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Re: Anthrax...coincidence?
by Steve Furlong 06 Oct '01

06 Oct '01

"Dr. Evil" wrote: > > > Center for Disease Control Investigating Second Anthrax Case > > By Chris Dolmetsch > FORTUNATELY, this stuff is not contagious. Either you have it or you > don't. I'm not sure I believe that, or much of anything else put out regarding a bioagent. ("We have everything under control. Just continue to pay your taxes and do what we tell you and everything will be all right.") Are there any real doctors or vets on the list who can confirm it from their own knowledge? (Sorry, I don't think I want to trust the word of a "Dr Evil". <grin>) I figure the spores have to come from somewhere, and they seem to be grown in animals and then released to spread. According to the CDC page on the subject, "Anthrax most commonly occurs in wild and domestic lower vertebrates..., but it can also occur in humans when they are exposed to infected animals or tissue from infected animals". Humans are animals, aren't they? Do the spores reproduce only in herbivores? Well, maybe I'm just cynical from experience with the government's lying and concealing for our own good. SRF -- Steve Furlong Computer Condottiere Have GNU, Will Travel 617-670-3793 "Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly while bad people will find a way around the laws." -- Plato

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Re: Another Golden Moment of law enforcement
by Ali Baba 06 Oct '01

06 Oct '01

> "A CONFIDENTIAL FBI list of 370 people suspected of > helping Osama bin Laden's terrorist network has > leaked out. > > The names, addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail, > and social security codes of the suspects were > posted on the internet by Finland's Financial > Supervision Authority (RATA)." > You mean the were... (wait for it) RATA'd out?...

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Thawte Founder Fails Russian 'Web of Trust'
by Bill Scannell 06 Oct '01

06 Oct '01

http://cgi.canoe.ca/CNEWSSpace0110/05_tourist-ap.html Russian officials reject tourist MOSCOW (AP) -- Officials rejected a South African Internet tycoon's bid to fly to the International Space Station because he made unreasonable demands, Russian news agencies reported Friday. Mark Shuttleworth, 27, underwent a month of tests and preparation at the Star City cosmonaut training center outside Moscow over the summer. But the Cape Town native failed to conclude a contract to become the second tourist in space. California tycoon Dennis Tito, who reportedly paid $20 million to Russia's cash-strapped space agency, made an eight-day trip to the station last spring. "All attempts to bring Shuttleworth's conditions into correspondence with regular practice have been abortive," the ITAR-Tass news agency quoted Russian Space Agency director Yuri Koptev as saying. Koptev said that Shuttleworth had insisted on a minimum of two weeks in space, instead of the eight to 10 days the space agency favored. "This demand would throw off the flight schedule," Koptev said. Koptev said that Shuttleworth had also expected a free second flight to space if the first spacecraft failed to dock with the station, ITAR-Tass reported.

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Jim Bell Justified???
by CJ Parker 06 Oct '01

06 Oct '01

During my PreTrial InFarceRation, at a time when the Federal GovernMint was attempting to pressure me into giving up my right to an extradition hearing, Linda Lou informed me that Jeff Gordon had asked her to tell me that if I waived extradition, that I would be able to get proper medical treatment once I was extradited to Washington. This, of course, turned out to be a BaldFacedLie, but regardless, one has to ask oneself what kind of LowLifeBottomSuckingScum would attempt to pressure a citizen into giving up one's legal rights by suggesting that relief from medical torture and abuse is conditional upon making one's prosecution, and unavoidable conviction, easier for the GooberMint. There is a reason that the Feds object to the Citizens paying too close a scrutiny to them personally. It is because Federal Employees who use their positions to ShitOnTheConstitution and commit Ethical Atrocities understandably live in Fear of the Citizens. Jim Bell's prosecution did not reflect his danger to anybody, but his danger to the Fears of the Justice Criminals who recognize that, according to the Values&OR&Ethics of the Founding Fathers, THEY [TM] would be Targets... In Reality, THEY [TM] Prosecute Only ThemSelves... FuckTheseMorons!Monger #05987-196

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Another Golden Moment of law enforcement
by Null＠null.com 06 Oct '01

06 Oct '01

Any way to recapture this moment? http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/10/06/wbus… Blunder puts FBI suspects on internet "A CONFIDENTIAL FBI list of 370 people suspected of helping Osama bin Laden's terrorist network has leaked out. The names, addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail, and social security codes of the suspects were posted on the internet by Finland's Financial Supervision Authority (RATA)."

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Anthrax found in Florida
by Anonymous 06 Oct '01

06 Oct '01

A man in Florida has been infected with anthrax, according to the CDC. <http://www.hhs.gov/news/press/2001pres/20011004b.html> But don't freak out, they say. Don't buy a gas mask or antibiotics. Don't panic. Get back in your cubicle. Keep working. Stay at your desk. Under no circumstances should you try to find some ciprofloxacin, an antibiotic which might be useful in treating inhalational anthrax. <http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/ANSWERS/ANS01030.html>

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Threat Recognition Testing (fwd)
by mmotyka＠lsil.com 06 Oct '01

06 Oct '01

Very interesting and worth more reading. I would guess that even if it moves beyond the lab it will be treated like the polygraph. I wouldn't be surprised though if it is possible to train one's brain to move from state to state at will. Defocus your vision and visualize your training.

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Re: PDA versions of Speak Freely (fwd)
by Eugene Leitl 06 Oct '01

06 Oct '01

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204/">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBMTO: N48 04'14.8'' E11 36'41.2'' http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204 57F9CFD3: ED90 0433 EB74 E4A9 537F CFF5 86E7 629B 57F9 CFD3 ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sat, 06 Oct 2001 02:06:58 +0200 From: John Walker <kelvin(a)fourmilab.ch> To: Robert & Jennifer Hartley <rehartley(a)sympatico.ca>, speak-freely(a)fourmilab.ch Subject: Re: PDA versions of Speak Freely >> Has anyone else been working on a PDA version of SpeakFreely? To my knowledge, nobody is working on this. Several people have expressed interest in such a package, but nobody has yet lifted a coding stick to create one. If you have a GCC environment, Speak Freely should port to almost any platform with little difficulty; the main problem is coming to terms with audio support. The iPAQ should have adequate CPU power for any normal Speak Freely compression and encryption mode. If there is handheld-specific code which belongs in the Speak Freely distribution, I am perfectly willing to integrate it in the next release. Next week I hope to post a "bleeding edge early-adopter" version of Speak Freely for Unix 7.5. This version will (*gasp*) compile without any -Wall warnings from gcc 2.96, include Ivan Popov's fix for transmission of face images in encrypted sessions, correct the lingering problems with LPC-10 compression not working with this or that compiler and optimisation modes and include, for the first time, support for FS 1016 4800 baud CELP (Code Excited Linear Prediction) encoding. The latter CODEC will be initially supported only in *nix versions of Speak Freely, and integrated into the Windows version some time in the future. I've always considered Speak Freely to have a secondary mission of serving as a "reference implementation" of network audio algorithms, and CELP is the latest addition to this list (even though GSM is adequate for the vast majority of users). Bashing the CELP code into something you can just "make" has taken a lot longer than I anticipated, which is why this release is so late. I hope to have something for you to try sometime next week, but I won't announce it until it passes all my tests on Linux, Solaris, and SGI IRIX here. The Speak Freely for Unix 7.5 release will be 100% ANSI C; if you need to build it on legacy compilers, you'll need to run it through ANSI2KNR or an equivalent translator. Let's think about what a PDA version should be. Should it be a scrambler, a dial-up (or GSM, etc.) VoIP bridge, or application running under a network-enabled OS? * * * To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send E-mail containing the word "unsubscribe" in the message body (*not* as the Subject) to speak-freely-request(a)fourmilab.ch

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Re: The Martyrdom Videogame
by Optimizzin Al-gorithm 06 Oct '01

06 Oct '01

At 10:42 AM 10/5/01 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote: >Just another example of the trend that you >don't need to be religious to exercise religious bigotry. >Hating other people and insulting their values >doesn't require either understanding them >or having values of your own. >It's frustrating how rabidly intolerant a lot of >ostensibly socially liberal people are. > >>Optimizzin Al-gorithm <oa(a)acm.org> wrote : >> >> > Christians need to start cultivating a >> > martyrdom culture/generation. Maybe a >> > videogame where you win by blowing >> > yourself up and taking out a lot of >> > drugdealers^H^H^H^Hmoslems^H^H^H^Hwhatever >> > the fuck the bogeymen du jour are. Actually this comment isn't about religions ---its about what happens when a more aggressive culture meets one less so. The losers get to run casinos at best. Guns germs & steel. And suicide bombers. A culture that has them has advantages over a risk-averse one. My commentary also alluded to the demonization of the enemy, done by the 'faithful' of both flavors. I was sarcastic, ie expressing author's disdain for this demonization. This follows my black humor, which is cynicism about the actual reality of competing-civilizations (named by their dominant religion) and the way they (ab)use their (young male) subscribers. Thanks for the opportunity to clarify.

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WTC Collapse Alternative
by John Young 06 Oct '01

06 Oct '01

What is odd about the WTC debris is how few larger fragments of concrete it contains. Reports on the structure say reinforced concrete was used for floor slabs and customarily in demolition such material breaks apart in relatively large chunks, the broken concrete remaining attached by steel reinforcing bars or wire mesh. However, there is a structural design where plain concrete is placed on metal floor decking with little or no reinforcing. Also, lightweight concrete, whose course aggregate is cinder rather than stone, is often used to limit the weight of the structure, especially in high-rise building. This lightweight material does not usually have the strength of regular concrete and strength is provided by metal decking below it. The large amount of dust produced by the towers' collapse and the relative lack of larger concrete shards raise the possibility that the building disintegrated at least in part due to lesser strength of the type of concrete used in the floors. That remains to be examined. Observation of the towers' remains show that while main steel vertical structural members of the exterior wall and central core withstood the collapse, the horizontal floor-supporting trusses broke away from these vertical supports at the points of attachment (probably made by welding). One view of the North Tower (1 WTC) shows the exterior and core remnants and the ruptured points of floor structure attachment. Photos: http://cryptome.org/wtc/wtc035.jpg http://cryptome.org/wtc/wtc047.jpg What this suggests is the possibility that the structure of each floor collapsed due to load of collapsing floors above them, and that only afterwards did the vertical supports at the exterior and core collapse. Review of video of the collapse appears to confirm this sequence as well as the consequent supposition that the floor structure was the weakest part of the buildings -- which would not be uncommon for floor structure supports only a single floor while the vertical members support all floors above them. However, a slow motion examination of visual recording would be needed to confirm exactly what collapsed first. There has been speculation about the initial step in the collapse of the buildings, most commonly attributed to the intense heat of burning jet fuel softening structural steel, usually the steel of the core. However, it is possible that collapse of the core steel was not the initial phase, but instead it was the floor structure breaking away from vertical supports. The collapse in this scenario would be that of floors dropping one after the other onto floors below, the load of the upper floors overwhelming the relatively weak attachments of floors to vertical supports -- the attachments customarily being designed to support only a single floor load. For example, a single floor dropping onto the one below could have ruptured the next lower attachment, thus setting off a disastrous sequence. This could have occurred without fire initially weakening the vertical steel structure as has been speculated. The impact of the crash, and/or subsequent swaying of the buildings, could have ruptured floor structure attachments, and only one floor breaking away would have been enough to precipitate the collapse. Alternatively, the fuel fire, and flaming building contents, could have weakened floor structure and/or its attachment to vertical supports, in particular if the crash destroyed fire-protection materials of the floor structure. Thus, with heat weakening floor structure along with the attachments being ruptured by the crash, the collapse sequence commenced. One significance of these speculations is that weakening of the core steel by intense heat may not have been the initial cause of collapse. A New York Times report of October 6 describes an investigative engineer "finding what appears to be a few pieces of the south tower that were directly hit by the Boeing 767 jetliner, and the discovery poses a few new puzzles. While the impact sliced through half the column, the column did not buckle; each column is designed to support the weight even if half is missing. The column also exhbits no outward signs of smoke or heat damage." Another signficance is that more steel reinforcing in the concrete could have increased the strength of the floor structure and better withstood the initial step in the floor-by-floor collapse sequence. And, the immediate and long-term adverse affects of the huge dust clouds of the collapse might have been lessened. It is likely that some victims were suffocated by these clouds.

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