| Thursday,
June 20, 2002 On
the issue of women and dirt, Joe Zeff adds:
From your Wednesday mail:
What women do not understand is that the
dirt-seeing gene must appear on two X chromosomes to function. Therefore,
no man ever born can see dirt like a woman. Women don't believe this, but
it is true.
-- Robert Bruce Thompson thompson@ttgnet.com
http://www.ttgnet.com <http://www.ttgnet.com>
I suspect you have the cause.
There is no solution...
I take it neither Mr. Thompson nor you ever went
through Basic Training as an enlisted man; Company Commanders can see dirt
no woman would ever find. Back when I was in Uncle Sam's Navy, we'd put a
pair of socks over a push-broom for a final sweep to get that last, little
bit of dust off the floor because the inspector would find it if we
didn't.
Of course you know I went through Basic although
at the time the Army was more concerned with getting people into the
pipeline than cleaning the barracks. Still we got our share of white glove
inspections. My suspicion is that drill sergeants get some kind of
implant.
Another anti-spam suggestion. I have a lot of
these and I need to look into them. When? I am so busy deleting spam
that...
Here is an interesting Anti-spam service (currently
free)
http://www.theregus.com/content/6/25317.html
Kind of a Anti-spam democracy. Enough people select
something as Spam and weighted by their past accuracy, it determines if
the e-mail is listed as Spam.
Charles Butler
Thanks
And another
This sounds workable... I'd give it a shot for free
:)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/25811.html
Jason Jones
There seem to be many suggestions for this one.
Dr. Pournelle
Thanks very much for your web site. It is full of
wonderful technology and political museings and I enjoy it greatly.
Knowing you problems with spam and smap filtering
when I saw the following story on the Register I thought it might be
another great help to you.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/25811.html
It is about www.cloudmark.com
and it looks useful enough that I am downloading it to test out now. I
hope this is useful to you.
Miles
==
Well, it says it will stop 75% of spam, since you receive
a ton, thought you might want to look into it. http://www.cloudmark.com/
Douglas Moak
With luck I'll get to it.
And then:
Jerry,
Perhaps using this as the home page of your site
would keep out the riff raft
Rick
http://www.riversoft.com/newsroom/disclaimer.shtml
I am not trying to filter out the riff-raff ( I
seem to recall once knowing the origin of that term, but I have
forgotten); but that is the darndest disclaimer I have ever seen! Thanks!
And a new twist:
Jerry
Re: http://www.petitiononline.com/twotower/
Take a look at Kevin Klerck's e-mail address! I
think this was a fishing trip which netted a rather large no. of fish
(3485 and rising).
Having looked at some of the signature comments I'm
not sure who are the more gullible, those who signed to complain about the
idiocy or those who signed because they agreed with the petition.
Still it brightened my day somewhat.
Keep dancing and doing the things so we don't have
to.
All the best
Ian Crowe.
Shark bite...
From Sue Ferrara:
To view the entire article, go to
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/
articles/A14093-2002Jun19.html
Mexican Workers Pay for Success
By Mary Jordan
TIJUANA, Mexico -- Cesiah Ruiz Brena came to Tijuana
in 1989, deliriously happy to get a job at a new Japanese factory. Her
work space was grand, the lights were bright and the pay was unimaginably
good: $100 a week to start.
But after 13 years during which her wages rose to
$200 a week, Ruiz Brena lost her job on June 1. Her Canon inkjet printer
factory shut down. She and her co-workers shared a cake, snapped photos of
one another and said goodbye. The factory, they were told, was moving to
Thailand and Vietnam, where wages are as low as $15 a week -- less than
what she earns in a day.
All along the Mexican border with the United States,
once-busy factories are closing. Since the end of 2000, tearful farewell
parties have been held for 250,000 factory workers in Mexico. Some of the
same jobs that left North Carolina textile plants and Ohio auto-parts
assembly lines for Mexico in the 1980s are now moving to Asia. The reason
is the same: cheaper labor.
The loss of jobs here in part reflects the slowdown
in the U.S. economy. But many of the plant closings are just the
globalized economy at work. Factories came to take advantage of low wages;
now that success has driven wages up, they are moving on. Mexico is left
with a bittersweet legacy: higher wages, but fewer jobs.
More than 500 foreign-owned assembly-line factories
in Mexico, called maquiladoras, have closed in the past two years, in part
because wages have doubled in the past 10 years and are no longer
considered low in the world economy. An entry-level factory worker in
Tijuana earns $1.50 to $2 an hour, compared with 25 cents an hour in parts
of China.
<snip> That giant sucking sound?
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
On NHK World Daily News (Japan) tonight it was
reported that the Japanese Space Agency will contract out maintenance and
support for their ISS module. They will also allow the company to run the
module as a profit-making enterprise.
Seems everyone but NASA sees the value of private
enterprise...
Regards,
Gordon Runkle -- "Far and away the best prize
that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth
doing." -- Theodore Roosevelt
Indeed
And
on FANS and Fandom, a phenomenon some of you know well and some of you
won't believe...
In science fiction fandom there's an expression for
those who don't "get it" -- they're called Mundanes. S.f. fans
hold themselves out as special: Fans are Slans, as the old rallying cry
goes. It's a defense against the put-downs so many fans received from the
'30s through at least the late '60s ("You reading that crazy Buck
Rogers stuff? That pulp trash?"), until Apollo 11 put a sock in most
of that.
However, it's still fashionable in the mainstream
culture to make fun of s.f. fans by holding them as all the same as their
worst examples, as in the famous William Shatner "Get a Life!"
sketch on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE or the film documentary TREKKIES.
I hadn't thought about it in some time, until Nila
and I today rediscovered just how far out of mainstream culture we are.
Jack Buck, long-time play-by-play commentator for
the St. Louis Cardinals, died about 24 hours ago as I write this. He was
by all accounts a great guy, genial, generous, gentle, and decent, and he
fought gallantly against the diseases which ultimately took his life. I'm
not much of a sports fan, but my dad listened to Cardinals games on KMOX
as we went on the long recreational drives he took us on the Sunday
afternoons of my childhood, and I've always had a couple of friends who
were baseball fans, so Buck's voice has always been in the background of
my life. I'm genuinely sorry for his death, and have great sympathy for
his family.
But for me, that's the extent of it.
Others see it differently.
He died just short of eleven o'clock last night. The
local TV stations ran it as a special bulletin, interrupting late night
programming. By one a.m. ball fans were showing up downtown at Busch
Stadium to lay flowers at the bust of him outside of it which he had
received to honor his career. (I dunno, maybe the existence of that should
have given me a clue to the public reaction.) This continued all into
today, and is still going on as I write. People are crying in public.
KMOX's talk show 'phone lines have been devoted to nothing else. The local
TV newscasters are wearing black suits.
Missouri Governor Carnahan's death in an airplane
crash during his U. S. Senate election campaign didn't get as much air
time.
Tomorrow there will be a public viewing of his
casket. It will he held in the *stadium*, partly because it was where he
worked, partly because there's a game later in the day anyway, and partly
because no other venue can handle the number of people who are expected,
perhaps double the attendance at a home game when the Cardinals are in
first place, which they are.
That means that perhaps as many as 90,000 people
will file past. Yes, ninety thousand.
What really brought it home to me is that the flags
are at half-staff at City Hall and the county courthouse -- you'd think a
sitting president had died. This entire metropolitan area is mourning.
And Nila and I don't see it that way. We're that far
outside the mainstream that we're just not reacting as everybody else. No
disrespect to Mr. Buck, but he didn't affect our lives in the way he has
seemingly everybody else's around here.
It was for Gene Roddenberry that I couldn't go to
class the day he died. It was for Robert Heinlein that I cried. It was for
DeForrest Kelley that I mourned.
I guess to mundane, mainstream society, I just don't
"get it".
------------------------------------- David K. M.
Klaus
"In questions of power, then, let no more be
heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains
of the Constitution." -- Thomas Jefferson
-------------------------------------
I don't know where I fit in this world. I write
science fiction. I go to increasingly fewer SF conventions as my old
friends die off. My first knowledge of Jack Buck was after he was dead,
and I am astonished to find that the United States is somehow involved in
a soccer tournament in either Japan or Korea, and my local newspaper
features the (divorced, not typical soccer mom) mother of one of the US
players on the front page with continuation inside with pictures. She
seems a decent sort with her priorities in order, but I never heard of her
or her son.
I do read newspapers, which I gather is not
typical of either fans or most of my neighbors.
Ah well.
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