable email and spoke heavily accented
american-indian-english that only their peers understood much.

--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .
This message was originally posted on Usenet in plain text.
Any other representation, additions, or changes do not have my
consent and may be a violation of international copyright law.

On 29 Jun 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.unix.admin, in article
<slrng6ev0v.95i.read_the_sig@mantell0.local>, jpd wrote:

Must have missed that.

Pity - they are more reasonable than most of the pimp operated sites.

I've seen positive and negative comments about monster. A number of
alumni organizations seem to use them here.

Only to the extent that individuals probably wouldn't challenge him
without good reason (as being charged by the A/G for some pr0no
violation). There are a few organizations - the American Civil Liberties
Union (ACLU) being most prominent - might challenge the ruling. There
is a significant legal precedence for this, including several Supreme
Court decisions that infuriated Bible Thumpers.

[binary vs. text news volume]

I don't see any reason to doubt this. I know the text group volumes
seem to be decreasing as users loose interest in Usenet. A quick
look at my logs shows I've been scanning the same groups since mid-2004,
and the totals downloaded (2005 = 959 MB, 2006 = 762 MB, 2007 = 671 MB,
2008 to date = 252.5 MB) have been decreasing. A contact at the local
junior college tells me they had to block access to all but the
sanctioned Big Eight groups (using a proxy server, and firewall) because
of abuse, and malware infestations. He stated that most of the malware
was coming out of the binary newsgroups, and that it kept getting worse.
Used to be, they'd allow the students to bring in their homework on
floppies that had to be malware inspected at the door. That's out, and
now they use plain text email - with a 25 kb quota on the mail.

So I switch to servers located elsewhere.

[common carrier defense]

The rules are set by (and if enforcement is needed it comes from) the
various government agencies.

I count where the mail was sent from, and the source varies quite a bit.
The last stats I ran were to the end of last year, and as of then, Asia
(specifically .cn, .hk, .id, .in, .kr, .my, and .tw) was leading the
list. Part of this may have been filtering (a number of ISPs have
finally started blocking outbound-to-tcp/25 except by their own mail
servers), and some may have been reduced exposure because of
non-(dictionary|phonebook) mail names. Four years ago, close to a third
of my spam load came from zombies on residential cable networks like
comcast, rr, or verizon and the rest of the former baby Bells.

Didn't they have a local sys-admin?

I suppose. It would also help if the press release was actually picked
up by the various US news media.

As you're aware, most users think webmail is a perfect solution. It
would run into a problem with organizations who think webmail is not
professional. I'll admit it would take extra effort on your part, but
this would satisfy the customers (especially those stupid enough to
think that electronic mail is anything other than a best effort type of
operation with no guarantees of reliability).

Just had a look at our own registration - yeah, that gets you to a
person, but you're more likely to get his voicemail and I think that
is set to a 90 second maximum message length. Still, he would get the
message.

Fun and games - the fax gets you to a different person, on the other
side of the continent. Well, they do talk to each other ;-)

[silly patents]
Yes, I was thinking that - but if the idea on a patent application
here is close enough to a patent issued to someone else over there,
should you be issuing a patent here? You would if it were the same
individual or entity in both countries, but not if the individual or
entity were different. Of course today, checking overseas is not
likely.

I'm just dreading the idea of the time it's going to take to go through
6 million plus patents here - the older ones probably hand written using
a character set and language style quite different from today. That's
not going to be a quick task.

Such research is normally in a field taught or related to subjects
the university has some expertise in

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

Item in a magazine I read - FAA and Air Farce are experimenting with
fire fighting requirements in "New Large Aircraft" (defined as carrying
more than 450 pax, 125 tons of jet fuel, multiple passenger decks,
composite materials). They've built a mockup of an A380 fuselage
section (in a 30 meter diameter fire pit that can be filled with up to
3 tons of jet fuel), which includes three replaceable panels to allow
firefighting booms with extendable turrets to pierce and penetrate the
upper decks to distribute foam. So the fire truck comes up to the
crash scene, extends this boom (the picture looks as it it's three
folding sections each about 8 meters long mounted atop the front of the
truck), pokes a hole through the side of the bird with the nozzle, and
turns on the foam deluge system. Whoopie!

Not if you've got magnesium alloys present. That's why the trucks also
carry a significant amount of dry chemicals as well. But my (very
limited) fire fighting training says no - petroleum fires and water
is not the way to go.

Out of my expertise - but you only use a stream when you are trying to
blast a hole into things, or push a thing (which might be a pool of
burning fuel) out of the way - normally you want a spray to cover more
area as well as cool or cover things.

Fascinating questions. Just let me watch from well up-wind.

Old guy

On Sun, 29 Jun 2008 22:35:37 -0500,
Moe Trin <ibuprofin@painkiller.example.tld> wrote:
Sure, but it's extra work dealing with someone who's choosing to make
a nuisance of themselves by causing governmental censorship instead of
doing their job --upholding the law, not making it--, and enforces de
facto ``justice for the rich'' as the poor can't afford to challenge
them. In Socialist Europe, that's frowned upon.

Just pointing out the difference, mind.


Probably could've easily left in alt.* without binaries too, but....


s/most of/all of/ as binaries elsewhere are auto-canceled. Well,
most of them anyway, and even more places also very ``not done''.


See, it really pays to write emails to look like emails and not spam. :-)


[verizon dropping euro-'spam' at the router level]
Which is roughly the timeframe I was talking about.


If they had they'd neglected to tell me about it. They were pretty good
at things like sending mails of the ``hey, could you give dave a mail
account?'' type, without bothering to explain whotf this dave guy was.

Back then I knew everybody in the company (at least by face and login),
so introducing new overseas hires this way was a little bit grating.
Nevermind that for some of those I later learned that there shouldn't've
been an account at all. The people there apparently didn't communicate
much among themselves either.

Worse was unannounced registering of new domains and moving their
mailboxes to some local outsourced provider, while still expecting to
have entries in my namespace and system.


Most users fail to think about their own ergonomics, and if they did,
they'd lack knowledge of what else is available and feel helpless
because they don't have the means to change it.


I happen to think so, but then I also think most by far people are
incapable to write readable emails, nevermind effective ones. It does
affect my willingness to come up with a helpful answer.

Since such emails often lack vital information I'm much more inclined
to give their homework (``write a good email'') back to them with the
instruction to try again until they get at least the content right.


Had I had the time, setting up such a thing as a courtesy for those
affected by their own provider for the express purpose of communicating
with our customer support (only), sure.


Oh, don't get me started on those. Ended up in a shouting match with
such-flavoured shoe-ins that the CFO had single handedly promised I'd
support them as well. As if I didn't have enough to do already.


That is a good question, but a policy related one. I'm willing to ignore
it if it makes coming up with a replacement patent system (much) easier.

The first difficulty is making sure new patents a) are meaningful or
at least mostly something other than a device of abuse, b) are not
duplicates or fully covered by other patents in this pool, and c) can
easily be checked agains non-patent prior art.


It's much easier than it was. Still, patents are bound by jurisdiction,
so you'd first need cross-juridsiction means (treaties, etc.) to tie
them together. That is quite the can of worms in itself.


No, but with the alternative being to ditch them all or at least all
expired ones... that's another way of giving the lie to the system.


Nice idea, and makes quite a lot of sense. Except for the minor point of
deliberately weakening the fuselage. Has to be strong enough to withstand
passenger and weather abuse and the daily wear and tear, yet still be
weak enough to be easily poked through within seconds.

Also, what if there's a passenger sitting right next to it, waiting for
the rest of the crowd to disperse enough that he can move? Purely going
on numbers, one passenger kebab to save 500+ others would be acceptable.
For the individual, though, it's a different story.


:-)


--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .
This message was originally posted on Usenet in plain text.
Any other representation, additions, or changes do not have my
consent and may be a violation of international copyright law.

[posted last night - disappeared? re-post]

On 30 Jun 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.unix.admin, in article
<slrng6h6q2.cb5.read_the_sig@mantell0.local>, jpd wrote:

I'm not sure why they dropped everything. Their upstream peer is the
local university, and I've noted that most of the posts from there were
using google instead of the university news server.

Actually, they did it to block people mailing in binaries.

It got to the point where I wrote a tool for home use that polled the
ISP mail servers regularly, and on finding there was mail grabbed the
headers and first ten lines of the body. There was a white-list, but
after that it got downright snarky. One reason for dropping mail was
the presence of "Received:" headers reporting the delivery source
having no PTR, a generic name that looked to contain the IP address,
or having the strings (cable|client|dial|dsl|dyn|pool|ppp|user|wiley)
in the PTR name. That eliminated a lot of the zombie crap.

Aware of those situations. "Dave" was given the password originally
used by Frank - but everyone is using that account because there is no
need to have individual accounts (until Enrico fumble-fingers something
and trashes most of the files in that account). Our auditor (part of
the security group) likes to remind people that this type of activity
can get people fired. No one has been fired for this in several years,
but the message gets through.

We avoid some of this problem by requiring advanced written requests
from the department head before creating any accounts. HR gets a copy
of the request, and in the event of a person leaving or being
transferred, we get mail from HR (although the department head is
supposed to tell us this first).

POP and IMAP is blocked at the perimeter, and we get stats of web
connections - that isn't a problem here.

I think this was already mentioned - the company expects all business
mail to go through the company mail servers, and attempting to do any
company business using a non-company mail account is grounds for
dismissal. It's simply not tolerated.

Writing has become a lost art. Part of it is the changing educational
schemes and the dumbing down of the population. On job offers, you will
often see a "requirement" for "excellent communications skills" and I
am sure this is ignored by everyone because such skills are so rare now.

Oh, you mean the idiots who think that "PowerPoint" is an email tool?
(Some time ago, my wife showed me a mail she had received - the whole
damn thing was a powerpoint style - except that it was from a government
entity who was replying to some state transportation ruling question.
What's worse is that the original mail was a URL to a powerpoint file on
some klowns computer, not an attachment or a text copy.)

When the only other solution is snail-mail, this makes sense. Obviously
you'd restrict it - we don't need another open spam relay.

========================
They aren't. That nozzle has the hardware necessary to pierce the skin.
Where it would run into a problem is if it hit a frame, rib, or
stiffener of some kind. With metal aircraft this is no problem, as you
can see the rivet lines even through paint. It's going to be more
difficult with composite materials. That's why they're experimenting.

Think of a big spear.

Given the way people would be trying to leave (or already had left) by
the time the fire truck arrived (remember that bird is supposed to be
empty in 90 seconds, and it's going to take some amount of time to get
the fire truck in place) this is a comparatively small problem.

Old guy.

On Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:46:09 -0500,
Moe Trin <ibuprofin@painkiller.example.tld> wrote:
Didn't see a duplicate in the reconstructed thread, so probably.


That sounds... like the university needs polishing, specifically
internet use 101, teaching thereof.


Don't think we had much of that. People who needed access to other
people's imap folders (or shared imap folders) got that through their
own username/pw instead. Getting such an arrangement wasn't actually
hard, provided they remembered to ask for it (including the reason).


Well, that's something. :-)


We had those, which got extended after I left in an explosion of
drama[1], though the entire informing the right people was lost on, oh,
the execs, the department heads, heck, HR pulled that multiple times.


It's nice if at least some of the people do their jobs.


I had no control over their doings or their network. The local one, yes,
but not the hotshot bag of warm bodies over there. I was merely forced
to let them play through the VPN onto my network too.


Worse, I get the feeling that writing halfway competent emails
embarrasses the receivers more often than not.


I am aware of the more pompous people loving to email each other
powerpoint presentations and then call each other and during the phone
call say ``now go to the next slide''.

Apparently reading is a lost art too.


I was actually thinking of the (mostly plain text) emails containing a
single line with a vague instruction that then requires five or more
further mails to sort at least the meaning of that line, nevermind
coming up with a useful design and starting to implement it.

Sending someone several thousand lines of information at his request,
then getting the entire mail quoted back to me with a single line on top
is an entirely different and possibly more direct insult. Yes, that was
a MIT CS graduate. Why do you ask?


Writing, nay, _Thinking_ clearly is overrated.


Right, that makes sense.


[1] It helps if you take your systems people seriously.

--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .
This message was originally posted on Usenet in plain text.
Any other representation, additions, or changes do not have my
consent and may be a violation of international copyright law.

On 2 Jul 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.unix.admin, in article
<slrng6mgf8.kcc.read_the_sig@mantell0.local>, jpd wrote:

We have some rather draconian rules based on security concepts. A
further example is for the hardware itself - everything is static IPs,
so we require hardware information before the hostname/IP is enabled.
We're even more anal, monitoring the switches to see what system is
connected to what port using what IP. If a stranger pops up on the
wire, it's usually a race between security and network people as to
who will reach the intruder first.

Security may also send word if a person moves, and will definitely
send word if they leave. Paranoia 'R' Us.

The company net has several links to the world, and on each there is
a firewall blocking lots of things. Within the company, there are
additional firewalls blocking other things. Policy prohibits
personal use (we have isolated boxes in employee break areas owned
by the Employee Association for personal use), and this also means
blocking packets to "home" IP address ranges, open proxy sites, pr0n
sites - you get the idea.

I dunno - I think some of them are to incompetent to recognize the
difference in writing style.

I can't imagine how they think that bullet points are communication.

I don't have time for this - just give me the highlights. Yeah, right.

Maybe I'm lucky, but most of the emails I see aren't this bad. They
may be (and often are) missing vital details, but at least you have
an idea of what they are talking about. We've had some presentations
where clues about what needs to be included, and what not were shown
to all employees. Part of this was addressing spam problems (how to
recognize spam in your home mail, and how to deal with it), but some
of the concepts run clear over as far as Usenet postings (choose a
short but concise and descriptive subject). At least we don't get
that many mails the "the internet is broken - when will it be fixed?"

I don't ask - we've got some of those here. We also have some bean
counters from the next school up the street (Hahvad) and they're
at least as bad in spite of being business and English-lit grads.

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

A "letter to the editor" of the magazine that was discussing this issue
reminds people to consider the hazards of the airborne composite fibers
and dust, along with the smoke and noxious gases from burning epoxy
matrix. A recent Australian Transport Safety Board report (AR-2007-02)
that fiber dust can pose an inhalation risk similar to asbestos. Geez,
one thing after another. ;-)

Old guy