OT: Goodbye to the American Dream

[DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUn]

On Wed, 9 Sep 2015 12:29:14 -0700 (PDT), "dcaster@krl.org"
<dcaster@krl.org> Gave us:

On Wednesday, September 9, 2015 at 3:34:24 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Wednesday, 9 September 2015 16:43:01 UTC+10, rickman wrote:
On 9/8/2015 10:53 PM, Bill Sloman wrote:

Jim Thompson reported me to the FBI for having dangerously
anti-American ideas. He's apparently rich enough that they didn't
ridicule him at the time, but it did reinforce his status as
Jim-out-of-touch-with-reality-Thompson.

Whaaaa? Is this for real? "having dangerously anti-American ideas"
sounds like something from the McCarty era. My GOD!

You are making this up, right?

Nope. Jim boasted about it here at the time, and a few years later, when I was raking up his collected absurdities, he was silly enough to admit it again.

I'd really like to satirise Jim, but my imagination isn't up
to finding something really absurd that he hasn't already done.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

As far as Bill is concerned it is fact. But then Bill is not
very perceptive. For one he thinks I am a right wing nitwit
even after I told him that I do not say much about myself.

But as far as I can tell the only thing that makes Bill believe
that Jim reported him to some friends at the FBI is that Jim
said so. So is anyone else gullible enough to accept
statements on SED as the truth, the whole truth and nothing
but the truth?

Dan

Yeah, you're right. That idiot Tripeson... It IS hard to believe
that that dumbfuck would actually have a friend in the FBI. Maybe a
reject who got kicked out, but an actually connection? Naw...

 

[John Fields]

On Thu, 03 Sep 2015 19:24:22 -0700, John Larkin
<jjlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

I don't like debt. The problem with borrowing money is that most
people expect you to pay it back.

---
And why shouldn't they?

John Fields

 

[John Fields]

On Tue, 8 Sep 2015 08:27:06 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
<bill.sloman@gmail.com> wrote:

On Saturday, 5 September 2015 07:22:58 UTC+10, John Fields wrote:
On Wed, 2 Sep 2015 20:30:16 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
bill.sloman@gmail.com> wrote:


For the record, I am designing electronics (if not at this instant) and hope eventually to have a design that's worth publishing. John Larkin's "design" cycle takes two weeks on average. Mine has always been several years, and it seems to have slowed down as I've got older, and more aware of how complicated the the process can be.

Age, and its attending misunderstanding, befuddles.

I suspect that you were somewhat befuddled before you got old, otherwise you wouldn't be quite so besotted with the NE555.

---
So says the loser who begrudges everyone their successes where he has
only found failure.
---

Larkin clearly has a lead which you can't, in your wildest dreams,
compete against, so your begrudging his technical acumen smacks of the
green-eyed monster.

John Larkin has clearly sold a lot more items. Basically, he sells bespoke electronics to physicists - and my publication history in Rev. Sci. Instrum. makes it clear that Phil Hobbs isn't a typical physicist.

---
The lead I was talking about, if you could have been paying attention,
was technical acumen, not sales.

And what on Earth does the reference to the good Doctor Hobbs have to
do with anything?
---

>So he's leading on quantity. I have reservations about the quality of his offerings.

---
You should use your reservations to get out of Dodge, because you
clearly have no base on which to stake your claims.
---

I'm sure they do exactly what the customers want, but better
customers would have wanted more, and somebody with more technical
smarts that John Larkin would probably have delivered more,
even though his customers didn't actively demand it.

---
You cast John Larkin in the role of being niggardly for not delivering
more than he was asked to, and yourself as a magnanimous judge who
would have lived John Larkin's life differently if only you'd have
been John Larkin, and yet your resentment of his success because he
didn't do it your way seems to lie close to the pinnacle of
niggardliness.
---

>I'm sure that you have got an opinion on the quality issue,but save it - it isn't going to be worth posting.

---
Geez, Bill, if only anyone believed you you might have the shot you so
long for to lift you out of the bourgeoisie.

John Fierlds

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Thursday, 10 September 2015 06:56:28 UTC+10, John Fields wrote:

On Tue, 8 Sep 2015 08:27:06 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
bill.sloman@gmail.com> wrote:
On Saturday, 5 September 2015 07:22:58 UTC+10, John Fields wrote:
On Wed, 2 Sep 2015 20:30:16 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
bill.sloman@gmail.com> wrote:

For the record, I am designing electronics (if not at this instant) and hope eventually to have a design that's worth publishing. John Larkin's "design" cycle takes two weeks on average. Mine has always been several years, and it seems to have slowed down as I've got older, and more aware of how complicated the the process can be.

Age, and its attending misunderstanding, befuddles.

I suspect that you were somewhat befuddled before you got old, otherwise you wouldn't be quite so besotted with the NE555.

So says the loser who begrudges everyone their successes where he has
only found failure.

John Fields' record of successes seems to be mainly with people who were impressed by what he got the 555 to do for them. Not the most discriminating audience.

Several of my failures were tolerably heroic, and I certainly don't begrudge our success stories their successes. Jim Thompson has designed any number of barely good enough integrated circuits ...

Larkin clearly has a lead which you can't, in your wildest dreams,
compete against, so your begrudging his technical acumen smacks of the
green-eyed monster.

John Larkin has clearly sold a lot more items. Basically, he sells bespoke electronics to physicists - and my publication history in Rev. Sci. Instrum. makes it clear that Phil Hobbs isn't a typical physicist.

The lead I was talking about, if you could have been paying attention,
was technical acumen, not sales.

Yes, but sales are simple enough for you to understand. Assessing technical acumen is a little more demanding.

And what on Earth does the reference to the good Doctor Hobbs have to
do with anything?

He's a physicist who is uncharacteristically deft with electronics.

So he's leading on quantity. I have reservations about the quality of his offerings.

You should use your reservations to get out of Dodge, because you
clearly have no base on which to stake your claims.

None that you are in a position to assess.

I'm sure they do exactly what the customers want, but better
customers would have wanted more, and somebody with more technical
smarts that John Larkin would probably have delivered more,
even though his customers didn't actively demand it.

You cast John Larkin in the role of being niggardly for not delivering
more than he was asked to, and yourself as a magnanimous judge who
would have lived John Larkin's life differently if only you'd have
been John Larkin, and yet your resentment of his success because he
didn't do it your way seems to lie close to the pinnacle of
niggardliness.

I'm sure John Larkin has done well with the skills he has. As you've commented, they aren't quite as impressive as he thinks they are.

I'm sure that you have got an opinion on the quality issue,but save it - it isn't going to be worth posting.

Geez, Bill, if only anyone believed you you might have the shot you so
long for to lift you out of the bourgeoisie.

The haute bourgeoisie is the environment into which I was born, and I've not been tempted to try to move out of it. When it's inhabited by people like

William S. Percival

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_amplifier

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Davies

it is not a bad environment at all.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Thursday, 10 September 2015 05:29:18 UTC+10, dca...@krl.org wrote:

On Wednesday, September 9, 2015 at 3:34:24 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Wednesday, 9 September 2015 16:43:01 UTC+10, rickman wrote:
On 9/8/2015 10:53 PM, Bill Sloman wrote:

Jim Thompson reported me to the FBI for having dangerously
anti-American ideas. He's apparently rich enough that they didn't
ridicule him at the time, but it did reinforce his status as
Jim-out-of-touch-with-reality-Thompson.

Whaaaa? Is this for real? "having dangerously anti-American ideas"
sounds like something from the McCarty era. My GOD!

You are making this up, right?

Nope. Jim boasted about it here at the time, and a few years later, when I was raking up his collected absurdities, he was silly enough to admit it again.

I'd really like to satirise Jim, but my imagination isn't up to finding something really absurd that he hasn't already done.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

As far as Bill is concerned it is fact. But then Bill is not very perceptive. For one he thinks I am a right wing nitwit even after I told him that I do not say much about myself.

The nitwit bit is easy. The right-wing comes from the sort of stuff that
provokes you into posting. You don't have to say much to demonstrate that you are a nitwit - the paragraph above makes it perfectly obvious.

> But as far as I can tell the only thing that makes Bill believe that Jim reported him to some friends at the FBI is that Jim said so. So is anyone else gullible enough to accept statements on SED as the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

I'm happy to say that I've got no evidence - except Jim's word - that he reported me to FBI. I've never been hassled at an airport - probably the entry in my file back when I was cleared to "Most Secret" (which isn't all that high, but high enough to get me into US Army ECOM back when it was in New Jersey, in 1970) still works.

It's still bizarre enough to be recycled on SED from time to time. In real life I've used it to demonstrate that SED hosts at least one total nut-case, but only to people who know me well enough to appreciate that I'm not actually a nut-case, even though I hang out there myself.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Friday, 11 September 2015 06:45:06 UTC+10, John Fields wrote:

On Wed, 9 Sep 2015 18:28:11 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
bill.sloman@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thursday, 10 September 2015 06:56:28 UTC+10, John Fields wrote:
On Tue, 8 Sep 2015 08:27:06 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
bill.sloman@gmail.com> wrote:
On Saturday, 5 September 2015 07:22:58 UTC+10, John Fields wrote:
On Wed, 2 Sep 2015 20:30:16 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
bill.sloman@gmail.com> wrote:

For the record, I am designing electronics (if not at this instant) and hope eventually to have a design that's worth publishing. John Larkin's "design" cycle takes two weeks on average. Mine has always been several years, and it seems to have slowed down as I've got older, and more aware of how complicated the the process can be.

Age, and its attending misunderstanding, befuddles.

I suspect that you were somewhat befuddled before you got old, otherwise you wouldn't be quite so besotted with the NE555.

So says the loser who begrudges everyone their successes where he has
only found failure.

John Fields' record of successes seems to be mainly with people who were impressed by what he got the 555 to do for them. Not the most discriminating audience.

Au contraire, mon ami.

Once one delves into uncharted waters and finds treasure, it's easy
for the Monday morning quarterbacks to sit back on their haunches and
scoff, pretending that they could have done the same thing, if only...

Perhaps I too could be the world's expert on getting the NE555 to do tricks that could be better done with more recent devices. Happily I've got better things to do.

Several of my failures were tolerably heroic,

In that you were able to bear the ignominy in the aftermath of the
debacle?

The Japanese have a better way.

I'm suppose to slash my stomach because some half-wit in marketing pointed us at a non-existent market?

The world's best technology - and that's what we were putting together at the time - isn't much use if nobody wants to buy it, and the engineers are supposed to know how to build stuff, not how many people are likely to buy it.

and I certainly don't begrudge our success stories their successes.
Jim Thompson has designed any number of barely good enough integrated circuits ...

"Barely good enough" was "just right" in the day, and your tone is
contemptuous, belying your affectation of candor.

If you ever got one of Jim integrated circuits to work, your tone would be rancorous too. Probably not contemptuous - Jim did put stuff together that could be made to work, if not easily - but he did leave a lot of room for other people to design stuff that was easier to exploit.

Larkin clearly has a lead which you can't, in your wildest dreams,
compete against, so your begrudging his technical acumen smacks of the
green-eyed monster.

John Larkin has clearly sold a lot more items. Basically, he sells bespoke electronics to physicists - and my publication history in Rev. Sci. Instrum. makes it clear that Phil Hobbs isn't a typical physicist.

The lead I was talking about, if you could have been paying attention,
was technical acumen, not sales.

Yes, but sales are simple enough for you to understand. Assessing technical acumen is a little more demanding.

Indeed, and I've seen nothing 555 out of your camp, and very little
even more impressive, so the assessment doesn't suffer from lack of
evidence.

You weakness is not in what you see, but in what you fail to understand. Your assessment does suffer from lack of evidence - not because the evidence isn't there, but because you aren't equipped to appreciate the evidence.

And what on Earth does the reference to the good Doctor Hobbs have to
do with anything?

He's a physicist who is uncharacteristically deft with electronics.

What you mean is that he drags your dick in the dirt, but what I want
to know is why you want to drag his good name down with yours while
you're sinking in your own quagmire.

I register my admiration for the good Dr.Hobbs, and you think that I'm dragging down his good name. I hadn't realised that my admiration was so toxic.

So he's leading on quantity. I have reservations about the quality of his offerings.

You should use your reservations to get out of Dodge, because you
clearly have no base on which to stake your claims.

None that you are in a position to assess.

Perhaps, but my assessment is that, so far, all that you seem to be
able to report is a few more or less successful papers surrounded by
your milieu of failure.

Austin Instruments being the acme of success ....

I'm sure they do exactly what the customers want, but better
customers would have wanted more, and somebody with more technical
smarts that John Larkin would probably have delivered more,
even though his customers didn't actively demand it.

You cast John Larkin in the role of being niggardly for not delivering
more than he was asked to, and yourself as a magnanimous judge who
would have lived John Larkin's life differently if only you'd have
been John Larkin, and yet your resentment of his success because he
didn't do it your way seems to lie close to the pinnacle of
niggardliness.

I'm sure John Larkin has done well with the skills he has. As you've commented, they aren't quite as impressive as he thinks they are.

Indeed, but that's between Larkin and me and your attempt to horn in
for your own self-aggrandizement is contemptible.

Nothing in this thread looks like self-aggrandisement to me , except perhaps for your pretensions to commenting on the design skills of your betters.

I'm sure that you have got an opinion on the quality issue,but save it - it isn't going to be worth posting.

Geez, Bill, if only anyone believed you you might have the shot you so
long for to lift you out of the bourgeoisie.

The haute bourgeoisie is the environment into which I was born, and I've not been tempted to try to move out of it. When it's inhabited by people like

William S. Percival

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_amplifier

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Davies

it is not a bad environment at all.

So you admit that you have no aspirations but to wind down
comfortably?

I never had any particular aspirations. I'd like to have more to do now, but I draw the line at one hundred things a half-wit can do with a 555, which does seem to be all you can manage.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[John Fields]

On Wed, 9 Sep 2015 18:28:11 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
<bill.sloman@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thursday, 10 September 2015 06:56:28 UTC+10, John Fields wrote:
On Tue, 8 Sep 2015 08:27:06 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
bill.sloman@gmail.com> wrote:
On Saturday, 5 September 2015 07:22:58 UTC+10, John Fields wrote:
On Wed, 2 Sep 2015 20:30:16 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
bill.sloman@gmail.com> wrote:

For the record, I am designing electronics (if not at this instant) and hope eventually to have a design that's worth publishing. John Larkin's "design" cycle takes two weeks on average. Mine has always been several years, and it seems to have slowed down as I've got older, and more aware of how complicated the the process can be.

Age, and its attending misunderstanding, befuddles.

I suspect that you were somewhat befuddled before you got old, otherwise you wouldn't be quite so besotted with the NE555.

So says the loser who begrudges everyone their successes where he has
only found failure.

John Fields' record of successes seems to be mainly with people who were impressed by what he got the 555 to do for them. Not the most discriminating audience.

---
Au contraire, mon ami.

Once one delves into uncharted waters and finds treasure, it's easy
for the Monday morning quarterbacks to sit back on their haunches and
scoff, pretending that they could have done the same thing, if only...
---

>Several of my failures were tolerably heroic,

---
In that you were able to bear the ignominy in the aftermath of the
debacle?

The Japanese have a better way.
---

and I certainly don't begrudge our success stories their successes.
Jim Thompson has designed any number of barely good enough integrated circuits ...

---
"Barely good enough" was "just right" in the day, and your tone is
contemptuous, belying your affectation of candor.
---

Larkin clearly has a lead which you can't, in your wildest dreams,
compete against, so your begrudging his technical acumen smacks of the
green-eyed monster.

John Larkin has clearly sold a lot more items. Basically, he sells bespoke electronics to physicists - and my publication history in Rev. Sci. Instrum. makes it clear that Phil Hobbs isn't a typical physicist.

The lead I was talking about, if you could have been paying attention,
was technical acumen, not sales.

Yes, but sales are simple enough for you to understand. Assessing technical acumen is a little more demanding.

---
Indeed, and I've seen nothing 555 out of your camp, and very little
even more impressive, so the assessment doesn't suffer from lack of
evidence.
---

And what on Earth does the reference to the good Doctor Hobbs have to
do with anything?

He's a physicist who is uncharacteristically deft with electronics.

---
What you mean is that he drags your dick in the dirt, but what I want
to know is why you want to drag his good name down with yours while
you're sinking in your own quagmire.
---

So he's leading on quantity. I have reservations about the quality of his offerings.

You should use your reservations to get out of Dodge, because you
clearly have no base on which to stake your claims.

None that you are in a position to assess.

---
Perhaps, but my assessment is that, so far, all that you seem to be
able to report is a few more or less successful papers surrounded by
your milieu of failure.
---

I'm sure they do exactly what the customers want, but better
customers would have wanted more, and somebody with more technical
smarts that John Larkin would probably have delivered more,
even though his customers didn't actively demand it.

You cast John Larkin in the role of being niggardly for not delivering
more than he was asked to, and yourself as a magnanimous judge who
would have lived John Larkin's life differently if only you'd have
been John Larkin, and yet your resentment of his success because he
didn't do it your way seems to lie close to the pinnacle of
niggardliness.

I'm sure John Larkin has done well with the skills he has. As you've commented, they aren't quite as impressive as he thinks they are.

---
Indeed, but that's between Larkin and me and your attempt to horn in
for your own self-aggrandizement is contemptible.
---

I'm sure that you have got an opinion on the quality issue,but save it - it isn't going to be worth posting.

Geez, Bill, if only anyone believed you you might have the shot you so
long for to lift you out of the bourgeoisie.

The haute bourgeoisie is the environment into which I was born, and I've not been tempted to try to move out of it. When it's inhabited by people like

William S. Percival

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_amplifier

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Davies

it is not a bad environment at all.

---
So you admit that you have no aspirations but to wind down
comfortably?

 

[dcaster@krl.org]

On Friday, September 11, 2015 at 2:54:12 PM UTC-4, rickman wrote:

Ok, I see. "pointed out said behavior to ICE and a few of my friends
within the FBI" is not the same as "reporting" someone to the government.

Not in my book. Reporting someone to the government would probably entail filling out forms and signing affidavits.

Dan

I seem to recall leaving my car parked for a few days in front of a
friend's house. I don't recall what happened, but my friend pointed out
to me that several of his neighbors were FBI, etc and my car had been
checked out. Hardly an "investigation" of any sort.

--

Rick

 

[dcaster@krl.org]

On Friday, September 11, 2015 at 2:48:34 PM UTC-4, rickman wrote:

If you make a confession to the cops, it is pretty hard later to say you
were making it up! Why would anyone say such a thing? Was this a
"joke"? Does Jim deny it now?

--

Rick

Yes , but this was a post on SED. Hardly a confession to the cops.

I can believe that Jim did it just to mess with Bill's mind. And if I were Jim, I would continue to claim it was true. If Bill believes it for another year, that would be a ten year record for gullibility.

Dan

 

[John Fields]

On Thu, 10 Sep 2015 16:28:56 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
<bill.sloman@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, 11 September 2015 06:45:06 UTC+10, John Fields wrote:
On Wed, 9 Sep 2015 18:28:11 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
bill.sloman@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thursday, 10 September 2015 06:56:28 UTC+10, John Fields wrote:
On Tue, 8 Sep 2015 08:27:06 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
bill.sloman@gmail.com> wrote:
On Saturday, 5 September 2015 07:22:58 UTC+10, John Fields wrote:
On Wed, 2 Sep 2015 20:30:16 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
bill.sloman@gmail.com> wrote:

For the record, I am designing electronics (if not at this instant) and hope eventually to have a design that's worth publishing. John Larkin's "design" cycle takes two weeks on average. Mine has always been several years, and it seems to have slowed down as I've got older, and more aware of how complicated the the process can be.

Age, and its attending misunderstanding, befuddles.

I suspect that you were somewhat befuddled before you got old, otherwise you wouldn't be quite so besotted with the NE555.

So says the loser who begrudges everyone their successes where he has
only found failure.

John Fields' record of successes seems to be mainly with people who were impressed by what he got the 555 to do for them. Not the most discriminating audience.

Au contraire, mon ami.

Once one delves into uncharted waters and finds treasure, it's easy
for the Monday morning quarterbacks to sit back on their haunches and
scoff, pretending that they could have done the same thing, if only...

Perhaps I too could be the world's expert on getting the NE555 to do tricks that could be better done with more recent devices. Happily I've got better things to do.

---
Right...

Like rancorously shrinking away from even trying to do an objective
evaluation of A versus B.
---

Several of my failures were tolerably heroic,

In that you were able to bear the ignominy in the aftermath of the
debacle?

The Japanese have a better way.

I'm suppose to slash my stomach because some half-wit in marketing pointed us at a non-existent market?

---
No, you're supposed to because your masters found you lacking.
---

>The world's best technology - and that's what we were putting together at the time - isn't much use if nobody wants to buy it, and the engineers are supposed to know how to build stuff, not how many people are likely to buy it.

---
You perpetually spin a pitifully amazing yarn of your constantly
hooking up with even bigger losers.

Voluntarily.

Misery loves company, I guess...
---

and I certainly don't begrudge our success stories their successes.
Jim Thompson has designed any number of barely good enough integrated circuits ...

"Barely good enough" was "just right" in the day, and your tone is
contemptuous, belying your affectation of candor.

If you ever got one of Jim integrated circuits to work, your tone would be rancorous too. Probably not contemptuous - Jim did put stuff together that could be made to work, if not easily - but he did leave a lot of room for other people to design stuff that was easier to exploit.

---
I used Jim's stuff back in the day, and I never had much trouble with
it.

When one is a pioneer, I think it's a given that those who follow will
find better ways, but that certainly doesn't diminish the contribution
of the inventor.
---

Larkin clearly has a lead which you can't, in your wildest dreams,
compete against, so your begrudging his technical acumen smacks of the
green-eyed monster.

John Larkin has clearly sold a lot more items. Basically, he sells bespoke electronics to physicists - and my publication history in Rev. Sci. Instrum. makes it clear that Phil Hobbs isn't a typical physicist.

The lead I was talking about, if you could have been paying attention,
was technical acumen, not sales.

Yes, but sales are simple enough for you to understand. Assessing technical acumen is a little more demanding.

Indeed, and I've seen nothing 555 out of your camp, and very little
even more impressive, so the assessment doesn't suffer from lack of
evidence.

You weakness is not in what you see, but in what you fail to understand. Your assessment does suffer from lack of evidence - not because the evidence isn't there, but because you aren't equipped to appreciate the evidence.

---
Make your case, then.
---

And what on Earth does the reference to the good Doctor Hobbs have to
do with anything?

He's a physicist who is uncharacteristically deft with electronics.

What you mean is that he drags your dick in the dirt, but what I want
to know is why you want to drag his good name down with yours while
you're sinking in your own quagmire.

I register my admiration for the good Dr.Hobbs, and you think that I'm dragging down his good name. I hadn't realised that my admiration was so toxic.

---
It's not admiration you register as much as feigned association.
---

So he's leading on quantity. I have reservations about the quality of his offerings.

You should use your reservations to get out of Dodge, because you
clearly have no base on which to stake your claims.

None that you are in a position to assess.

Perhaps, but my assessment is that, so far, all that you seem to be
able to report is a few more or less successful papers surrounded by
your milieu of failure.

Austin Instruments being the acme of success ....

---
Compared to whatever you're offering, of course.
---

I'm sure they do exactly what the customers want, but better
customers would have wanted more, and somebody with more technical
smarts that John Larkin would probably have delivered more,
even though his customers didn't actively demand it.

You cast John Larkin in the role of being niggardly for not delivering
more than he was asked to, and yourself as a magnanimous judge who
would have lived John Larkin's life differently if only you'd have
been John Larkin, and yet your resentment of his success because he
didn't do it your way seems to lie close to the pinnacle of
niggardliness.

I'm sure John Larkin has done well with the skills he has. As you've commented, they aren't quite as impressive as he thinks they are.

Indeed, but that's between Larkin and me and your attempt to horn in
for your own self-aggrandizement is contemptible.

Nothing in this thread looks like self-aggrandisement to me , except perhaps for your pretensions to commenting on the design skills of your betters.

---
Larkin at least paints by numbers, while you don't even have a clear
idea of what brush should be used for what.
---

I'm sure that you have got an opinion on the quality issue,but save it - it isn't going to be worth posting.

Geez, Bill, if only anyone believed you you might have the shot you so
long for to lift you out of the bourgeoisie.

The haute bourgeoisie is the environment into which I was born, and I've not been tempted to try to move out of it. When it's inhabited by people like

William S. Percival

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_amplifier

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Davies

it is not a bad environment at all.

So you admit that you have no aspirations but to wind down
comfortably?

I never had any particular aspirations.

---
Perhaps that's why you find yourself in your current pickle, bemoaning
your fate and blaming everyone else for your lack of being recognized
as anything other than a bit player.
---

I'd like to have more to do now, but I draw the line at one hundred
things a half-wit can do with a 555, which does seem to be all you can manage.

---
But which you certainly can't.

John Fields

 

[rickman]

On 9/9/2015 3:34 AM, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Wednesday, 9 September 2015 16:43:01 UTC+10, rickman wrote:
On 9/8/2015 10:53 PM, Bill Sloman wrote:

Jim Thompson reported me to the FBI for having dangerously
anti-American ideas. He's apparently rich enough that they didn't
ridicule him at the time, but it did reinforce his status as
Jim-out-of-touch-with-reality-Thompson.

Whaaaa? Is this for real? "having dangerously anti-American ideas"
sounds like something from the McCarty era. My GOD!

You are making this up, right?

Nope. Jim boasted about it here at the time, and a few years later, when I was raking up his collected absurdities, he was silly enough to admit it again.

I'd really like to satirise Jim, but my imagination isn't up to finding something really absurd that he hasn't already done.

So what are your "dangerously anti-American ideas"? Anything good?

--

Rick

 

[rickman]

On 9/9/2015 3:29 PM, dcaster@krl.org wrote:

On Wednesday, September 9, 2015 at 3:34:24 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Wednesday, 9 September 2015 16:43:01 UTC+10, rickman wrote:
On 9/8/2015 10:53 PM, Bill Sloman wrote:

Jim Thompson reported me to the FBI for having dangerously
anti-American ideas. He's apparently rich enough that they didn't
ridicule him at the time, but it did reinforce his status as
Jim-out-of-touch-with-reality-Thompson.

Whaaaa? Is this for real? "having dangerously anti-American ideas"
sounds like something from the McCarty era. My GOD!

You are making this up, right?

Nope. Jim boasted about it here at the time, and a few years later, when I was raking up his collected absurdities, he was silly enough to admit it again.

I'd really like to satirise Jim, but my imagination isn't up to finding something really absurd that he hasn't already done.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

As far as Bill is concerned it is fact. But then Bill is not very perceptive. For one he thinks I am a right wing nitwit even after I told him that I do not say much about myself.

But as far as I can tell the only thing that makes Bill believe that Jim reported him to some friends at the FBI is that Jim said so. So is anyone else gullible enough to accept statements on SED as the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

If you make a confession to the cops, it is pretty hard later to say you
were making it up! Why would anyone say such a thing? Was this a
"joke"? Does Jim deny it now?

--

Rick

 

[rickman]

On 9/9/2015 6:43 AM, Martin Brown wrote:

On 09/09/2015 07:42, rickman wrote:
On 9/8/2015 10:53 PM, Bill Sloman wrote:

Jim Thompson reported me to the FBI for having dangerously
anti-American ideas. He's apparently rich enough that they didn't
ridicule him at the time, but it did reinforce his status as
Jim-out-of-touch-with-reality-Thompson.

Whaaaa? Is this for real? "having dangerously anti-American ideas"
sounds like something from the McCarty era. My GOD!

JT *is* from the McCarthy era.

You are making this up, right?

It is genuine. ISTR "OT: Atheist Joke Thread" in about 2006.

Keywords "Jim Thompson Anti-American FBI ICE" in Google Groups.

Ok, I see. "pointed out said behavior to ICE and a few of my friends
within the FBI" is not the same as "reporting" someone to the government.

I seem to recall leaving my car parked for a few days in front of a
friend's house. I don't recall what happened, but my friend pointed out
to me that several of his neighbors were FBI, etc and my car had been
checked out. Hardly an "investigation" of any sort.

--

Rick

 

[rickman]

On 9/4/2015 1:45 PM, John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 4 Sep 2015 07:40:43 -0700 (PDT), "dcaster@krl.org"
dcaster@krl.org> wrote:

On Friday, September 4, 2015 at 8:49:09 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:



I couldn't care less about his personal details, but he did seem to know very little about how bank worked.


--
Bill Sloman, Sydeny

Yet I noticed that you changed your statements about how banks work after I pointed out that you were wrong.

Dan

You can play the insult game endlessly with Sloman. If he enjoys
anything in life, it's issuing pompous insults.

Note that he has little say about electronics.

Ignore him and everybody will benefit.

Wow! How about following your own advice? There are TONs of pointless
arguments you seem to get caught up in.

--

Rick

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Saturday, 12 September 2015 04:36:30 UTC+10, John Fields wrote:

On Thu, 10 Sep 2015 16:28:56 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
bill.sloman@gmail.com> wrote:
On Friday, 11 September 2015 06:45:06 UTC+10, John Fields wrote:
On Wed, 9 Sep 2015 18:28:11 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
bill.sloman@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thursday, 10 September 2015 06:56:28 UTC+10, John Fields wrote:
On Tue, 8 Sep 2015 08:27:06 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
bill.sloman@gmail.com> wrote:
On Saturday, 5 September 2015 07:22:58 UTC+10, John Fields wrote:
On Wed, 2 Sep 2015 20:30:16 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
bill.sloman@gmail.com> wrote:

For the record, I am designing electronics (if not at this instant) and hope eventually to have a design that's worth publishing. John Larkin's "design" cycle takes two weeks on average. Mine has always been several years, and it seems to have slowed down as I've got older, and more aware of how complicated the the process can be.

Age, and its attending misunderstanding, befuddles.

I suspect that you were somewhat befuddled before you got old, otherwise you wouldn't be quite so besotted with the NE555.

So says the loser who begrudges everyone their successes where he has
only found failure.

John Fields' record of successes seems to be mainly with people who were impressed by what he got the 555 to do for them. Not the most discriminating audience.

Au contraire, mon ami.

Once one delves into uncharted waters and finds treasure, it's easy
for the Monday morning quarterbacks to sit back on their haunches and
scoff, pretending that they could have done the same thing, if only...

Perhaps I too could be the world's expert on getting the NE555 to do tricks that could be better done with more recent devices. Happily I've got better things to do.

Right...

Like rancorously shrinking away from even trying to do an objective
evaluation of A versus B.

Evaluation takes time. One tends to confine the exercise to stuff worth evaluating.

Several of my failures were tolerably heroic,

In that you were able to bear the ignominy in the aftermath of the
debacle?

The Japanese have a better way.

I'm suppose to slash my stomach because some half-wit in marketing pointed us at a non-existent market?

No, you're supposed to because your masters found you lacking.

They didn't. What I did worked - and worked well. The customers had found a completely different way of tackling the problem (which is something that marketing is supposed to become aware of) and weren't prepared to buy our product in high enough volume to make manufacturing it a commercial proposition.

The world's best technology - and that's what we were putting together at the time - isn't much use if nobody wants to buy it, and the engineers are supposed to know how to build stuff, not how many people are likely to buy it.

You perpetually spin a pitifully amazing yarn of your constantly
hooking up with even bigger losers.

Voluntarily.

Misery loves company, I guess...

It's actually an interesting story. I've tried to write it up. The initial politics is entertaining, and explains a lot of the nature of the subsequent disaster, but the eighteen months of dedicated bug-hunting and bug-fixing (which took longer than it should have done due to some particularly wrong-headed management decisions early on) is hard to make entertaining. I fool around with that text from time to time, but so far it has proved intractable.

and I certainly don't begrudge our success stories their successes.
Jim Thompson has designed any number of barely good enough integrated circuits ...

"Barely good enough" was "just right" in the day, and your tone is
contemptuous, belying your affectation of candor.

If you ever got one of Jim integrated circuits to work, your tone would be rancorous too. Probably not contemptuous - Jim did put stuff together that could be made to work, if not easily - but he did leave a lot of room for other people to design stuff that was easier to exploit.

I used Jim's stuff back in the day, and I never had much trouble with
it.

When one is a pioneer, I think it's a given that those who follow will
find better ways, but that certainly doesn't diminish the contribution
of the inventor.

There were plenty of inventors around at the time. Jim isn't usually listed as one of them. Floyd M. Gardner's "Phaselock Techniques" doesn't mention Jim's 4024 and 4044 at all, which has always struck me as odd. Jim's MC1495/MC1496 products actually exploited Barry Gilbert's patent - I think that Jim has mentioned that Motorola paid some kind of royalty - so your use of the term "inventor" may be inappropriate.

Jim has got his name on some patents, but then so have I, and so does krw.

If your employer has a stable of patent lawyers, you are much more likely to find your name on a patent.

Larkin clearly has a lead which you can't, in your wildest dreams,
compete against, so your begrudging his technical acumen smacks of
the green-eyed monster.

John Larkin has clearly sold a lot more items. Basically, he sells bespoke electronics to physicists - and my publication history in Rev. Sci.. Instrum. makes it clear that Phil Hobbs isn't a typical physicist.

The lead I was talking about, if you could have been paying attention,
was technical acumen, not sales.

Yes, but sales are simple enough for you to understand. Assessing technical acumen is a little more demanding.

Indeed, and I've seen nothing 555 out of your camp, and very little
even more impressive, so the assessment doesn't suffer from lack of
evidence.

You weakness is not in what you see, but in what you fail to understand. Your assessment does suffer from lack of evidence - not because the evidence isn't there, but because you aren't equipped to appreciate the evidence.

Make your case, then.

Why bother. You won't be able to follow it.

And what on Earth does the reference to the good Doctor Hobbs have to
do with anything?

He's a physicist who is uncharacteristically deft with electronics.

What you mean is that he drags your dick in the dirt, but what I want
to know is why you want to drag his good name down with yours while
you're sinking in your own quagmire.

I register my admiration for the good Dr.Hobbs, and you think that I'm dragging down his good name. I hadn't realised that my admiration was so toxic.

It's not admiration you register as much as feigned association.

"Feigned"?

So he's leading on quantity. I have reservations about the quality of > >> >> > his offerings.

You should use your reservations to get out of Dodge, because you
clearly have no base on which to stake your claims.

None that you are in a position to assess.

Perhaps, but my assessment is that, so far, all that you seem to be
able to report is a few more or less successful papers surrounded by
your milieu of failure.

Austin Instruments being the acme of success ....

Compared to whatever you're offering, of course.

You do have a more positive opinion of it than the objective observer.

I'm sure they do exactly what the customers want, but better
customers would have wanted more, and somebody with more technical
smarts that John Larkin would probably have delivered more,
even though his customers didn't actively demand it.

You cast John Larkin in the role of being niggardly for not delivering
more than he was asked to, and yourself as a magnanimous judge who
would have lived John Larkin's life differently if only you'd have
been John Larkin, and yet your resentment of his success because he
didn't do it your way seems to lie close to the pinnacle of
niggardliness.

I'm sure John Larkin has done well with the skills he has. As you've commented, they aren't quite as impressive as he thinks they are.

Indeed, but that's between Larkin and me and your attempt to horn in
for your own self-aggrandizement is contemptible.

Nothing in this thread looks like self-aggrandisement to me , except perhaps for your pretensions to commenting on the design skills of your betters.

Larkin at least paints by numbers, while you don't even have a clear
idea of what brush should be used for what.

Larkin's enthusiasm for wide-band transistors and transmission-line layout - sometimes on non-FR4 substrates - is perfectly understandable. I enjoyed doing that back in the late 1980's myself. You don't seem to be in that league.

I'm sure that you have got an opinion on the quality issue,but save it - it isn't going to be worth posting.

Geez, Bill, if only anyone believed you you might have the shot you so
long for to lift you out of the bourgeoisie.

The haute bourgeoisie is the environment into which I was born, and I've not been tempted to try to move out of it. When it's inhabited by people like

William S. Percival

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_amplifier

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Davies

it is not a bad environment at all.

So you admit that you have no aspirations but to wind down
comfortably?

I never had any particular aspirations.

Perhaps that's why you find yourself in your current pickle, bemoaning
your fate and blaming everyone else for your lack of being recognized
as anything other than a bit player.

I don't recall blaming anybody else for my current situation, which - while less than ideal - is decidedly comfortable.

I'd like to have more to do now, but I draw the line at one hundred
things a half-wit can do with a 555, which does seem to be all you can
manage.

But which you certainly can't.

Perhaps not, but I'm well-off enough not to have to bother finding out.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Saturday, 12 September 2015 04:46:54 UTC+10, rickman wrote:

On 9/9/2015 3:34 AM, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Wednesday, 9 September 2015 16:43:01 UTC+10, rickman wrote:
On 9/8/2015 10:53 PM, Bill Sloman wrote:

Jim Thompson reported me to the FBI for having dangerously
anti-American ideas. He's apparently rich enough that they didn't
ridicule him at the time, but it did reinforce his status as
Jim-out-of-touch-with-reality-Thompson.

Whaaaa? Is this for real? "having dangerously anti-American ideas"
sounds like something from the McCarty era. My GOD!

You are making this up, right?

Nope. Jim boasted about it here at the time, and a few years later, when I was raking up his collected absurdities, he was silly enough to admit it again.

I'd really like to satirise Jim, but my imagination isn't up to finding something really absurd that he hasn't already done.

So what are your "dangerously anti-American ideas"? Anything good?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level:_Why_More_Equal_Societies_Almost_Always_Do_Better

It's not what Jim was actually getting upset about, but the book does crystallise a lot of ideas that I had about where America could be improved.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Saturday, 12 September 2015 07:32:35 UTC+10, dca...@krl.org wrote:

On Friday, September 11, 2015 at 2:48:34 PM UTC-4, rickman wrote:


If you make a confession to the cops, it is pretty hard later to say you
were making it up! Why would anyone say such a thing? Was this a
"joke"? Does Jim deny it now?

Yes , but this was a post on SED. Hardly a confession to the cops.

I can believe that Jim did it just to mess with Bill's mind.

Jim isn't that clever. He was clever enough to get into MIT, but nothing he posts here suggests much grasp of subtlety - I label him as Jim-out-of-touch-with-reality-Thompson on the basis of frequent daft posts here.

> And if I were Jim, I would continue to claim it was true. If Bill believes it for another year, that would be a ten year record for gullibility.

My attitude is that Jim claims to have done it, which makes him the idiot.

I don't have to accept that Jim "pointed out said behavior to ICE and a few of his friends within the FBI" to jeer at him for having claimed to have done so.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[krw]

On Fri, 11 Sep 2015 14:31:36 -0700 (PDT), "dcaster@krl.org"
<dcaster@krl.org> wrote:

On Friday, September 11, 2015 at 2:54:12 PM UTC-4, rickman wrote:


Ok, I see. "pointed out said behavior to ICE and a few of my friends
within the FBI" is not the same as "reporting" someone to the government.


Not in my book. Reporting someone to the government would probably entail filling out forms and signing affidavits.

http://www.dhs.gov/how-do-i/report-suspicious-activity

"Remember you can report on suspicious activities anonymously."

Dan


I seem to recall leaving my car parked for a few days in front of a
friend's house. I don't recall what happened, but my friend pointed out
to me that several of his neighbors were FBI, etc and my car had been
checked out. Hardly an "investigation" of any sort.

--

Rick

 

[rickman]

On 9/11/2015 5:31 PM, dcaster@krl.org wrote:

On Friday, September 11, 2015 at 2:54:12 PM UTC-4, rickman wrote:


Ok, I see. "pointed out said behavior to ICE and a few of my friends
within the FBI" is not the same as "reporting" someone to the government.


Not in my book. Reporting someone to the government would probably entail filling out forms and signing affidavits.

I think in this case it would involve walking back out the same door you
came in with nothing accomplished.

--

Rick