Monday, September 13, 1999
I noticed in the last NSD Letters that Roger Klein took exception to something I wrote, disagreeing that a court decision limiting the use fo trademarked terms on Web pages would help help keep the Web useful.
A case in point: I looked up PanAm games, wanting to find how to buy tickets. Found two sites, one of which turned out to be a rant about white exploitation of natives, blah, blah, natter, natter - completely irrelevant. This is non-information, pure noise, and dilutes the value of the Web as an information tool, which is the point I was making. I should find the site when I look for diatribes about native exploitation, but not when I am looking for info on PanAm games. Case rests.
Michael Luke
Just wanted to thank you very much for your quick response to the nonsense in Kansas about not teaching evolution. I am also enjoying the excellent link you provided on evolutionary theory.
John Ransom
I applaud your stand on the Kansas Board of Education issue. Bravo! Bravo!
Alex Grossberg
Go ahead and mock me. I really don't care. I unsubbed because you mocked my beliefs. I feel badly that you can't accept other people's beliefs without mocking them. Does it make you feel better about yourself? Are you trying to get people irritated? Or are you just plain mean?
I would be interested in your reply. I am not sure if you are even reading this and if you are, whether you will reply.
Maybe next time you could do what a reporter should do: present the facts without inserting your own liberal beliefs into the story. But hey, why should you be different? People from the right and left wings have been doing for years. Hmm Maybe you should drop the little quote you have on your newsletters of "More signal, Less noise" As far as I see, you are making your own noise and losing the signal. Tune back in.
Atticus Longwalker
I don't believe there's anything sacred about beliefs. Some are good, some bad, some ugly, and some just plain looney. On the spectrum of possible responses, mocking beliefs is actually a low profile - and surprisingly effective - expression of disagreement. Besides, if any specific beliefs can't stand up to being mocked they're probably not very robust and won't last long in the evolving ecology of ideas.
"Does it make you feel better about yourself?" Yes. "Are you trying to get people irritated?" A bit. "Or are you just plain mean?" Occasionally.
We're not reporters. Never claimed to be. Perhaps our new tag line should be "Signal Is in the Eye of the Beholder"? Kinda' catchy.
Thanks for your opinion, we do appreciate that it was reasonably thoughtful and not a total flame. - AB
In regard to your blatant pro-atheist, anti-Christian article cited below, I wish to express my keen disappointment. In the first place, the site you are promoting is the same one promoted on alt.atheism. I know, because I have debated numerous atheists on that newsgroup. Also, you have ignored the scientific evidence that debukes the hoax known as the Theory of Evolution. I refer you to the book, The Collapse of Evolution, by Scott M. Huse, as but one example.
That a difference of opinion of this controversial subject exists cannot be denied. Simply because the Kansas State Board of Education believes in academic freedom and you do not, that is no reason to brand those who disagree with as "loonies." When may we expect you to evolve a better sense of fairness in your reporting?
OrlandoFlorida
I find your comments are certainly quite biased. In fact, the take I get on the evolution issue is that there is not overwhelming evidence and tons of data supporting evolutionary theory. This theory is pushed down the throats of students and both sides should be presented. I believe there is no evidence that can prove links...... In fact, there are no links or it would no longer be theory. How hard and for how long has science been trying to fine one solitary link? Decades. One would think something would turn up, but all they find are turnips.
You can mock my comments as mercilessly as you want. I'll still read and enjoy most of your commentaries.
Bill Splaine
How about the recent spate of discovery of Mongolian dinosaurs with feathers? - LN
Sorry, haven't seen the Mongolian dino/feather news yet. But I saw a program on PBS last nite where they identified new species of lizards with bone fragments. That's real science. Much of what we look at and consider "real evolution" is done with bone fragments. Objectively, I don't see this as proof of anything except that which a scientist wants to use to make a name for him/herself. Who's blind here? I can see it now, a lizard and a bird die in some cataclysmic catastrophe and all that remains is a feather and a bone fragment... therefore, a lizard with feathers. Sorry to be so trite but, hope you understand my position. I'm quite skeptical about any of this.
Seeing the news on Kansas recently, there is fear that biology is compromised by Creationism. Those who believe that all there is to biology is evolution are narrow minded. Biology is much greater than evolution. Science has chosen to embrace this position and boxed its arguments in too small a package. How many evolution hoaxes have been turned up by those trying so hard to prove a direction that they compromised their scientific standing with a lie? How many of those bone fragments, skull fragments, with no further supporting evidence are really (new) humanoids or feathered lizards or what? Even beyond evolution, the dating of the universe has now been proven to be much younger than was originally believed. Sorry, of the billions of specimens that have been found there really should have been thousands of "missing links" just by some sort of rule of averages.
Bill Splaine
Lots of nifty dino fossils have been found in the last five years. Caudipteryx has a fan of feathers on the tip of its tail like a miniature peacock. Sinosauropteryx has fringes of feathers lining its body and limbs. There are more examples, but these will do for now.
Species can be defined by framents and just because you don't understand how does not mean it's bogus. I'm not a lizard expert, so I can't comment specifically on that group, but mammals, for example, can be defined by single teeth. Mammal species have particularly unique teeth and every species can be told apart with them. That includes species as similar as zebras/donkeys/horses, rats/mice, and dogs/wolves/coyotes.
It depends on the fragments in question. Some can be diagnostic. If you have a piece of lizard skull with a suture pattern that is found in no other species, you can call your discovery a new species, even though you have no idea what the rest of animal may have looked like.
As far as "a lizard with feathers" goes, with few exceptions, all feathered dino fossils are fairly complete - which makes sense, if you think about it. In order to preserve a feather, the fossilization process must be extremely delicate, and such a delicate process would likely preserve the bones of the animal as well. One exception is merely a single feather unassociated with any bones, and assigned to Archaeopteryx. (And, just to clear things up, dinosaurs are not close relatives of lizards.)
I can name many "missing links". Let's look at ceratopian dinosaurs, which I know well:
Generalized hypsilophodonts -> pachycephalosaurs -> primitive ceratopsians like Leptoceratops -> Triceratops.
Not bad for a 100-million-year-old sequence.
Every animal, every link, must be viable in its own right, or it couldn't survive and leave ancestors. Of course, not every lineage can be documented exactly. Some animals are rare and won't be found. Others live in environments that don't promote fossilization (forests, for example). Considering what there is to work with, the process is pretty well documented.
Sure, there are errors. And there's the sole hoax I can think of: Piltdown, but that was more a nasty practical joke than a deliberate lie. The perpetrators didn't publish the material, they just left it for an unsuspecting victim to find. Overall, however, human evolution is so ridden with egos and politics that, yes, I'll agree it's a scientific mess. Still, the arguments are more over what belongs to which species rather than over whether it happened or not.
I think much of the skepticism stems from naivete, but that doesn't mean I either fault you for it or that I can't understand it.
To understand biology, you need to understand the processes that drive it. Right now, the paradigm that best fits the evidence is evolution. In fact, it fits so well, that very few biologists think it is incorrect. Sure, there's some debate over the details, but the basic concept holds for every piece of evidence we find in the ground and in the genes. Even predictive tests have not compromised the fit.
And just to get into talking about the age of the universe, there's 17 billion there, 12 billion here, 15 billion somewhere else. All things considered, I think you can narrow it down to 10-20 billion. And that's pretty good. - LN
I was very disappointed to see your one-sided and extremely sarcastic article on the Kansas State Board of Education decision. Have you really given the evidence on both sides a serious look? Are you aware of how many proofs of evolution have been conclusively refuted? Are you aware of how many evolution hoaxes there have been?
If you truly think of yourself as a scholar and an intelligent person, then you owe it to yourself to thoroughly check out both sides. I think you'll be very surprised. Might I suggest you try out the Creation Research Society or Answers in Genesis.
Tom Hogan
You talked about creationism as an irrational belief, well it would be if the overwhelming evidence actually existed - evolution is a theory, unprovable until someone invents a working time machine to go back and watch whatever happened. To elevate it to proven science is bad science - starting with the desired conclusion and ignoring other data that doesn't fit in with your theory.
You might like to ponder Mount St. Helens. When that erupted relatively recently, the sediments laid down in neat layers in a matter of hours - strangely looked just like the neat layers you find in the "ancient" Grand Canyon. It could be argued that the geology that appears to support evolution's need for millions of years to take place is suspect as well, or at least open to a believable counter theory that it was laid down, not after the millenia required, but after a single relatively short cataclysmic event. Like a flood perhaps?
Thanks for NSD, it's interesting.
Daniel Russell
So, just how much sandstone did Mt. St. Helens put down? Heck, to make it easier on you, how much of that ash is now volcanic tuff? - LN
Being a relatively avid reader of the digest, I trust that you'll enjoy an intelligent response for what it's worth - not as flame-fodder from someone who normally agrees with you.
That being said, I must admit that while the Kansas Legislature's move is somewhat overreaching and reactionary, there is certainly no "overwhelming evidence" that you seem to refer to. I would like to point out to you that much of Darwin's theory has been debunked by newer data and analysis, and I would also like to point out the fact that there is a very strong belief among the scientific community that the original "evolution theory" is as full of holes as a good swiss cheese. In fact, there are a great number of very prominent scientists, researchers, etc. who have openly stated that there is not enough substantiated or factual data to support evolution theory. Many, I'm sure you'll find, are "creationary evolutionists." And I have a hard time calling the domain experts' beliefs "irrational."
As I write this, I realize that I am not providing the citations that would make this a great debate (I'm "debating naked," as debaters say). However, the real reason I'm writing is not to "pick a fight" or spur a flame fest, but simply to point out that you've swung your editorial pendulum a bit too hard in the opposite direction.
Let's just say that I think that presenting every theory, and all the relevant data, is the only way to get kids to think clearly and critically and that's got to be the primary aim of school, not the indoctrination of one theory or another. Can that be called loony? Nope.
At any rate, I generally enjoy NSD, but this article's lack of objectivity was just too much. Not all of us will share your views. Please don't forget that!
Tom Hobbs
By any rational measuring stick, the evidence is indeed overwhelming. Sure, there's still debate, and the exact mechanisms of evolution are still argued, but the end product of the process is accepted as is natural selection.
There's still a hell of a lot of cheese in a holey Swiss. If you go by this definition of "debunked", Isaac Newton's elegant discoveries should also be consigned to the dustbin of history.
We're not calling for indoctrination and anyone who says that mixes politics and science, as has Kansas. Why not teach flat earth theory or alien visitation studies? becuase the evidence is so flimsy, it's not worth taking seriously.
In fact, I'd love to see every evidentially supported theory get taught. And evolutionary theory has reams of studies backing it up. But do keep in mind that the only evidence for Creationism is an old, self-contradictory book. It has no more evidence going for it than the Cat in the Hat does as a primer on feline social behaviour. Go ahead and teach it... in a religious studies context.
Lastly, please do note that the theory of evolution was around long before Darwin. His (and Wallace's) contribution was the theory of natural selection. - LN
"Why do irrational beliefs persist in the face of overwhelming evidence?" Check out Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things at Amazon.com, or his Skeptic Society.
Stephen B Cobb
I have enjoyed receiving NSD, but the monkey running back and forth across the screen is most annoying. I thought once I had scrolled past it the first time I was free of this annoyance. But like a bad penny it came returning as I continued to scroll down the page. Please, I beg you to do away with this monkey which only causes aggravation. I'm sure I speak for many who enjoy NSD for the articles and don't have a desire, or a need to win $20.
Donna Venuchekov
Get rid of that damn monkey or I'll get rid of you.
Geoff Trace
Now, exactly which writer are you referring to?
Seriously, I know that monkey - that little scamp. It's the curse of Flycast banner ads all over the Net. Unfortunately, there's not much we can do about it - Flycast is sort of an advertising co-operative and we display what they parcel out. - LN
Actually, if we really, really wanted to we could block that advertiser - but you know, I'm getting kind of fond of the little bugger. He's almost inspired me to create a "Most Annoying Banner Ads (excluding universally hated pop-up windows)" Web site.
We should do an item about the monkey, and encourage people to e-mail the company and rag on them for the ad. True, it's not good to piss off your advertisers, but sometimes it just feels good to be a thorn in somebody's side. :) - AB
I didn't expect an answer to my sarcastic note. Thanks for a legitimate explanation to someone who had a long day and found the monkey annoying. I'm all better now.
GT
I have been a loyal reader of NSD for about five years. Almost every issue turns up something of interest too me. But I have one complaint. You have one extremely annoying ad: Catch the Monkey*. Frankly, it is so distracting, I am more likely to close the page, or move on to the next piece of mail. Obviously this is not in your best interest.
Besides, it looks like little more than a scam. Other than that, keep up the good work.
Russ Silbiger
You know, I love Netsurfer Digest. I've been subscribed to it forever, it seems. Unfortunately, the last few offerings have been marred by that insipid Catch the Monkey banner on the opening page, which makes me want to puke every time I see it. It also makes me wonder why a circulation staff person would allow such stupidity to detract from a very well done site like NSD.
For now I'm unsubscribing. Shoot the monkey and I might return.
Ray Russ
Hit the escape key to stop the little scamp in his tracks. - AB
I am doing a research paper on Canter and Siegel. I am looking for their first ad that caused controversy. I do not have the title. The only information I have is that it is concerning immigration.
Lisha Romeo
This is an interesting question. Here are some references.
Netsurfer actually produced a special feature about C&S on June 24, 1994: Canter & Siegel: Stop Them Before They Spam Again! This has details about the ad, though not the ad text itself, which can be found here.
Early issues of NSD have several items about C&S. Our very first issue had an item on them: ONLINE ADVERTISING EXCORIATED IN NEWS.* USENET NEWSGROUPS
In NSD 0.16: GREEN CARD LAWYERS CLAIM COPYRIGHT TO NOTORIETY
There's more info on the T-shirts in issue 0.18: GREEN CARD LAWYER T-SHIRTS AND DEVILBUNNIES
And quite a bit of stuff in issue 00.22: CANTER & SIEGEL MISAPPROPRIATE WWW PAGE (BRIEFLY) and HARPERCOLLINS TO PUBLISH BOOK BY CANTER & SIEGEL
The last major mention was in NSD 3.23 on July 19, 1997: LAURENCE CANTER DISBARRED
You can do a search for related stuff in NSD in our search engine.
C&S rate their own section on the NetAbuse FAQ.
There are also several sections about them on the Rutgers NetAbuse page.
That should get you started. :) - AB
I have found it increasingly important to have privacy on the Internet. There are Web sites all over the place on how to hack. There needs to be more protection from these potentially dangerous hackers. It amazes me the ease at which they can penetrate people's lives. Do you know of any software that protects Internet anonymity? I also am looking for a good way to trace e-mails to an ISP or distinguish whether the person stalking me from several e-mail addresses is one person or several. Any help would be appreciated. By the way, this magazine is very informative and enjoyable.
Robb
Try this.
There's also a good bit of underground anon stuff at the Cypherpunks site. Try the Pointers section in particular. - AB
In NSD 5.26, you use non-compliant HTML in the text version of your URLs. The offending section is:
<FONT SIZE="-1">
<A HREF="http://www.securityfocus.com/templates/forum_message.html?forum=2&head=32&id=32">
http://www.securityfocus.com/templates/forum_message.html?forum=2&head=32&id=32</A><BR>
</FONT>
The "&" characters inside the HREF are legal (and necessary!). The raw "&" characters outside the HREF aren't legal - ampersand characters in HTML text must be generated by "&". Netscape ignores this violation and displays the HTML as you intended. My mailreader isn't as smart (or perhaps is more correct...) and improperly displays the digest because it's expecting an escaped character to follow the "&" in the body text.
The above section should be done as follows:
<FONT SIZE="-1">
<A HREF="http://www.securityfocus.com/templates/forum_message.html?forum=2&hea d=32&id=32">
http://www.securityfocus.com/templates/forum_message.html?forum=2&head= 32&id=32</A><BR>
</FONT>
When done this way, the text displays properly on all readers, including those that strictly follow the HTML spec.
Ethan Miller - Baltimore, Maryland
Yep, you're absolutely right. We've got filters in the text to change the ampersands, but not in the URLs. Mostly this is because our formatting code is so old, it was in use when ampersands in URLs were unknown. We've been getting away with this for some time because most of the modern browsers are pretty tolerant about ampersands in the body of HTML. However, you're right, we should change it. Nice of you to take the time to call us on that.
By the way, I don't even remember why somebody thought that ampersands had to be escaped in HTML. I know that < and > need to be and why, but I don't recall if there's something special about the ampersands in the HTML spec that they had to be protected in this way. - AB
The reason is that special characters are represented as &xyz;. If you didn't have to escape the ampersand itself, you'd have no way of representing the text " " in HTML. Granted, I doubt that such text is incredibly common, but HTML has to be able to handle any text, not just "almost all". The escapes that are in common use (that I know of) are:
>
<
&
"
There are lots of other escape characters as well; as a result, the character that introduces them ("&") must itself be escaped. By the way, this is in the HTML spec (I just did a quick Web search...).
EM
SpamBouncer blocks any mail addressed "To: Recipient list suppressed", including NSD. You might want to consider changing your To: line from "recipient list suppressed" to something like "Subscribers of Netsurfer Digest".
Gib Henry
Thanks for the tip. We did just that. - AB
If I download your newsletter into Netscape 4.6 it takes months for the content to appear. Put it straight into Eudora Pro 4.2 and everything is there as soon as downloading finishes. Any idea why?
Richard Weeks
It's all about the layout engine - some browsers are smarter then others in how they interpret HTML code. Netscape 4.x for example, is not very intelligent and will wait for a graphic to appear before it renders anything in a table after that graphic. So it waits for the first ad in Netsurfer to show up before it will print the rest of the issue on the screen.
The other difference may be timing. Sometimes the ad servers are slow and sometimes they are fast. Slow ad servers mean slow ads, which may hold up the rendering. Finally, there's also Net congestion, which also may affect how fast something is loading in at any given time - though that's probably swamped by the coding differences between the two programs. Some browsers are just inherently faster.
Bottom line, lot's of pretty complicated technology stands between you and your browsers. - AB
For the last month, I have received 100+ copies of NSD which is clogging up my in box and almost crashing my system. My netword administrator said he thought the problem was on your end. I had been receiving only one copy for over a year now, which was enough. Hope you fix the problem.
Neil Shewmaker
I am receiving over 50 identical unrequested messages from your organization every day! I am unable to unsubscribe and I will need you to do this for me. If I can offer any aditional info please feel free to contact me. If possible, please send confirmation that this task has been completed.
Calvin Haavig
We strongly suspect that your mail server is somehow misconfigured and has trouble accepting standard SMTP connections which send e-mail to all 33 subscribers in that domain at the same time. Also, we certainly don't send messages every day, so that's another clue that something is wrong. We only send out the issue once per week.
In any event, we'll change the way we send e-mail to that domain - one user at a time rather then to all at once, and see if that fixes it.
As for your subscription I've removed your name from our mailing list. You can still read the Digest at our web site if you like, or wait a while and try subscribing again and see if the problem has been fixed.
Meanwhile, if you want to put us in touch with your sysadmins we'd be happy to work with them to solve this problem.
Thanks for letting us know about the problem, we really appreciate the feedback. - AB
I sent to your organization a poorly worded and grammatically incorrect message approximately two weeks ago during a period of high frustration. I want to send you a message expressing my gratitude for your assistance in this matter. The alternations in the method that you used to transmit messages to this domain (nsccux.sccd.ctc) have removed all unrequested data from my mailbox. I was very impressed with the response time and concern that you showed about the situation. Thanks for your help
CH
Thanks for the kind words. We ourselves are the occasionally frustrated users of the Net, so we try to treat our readers the same way we'd like to be treated. Glad your problem was solved, and thanks for reading. - AB
Since I unsubscribed the other day I've received 74 copies of NSD 5.26. Can someone please get this stopped?
Steve Reigle
Steve, you're the second person at ibm.net who's reported that problem. This, along with the fact that nobody else is complaining, leads me to conclude that the ibm.net mail server is seriously hosed. The symptom that the other person had was that he was receiving e-mail at ibm.net, then forwarding it to another e-mail service. As a result he got tens of copies of the NSD e-mail at his other service, and even continued to receive them long after we stopped sending the entire issue. We conjectured that ibm.net was not deleting the e-mail after forwarding it, but just kept being dumb and forwarding it over and over.
Is your situation similar? Are you forwarding your e-mail? If so that would be an important clue to what's going wrong, and we can yell at the ibm.net postmaster to get their software fixed. On our end it looks like we're sending out only one issue to ibm.net, and as I noted above, we're not getting complaints from any other users there, or anywhere else at this point. - AB
In your NSD 5.19 article entitled "The Iroquois Used Star Violets for What?!", you indicate that we notes that you should use "Linnaen" nomenclature for best results. While you are absolutely correct in that we say you will get better results with Latin names, it is nonetheless true that you may enter the common name of the plant for your search and you will either quickly identify the Latin name - or you'll get quite an education trying to figure it out! You may get differing sets of search results by using the common vs. Latin names, but you will get more precise results if you know specifically which plant you are interested in (i.e., by botanical/Latin name). For example, if you search for "Wild Yam" you will get at least two very different species in your search output. You better know which one you want!
Wow! Thank you so much for reviewing Earth Crash (under the rubric of "Environmental Optimism Busters") in NSD 5.21! You've managed to single-handedly double the number of visitors it usually gets.
Just one small quibble - well, two minor quibbles, actually. One, you wrote, "While its incessant drumbeat of doom might put some off, its biases are right up front, and once those are acknowledged (a headline like "Fireworks Shower Toxic Chemicals" for the American July 4 celebration, for example)..." All of the headlines for the news articles included in Earth Crash are those of the original source, so in the case of the headline for the "Fireworks" article, it was the BBC that was being "apocalyptic" about dioxin showering down on all of those Fourth of July spectators, not me. Two, personally, I like to think of Earth Crash as being more of an Environmental Complacency Buster than an Optimism Buster, but I suppose I shouldn't worry too much about how people characterize it as long as they give some serious thought to the issues it raises, huh?
At any rate, thank you again so much for the review. I've put a lot of hard work into Earth Crash and it really made my day to know that you considered it worthy enough to bring to the attention of your subscribers.
Oneida Kincaid
I've been getting NSD for a few weeks now, and I just had to drop an e-mail to tell you I've enjoyed every minute of your site. Sometimes I laugh, sometimes I frown, sometimes I have a fit of anger at what I find in the links you provide, but always I find something of interest.
Keep up the good work. I look forward to every issue.
Leonard Rubin - Marlboro, Massachusetts
A few years ago, you listed a URL for a site that had information on a meteor that was headed to Earth. Your suggestion: "Put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye." That was great. Would you reprint it?
Don Greer - Tulsa, Oklahoma
There's so much out on the Web, we don't often reprint stuff, but the article you're looking for is Big Rocks Flying through the Sky Too Close for Comfort. - LN
I've been receiving NSD since, well, you were writing it in crayon. I'm pleased to report that you still delight, annoy, intrigue, and otherwise provoke my consciousness. Great work folks - staying fresh is getting more and more difficult.
Joseph Wise
I'm the webmaster over at MenSuck.org (featured in NSD 5.27) and i just wanted to thank you for listing a little review on your site.
Thanks guys and keep up the good work
Jaime Kozlowski
Just thought I'd drop you a line. I believe that NSD is the best Web analysis e-mail mag available anywhere. Thank you,ll for an informative, amusing and oftimes educational missive. Best Wishes now and in the future.
Fred Spector
I've never written a letter to any magazine before, and didn't plan on writing this - but then I can't believe what happened to me yesterday morning. While I was driving to work, this naked tuba-playing coed.... Sorry, wrong letter. Let me begin again. Hell, I'll just cut to the chase. You folks do good work. Of all the crap I receive via e-mail, NSD is the only crap I anticipate and enjoy. You guys and gals can really put together some good crap. And I mean this sincerely (I really do, all craps aside). If there is ever anything I can do for you, you know, like buy you a beer or perhaps a whiskey, let me know.
Bob Armstrong
I'm partial to Newcastle - bottled, not draft, oddly enough. - LN
I very much enjoy NSD and appreciate the truth of your motto "More Signal, Less Noise". Reading NSD 5.21, I got really charged up about the "Absolut Contest" article and raced off to the site. The competition looked great and my excitement grew till I found where it says, "Contest open only to residents of the United States"! WWW stands for "World Wide Web"; which word do Americans have trouble understanding? To advertise a competition on a "World Wide" media and restrict entry to just US residents is arrogant, or are the xenophobic cowards there worried that US residents would not get a look-in with some real "World Wide" competition? In future, it would be nice if NSD could highlight such small-minded entry conditions before anymore of your international readers ride a dream rollercoaster to the standard disappointment of "made in US of A".
Shaun Gray - Australia
Today, both my wife and I have unsubscribed from NSD. I thought I'd let you know why.
First of all, since your switch from standard e-mail to exclusively HTML, I've found it takes much too long to see anything I'm interested in. All the graphics, banner ads, etc. that take a hell of a long time to download - longer than most Web sites - don't make me inclined to check out your sponsors at all.
Secondly, over the last year, it seems you've become obsessed with computer-related sites, in particular anything to do with Microsoft. I'm as interested in computer stuff as the next person, but that's not the only thing I'm interested in! It's been rare indeed in the last few months that my we've seen a single site that we're interested in. We find much more that we're interested in Yahoo's weekly site alerts, and they don't send us HTML e-mail that has a tendency to crash our computers or take forever to download the graphics.
I don't know what your target readership is, but apparently my wife and I are not part of it. We'll continue taking Yahoo's digest, and we'll not miss NSD one bit.
Jon Knutson
Does the statement "We assume (foolishly?) that the military has tested their cruise missiles to make sure their GPS navigation systems work through the rollover" in NSD 5.25 mean you're foolish to think the military had not tested their cruise missiles for GPS rollover, or is it meant to imply the military isn't smart enough to have planned for anomolies in a system they conceived, built, and tested and which has come to be one of the preeminent success stories of the past decade?
Maybe the military is so stupid that they really want these lethal and expensive weapons flying around at their whim, landing hit-or-miss wherever. Perhaps the military is a bunch of sadistical bastards, going so far as to have an office betting pool on where the next launched missile will land?
eomfda
Let's just say it's always foolish to assume. :) - LN
You're reading a lot into one foolish little word, aren't you? :)
The military is the military, and is not always known for its efficiency and competence. On the other hand, I'll grant you that the US military is by far the most technically competent armed force on the planet. As far as testing for the rollover, if I was a military planner I'd make sure no cruise missiles were in the air during the rollover no matter how much testing had been done. The risk of friendly fire or mistargeting, no matter how small, would probably not be worth it. Not to mention the risk of losing an expensive missile. And if you follow that argument to its logical conclusion then it might make sense not to bother doing the testing - spending money and time - when you can accept the limitation of not launching during the small window of the rollover. Engineering tradeoffs are seldom entirely black and white.
Now about the betting pool on where missiles will land - do you really think you won't find somebody doing just that? Human nature being what it is I'd lay odds on there being such a beast somewhere in the less enlightened bowels of the armed forces manpower pool.
Finally, with regard to sadistic bastards - arguably the greatest evils in history have been perpetrated by narrowminded pudgy little men behind nondescript desks wielding small pens, men who would perhaps faint at the sight of an eviscerated chicken. The banality of great evil is a well proven fact. A few overenthusiastic bombs here and there hardly qualifies in this particular contest. What does this have to do with anything? Hell if I know.... - AB
It may be boring, but they did drown. In a way, it's a voice in the wilderness: someone says something, points out the truth, and no one listens because of the author's character and his/her deeds. The world's religions are based on this; and still, most everyone simply believes, runs on faith.
A nice consolation prize in life (as we know it): no one comes out alive.
(By the way, you've a good site.)
Randall
Thanks. I hate to seem too dense, but what the heck are you referring to? - LN
Sorry. The ambiguity stems from the fact that TK has written a basic, standard, test-of-time-type parable and it's always the readers trying to figure out the author and his life, while, instead, the attention should be fixed simply on the text/story. After all, it's only a story. TK seems a bit (quite!) outside/against society, looking at parts of the whole of society. His being violent is typical of many in history that elevate themselves 1) above society, and 2) approach the "I shall be judge and jury" level to set things their way. A lot of times these aren't very nice people.
R
Ohhhhhhhh. Gotcha. TK=UnaB :) - LN
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