5/10    A flashlight I've owned for over 20 years finally burned out its
        bulb which gives me an excuse to buy a new LED flash light. Anyone
        have recommendations?
        \_ The Gerber Inifinity is pretty cool.
        \_ preferred form factor?
        \_ the Inova ones are pretty sweet and sturdy: http://www.inovalight.com
           \_ I second that.  I have three Surefire (P6, M2 with LED
              conversion, and G2).  Every single one of them had
              assembly flaw.  Chinese workers getting paid pennies an
              hour would have assembled them better, but no, it's made
              in the U.S.  It's WAY overpriced, too.  Also, if you use
              it a lot, you'll want rechargeable.  There are CR123A-sized
              rechargeable Li-Ion (slightly higher voltage, about half the
              capacity of non-rechargeable type), but I've never tried it.
              I also have Inova light and it's much cheaper and just as
              good, if not better.  Well, Surefire does use high quality
              materials.
        \_ If it's a quality flashlight (e.g. Mag) you can buy another bulb.
           \_ maglights are shit.
              \_ ?  I have mags in my cars, and have had several of all
                 sizes.  Never had a problem.  Why s hit?  -John

5/11    http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060511/ap_on_sc/hybrid_bear
        Inter-racial bear.
        \_ Good thing that hunter travelled up there to kill it. What a hero.
        \_ Is that really hunting?  Paying someone to lead you to the bear,
           and then just shooting it once you're led there?

5/11    Dear balsamic vinegar beef marinate guy and red wine beef marinate
        guy. I have new test results. 4/5 of my test subjects consistently
        prefer the taste of balsamic vinegar beef, and 5/5 prefer the
        tenderness of the red wine beef. I reproduced the results twice,
        using Costco new york beef marinated for 3 days. This week I am
        going to experiment a hybrid approach by marinating the beef with
        red wine to make the meat more tender, then put balsamic vinegar
        right before I cook them. I'll report results next week. ok thx.

5/10    NSA Has Massive Database of American's Phone Calls
        http://csua.org/u/ftd (Yahoo! News)
        \_ Need the phone records for a terror suspect?  No need to present
           evidence to the phone company to get 'em -- you already got it!
           The last thing we need is a mushroom cloud over a major American
           city.
           \_ What, you're willing to trade any freedom, tolerate any
              oppression, just so that someone can't nuke a US city?  Guess
              what:  they'll still be able to nuke the city, but politicos
              will be able to use the information for personal purposes.
              Just look at the antics of the FBI under Hoover.
              \_ I like how Al Franken put it this morning:
                 "What President Bush doesn't realize is that the next guy in
                 office might not be as trustworthy as him ..."
                \_ he's right. it's gonna be Hillary.. we are all screwed
                   \_ Man, berkeley's standards seem to get lower every year.
                      \_ Seriously, pp doesn't even remember history from
                         8 years ago.
           \_ obTrollbait.
        \_ http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/5/11/105237.shtml?s=ic
           Carl Limbacher of http://newsmax.com says, "USA Today NSA Scoop Not News".
           Now tell me what's wrong with this article.
           \_ OMG!!!11! it's all CLINTON'S FAULT!!! WHY DIDN"T I THINK OF THAT?
              Fuck off and die.
           \_ I'm replying to myself, but key problems with the article are:
              (1) The Clinton-era program had FISA approval and focused on
                  international surveillance
              (2) The program under dispute is ALL domestic.
              (3) Qwest asked for a FISA review before turning over records,
                  but the NSA didn't want to ask FISA.
              (4) Dubya is trying very hard not to let this undergo judicial
                  scrutiny, perhaps not until a Democrat takes power, to
                  decide the issue of whether the "unitary executive" theory
                  enables Dubya to break laws as commander-in-chief in a time
                  of war ("interpret differently via signing statement")
                  \- have you read the standard article on signing statements?
                     http://csua.org/u/ftr
                     i had not really heard of them until last year. these
                     seem crazy to me ... consdered in light of say
                     CLINTON v CITY OF NEW YORK. --psb
                     \_ yep.  the interesting aspect to me is the different
                        ways they've been keeping it from judicial review.
                        \- the new view of limited govt: no judicial review.
                                \_ We'll just limit the government part that
                                   keeps the other government part from
                                   becoming unlimited.

5/11    http://csua.org/u/fti (wsj.com)
        Star conservative judge J. Michael Luttig gives up lifetime federal
        appeals court seat to become General Counsel for Boeing, partly because
        of disillusionment by the encroachment of politics on the judiciary
        sources say
        How to resign without ruining your career prospects:
        link:csua.org/u/ftn (timesdispatch.com)
        "[by phone] I've been on the court 15 years. It's a long time. This
        opportunity came up, as I said in my letter to the president, by
        serendipity and I thought about it a long time with my wife and we just
        decided that it was time for a change. [via letter] I want to express
        my heartfelt thanks to your father ..."
        \_ Maybe it's just true?

5/11    I've answered lots of Unix Qs, so now my turn: Say I have the
        output of "find ... -print" in a file, one per line. Is there a
        STARDARD TOOL to change this one-per-line format to a NULL
        delimited format I can feed to xargs -0 to operate on ... so I
        dont have to worry about spaces and other weird characters legal
        in file names. Obviously I am trying to avoid re-running with -print0
        and the one-per-line fmt is convenient for other tools like "grep".
        --psb

5/11    Add bling bling to your SUV:
        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeKD-LWjAKY
        http://customwheel.com/custom_wheels/product_info.php/products_id/1687
        \_ I like the big old computer interface..
           "..do it while you're drivin'!"
        And by doing so you increase the chance of getting sex:
        http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20060511/sc_space/menpaytheultimatepricetoattractwomen

5/11    Hi guys.  Is JIRA all that?  We have Bugzilla too, but JIRA looks nice,
        and we can afford it.  Thanks.
        \_ It was the leading candidate in our attempt to replace Bugzilla,
           but there were enough problems with it that we decided not to use
           it. (The status of the replacement project is undetermined.) My
           biggest complaint was that the search interface sucks, both in
           terms of UI and power. I also didn't much care for the fact that
           email preferences are per-project and not per-user, so I can't
           adjust when I get email. The lack of Bugzilla's "watch user"
           feature is a problem too; although some aspects of notification
           schemas are better than user watching, they don't cover the same
           set of features. I also just didn't like the UI -- every action
           requires opening a new page, it's clunky, important information
           isn't presented very well, and it keeps rather more state than
           I would like (so clicking on one link, clicking a second link,
           and clicking the first link again doesn't bring me back to the
           same page). It seems like it's not well built for the way we work.
           There are features we like, just not enough to overcome the things
           we didn't like. -gm
           \_ We switched to JIRA. All the things that gm doesn't like, except
              for the back page stuff, you can control by setting up custom
              work flows. This takes time though. -ausman
              \_ Thanks guys.

5/11    http://www.decf.berkeley.edu/help/mail/pine-imapssl.html
        I followed step 11 to transfer from local files to IMAP. However,
        the ordering in IMAP is completely reversed. Is there a way to
        sort folders in IMAP? Thanks.

5/11    http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060511/ap_on_go_co/murtha_interview_1
        Murtha predicts U.S. troops will be brought home by end-2007, and also
        predicts there will be a "tidal wave" in November with Dems gaining
        40-50 House seats, unless Dubya brings back more than half the troops
        before then.

5/11    Physics question.  Why doesn't the Weak Nuclear Force fall off
        inversely proprotionally to the square of distance?
        \- Oh hello, this is a good question and "why is the weak force not
           like the em force or gravity" is one of the great results of
           THE STANDARD MODEL. I am going to assume you have taken a little
           bit of quantum mechantics but not quantum field theory, so this
           will be a little bit hand-wavey. Basically, the weak force is
           different from the em/gravity because unlike the photon [em]
           and the graviton, THE FORCE CARRIERS FOR THE WEAK FORCE ARE
           NOT MASSLESS PARTICLES [see W+ W- and Z particles]. The hand-
           wavey part is: higher masses are associated with higher energies
           which in turn are associated with smaller interaction distances.
           This comes from the uncertainty principle and some dictates of
           relativity [speed of light constant and finite] but that is beyond
           the motd. Why the weak force carriers have mass is at the cutting
           edge of HEP research in a area called the HIGGS MECHANISM. The
           LHC coming online at CERN in about a year should be producing
           some amazing and eagerly anticipated results "soon". To go up a
           notch from here, this length-energy relationship is why STRING
           THEORY involves lengths so many orders of mag smaller and energies
           so many orders of mag higher [the WEAK SCALE and the PLANK SCALE
           about 16-17 orders of mag apart]. another cool thing about the
           weak force is PARITY VIOLATION, which if you have taken a little
           intro QM is related to the spin statistics. BTW, the weak force
           also proves god does not exist. ok tnx. --psb
           \- hey this was a pretty good explanation. I took particle physics
              and was about to write something but then psb pwned it. good
              job! -linxu. ps: wikipedia has much on this. pretty accurate.
              \- which class is "particle physics"? there is an upper div
                 quantum class and a special relativity class, but is there a
                 particle physics class before 221? BTW, do you have any
                 preferences between the ZEE and WEINBERG QFT books?
                 "QFT is hard. let's go shopping."
              \- oh the wikipedia entry on the "weak force" is pretty good.
                 (meaning it is comprehenssable)
                 i thought it was kinda funny they "hand waved" over the
                 same part i did: "uncertainty+special relativity -> short
                 interaction distance", but i guess it makes the additional
                 point about particle life time. BTW, here is some interesting
                 trivia about the parity violation: YANG & LEE did the
                 theoretical work to predict this. apparently they took a
                 class at UCHICAGO from S CHANDRASEKAR (possibly with some-
                 body else too) and it turns out that everybody in that class
                 would go on to win the nobel prize in physics ... in fact
                 the teacher himself would be the last person to win the
                 nobel. also, perhaps even a greater scandal than the
                 WATSON/CRICK/WILKINS vs ROSALIND FRANKLIN female nobel snub
                 was not naming WU along with YANG and LEE for the parity
                 violation nobel (since you are allowed to name up to 3
                 co winners). WU also did her phd at UCB under EOLAWRENCE.
              \- which particle physics course? i didnt think there was a
                 particle physics class until after 221. what textbook do
                 you use ... WEINBERG or ZEE? ("QFT is hard")?
                 the wikipedia entry on the "weak force" is pretty good.
                 (meaning it is comprehensable). i thought it was kinda funny
                 they "hand waved" over the same part i did:
                 "uncertainty+special relativity -> short interaction
                 distance", but i guess it makes the additional point about
                 particle life time. BTW, here is some interesting trivia
                 about the parity violation: YANG & LEE did the theoretical
                 work to predict this. apparently they took a class at
                 UCHICAGO from S CHANDRASEKAR (possibly with somebody else
                 too) and it turns out that everybody in that class would go
                 on to win the nobel prize in physics ... in fact the teacher
                 himself would be the last person to win the nobel. also,
                 perhaps even a greater scandal than the WATSON/CRICK/WILKINS
                 vs ROSALIND FRANKLIN female nobel snub was not naming WU
                 along with YANG and LEE for the parity violation nobel (since
                 you are allowed to name up to 3 co-winners). WU also did her
                 phd at UCB under EOLAWRENCE.
                 \- Woo that's pretty interesting to know. I took 129A. It was
                    taught by Gaillard, an old professor who actually did
                    stuff back in the day. To be honest, most of the math
                    went over my head... I got a B+ in the class but I don't
                    deserve it. (Really i should have gotten a C). Some
                    really interesting stuff re: renormalization, Feynman
                    diagrams, etc. -linxu
                    \- oh i was kinda curious if it was MKG or ZUMINO ...
                       i didnt think the dept let them near undergrads.
                       BTW, another interesting bit of trivia maybe for
                       some of you: some of you may have had DANA RANDALL
                       as a TA for a CS THEORY class ... her sister LISA
                       did her postdoc at UCB/LBL is now a prominent
                       physicist and just came out with this book:
                         http://csua.org/u/fuj
                       which should cover some of the topics above
                       at a level accessible to a reasonable sloda user.
                       BTW, for berkeley MKG isnt that "old" ... not with
                       people like Al Ghiorso still around ... who started
                       working for SEABORG in the 40s.
        \_ What's with the caps?
           \- high speed keyword matching. sort of like compiler hints.

5/11    http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060511/od_nm/crime_fetish_dc
        Foot fetish man in New York

5/11    Regarding the earlier post about Thinkpad warranty service:
        It was picked up by DHL at 4:30 on Monday and it came back repaired
        at noon today.  I'm quite impressed.  Props to Lenovo and DHL.
        \_ Wow--exact opposite of what I experienced (albeit in
           Switzerland.)  Rude, complicated, and inefficient.  -John

5/11    So how the hell do you collect phone call info on every single
        Americans? What type of throughput are we talking about,
        10,00 record a second? And how big of a database do you need
        to scale to that size? Are they using Oracle 9i or something else?
        \_ Google probably has about this throughput.  (assuming you meant
           10,000/second)
        \_ a small cluster of mysql/postgres could handle 10k easily
        \_ Search for info about the EFF sueing AT&T in regards to letting
           the NSA installing data sniffing hardware.
        \_ Search for info about the EFF suing AT&T in regards to letting
           the NSA install data sniffing hardware.

5/11    MacOS question:  for some reason, my Powerbook's wifi card isn't
        picking up any wireless networks with any sort of protection--wep,
        wpa, wpa2, whatever.  My home network shows up in keychain, but if
        I want to connect, I have to do it manually.  Any ideas what this
        could be?  -John
        \_ How much are vacation homes in Chile, Santiago?
        \_ More specifics, pb type, os version, internal/external card
           \_ Oh, didn't think that'd make a difference.  10.4.5, 12" PB,
              Airport card (not sure which one.)  This worked at one point,
              and I have no clue whwat might have changed.  -John
              \_ Dunno.  What does MacStumbler report?
        \_ +1-800-275-2273
                 \_ That's the thing, I can join encrypted/authenticated
                    networks, I just have to do it manually every time I
                    power up or recover from sleep.  Not tragic, I just
                    thought maybe someone here might have seen this.  -John
        \_ +1-800-275-2273